A Separate Peace by John Knowles Page A

emphatically taken by surprise, by this and every other shift in our life at Devon.
    The heavy snow paralyzed the railroad yards of one of the large towns south of us on the Boston and Maine line. At chapel the day following the heaviest snowfall, two hundred volunteers were solicited to spend the day shoveling them out, as part of the Emergency Usefulness policy adopted by the faculty that fall. Again we would be paid. So we all volunteered, Brinker and I and Chet Douglass and even, I noticed, Quackenbush.
    But not Leper. He generally made little sketches of birds and trees in the back of his notebook during chapel, so that he had probably not heard the announcement. The train to take us south to the work did not arrive until after lunch, and on my way to the station, taking a short cut through a meadow not far from the river, I met Leper. I had hardly seen him all fall, and I hardly recognized him now. He was standing motionless on the top of a small ridge, and he seemed from a distance to be a scarecrow left over from the growing season. As I plodded toward him through the snow I began to differentiate items of clothing—a dull green deer-stalker’s cap, brown ear muffs, athick gray woolen scarf—then at last I recognized the face in the midst of them, Leper’s, pinched and pink, his eyes peering curiously toward some distant woods through steel-rimmed glasses. As I got nearer I noticed that below his long tan canvas coat with sagging pockets, below the red and black plaid woolen knickers and green puttees, he was wearing skis. They were very long, wooden and battered, and had two decorative, old-fashioned knobs on their tips.
    â€œYou think there’s a path through those woods?” he asked in his mild tentative voice when I got near. Leper did not switch easily from one train of thought to another, and even though I was an old friend whom he had not talked to in months I didn’t mind his taking me for granted now, even at this improbable meeting in a wide, empty field of snow.
    â€œI’m not sure, Leper, but I think there’s one at the bottom of the slope.”
    â€œOh yeah, I guess there is.” We always called him Leper to his face; he wouldn’t have remembered to respond to any other name.
    I couldn’t keep from staring at him, at the burlesque explorer look of him. “What are you,” I asked at last, “um, what are you doing, anyway?”
    â€œI’m touring.”
    â€œTouring.” I examined the long bamboo ski poles he held. “How do you mean, touring?”
    â€œTouring. It’s the way you get around the countryside in the winter. Touring skiing. It’s how you go overland in the snow.”
    â€œWhere are you going?”
    â€œWell, I’m not going anywhere.” He bent down to tighten the lacings on a puttee. “I’m just touring around.”
    â€œThere’s that place across the river where you could ski. The place where they have the rope tow on that steep hill across from the railroad station. You could go over there.”
    â€œNo, I don’t think so.” He surveyed the woods again, although his breath had fogged his glasses. “That’s not skiing.”
    â€œWhy sure that’s skiing. It’s a good little run, you can get going pretty fast on that hill.”
    â€œYeah but that’s it, that’s why it isn’t skiing. Skiing isn’t supposed to be fast. Skis are for useful locomotion.” He turned his inquiring eyes on me. “You can break a leg with that downhill stuff.”
    â€œNot on that little hill.”
    â€œWell, it’s the same thing. It’s part of the whole wrong idea. They’re ruining skiing in this country, rope tows and chair lifts and all that stuff. You get carted up, and then you whizz down. You never get to see the trees or anything. Oh you see a lot of trees shoot by, but you never get to really look at trees, at a tree. I just