The little cabin sat beside a sizeable pond, in a valley of forested hills and a rocky cleft we hiked through one afternoon. Mornings the low sun briefly cast ghostly shadows of tree trunks across the water’s icy-snowy surface. It was familiar territory but like the best special places different this time, as with each time we go.
This was my fifth stay in the Midcoast Conservancy’s Hidden Valley Nature Center, and my third with this group: six or seven women on a weekend sabbatical from husbands and children. Most of the others had been coming on this trip for years. I was a relative newbie—and I almost hadn’t come.
Face it, I’m nearly a generation older than the others in this group. I feel good: spunky, sassy, eager to step out and explore the world. I have a friend who insists that 70 is the new 50, making, I suppose, 60 the new 40, or maybe 45, and on down. I’ll take it.
Even so, by coming with these women I knew I’d need to resign myself to being the slowest hiker and skier, the most hesitant to take a dip in the pond, should someone pull out an ice axe and proceed to chop a hole, as is usual with this crowd. I couldn’t help thinking of Blanche DuBlois in A Streetcar Named Desire, hiding from the light, pretending to be younger than she was.
Shortly after we moved to Maine (seven years ago now), my “70-is-the-new-50” friend had told me about her annual winter trips with women friends to a remote cabin in Baxter State Park. They skied 12 miles into the park, toting their food and gear. I thought, “I want to do that sometime!” I had yet to don a pair of cross country skis, but I’d done lots of downhill skiing. How different could it be?
Plenty, it turned out. There’s something about not having your heels locked into your bindings that utterly changes the equation. Still, I practiced, and practiced—and I got . . . okay at it. Not great, but passably adept. So three years ago when my friend Susan, the long-time organizer of the Hidden Valley weekend, invited me along, I eagerly accepted. We’d only need to ski in two miles. I could handle that, right?
Possibly. But there was still the matter of hauling food and gear. For our own trip to Hidden Valley one snowless winter, Jeff and I had purchased a heavy plastic “jet sled,” the kind hunters use to haul their game out of the woods. It came with a rope handle, which was fine for hiking but not skiing. I needed something stiff to prevent the sled from riding up behind me when I skied downhill. A friend showed me how to rig a harness with two pieces of narrow PVC pipe: a simple, economical solution.
Susan and I drove together to the trailhead that Friday afternoon. We were to haul much of the group’s gear (food, cookware and stove, plus our clothes, headlamps, sleeping bags and pads) using my sled. We’d take turns pulling it. We loaded it up—there certainly was a lot!—secured the gear with bungies, and maneuvered it the few feet to the trailhead.
It wasn’t until then that I noticed the conditions. Uh-oh. There had been a lot of thawing and refreezing that year, and the snow was hard and fast.
Susan offered to take the first turn pulling the sled. I hooked the harness to her daypack, and she took off, going downhill faster perhaps than she expected but looking like the veteran that she is. I clipped on my skis to follow.
I managed the first decline, which was short and not at all steep, and made my way as well as I could up the next hill. The snow beneath me was white, but it just as well might have been blue ice. Speeding downhill I tried to turn to avoid the trail edge, which dropped steeply into woods. My skis wouldn’t respond! I crashed to the ground and lay there, thinking how comical I must look.
I glanced up to see Susan disappearing over the third hill, her back to me, the sled obediently following. I managed to get myself righted and up—and almost fell again.
I took off my skis and began walking.
And so it went that weekend: Everyone else stepping out confidently, on skis or not, while I took things more cautiously. There was no judgment from the other women. Quite the opposite: They were warm and welcoming. The problem was my own mind talk. I couldn’t help feeling a bit different, having no children at home or full-time job to talk about. Being a self-employed writer can be hard to explain. What do you do? Um, I write about what interests me. It’s great, except when my mind goes utterly blank. Still, I enjoyed myself. I was doing something women from Maine do! I didn’t take a dip in the bathtub-sized hole that my companions chopped in the ice that sunny Sunday morning, though everyone else did. Susan had included “bathing suit” on the list of items we should bring, but I’d thought it was a joke.
The following March we had a glorious six-or-so inches of snow after we’d walked into the cabin on mostly bare ground. I’d again brought my skis—and I had fun, lots of it.
Even so, as we took starry nighttime walks across the snowy pond, exploring its thickly wooded islands, I pushed myself hard trying to keep up with the others. These are fit, energetic, mostly long-legged women. They strode along, talking and laughing—and finally I had to decide whether to ask them to slow down or just lag behind. I lagged, taunted by a vision of myself as the slower, shorter little sister. Saturday afternoon, when my friends went skiing on some of the steeper, more remote trails, I set out alone, sticking to trails I knew I could handle. My skiing had vastly improved. I wound past snow-laden conifers and through groves of leafless hardwoods, their trunks sprayed white on the windward side. I skied to the end of the trail through sodden groves of thin-trunked red maples to where the stream that feeds the pond sluices through a rocky cut. In the winter quiet it seemed that my real life was far away.
Last March I was in Alaska when my young friends went to the cabin by the pond. This February, when Susan sent out her invitation (Come with us!), I sat looking at it for a long time.
Did I want to spend three days as the older-younger sister?
I sat down to write Susan and explain that I just felt too different from the rest of the group, and that I’d be staying home. But I couldn’t make myself type those words. Instead I wrote my feelings:
“I can’t keep up with you youngsters,” I wrote. I’d found that “as the years roll by, you revert to your less-capable self. Humbling and enlightening.”
“I’ll admit to thoughts along the lines of: ‘This is ridiculous. I’ve aged out. I just need to accept that.’ But I think it’s something even more difficult: I should come with you and face up to my limitations. I should cut myself a big piece of humble pie and enjoy it. I’ve earned it.”
And so I did.
Warm rains arrived before our trip to the cabin this year, so there wasn’t any skiing. But there was exploring and feasting and lots of laughter. There were long evenings by the woodstove, talking about our lives. Saturday afternoon, after a lengthy hike, someone said, “We walked six miles! I don’t feel like we went nearly that far!”
I said, “I do!” And everyone laughed.
I had my bathing suit with me this time. The ice on the edge of the pond was slushy--no axe required. I was the last one in and probably stayed in the shortest time. But in I went. It’s true what they say: Cold water brings you alive.
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