My feet are finally coming back to life.

When I was eleven, my mother and father took me to Mohawk Mountain, in West Cornwall, Connecticut. It wasn’t planned, it wasn’t discussed, my father just came home from work and suggested it to my mother and off we went.

I’m not sure what my dad was doing that Saturday morning. Maybe going to the deli, to buy smoked fish and chive cheese. Probably something more significant than that, looking at a property, but on this cold, bright blue Saturday afternoon in 1965, he was home by ten a.m., he was the earliest of risers, and we put our ski plan in action.

When you’re one of three children, you don’t often get solo time with your parents. And when you do, you feel special. The whole ride there I beamed in the back seat of the VistaCruiser, loving the adventure. And an adventure it was, we hadn’t been to Mohawk Mountain before.

Mohawk was Walt Schoenknecht’s first ski area, before he built Mt. Snow. At this time, it possessed one chairlift, and twelve rope tows.

A rope tow is just that. An endless rope, that you grip with your gloves, squeezing until you’re yanked up the hill. They run at light speed, but the toll on your arms and shoulders is incredible. But you don’t know that until the end of the day.

Being more experienced than my parents, having skied in Bobby Hickey’s backyard, I took off alone, I left them on the bunny slope.

Oh, what a grand time I had. Exploring this new hill. I stayed out all afternoon. I didn’t get back to the base lodge until the final tow had shut down. And when I walked inside, I couldn’t feel my feet.

I didn’t think this was that big a deal. What does an eleven year old know about frostbite?

When we got back into the station wagon, I put my feet over the front seat and my mother promptly removed my ski boots. The lace-up ones they’d bought me at Mooney’s Sporting Goods the winter before. And it wasn’t until about twenty minutes later that the pain started in, that I started to scream.

Instead of the adult I’d been on the drive up, I was now a complete baby. Bawling, begging for the pain to stop, as if my parents could do something. When you’re that age you think your parents are all powerful.

Maybe my feet would never come back, I’d be maimed for life.

The better part of an hour went by before my feet returned to something akin to normal.

You’d think I learned my lesson. But I stayed out a bit too long today. My nose is tingling. I pushed Felice to hurry up, to get a move on it, which pissed her off, since she’s recovering from a torn ACL, but I suspected a threshold had been crossed.

You see I’ve become sensitive to frostbite. Sensitive isn’t quite wise, however. I suddenly realize, things have gone too far. I need to GET INSIDE!

Which we eventually did. But this required riding the Game Creek chair, and skiing down to Mid-Vail.

And oh how pretty it was. It was just like that January day back in ’65, not a cloud in the sky. Pristine slopes, trees covered in snow.

After warming up, I took Felice to the base. And then I ascended the Golden Peak chair, up to Highline. But the lift stopped, for seven minutes. I was in the sun, but the thermometer reading was close to zero.

And the Highline lift is always in shadow. My hands started to go. Would this be my last run? The lifts would continue for another half hour, the conditions were so good!

And as I descended Blue Ox, I went from shadow to light. When the terrain fell away and I swooped across the hill I was exhilarated. But then I could no longer feel my hands.

I stopped at the bottom of the run. Did fifty windmills. My hands came back alive.

But not my feet. As I traversed the catwalk, my left foot started to freeze, as if the cold was running from the snow right through both my ski and boot sole. I wasn’t quite ready to scream, but I was approaching freak out.

After a long hot chocolate inside the Lodge, my body started to return to normal. All but the tip of my nose.

So somehow, forty years later, I’m in the same spot as I was before. Supposedly smarter, yet my ignorance still shines.

I called my mother on the cell phone. I got voice mail.