Where did I grow up skiing?

I grew up skiing from the age of three at a little place in Richmond, Vermont called Cochran’s Ski Area.

It was built (or rather scraped together) by my grandparents Micky and Ginny. My grandfather was a tinkerer, a lover of all things mechanical, and an avid skier.

When he put up his own homemade rope tow in 1961, he was just as excited as his four young children. I can imagine my grandfather’s shear joy, standing atop his hill enjoying the background thrum of the tow’s VW motor, watching the little whipper snappers ride his tow.

The back yard ski hill also became a training venue for his kids (my dad and his three sisters). There they would spend evenings out under the lights running gates. Eventually they became world-class ski racers. They were each Olympians, and one even a gold medalist.

Their accolades are many, and I could write on and on about them, but the little family ski hill is what I want to get at. Anyway, my grandfather loved those winter evenings so much he eventually decided to give up his engineering job and run the ski area full time. It was a mom and pop operation in the truest sense.

My grandfather would often pull the school bus out of the muddy parking lot with a come-along, and when my grandmother wasn’t teaching kids how to ski, she would be finding an extra pair of mittens for the kids that forgot theirs. I was a whipper snapper riding his rope tow about 23 years after that first season, and I will always remember the satisfaction he radiated as he stood at the top of the lift (where he had to be ready to cut power if kids piled up, as they often did).

Lap after lap, my grandfather would shoot me this cartoon-like expression where his eyes got really big and his jaw would drop… “you again!” He definitely loved what he did, though that legendary Irish gruffness would occasionally come out (he was a die hard Red Sox fan so he undoubtedly had some repressed anger). If you rode his T-bar incorrectly, he would lose it (while taking the lords name in vain of course). Something like, “STAY IN THE TRACK! BLASPHEMY, BLASPHEMY!” That’s the censored version.

Apparently my cousin Roger’s first full sentence as an infant was an approximation of one of these tirades. Aunt Marilyn must have been so thrilled… “Oh how wonderful! He swore just like Dad!”

As a grandchild of Ginny and Micky (or Mimi and Grampa), I was like royalty (a weak approximation anyway) at the ski hill. For example, lunch at the snack bar was free: all I could eat burgers and soup! It was pretty sweet, though candy bars were off limits. My grandmother made sure of that. I never understood why, but rules were rules and she was not to be trifled with.

Another rule she enforced was a ban on ski jumps of any shape or size (My grandfather fully supported this jump prohibition). We could go tucking straight into the woods at a bajillion miles an hour, breaking branches and limbs, and yet break no rules. But if there was a pile of snow that even hinted at a “you know what,” Mimi would have a conniption. Like Bill Cosby’s description of a conniption: “Her face split! And the skin came of off her face so there was nothing except the skull! And orange light came out of her hair! It lit all around and fire shot from her eye sockets and began to burn my stomach!”

OK, it wasn’t as bad as the vivid picture Bill paints, but she really did hate jumps. We still found ways to get hurt of course, but we were discreet about it.

I inherited a love for skiing that stems straight from that little hill in Vermont. It’s still by far my favorite place to ski. Traveling all over the world ski racing has yet to turn up its equivalent.

OK, so I’m just a little biased.