Read Holidays in Heck for Free Online

instructor Joe Cooper to deal with whatever, and he put instructor Dave Hall in charge of Muffin. Alpine’s marketing director Jodi Tusik found a quiet spot in a function room for Buster and our family babysitter. The babysitter had trepidations about the trip. She comes from a part of the world with indoor temperatures outdoors. But then she realized—what with the jolly bustle in Alpine Valley’s lodgeand the uncrowded nature of Alpine Valley’s slopes—a lot of Ohio skiing is done indoors.
    Dave and Joe would return with glowing reports of Muffin’s and Poppet’s behavior. This leads me to suspect that Dave couldn’t catch Muffin either and that Joe was being diplomatic or, as we call it at our house, lying. More to the point, Muffin and Poppet were themselves aglow and full of hints that adoption by the Alpine Valley ski school would be a parental upgrade. I gather Alpine does not use the “damn-it-listen-to-me” instructional method favored by Dad.
    Meanwhile, Mrs. O. and I had our first chance to spend the day skiing together since 1997. Being diplomatic, I’d say she was a little rusty. While “damn-it-listen-to-me” may dampen relations with your children, it produces a tsunami in relations with your spouse. A good family ski experience depends on an adept movement with one part of the body. Shutting the mouth.
    Once I clammed up, Alpine Valley was a swell family ski area. This was Tuckerman Ravine as far as Poppet was concerned. There was enough challenge for Muffin and little enough worry for her parents. On seventy-two well-supervised acres, Muffin couldn’t get much more lost than we want her to be.
    The snowboard park was around a corner so Muffin need not see that cousin Tiffany’s earrings are the least of Mom’s worries in the piercings department. Employees and customers were possessed of a downright, fundamental Red State friendliness as if they were made from John Kerry antimatter. We were happy at Alpine Valley. I can prove it mathematically:
2 adult lift tickets
$52
(and in three years I get the ½-price senior discount)
1 child lift ticket
$24
1 under-6 lift ticket
$ 8
3 equipment rentals
$55
2 private lessons
$64
=
$ Lunch in Vail
    You might think Alpine Valley lacked thrills for me. You’d be wrong. There was one run that took my breath away and transported me to that near weightless sense of bliss, a giddy marriage of flight and free fall, where I was beyond command yet not out of control. This was the tube ride I took with Muffin.
    The line for the inner tubes was much longer than the lines for the chairlifts. Come to that, so was the line for lunch. Ohio exposes the id of winter sports. Secretly we’d all rather be sitting down.
    Ohio’s skiers do a lot of their sitting down on the slopes. The Boston Mills ski area is southeast of Cleveland and very similar to Alpine Valley in size, bargain value, solicitousness, and pleasant company. A sunny forty-degree day had brought out large numbers of that pleasant company. Their skiing explained how Ohio has produced seven presidents and no Bode Millers. The problem is one that’s not addressed by instruction books, instruction videos, or instructors. Ohioans, with no point of reference for skiing except what they do in the summer at the lake, are trying to water-ski. They carefully distribute their weight on both skis and hunch to compensate for the pulling power of gravity, which they picture as a metaphorical 100-horsepower Evinrude. A special form of Ohio ski teaching is needed. Most Ohioans know how to ice-skate. A video called “Playing Hockey with Planks onYour Feet” would be invaluable, although this might cause Ohioans to start high-sticking with their poles and thereby spoil the atmosphere at Boston Mills.
    Alternatively, Ohioans could spell our babysitter and watch Buster toddle. He does fine as long as he’s shifting from foot to foot and maintaining