I spent this past spring break skiing with my friend Colin’s family in Denver. I thought that everyone in Colorado would be horrifically toned, occupying all their time skiing, with super reinforced ice axe straps on everything from their underwear to their book bags. I nervously prepared myself for the trip by assembling a stylish ski ensemble and watching as much of Jackson, Wyo.’s neo-ski cinema that Netflix would send me.
Though Colin’s family was sufficiently fit and well over six feet two inches in height (including his mother), they were not toting ice axes when we arrived at their house in the suburbs of Denver. And their interests spanned further than skiing: his mother is a nurse and teacher in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood in Denver, skilled at cooking terrifically healthy meals that even young male college students enjoy and his father is a geologist who entertained my questions about dinosaurs, the proto-Rockies, and the mines of the Wild West.
Because Colin insisted that we get the first chairlift each morning, we kept the same sleeping schedule as his parents. I went to bed suburbanly early to wake at dawn, drinking enough coffee to require bathroom stops every 20 minutes on the drive into the mountains. Colin’s mother prepared skirt steak and complexly oated bread sandwiches with no mayo for me to go with our Coors lites at the lodge. The beer revived the need for frequent bathroom breaks, this time all over the fresh snow, semi-concealed from the other skiers, like little wild foxes.
After skiing we would cuddle with Colin’s puppy, drink all his family’s interesting foreign beer, and play Scrabble, while Mom knit us scarves. I looked forward to the evenings when, sunburned and exhausted from skiing, I could camp out with a book on the “money seat” of the couch—the seat with leg room enough for someone over 6 feet tall. His parents would wander in to eat fresh guacamole and sunflower seed flax chips with us and watch Georgetown basketball on television.
It wasn’t the scholarly scrabble games or topics of conversation that made my spring break delightful, though. It was that I had left D.C. behind and my narrow concerns about graduating with it. I even became used to Colin’s personal customs. His music taste no longer seemed infinitely repetitive and his forgetful nature for things like ski tickets and lunch money did not irk me as it usually does back at school.
Spending so much time together, we practiced intimacy with one another’s personal habits. We were comfortable driving in silence save for Sade’s smooth R&B. I didn’t judge his impatient rage with traffic or slow chair lifts, nor did he bemoan my habit of liking his beer more than my own. As our friendship grew, so did our frankness. We could discuss bowel irregularities with each other and we could pick our noses in front of the other. No eating it, though, and no matter how close friends you are, you can’t chew like an animal with your mouth open, and you have to wash your polypro top after a few days of sweating down surprise moguls so that the car doesn’t smell like mildewing parsley.
Even our smelly proximity was that much sweeter over the last week. As a Bostonian it takes me several hours to find real mountains. Where I live people burn calories on elliptical machines, not on hikes. Colin’s family could leave the TV and the homogeneity of the cul-de-sac and soon be playing in the mountains surrounded by Colorado pine trees. Everything seemed healthier and more appealing than in D.C. Even his dog, a ten-year-old black lab, attacked me and my snacks with the vigor of a puppy. Unlike my own suburban home, where I would be playing 1986 Sega and drinking my mother’s Heinekens, I did not feel stifled by the insistent patterns of living while in Colorado. My satisfaction could have been because I was with this family only for a week. But it could also be that changing my geography, whether from the suburbs into the mountains, or from D.C. further west, is essential for any kind of joie de vivre.
