A Waitsfield Ski House on the Common Road
By Lee Hall Delfausse
My favorite question to ask any new person I meet in Waitsfield is, “How did you come to The Valley?” Of course, a native, whose roots go back generations, takes affront and asserts, “Yup, I was born here.” But, for the many of us who found The Valley as non-natives, our stories are diverse, yet always laced with an expression of the love for the uniqueness of this Brigadoon.
Our family discovered The Valley in 1956, when we decided to buy a ski house on the Common Road with other Concord, Massachusetts, families: The Halls, the Hazards and the Baldwins. This three-bedroom, one-bathroom house cost $3,000, which seemed affordable for the families, each with three kids. Do the math, 15 people in one house with a wood-burning furnace in the basement, a semi-reliable spring for water, and an attic dormitory with 10 beds. Yes, each weekend one family could have one guest.
However, the menagerie worked because of the strict discipline imposed by the adults. Since skiing was the focus, the house emptied out at 8:00 in the morning with three cars driving to Mad River Glen. Depending on how quickly one could get ready after a communal breakfast, make a sandwich for lunch, and finish one’s single-file use of the bathroom, one could have a choice of a 7:30 car, an 8:00 car or, for the lazy ones, a 9:00 car.
After skiing, once again, the carpools were arranged with one family having to stop at Mehuron’s grocery store for the evening’s food supplies. On Saturday nights, dinner at a large 8 by 12 kitchen table began at 6 p.m. for the kids. The rule was that the kids were to eat, wash their dishes, set the table for the adults who were enjoying cocktails in the small living room, and then go outside the house until 8 p.m. At the time, most of the kids were old enough to freely explore the wonders of this magical Valley.
The kids’ entertainment depended on the snow conditions and/or the temperature outside. If a fresh snow had fallen in the past few days, Brook Road, which was barely plowed, offered a 2-mile sled ride into town. The fun was to piggy back on the sleds, boys and girls, and takeoff, heads forward, feet dragging to slow down, and bodies cocooned, two-by-two, on each other. To prevent frostbite, we outfitted ourselves with all our ski clothes, masks, and goggles. Crash helmets had not been invented. We didn’t worry about cars because we could spot their headlights long before we confronted them.
Once at the junction of Brook Road and Joslin Hill Road, we dragged our sleds through the covered bridge to Seivright Pharmacy where we could call home on the party line. On other nights if Brook Road had been sanded, we would strap on our Northland skis, head down the hill through the broad pastures that contained few impediments except two barbed wire fences. At the time, there were no houses between Common Road and Waitsfield Village. In fact the fields were so open, that on a clear night, we could see, and often hear, the Waitsfield church bell on our way down.
Finally, if the snow were crusty or the temperature had dropped below zero, we would head up the road to the Barnard’s farm, now Gig Geiger’s barn, and help with the feeding and cleaning of the 50 cows at milking time. For suburban kids from Massachusetts, this was exotic and certainly added to the tales we could tell our friends Monday morning in school. We loved the ripe smell of cows, the sweetness of the hay, and the mystery of the lofts. Hide and seek became a little pastime.
I’m not sure what the Barnard children thought of these out-of-towners who treated their chores like a game, not work. But they did welcome us, shared time around their pot-bellied furnace with us and often invited us to New Year’s Eve. Each winter, each weekend, for one brief moment, we felt like locals and accepted.
Enchanted by this rural life, my father and mother, George and Sally Hall, finally decided to shed their suburban lives in Massachusetts, buy the Common Road house from the other families, and move permanently to The Valley. Harvard-educated George became a physics teacher at Harwood and eventually at Green Mountain Valley School; while Sally, well she became known as the town constable and school bus driver ─ a little different from the country club and garden club life in Concord, Massachusetts, they had known.
However, for me, even after 67 years of living in The Valley, of 14 years of retirement here, I still feel as if I’m not a native, but I do feel welcomed.
