Chapter Nine
Nine
They decided to join the local children’s ski league.
—
The Greensbury Valley Ski Center was just fifteen minutes up a road from town, and the schools let the children out early so they could ski in daylight.
It was lightly snowing when Miles collected first Wesley, then Olive, and followed a caravan of other families to the Center, a modest log building heated by wood-burning stoves, where helpful parent volunteers fitted the children with skis and poles, and, outside, other parent volunteers stood in a snowy field with signs showing creatures of ascending levels of lethality—Snowshoe Hare, Owl, Viking—corresponding to skiing experience.
The parents in the field were alone, having failed, communally, to gather a single child from a small hill of plowed snow, where a game of King of the Mountain was under way, and two larger boys and one little girl, who Miles realized with a shock was Olive, pushed child after child down the slope, their falls broken only by the bodies of other children.
Miles noticed several things about the ski league, the first being that many of the local children wore sweatpants and sweatshirts, and there were even a couple in T-shirts, while his were bundled for a gale.
The other was a very muscular, very healthy man, dressed in red, white, and blue full-body spandex, like a patriotic performer in a circus, except the red, white, and blue seemed somehow different from the American red, white, and blue, and the central design was not the Stars and Stripes but a cross.
This man looked repeatedly at his watch, and, at the appointed hour, blew on a whistle.
The children froze, even the falling children froze, and then everyone rushed over and gathered under their predetermined signs.
This was Coach Bjorn, whom they had heard about from Miranda, and this was his Olympic spandex, which he had worn at Sochi, and this was the two meters of solid Scandinavian muscle contained within, and together they were the reason for the presence of many of the moms, and a couple of the dads, who otherwise had little interest in skiing.
Going to watch Bjorn was known locally as “Bjorning.”
Miles had first learned of Bjorn the previous week, from Miranda.
With a wink at Kate, Miranda had pulled up Bjorn’s Sochi performance on her phone, then some videos of Bjorn shirtless in summer training, and then some cross-training videos that showed him swimming in a fjord, perhaps swimming the entire fjord, stopping only to play Frisbee on a shingle beach with some of his young fans, still in his swimsuit, his tan lats shimmering with ocean spray as he hurled children far into the surf.
“And he comes from a country with a national healthcare system,” said Miranda.
The women were rapt. Miles, straightening his posture as best he could, asked why, if Bjorn was so amazing, he hadn’t medaled at Pyeongchang, four years later.
“Bjorn did not compete at Pyeongchang,” answered Miranda, a little protectively.
“That must have been really hard for him,” said Miles.
Then Miranda explained that Bjorn didn’t compete in Pyeongchang because he had his foot shot off during his Norwegian military service as a paratrooper. This was during the 2017 hostage taking at Oseberg Oil Platform E, after he had parachuted in on skis.
And the good thing was that it was really cold on the platform, because it preserved his foot, which they reattached in Trondheim in time for him to get the War Cross from King Harald. The following year, he had come to Greensbury with his partner, a professor of art.
If Oseberg had stayed offline, added Miranda, France, Germany, and most of Scandinavia would have been forced to shift almost entirely to Russian crude. Some said Bjorn saved the Western European petrochemical industry.
“Saved Western Europe, you could say,” said Kate, pulling up yet another video.
“Basically,” said Miranda.
There was a hushed moment of awe.
“In the short term,” said Miles.
“Sorry?”
“Because of climate change,” said Miles. The women now looked at him. “I’m not saying it was wrong, what he did, and that I wouldn’t do the same. But I’m just asking, has that helped or hurt?”
—
Now Bjorn stood before them with nothing but the thinnest, most aerodynamic fabric between his body and the world.
He explained the Norwegian way of friluftsliv, life in the open air.
How important it was to be one with the elements!
In Norway, children were born with skis on.
Not physically born, but spiritually. Without skiing, Norway would still be ruled by—his face contorted—Sweden.
Ancient wooden skis, preserved in bogs, gave testament to the glorious past, when man and ski were one.
There was even a Norse god of skiing. Did the children know the Norse god of skiing?
Several of the children raised their hands, including Wesley.
It must have been a rhetorical question, because Bjorn answered it himself.
It was Ullr, he said, the son of Thor, who ruled the world during the winter months.
Then he spoke for a while about Ullr, and the difference between the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda, sang a skaldic poem, told them about the team Listserv, the end-of-year smalahove feast, what they should do if they needed to use the bathroom (stop skiing first), and asked if they had any questions.
The bundle of clothing that was Wesley still had his hand raised. Miles closed his eyes, for he knew what was coming.
“Yes, young skier?”
“The other Norse god of skiing is Skadi, a female god. I didn’t know if you were going to mention her, you know”—he put his hand on Olive’s shoulder—“because of the girls.”
There was silence.
“Also,” said Wesley, in a quieter voice, as if he knew he shouldn’t say it but could not abide the further spread of disinformation, “Ullr was Thor’s stepson, not his son by birth.”
Miles looked at Bjorn. Don’t do it, he pleaded, telepathically.
Don’t fuck with a twelve-year-old about Norse myths, he begged.
Not in front of everybody. Later, he would have a talk with Wesley, to explain again that adults didn’t care if information was actually correct.
But not now, Mr. Sochi Medal. You have no idea who you are up against.
And Bjorn must have received the warning, or maybe part of his training involved sizing up an adversary, because he chose not to answer.
It was time to break into groups! He would stay with the Snowshoe Hares.
This was the secret of the ski league’s dominance, he explained—to focus on the little ones, the weakest links.
The Owls and the Vikings hurried off.
Now Bjorn addressed the smaller gathering.
Welcome! he said. The first thing they must learn was to rise when they had fallen.
This was particularly important, for they would be skiing in the woods, in the darkness, and sometimes a straggler would fall beyond the pack.
And what would happen if they fell then, alone in the cold woods, with no one to help them up?
That’s a great question, thought Miles.
One by one, Bjorn skied behind the Snowshoe Hares and pushed them over.
“Don’t worry,” said a woman with lipstick and hair styled for a night out, who must have read the fear in Miles’s expression. “He’s amazing. He’s perfect. All my children skied with him. He didn’t lose a single one.”
—
Back in the lodge, in a fit of generosity, Miles had signed up to be a parent coach, a job that consisted of skiing with the Snowshoe Hares, not all of whom could keep up with Bjorn.
There were three other parent coaches—Tom, Herb, and Anne—and Miles, last having cross-country skied seventeen years before, was assigned the job of “sweeper,” which, true to its name, meant following behind the group, to make sure the stragglers weren’t stranded.
He had selfish reasons. Olive and Wesley might be among this straggly crew, and he didn’t entirely trust the reassurances of the woman with the lipstick, who was clearly Bjorning.
After a half-hour of everyone falling in every way possible, Bjorn proclaimed them ready to go into the woods. With a cheer, they set out. Bjorn, Tom, Herb, Anne, and Miles in back.