Palmer Hall

I said a mysterious force took my brother Mike off the mountain but I couldn’t be sure anyone believed me.  We were on a skiing vacation together.  It was the first two weeks in December; my brother and I laid aside our medical practices for this time to drive up to Eagle’s Lair Ski Lodge.

            The sprawling winter compound was situated halfway up a high mountain in Vermont and sprawled out majestically surrounded by forests and overlooked by pointy mountaintops in all directions.

The main building looked like an immense old-fashioned Swiss Chalet with all its charm---but the lodge also had the new technology of huge snow blowers to make its own sweeping ski trails if the weather failed.  We had always counted on wonderful skiing when we were young regardless of what Mother Nature decided in the way of storms and white powder.

            My brother and I worked at The Leaf Hospital fifty miles to the West.  He was a doctor and I was a psychiatrist and the hospital was a small private facility that took in special psychiatric patients but also catered to the dying.  Tending to dying or psychotic patients is emotional work, I can tell you.  I had stayed on a temporary basis but I thought my job was more demanding than Mike’s was but we had both agreed on this hiatus this year. 

From the moment we drove the long drive away from The Leaf to the moment we drove up the long drive to Eagle’s Lair Lodge, Mike and I became the carefree children we were in our youth for the two weeks we were there.

            Every day for those two weeks we skied the mountain trails flying after the perfect run.  I was usually out in front with my blond hair flying in the wind, while, Mike, who wasn’t such a competitive skier, would hang back at a more leisurely pace.  On this particular day, our last, I thundered down the course like I was trying for an Olympic medal.  I glanced back to find Mike twenty-five feet behind; I recognized him by his sky-blue parka and white goggles.  Then, in what seemed only a minute, to my surprise he was right next to me, and then he truly shocked me by pulling ahead of me racing at a frenzied clip.  I was quite happy to take up his challenge, it awoke me out of my daydreaming and led me toward the fruition of my own need to gather speed and catch up to him. 

            When he turned and saw me coming on rapidly, he started playing games with me.  If I sped up, he did too; it seemed he was hell bent on my not catching him.  I was amazed that Mike was skiing so recklessly. 

Mike had never shown any particular need in the past to beat me down to the bottom of the hill and never seemed to mind that I trounced him consistently on the mountain.

            I count my dreaminess that day to being more interested in the beauty of the trees and sky and the white powder that had dropped overnight turning everything into a winter fairyland.  The snow, where it had been swept from the trail into great mounds, glistened in the dying sun and the wind-filled pines whispered music to me.  The air was growing more frigid as dusk came on and I felt the out-of-doors doing its healing magic sweeping aside my moodiness as it always did.

            I adjusted my goggles and found Mike just ahead of me, then he dived down into a wide, sweeping turn spraying a huge fountain of snow up into the air, and I lost him in the glint of the dying sunlight.  Minutes later I came around the same turn.  I have never said what actually happened until forced to.  I explained it all by saying I was overtaken by a sudden urge, a compulsion, to catch up to my brother and give him the ride of his life.