Scars
By Stout Cortez
We hit the mountain at the same time, skidding face to face. I don’t know exactly how our skis got tangled up to lead to our trajectory; I came out of my break and was late to see her, having just come out of one of her usual tight and flat turns across the mountain, now on a straight line towards me. I know that the tip of my ski ran over top of hers and got itself to the inside of her right boot, and when our bodies collided the torque on her left leg — anchored as it was in a freshly secured binding, breaking in its first run of the season — twisted through her knee and cleanly severed her left anterior cruciate ligament. Then, somehow, we turned and slid together face to face, allowing her shocked, pained, tortured expression through orange-tilted goggles to sear itself into my memory where it will probably reside until I die.
“How could you do this to me,” is what it said.
“It’s gone — it’s gone,” is what my wife actually said, through pained short breaths as she managed her way out of a shock response.
I stayed in mine for a while.
The ski patrol came very quickly — at least that’s what I’ve been told. I was sitting catatonic on the eastern face of Mount Mansfield, home of Vermont’s Stowe Ski Resort, and was not truly experiencing time. I was stuck in the moment that had just passed, 15 seconds or 15 minutes prior. I’d seen her winding her way down the mountain in front of me, at what I had judged to be a safe distance away. I’d pushed hard into the mountain with my left leg for the first time that season but wasn’t feeling secure in my cut, leading me farther down-mountain than I had intended to go. On my pass back, I had pushed hard with my recently injured right leg, but my ankle twinged with pain from where it had recently been injured, drawing that turn once again much farther down the slope than I wanted to travel. By the time I had come out of my break, she was right there, looking over her left shoulder down the slope. I screamed her name and tried to move but it was too late.
She never saw me, never expected me to be there. Maybe she could have picked me up in her periphery and moved, and maybe she brought her line too far laterally across the run (as she would later say), but I knew it immediately: This was my fault.
I did this. My beautiful wife, who moves with such grace and power, who was just out on the first run of the season, on a trip she organized, would be out of commission for a year — if we were lucky.
