32 & Fresh Snow.

You might remember Shirley Jackson’s often anthologized piece, “The Lottery” from your high school english classes. (The class with Mrs. Gibbons that you skipped out on for many days of good tracks, Friday races or trips to Junior Nationals.) It is the story of a cadre of New England townspeople picking pieces of paper from a wooden box as firm, historic and stately as, well, New England townspeople. The papers and box are carefully described and treated with the same air of respect that a tin of the old extra blue, found forgotten in the basement, might get. Along with the papers, and the box, stones are picked up from streets and sidewalks, their heft and shape cleary desribed. The stones will kill the lottery’s winner, but we don’t know that in the early reading. This all happens with the same dull tone of anticipation not unlike a modern day scratch- off lottery ticket or radio call-in contest. (Will it be me? Will I win?) In the end, a single woman has a black mark on her paper. The mark of the lottery and Jackson’s narrative turn on the character (Tessie Hutchenson). The stone-faced townspeople holding rocks collected throughout the three pages of lead-in move with even strides towards the black mark on the paper. We don’t get to see Tessie die, but do catch sight of the first rock hitting her in the side of the head. Jackson closes the story with,

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her

I think of “The Lottery” whenever it is thirty two and fresh snow or similar conditions that might transform a ski race from being a real contest to something…else.  A day that sends a few otherwise uncharacteristic results to the top or bottom of the results page. I think of the short story because it leaves one so unsatisfied. Even if there is a clear winner, and that winner is a talented classic skier, the skiers that follow look haggard. Bad classic conditions are as unsightly as a stoning. At the Supertour today at the Trapp Family Lodge, folks used harries, zeroes, multis, klister, hardwax, fishscales and version of hope that did not carry the last presidential election, the failed kind. There were folks that had decent skis, some that had skis that kicked well. There were no perfectly functional skis today and that made for a four-hundred skier field flailing over the fresh, Morton’s -designed kilometers: an unseemly thing.

Before the rain fell, before the wind gusts reached nearly sixty miles per hour, just as light broke this morning, a younger collection of good New England townspeople filed into the parking lot at the Trapp Family Lodge (the hills are indeed alive the with sound of music), and pulled out their best tackle boxes, torches and magic combinations. Many folks walked to where the tracks had been prepared and instinctively picked up a small pile of snow, from tracks or lanes. Will it be me? Will I win? Five hours later, with most of the field finished, a collection of later starters were on what was left of the same tracks, their times agonizingly long, their skis without kick and their bodies crying out the same thing in muddle, poor technique,

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,”