The Last Marathoner

Today marks the close of what we in the winter tourism business in New Hampshire call Massachusetts Vacation Week. All of the New England states take a week of vacation in February, but they don't all take the same week. Typically, Massachusetts takes the week that begins with President's Day weekend, and New Hampshire takes the following week. For the ski industry up here,  vacation weeks are the peak earning period of the winter.

Big operations might take on extra help, or routinely handle such a high volume that the vacation week onslaught just makes the normal shifts a little busier. In our little shop and touring center it's more like the Alamo. Everyone is on the parapet firing or behind some cover reloading. All leave was cancelled. We would work through our days off in a 12-day marathon. The shop is open seven days a week in the peak of winter or summer. Only in the past few years have we taken to closing on Sundays in the spring and fall. So each person's schedule overlaps, covering days off. Eliminate the days off from a week, and each schedule nets out to 12 in a row. I've written about the disorientation that develops during this period. That piece was written when we had the retail concession at Jackson Ski Touring, where we had a much heavier onslaught with a much lower common denominator. But we did the marathon before we had the Jackson gig, and we have continued since then.

Up until a couple of years ago, the Wolfeboro shop had two full-time backshop operatives. Then Big G decided to cut the wire and tunnel to freedom. For the past two winters we have only had part-timers in addition to me. So no one else goes through the 12-day grinder. El Queso Grande works seven days a week all the time, but the shop is his life's work. Despite the wretched financial state we all share, he does have the cachet of ownership, and justifiable pride at the considerable contribution his family has made to the community over the decades since they stepped into the tar pit of small business ownership. He appears to have nothing else he'd rather be doing, especially since various medical problems cut off his career as an aging athlete. If he felt better, he would want to ride his bike and ski more. But he doesn't have an unwritten novel or endless cartoon ideas hammering in his brain to make him constantly question his life choices. The two phases of his life are working and resting up to work some more. This is not said in disrespect. His life is hard and he works hard at it.

I am the last marathoner. Gone is the camaraderie and esprit de corps of the tourist wranglers. We'd be burnt out, irritable, zonked with fatigue, but we would have each other. I am the last.

Once the marathon ends, the season winds down very quickly, regardless of the amount of snow or the enthusiasm of the dedicated skiers. We can't reconfigure the shop to bike work for at least another month, but the general public is mostly finished with winter after their February gorge on it. If the weather enables it, we will have some busy weekends. For me, the easing of the schedule means that I might have the chance to dig through the scraps of paper with scribbled notes on them and develop the ideas captured there.