The fact that our high school had a ski club says a lot about the town we grew up in. Not that we were like the nearby prep schools such as Miss Porter’s or Avon Old Farms.

They had Kennedys and their ilk for alums and an actual week off specifically for parents to take their kids skiing in Europe or at Vail or Sun Valley. But we had kids that formed a club to go skiing and could afford to go.

Bethani was going on that trip and so was Sam. And Sam, I heard through school gossip, was going to ask Bethani to the junior prom during the trip. I didn’t want that to happen. And Bob, being my best friend, didn’t want it to happen, either.

Bob was a very good skier and I wasn’t too bad, when compared to most of the kids at school. None of the guys of the football team skied so it was something I could do better than they. But Bob and I didn’t join the ski club. That would have been too uncool. You would have to sit in meetings once a week and discuss the trip from the beginning of the school year until we went on the trip in February. The serious kids would have had serious discussions about planning the event. Ad nauseam.

Bob and I would have been seriously bored. We would have constantly disrupted the meetings with what we thought were witty comments and probably gotten thrown out and wouldn’t have been allowed to go on the trip anyway.

So we plotted. What could we do? Sam would be with Bethani all week at the ski resort and I’d be stuck at home. Then we had a flash of our future freedom.

“Why don’t we go on the trip ourselves?”

After all, we’d gone to Boston a few months before on our own. Just hopped in the car one Sunday with freshly printed drivers’ licenses and drove up to Fenway for a double header with the Washington Senators. Sat right behind home plate and saw Frank Howard hit a couple of home runs.

OK. That was Bob’s doing. He had shown up at my house that morning right after we got home from church. He had his mom’s station wagon and said he just wanted to drive around. That made sense. We were 16 and at that age, we did a lot of just “driving around.”

10 blocks into the driving around, though, he had the car on the highway heading to Boston. Just the first of the many times Bob shanghaied me.

But I was in agreement on the ski trip. We didn’t have enough money to pay for much more than the lift tickets, though.  So we came up with a plan that seemed perfect to our 16-year-old minds.

We’d sleep in the car.

In Vermont.

In the dead of winter.

Of course that part was Bob’s idea. He was always coming up with plans that often got us into sticky situations. It really bothered my mom. Whenever Bob called the house, she’d give me a look as she handed the phone to me that said she knew we were cooking up a scheme … and Bob was the head chef. 

And she didn’t know about half the trouble he got us into. I certainly never told her about skiing through a Wyoming avalanche field at midnight, guided only by the light of the moon. She did make peace with him 50 years later – when she was suffering from dementia.

We told our parents we’d be flopping on the floor of the motel rooms the other kids had. We didn’t tell them about sleeping in the back of Bob’s mother’s Ford Country Squire station wagon, the one with a 427 horsepower police engine that we got up to 115 mph on the rare straight-aways on the roads of Vermont.

We arrived the same night everyone else did and looked around town for a place to park where cops wouldn’t notice us. We found a lot on the edge of town that had some cars in it so we wouldn’t stand out as the only car. We ate some bologna sandwiches, which were to be our standard meal of the week.

In our first night of parental freedom, they tasted mighty good. After dinner, we cranked the heat to get the interior of the car as hot as we could. Then we cut the motor, cracked a window and dove into our down sleeping bags.

As we snuggled in the warmth of the moment, we congratulated each other on our great plan. The adventure was working perfectly. We were on our own, on the ski trip and we didn’t have the rules the other kids did. We could come and go as we pleased.

We soon discovered, though, that cars have absolutely no insulation properties. As the temperature plunged outside, it also plunged inside – to single digits. Even in our sleeping bags, we struggled to stay warm. We each curled into a ball, with every muscle tensed.

We woke up early the next morning and didn’t want to get out of our bags. We argued, as we often did, about who had to get us out of this mess. Finally, Bob, with a great display of thrashing and screaming curses, scrambled from his bag and started the car. We were both shouting at the top of our lungs in an effort to stay warm. As if our volume could push up the temperature.

Eating bologna sandwiches for a week also had seemed reasonable when we planned it at home. We both liked bologna. And it was cheap. However, as we faced bologna for breakfast on that second day – after having enjoyed bologna for dinner the night before – we found that it was frozen solid, as was the mustard. I couldn’t eat bologna without mustard, so it was then that I started to crack – just like I would 10 years later in that avalanche field.

We only had been best friends for a year at that point, but I would find over the next 40 years, Bob always made these plans that sounded great and could provide great adventure – “Hey, there’s a music festival with dozens of bands on a farm in upstate New York this summer and we’ve got to go!” – often with key elements unplanned. And I was almost always along for the ride.

I never learned. We survived some great and some harrowing experiences, so maybe it’s best I live half way across the country from Bob now.

We finally thawed ourselves out – the bologna and mustard took longer – and decided our plan needed some modification.

Bob had heard there were people who rented their basements for $2 a night. All you got was a cot in the basement and bathroom privileges, but we could afford that on our budget. Near town, we found a100-year-old house with 8 cots jammed in a basement decorated with a pair of bare, 25-watt bulbs hanging from the ceiling and dozens of spider webs.

We didn’t care, we assured each other as we dumped our stuff in the basement. At least we had heat. And a place to thaw our bologna and mustard.

Then we were off to the slopes. We hadn’t told anyone we were coming and suddenly we were in lift lines and slowly being revealed to classmates as they realized whom it was beneath the ski goggles and coats. I worked my way into line to be next to Bethani and got on a chair with her so she had no chance for escape all the way up the mountain. That was a pattern that continued all week as I worked on getting back in her good graces and she in mine.            

Sam was clearly upset. He thought since Bob and I weren’t in the ski club, Bob and I wouldn’t be there. Sam figured he’d have Bethani to himself all week and he hadn’t felt a sense of urgency. He thought he could just slowly let her see him in a different light – a boyfriend light – and at the end of the week, they would be going to the junior prom.

I threw a kink into those plans by showing up. We didn’t have a lot of honor in suburbia, but we had some and Sam, once he saw I was there, felt he had to back off and let me try.  After a couple of days, I knew my plan was working. By the end of the week, Bethani and I had agreed to go to the prom together. She didn’t really want to go with anybody else and it turned out, definitely not Sam.

Our space in the basement of the flophouse was the best part of the trip and the worst. We were warm and we had a place to sleep. We’d ski all day, go out to eat and hang out with the kids from school. But then they had a curfew and had to go back to their rooms. We’d laugh at them and give them a hard time. After all, Bob and I had freedom. We didn’t have a curfew. We could go anywhere we wanted.

But we were 16. We weren’t old enough to go to a bar and didn’t have the money even if we were. So there wasn’t much to do with that freedom except go back to our spooky cell in the basement. That had no TV or radio. So we’d be in bed by 8 o’clock. 9 at the latest. We were probably in bed before the kids on the school trip. Even though we were now indoors and had heat, we still zipped the sleeping bags up tight, as if we were on Mt. McKinley. Not to ward off cold, but anything that crawled in that basement.

“Aw, they’re asleep,” one of them said.

“I think they’re just pretending to be asleep,” another said. He was right. I held my breath.

“Well, if we find out they know anything,” the leader said and paused before continuing, casually, “we’ll just kill the fucks.”

I didn’t move a muscle. And neither did Bob, who, he told me the next day, was also awake. Luckily for us, those guys left early the next morning, not needing to kill us. Looking back, it was probably a drug deal and their comment was a warning to the high school kids they had been sharing the basement with. They had been cordial, but not warm, to us up to that point. That night, they were very cold.

Next week: Chapter 16: School Politics … Provides a Path