Preparing to take my son, then about 12, and his friend skiing, I said casually, “I’m packing a lunch.”
“You can make your own,” Teddy said, glowering, as I began assembling sandwiches.
“They’re good,” I said firmly. “They have cucumbers.”
“Cucumbers?” he raged.
In an attempt to be helpful, his friend Carson put in, “My mother’s sandwiches are worse than this.”
For the record, the sandwiches I make are good, great even, with lunch meat, pickles, lettuces, cheese and tomato, and sometimes olives, avocado or cilantro.
I started skiing at 13 while I was growing up in Annapolis, Md., and in all those years with my family, never once ate in the high-priced resort cafeterias. Bringing lunch was part of the experience.
At Elk Mountain, Pa., we cooked hot dogs over the open fire in the warming hut, which provided barbecue utensils.
Many years, at Christmastime, a group of families traveled to Vermont together, staying at a big old wooden lodge at Okemo Mountain.
A weep sheet was posted on the wall with jobs for all, including cooking and cleanup shifts.
Two kids were always assigned to make the sandwiches for our crew of 20 or more, and I remember dealing out long rows of bread slices on the wide counter. In some cases the ingredients we were given were conventional, but in many, our thrifty Yankee forbears instructed us to use dinner leftovers. All the kids wailed about the leftover roast with the lettuce on which we still could taste last night’s salad dressing.
To my great consternation, when I brought this ski tradition to my latter-day family, my children complained, especially when we planned to ski with friends who simply used the cafeterias.
“I don’t expect other families to change their habits for us, Teddy,” I would say firmly, “and they don’t expect us to.” He lamented, “But I’ll have to watch them eat, ” he paused meaningfully, “good food.”
Soon our sons found that the topic of sandwiches was guaranteed to send me through the roof. I told them that they were lucky to be able to ski, period. It had not occurred to my childhood ski cohorts and me to think otherwise, and my children’s attitude seemed to symbolize a failure in parenting.
In ski school and then when the boys joined the local race program, though, I found it hard to force them to be the only ones in their groups not buying. Still, $10 a day for each of two boys is $40 a weekend, $160 a month, in an already costly sport.
And then some things happened. A respected ski-race family moved here, like us living not in high-rolling up-valley Aspen but in Carbondale, and they, including a son Teddy’s age, brought lunches to practice.
Kevin from Glenwood Springs, a top skier, also joined the team and very unconcernedly brought his lunch.
Last, emulating an idea from another down-valley parent, my spouse, Mike, and I offered our sons a deal: Each time they packed, we gave them $5. We still saved; and at least I got to see the dollars put in savings accounts instead of just vanishing.
At one point last year, my younger son, Roy, mentioned that a few other packed lunches were appearing in the hands of his teammates.
Another day a group of the kids on Teddy’s team was ripping along and one kid clocked a bystander, knocking her down.
Teddy came home talking about the incident and how seriously the coaches took it, and what they said, and how all the kids had to write letters of apology to the Aspen Skiing Co.
“Teddy, did you get in trouble?” I asked, taken aback.
“No,” he said. “Kevin and I weren’t even there. We were skiing to the bottom to get our packed lunches.”
More recently, on a Friday, I asked my kids, again casually, “So, you want to bring or buy?”
“I’ll bring,” Teddy, now 15, said. Roy, 12, thought for a minute and said he guessed he’d bring, too.
As of now, in late February, I don’t think Teddy has bought once all season.
But the funny thing is that, this year, when my kids are finally willingly complying, the lesson suddenly seems near moot. Between the economic crisis and the time factor — waiting in a lunch line takes longer than pulling Tupperware out of a backpack — various normally free-spending kids are suddenly “bringing.”
Sandwiches are a good association to me. I remember the cavernous kitchen at Okemo, and my friend Steve’s and my boisterous mass sandwich production.
One of my favorite letters upon my father’s death was from Steve’s sister Melanie, who wrote: “I am sitting here with tears running down my face, but I’m smiling thinking of all the times at Okemo, and those disgusting sandwiches with the salad dressing.”
Alison Osius is an editor at Rock and Ice magazine in Carbondale. She can be reached at aosius@hotmail.com.
