Popsicle Dreams

“Squeamish stomachs cannot eat without pickles.”
-Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard, 1739

I learned to cross-country ski during the longest winter I have ever known. As a child, I spent many of my winter afternoons and evenings at the kitchen table, with my hands often around a cup of hot chocolate. My mother always tried to encourage me to get outside, but the ‘exciting’ winter activities that brought many to my Alaskan hometown never appealed to me.

If only I could have been a brightly clad fairgoer in a big city somewhere, trying the newest trendy food item, whether that be a deep-fried candy bar, or a pickle popsicle with real pieces of pickles frozen into it. The only pickles at home were the jar of baby dills sitting in the back of the fridge, that my sister would slip into her sandwiches, nestled between layers of Muenster cheese and salt and vinegar chips.

I was more enthused by the images on my computer of events and festivals far away, with throngs of people gathered to throw themselves into new experiences, or of gargantuan indoor city shopping centers, where you could spend all day flitting around shops looking for every possible item you could think of. In the fall, our town fair would last for a week, and one summer, I took up a job there, selling admission tickets near the livestock barn. As for shopping centers, a puny hallway of six shops in a building downtown was the closest thing to a mall that we had. As a child, I had begged to get my ears pierced at the dingy, pastel-toned jewelry store there. I bought sunglasses there too, and I wore them every day for several summers, until one of the screws fell out. Naturally, I bought an identical pair afterward.

The more winter set in at home, the more time I would stay in my room on my computer, and the less time I would spend looking through windows. The only hours the sun came out would be during the school day, and by the time I was old enough to start wishing for the sun, long gone were the days of recess and being outside, chasing giggling classmates. Every day was the same- drive to school in the dark, drive home in the dark, sit inside in the dark. Some would celebrate the winter solstice, but I never did. It didn’t matter; I was always inside for those 3 hours and 41 minutes of sunlight.

During the winter of my melancholy shadows and gloomy 15-year-old dreams, I decided I would join the high school cross-country ski club. It wasn’t bright or colorful, but there were so many people that skied, and at that point, I would take what I could get.

Day after day, I would squeeze my ski bag into the back of my car, hoping that my leftover wax wouldn’t freeze before I made it to practice. I would often make the half-hour drive to Birch Hill after school, in my cherry red and rusting Ford Explorer with pillow-soft seats and a broken heater. Passing by the bright lights of the hardware stores along the way would give me not quite a headache, but an uncomfortable sting behind my eyes. The sun would be long down by then; after I turned up the hill off the main road, it would be my car and I, the hill, and the darkness. The headlights would blankly open the path through the snow, up the hill and around the corner. The warmly lit hub of trails beckoned me forward and into the cold.

Trudging up the steps and trying not to slip, I was always glad to have my battered ski jacket stubbornly hanging on to any warmth it could scrape together. I was stubborn too; I stuck with skiing like a bug hanging on to a fly strip.

When the races started, I found myself going up the hill once again, shivering behind the wheel. I told myself I would at least show up to everything, even the days that were so chilly I could barely breathe. At one such race, my face was so puckered from the cold that by the end, it looked like I had consumed pickle popsicle, after pickle popsicle, after pickle popsicle, dodging flecks of dill along the way. Careening down the Blue Loop hill, my contacts shriveled up and fell out of my eyes, lost somewhere buried in the whirlwind of snow, swept up by hundreds of pairs of skis. I never really liked pickles, especially cold ones.

But I still dreamt of them, the yearnings of a lonely teenage girl who wanted to feel a sense of belonging with the world. The only thing I ever had in common with the land I had lived in my whole life was that I, too, felt just as isolated as the companionless and strangely shaped 49th piece of the continental puzzle. I at least found solace in the equalizing fact that the stinging air of deep winter would pierce everyone’s skin just the same, no matter who one was or claimed to be.

Once you start moving your muscles, you warm up, my ski coaches told me. Fellow skiers had strange tips to distribute heat around the body, some more questionable than others.

“Fling your arms around like this,” an enthusiastic girl with bleach-blonde hair said to me, after noticing me rubbing my hands together. She demonstrated how to move your arms in a circular windmill-like motion. “It brings the warm blood towards your fingers!”

