Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

Gerald Ford, it remains to say, is the only non-assassinated President whose name ends with “d,” the only Nebraska native and Michigan politician to attain the office, and the only skier. Oh, perhaps Kennedy and Roosevelt in the course of their privileged boyhoods strapped on some boards, but only Ford flashed down the slopes while President, creating a wholly new protection problem for the Secret Service.

I remember (this is the end, Retrospect , and remember, you asked) taking a run under Ford, on I forget what mountain. At the top, at the clattering terminus of the upper lift, where the pines were stunted and ice was prevalent and the trails were narrow, a taste of fear made the high air hard to breathe as I buckled on my skis, bending over to fasten my safety straps in this era before retractable ski brakes, my only companions on the dazzling windswept summit seeming to be whooping adolescent boys and leather-faced ski bums whose tans stopped at their goggles. Nervously I picked my way down the first glazed turns, trying to stay to the edges where the snow could still grab, the whole purple-blue valley yawning in the tree-gaps like a view from an airplane, and then I gathered looseness and confidence on the broader middle slopes. I began to swing from side to side as if striding through air, singing to give myself rhythm. I had discovered as a boy on the tilted fields around Hayes that singing helped your skiing, almost any tune, strangely enough, if you shifted weight — boot to boot, edge to edge — on the beat. This day, as I remember, the tune was a Beatles oldie, but not such an oldie then; “ Yes terday,” I sang, “all my troub les seemed so far away,” keeping my chest to the valley, “now it looks as though they’re here to stay,” my knees bent and thrusting, my mittened black hands in front of me as the poles pricked the snow alternately, elbows in. “I be leeeve in yes terday!” The held notes gave the ski tails time to turn and say swish . I felt weightless, and seemed to be carving a swanky great signature in the moguls and swales of the middle run. A quickening of tempo forced me to wedel: “ Why she had to go , I don’t know , she wouldn’t say . I said something wrong , and now I long , for yes terday-ay-ayy-ayyy.” Then came a flat lookout at the top of the beginner’s slope, and I rested my trembling legs a moment, the lodge as small beneath me as a matchbox, its vicinity crawling with colored dots. I shoved off, and gathered speed, my knees and feet absolutely together, the whole trick of it absurdly simple, a matter of faith and muscle memory, and, as I with one concluding wiggle-waggle swooped to a stop in a plume of slush, there they all were, my life’s companions, at an outdoor picnic table, their parkas off and jumbled with the wine bottles and picnic hampers: Norma and my children in woolly sweaters cats had napped on, and Genevieve looking terrific in her white cashmere and black headband, and Brent smugly polluting the mountain air with pipe smoke, and the Wadleighs in typically jolly matching Day-Glo yellow high-waisted ski pants with red suspenders, and assorted pink-cheeked children, their lips flecked with relish and mustard, and some other adults, the German professor and his Jewish wife, he still skiing in knickers and long-thongs and she togged out in a camel loden coat as if to go shopping at Bloomingdale’s, and a pair of freckled second wives, and poor elegant Mario Alvarez before his disgrace and abashed return to Providence.

There were smiles on their ruddy faces; they had been waiting for me; they were pleased to have seen me ski so well. In those years I was a fabulous creature, wiry and rapacious, racked by appetites as strange to me now as the motivations of a remote ancestor. I was slender, the result not of exercise but of nervous energy, and my hair was still mostly brown, and like animal fur to the touch, bouncy and soft, not brittle and white and thinning. I wore a ski cap on only the coldest days. Today was not one. It must have been during the Washington’s Birthday weekend (before it was dissolved into Presidents’ Day) or perhaps even the Easter break, because of the strengthening sun; it was picnic weather in the lee of the lodge. But what mountain could it have been? Gunstock and Sunapee don’t have outdoor tables, and Cranmore and Wildcat don’t have run-out slopes the way I remember this one. Could it have been Pleasant Mountain, across the state line in Bridgton, Maine? How could Norma and Genevieve, rivals for my hand, have been there both at once, beaming at me from above the Chardinesque tumble of welcoming food? Perhaps my vivid mental picture derives from the winter before our crise began. Or perhaps we had all patched things up for appearances’ sake, for this holiday outing, one big falsely happy family. Or perhaps memory is more trustworthy than history — Retrospect, your sub-editors might want to check if futons, boom boxes, ripped jeans, chirping video games, and Apple computers were around in 1974–77 or crept into this reminiscence from later years, other eras. Back there somewhere, I had descended the mountain into bliss; this lengthy response to your provocative query seems to have delivered me into darkness. The more I think about the Ford Administration, the more it seems I remember nothing.

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• The Carpentered Hen (1958)

• Telephone Poles (1963)

• Midpoint (1969)

• Tossing and Turning (1977)

• Facing Nature (1985)

• Collected Poems 1953–1993 (1993)

• Americana (2001)

• Endpoint (2009)

• The Poorhouse Fair (1959)

• Rabbit, Run (1960)

• The Centaur (1963)