A rumor of angels.(THE STRAGGLER)(Personal account)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

WE are five: Dad, Mom, daughter, son, son's friend. The kids have reached the age where they would rather be boiled in oil than be seen in company with their parents, so on this ski lift, with seats three across, all three of them pile into the chair ahead of us, leaving Mr. and Mrs. Straggler to take in a single.

The single is a young lady of six or seven, wearing a pink ski suit and a helmet with one of those 1960s slightly weird flower designs. Her name, she tells us, is Katy. I explain to Katy that I am an occasional and incompetent skier, liable to take a fall when disembarking from the first ski lift of the day, so she should steer away from me. Katy bestows a withering glance on my ski poles (she, of course, having none). "I never fall," she announces, with that invincible self-possession that peaks at around Katy's age and declines through life thereafter.

In the event I disembark smoothly, and commence a day of skiing. The skill quickly comes back, though it's been a year since our last family ski trip. Skiing is one of those pastimes--like ten-pin bowling or skeet shooting, but unlike swimming or tennis--that is pleasurable even at a low level of ability. A sedentary and ill-coordinated person, I can ski for pleasure, but swim only for survival.

The late founder of this magazine skied for close to half a century, and of course wrote eloquently about it. One of the first columns of his that I read--it dates from November 1975--was in praise of the book We Learned to Ski, by Harold Evans et al. I was not a skier at the time and had no interest in the subject, but could not resist the Master's prose, nor help admiring a man who had already been skiing for 21 years yet was still a keen reader of skiing textbooks. (Of those prior to the Evans book, Bill had no high opinion: "What is ... ignored in textbooks on skiing is usable material on how to ski.") I have never read a ski book nor taken a lesson. I suppose I should do the one or the other, or both, but it hardly seems worthwhile for such occasional outings. And then, something about old dogs and new tricks.

Our family ski trips are, like the rest of our lives, conducted on a modest suburban scale. A friend boasts of having been helicoptered to the summit of a peak in the Andes, to ski down for hours through long miles of virgin powder. I have no such boasts. These busy northeastern resorts are all I know, and I am happy with them. The ingenuity and efficiency with which they cater to time-starved suburbanites is comforting evidence that a civilized mass society is possible. I get the same consolation from supermarkets, which I can walk around happily for hours, and courts of law, and the cheery clamor of events at my kids' schools.

Having skimped on my preparatory exercises in the weeks before our trip, I find my leg muscles are protesting uncomfortably by late afternoon. The kids have ...