It was another quiet night in a once lively restaurant during a less than exceptionall time in my life. I was bussing tables at an establishment at the base of the ski area that had long been a staple, a bastion of 70s legends and their boisterous Cold War-era exploits. But now it was on its last legs. The food was bad. And we didn’t get a shift meal; we didn’t even get a shift drink, though that didn’t stop us, degenerates that we were. But it was a fun place to work – characters abounded.
I was working through some early adulthood fog that surely didn’t leave me during my shifts. I sort of hobbled through those nights. But the crew at the restaurant was a vibrant one – a mix of old timers who had been in the restaurant scene for decades, newcomers to town with wide eyes, and intimidatingly cute twenty-something waitresses I had no business approaching. And I didn’t. But the vibe felt good, and in my depressed state that wasn’t always easy to find.
One of the line cooks liked what I thought was good music, and grasping for contact in those days, I would chat with him about what we were listening to in between rushes. He was an easy guy to approach; a little older, graying, and unassuming. That night, I was hit with a particularly intoxicating melody as I walked into the kitchen carrying an overloaded bus tub. Spacey slide guitar met ragtime piano, with a soulful, weird vocal of the likes I had never heard before. I was instantly hooked. Covered in enchilada sauce I looked at one of the CD cases sitting on top of the boombox. It was Down on the Farm by Little Feat.
“This is one of their lesser albums, but it still has some good stuff on it,” he said to me, coming from behind the range to thumb through his albums sitting on the little stereo. The music didn’t matter as much as the old line cook’s genuine interest – it went a long way for a lonely 19-year-old trying to figure out a few things. It meant more than he knew, and I never forgot that.
Time marched on – I left the restaurant after that season to attempt college again, and by the next winter that old crusty establishment was no more, deleted from the landscape by developers with pre-housing-market-crash aspirations. They tore down all the buildings at the base of the ski area, and then went no further as the reality of collateralized debt obligations set in around 2008. The lot stands empty to this day. But that was far from my mind; starts and stops at college were punctuated by an enlightening stopover in Montana, meeting a girl, and finally coming back to town a few years later.
I started seeing the old line cook from afar when I moved back. Any time I was able to cut work for first chair he was there, first in the singles line, waiting, every day. Whether for powder or groomers, there he stood, hugging his old telemark skis in the crook of one arm, grey whisps of hair whimsically escaping from under his beanie. His eyes sat behind familiar circular glasses, staring off with a tired gaze. It was comforting to look past the throngs anxiously awaiting fresh tracks and see the old line cook from afar.
I kept seeing him and kept wanting to thank him for showing me Little Feat – my way of saying thank you for playing a small part in getting me through a tough time in my life. Not only did the line cook and I have Little Feat, but now I, too, was a telemark skier, hooked by the heady mix of grit and technique the turn required, and was eager to chat with anyone else who must share the same zeal that I now had for the turn.
One morning, our daily wobbles collided, and I ended up on the same gondola car as the old line cook, some ten years after that winter we worked together.
There he sat, as unmistakable as 10 years before, just a bit more weathered. A few minutes into the ride I finally spoke to the old familiar stranger. “We worked together at the restaurant the last winter it was open, you showed me Little Feat,” I said.
The old line cook immediately recoiled. “I had been listening to Little Feat way before that,” he barked with a dismissive snap, not recognizing that we had crossed paths briefly so many years before.
I tried meekly to save the already dying conversation, muttering “well, I, uh, still really like them and they ended up meaning a lot to me.” But the conversation wasn’t meant to go any further. The talk about telemark gear and the beauty of the turn wouldn’t happen. Nor any sort of fulfilling rendezvous with a familiar stranger from the past who helped me along when I needed it, though he probably couldn’t have known.
That gondola ride went on. We sat silently, each looking out the window. I felt defeated, foolish, and immediately regretful that I had said anything. Nothing in my mind made me think the attempt at that bridge could be so unsatisfying.
But just like the line cook couldn’t know how much his small gesture meant to a 19-year-old lonely me, he probably couldn’t know how the 30-year-old me felt now either. And complacent in the silence, I had little way of understanding what he was going through, either. I felt spurned, but maybe more so hopelessly naïve. Crushed was my ignorant notion that just because two people share the same style of free-heel ski binding that nothing else really matters.
Walking out of the gondola terminal, we went our ways, just like we always had, just like we always would, save for a few fleeting moments.
Moving onto the snow, we both bent down to a knee to strap our bindings on, one at a time. Then we each skied off in different directions.
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