That Christmas, I was gifted a pack of one hundred hand-warmers, eliminating the need to become a human windmill. I stashed a few packs in the team room, where they would stay nice and warm, waiting for my eager and chilly fingers, and I was glad to be rid of the humiliating windmill habit (it unfortunately had worked quite well and had been my primary method to warm up quickly). I felt like I was on the way to becoming a real skier- hiding away hand warmers in my lobster gloves before the Birch Hill practice just like the rest of them.

Birch Hill Recreation Area was the home base for high school skiers during the winter, as it became for me. Dozens of these athletes would don their expensive Nordic lobster gloves and take to the snow, slashing deep lines in the freshly groomed trails, constantly trying to best each other. I had it in my mind that I needed to keep going, keep getting faster, so that they would include me too, but as goes many such things, I would fall behind, trudging along through their ragged tracks.

I often felt forced to venture out past the lighted trails to avoid being slammed into by the razor-fast Varsity athletes, who nonchalantly laughed together at every moment, their camaraderie penetrating the chilly air. As I ventured away from the group, the untouched, darkened trails would gingerly greet me with fresh snow, enticing me to make my own path.

And make my own path I did. In January, my coach told me I was officially a member of the Junior Varsity ski team, and I remember blinking at her, questioning the reality of the situation. I felt I had not earned anything or progressed, both in skiing and in life. Throwing myself into a sport that so awkwardly collided with who I had always been, out of sheer desperation for human connection, had not resulted in any change in my empty social circle. I had long lost the thought of becoming a “real” member of the team, rather than a beginning club member in the perpetual mindset of putting on skis for the first time. Somehow, without noticing, I had found myself accepting the fact that the only constants in my life would be my solitude and the everlasting cold.

Through the long winter, the icy temperature became my reliable companion. I always wore my ski boots in the car; ski boots were comfortable for driving if you overlooked the small metal bar in the front of them. The snow stuck to those boots would accumulate in the floor mat below, and every few weeks, I would chip away at the seemingly infinite sheet of ice that had formed.

Driving alone to Birch Hill, even if the temperature in the car was the same as outside, it always felt warmer once I got out, whether it was late October or early April, or even the frigid Januarys in between. Those Octobers melded to Novembers to Decembers to mush together every second of winter, to the point where all I could differentiate by was the temperature, and the unfortunate intermittent summers.

I only started thinking about the time last autumn, when I touched my ski bag for the last time to zip it up and lean it against the garage wall in my parents’ home. I wedged a pair of roller skis from the summer prior in the newly made cranny between the bag and the wall.

There was no ski team, or even a ski club, in the city in Southern Minnesota that would be my new home, and I didn’t know anyone in about a thousand-mile radius. I trusted myself to go alone to this new place just as I had learned to trust myself to rocket down the steep and battered tracks on the Blue Loop many times over (albeit losing a few contacts).

I visited Birch Hill for the last time before I moved away- I had never been to it when it was green, but I felt I had to say goodbye. The local ski association conveniently had a potluck one week before my long-awaited departure, so I made some carrot cupcakes to bring. A rosy-faced mother complimented my baking and said she hoped Minnesota would treat me well.

My first agenda items in the sprawling Minnesotan suburbs were to visit the local mall, and then the state fair a few weeks later, where the popsicles were icy, and the pickles inside them were sharp against my mouth. They didn’t taste anything like the jar of baby dills in the back of the fridge, but they also didn’t taste anything like the teenaged bitter sense of loneliness that I had grown so infuriated by, that same bitter sense that spurred me to join the skiing community. The hopeful promises of chilly friendships lasting more than the cold, lasting all the way through sunny pickle-less summers, never came to fruition, as much as I had pined for them in search of outside approval when I first learned to ski.

Minnesota wasn’t responsible for “treating me well,” I soon discovered. I had to treat myself well, pickles or not. Honestly, I still don’t love pickles. There’s just something about their tangy sensation though, that always reminds me of the sharp winter cold that I had grown to love, and the beauty of being alone.