I pressed the gas harder to outrace my grim thoughts.
The crossing for the Appalachian Trail came into view. Few people attempted to hike this stretch of glacial terrain in the winter. There was a short ascent to Piazza Rock that got some foot traffic, but almost no one dared venture out onto the exposed ridges beyond. The foolish ones who did—the backcountry skiers and alpine snowshoers—often needed to be rescued by game wardens risking their own lives.
And then, suddenly, the mountains let me go, and I was back in the bright white world.
Down in the Sandy River Valley, almost all of the variety stores and motels had been closed for the winter—if not boarded up for good—but now I began seeing motor inns with glowing VACANCY signs, and restaurants with snowmobiles parked out front. SUVs with out-of-state plates and ski racks began to zip past. Finally, a great white bowl opened before me, and I saw the hard, shining expanse of Rangeley Lake. Bright-colored dots raced back and forth on the distant ice; the sledders were out en masse for Snodeo.
I’d never attended the winter carnival, but I understood it to be an extended weekend of snowmobile races, bonfires, and hard partying. While our fellow officers in the state police and the sheriff’s department patrolled the roads, Maine game wardens were given the trails and frozen lakes to watch over. Most of what we dealt with on the sledding routes were speedsters and drunks. I assumed the wardens assigned to Rangeley for the carnival must have gotten cramped hands from writing tickets.
As I drove through the village itself, I had to stop several times to let pedestrians cross the road. They piled in and out of the clothing boutiques and sipped lattes behind the steamed windows of the restaurants along Main Street. After the poverty and desolation I’d witnessed in the Sandy River Valley, I found it disorienting to see so much money on display in what seemed, on the map, to be the middle of nowhere.
The GPS told me to make a right onto Route 16, locally nicknamed “Moose Alley” for the number of collisions that occurred along it. Just past the village, the road took another hard turn, and then I was leaving the town and the traffic behind again. The houses began to be spaced farther and farther apart, and the woods began to edge closer to the snowbanks, until the trees on either side became unbroken walls of green. I drove fifteen more minutes along Moose Alley before seeing the sign for Widowmaker.
10
Widowmaker was situated on the steep southeast-facing slopes of East Kennebago Mountain. The last time I could remember the resort having been in the news was a decade earlier, when a chairlift had malfunctioned, sending dozens of skiers plummeting to the ground. A man from Connecticut, a father of two, had died. There had been a number of gruesome headlines in the tabloids playing on the Widowmaker name. After the accident and the subsequent multimillion-dollar civil suit, the mountain resort had struggled to stay open.
Then, last year, a big ski company from out west had bought the place for pennies on the dollar. Pulsifer had said the new owners were looking to renovate the outdated lodge buildings and lifts. I wondered if they were considering bigger changes as well. I didn’t know the first thing about marketing, but it seemed like they might want to rebrand their new investment with a less macabre name.
The access road to the resort crossed the frozen Dead River on a bridge that looked like it should have been replaced a decade earlier. Almost immediately, I came upon a cluster of businesses that had been built since the days when my father had driven a snowcat on the mountain. There was a grocery store plastered with signs that seemed to make a big deal out of its liquor selection; something called Kennebago Estates, which I guessed to be condominiums, offering many discounted units for sale; and a family restaurant, the Landing, which had an overly large and empty parking lot, as if its owners had opened the place with unreal expectations of how busy they would be.
One of the few landmarks I recognized from my childhood was the campus of the Alpine Sports Academy. The dormitories and halls had been built in the style of Swiss lodges—a timber-frame design that now seemed dated—but they looked better maintained than the other buildings I’d seen so far. Somehow ASA had managed to thrive even while the adjacent resort had fallen into disrepair—a tribute to the fund-raising prowess of its head of school, or at least proof that having half a dozen alumni with Olympic medals was enough to make the pickiest of parents overlook a lot of the mountain’s flaws.