Chairlift Confessions

Okay, so let me set the scene, because you need the scene to understand how a man ends up with his hand in his supervisor's hair on a stalled gondola at 4:40 on a Sunday.

I'm Rudy, I'm 28, and I've worked ski resorts since I was 22. Six winters, six mountains, never stayed anywhere longer than one season. That's not a flaw, that's a lifestyle. This year it was Summit Peak, a mid-size area in the Sierra Nevada, and the season was dying right on schedule. Late March, slush by noon, empty runs by three, and the whole mountain smelling like wet rubber and sunscreen.

And Clare. God, Clare.

She was 31, lift operations supervisor, which meant she was technically my boss even though I taught ski lessons and she ran chairs. We'd spent the entire season orbiting each other like two planets that hated the same sun. She kept a clipboard. An actual clipboard! Who still uses a clipboard? Clare, that's who, and she used it like a weapon.

"Line's backing up at Chair Three, Rudy," she'd say, tapping it.

"Line's backing up because your lift ops take four minutes to load a family of five," I'd say back.

"Then teach them faster, hotshot."

That was our whole relationship. Four months of that. I counted run times against her on the timing boards, she knew terrain opening dates better than dispatch did, and once, in January, we argued for forty minutes about whether Lower Copperhead held snow longer than the Ridge Traverse. It does, by the way. I was right. She has never admitted it and she never will.

Anyway. Last day of the season. Sunday, bluebird, seventy degrees at the base. The mountain closes for good that afternoon and half the staff already drove down to Reno. So by 4:15 the summit was basically mine, and I was standing at the top terminal in just a base layer because it's March in the Sierra and the sun means business.

And here comes Clare, walking out of the lift shack with her helmet under one arm.

"You're still here?" she said.

"You're still here?" I said. Great comeback, I know. I'm a professional.

"Somebody has to sign off the gondola shutdown." She looked at my outfit and rolled her eyes. "You're going to ride down dressed like that?"

"I'm going to ride down dressed exactly like this, yes."

"Fine. I'm coming with you. If you get hypothermia it's a paperwork nightmare."

So that's how we ended up alone in a gondola cabin, eight seats, all of them empty except us on opposite ends like a couple of strangers, gliding down over slushy groomers with the whole valley going gold underneath us.

And then she did the thing. The thing I'm going to be thinking about until I die.

She reached up, unclipped her helmet, and shook her hair out.

Let me explain what this did to me, because Clare in a helmet and a hi-vis vest is one person, a person who yells at me about line times. Clare with a helmet off and about two feet of dark hair falling past her shoulders is a completely different category of human being. It's unfair, honestly. There should be a sign.

"What?" she said, because I was staring. Of course I was staring.

"Nothing. Your hair. It's long."

"Observant." But she was smiling a little, smug, the way she smiled when she won an argument. "Four months of working with you and you never once noticed I have hair?"

"I noticed! I noticed constantly! I just never said it out loud like a weirdo."

"Rudy." She laughed. It was a real laugh too, not the supervisor laugh. "You are a weirdo. You timed your lunch breaks against mine all season. You think I didn't notice?"

Wait. Hold on. She noticed that? That's humiliating. I thought I was subtle. I would clock out for lunch eleven minutes after her every day like some kind of lovesick idiot with a stopwatch, and she clocked it in, what, December?

"You noticed that?" is what I actually said, because my brain was buffering.

"I notice everything, that's my whole job." She stretched her legs out, boots propped on the opposite bench, and looked out the window. "Last run of the season. Feels weird, right?"

"Weird good or weird bad?"

"Weird quiet. I've been doing this since I was twenty-one. Five years supervising, five years of guest services before that. Ten seasons and I still get a little sad on the last day."

"Ten seasons and you still won't admit Copperhead holds better than the Traverse."

"Oh my god!" She turned to look at me, grinning now. "You're STILL on that?"

"It's about principle."

The cabin hit a mid-station guide roller with a clunk, and then, right as she opened her mouth to roast me again, the whole gondola shuddered and stopped.

Not a wobble. A full stop. Dead silence, just the wind ticking against the cable.

"Great," Clare said, pulling out her radio. "Base, this is Clare. We're stopped between towers nine and ten, mid cable reset. Copy?"

The radio crackled back something about a ten minute reset, stand by, do not exit the cabin. She clipped the radio back on her hip and shrugged at me.

"Ten minutes," she said. "You're stuck with me."

"Tragic."

"Completely tragic." She sat back and looked at me with that half smile again. "You know what's funny? Four months of you trying to beat me to the bottom and you never once did."

"Excuse me? I beat you down in February."

"You skied the closure rope through the trees, you absolute liability. That doesn't count."

"It counted to me."

"Doesn't count." She pulled her boot up onto the bench, casual as anything. "Every legitimate race this season, I won. Every single one. You know how that feels, Rudy? Losing to a clipboard?"

And the thing was, sitting there in a stopped cabin with nowhere to go and ten minutes of nothing, the rivalry didn't feel like rivalry anymore. It felt like flirting. It had maybe always been flirting and I'd been too dumb to see it, which, honestly, tracks.

"Maybe I let you win," I said.

She laughed out loud. "You absolutely did not."

"Maybe once."

"You crashed into the snow fence in January."

"That was a tactical crash."

"Sure it was." Her hair had fallen forward over one eye and she made no move to fix it, just looked at me through it, daring me, and I don't know where the nerve came from but I reached over and brushed the strand back off her face.

And here's the part I need you to understand. I asked first. Sort of. My hand paused right there, fingers almost touching