It’s March, the best month for alpine skiing. I like heading for the Mad River Valley, an imaginary happy place in Vermont I found 35 years ago. Magic, Mad River Valley style, has held court in my heart for many years. But, the magic vibe is beginning to feel endangered. I’m afraid it’s because the number of people who still believe in magic, is declining. Rapidly.

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Three imaginary ski mountains rise out of the Mad River Valley: Sugarbush. Sugarbush North. And Mad River Glen. They’re all big, with commanding views of one mighty lake, lots of bluesy green-and-white mountain ranges, and protected, mysterious lairs woven throughout the valleys and woodlands.

Out of bounds is the in thing in the Mad River Valley. It’s the old, the new, and the forever black. Black diamond black.

Standing on top of the mountains, one can detect clouds arriving from outer space. One can leap onto the clouds as they float by. One can smile through the shine of snow that falls like glitter, high above the world. Glitter snow is pixie dust from the heavens and has one purpose–to bless the soul with a good dose of foolish joy.

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There has never been an elite, established selection process for deciding who is and who isn’t worthy of Mad River Valley cult membership, because the mountains–in cahoots with weather–are very good at weeding out those who should and shouldn’t be there.

What is weather? Weather is the consistent comings and goings of unpredictable atmospheric conditions. Sometimes you’re right and sometimes you’re wrong about weather. Skiers will spend all day, in wintertime, outside. Still, weather, is Earth’s own performance art, without a beginning nor an end. It is a kind of divine intervention, with uncontrollable power. Weather is as unruly as the heart of a true artist. The One True Artist.

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Here’s a map of the neverlands where I go for full bone and muscle massages–and attitude adjustments–all day long, outside, in wintertime. On the left side of the map, there’s a chair lift called the Valley House Double–which is constructed from a series of towers, with steel cables looped one to the other with chairs dangling from the cable, bolted into the mountainside. The chairs are big enough to fit only two skiers at a time. The Valley House Double is a surviving throwback to the days of yore when chairlifts cranked skiers up the hill at a slow rate of return. In other words, only a few skiers went up the hill, and only a few came down.

High-tech, high-speed and high-capacity lifts changed that dynamic. Now there are lifts engineered to zip skiers up the mountain, grouped into quad-packs or six-packs on the ski-lift chairs. I think there might even be eight-packs. The chairs are spaced closer together–and so, the rate of return down the hill is a sad thing. There are too many skiers on the trails. It is really, really sad on a powder day because the fresh powder snow on the trails gets shredded and reduced to crud before the buzz-brain rewards from your first cup of coffee, or tea, or bag of M&M’s, has even had a chance to kick in.

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When I was skiing at Sugarbush this weekend, I heard a rumor that the Valley House Double is going to be replaced with a high-speed quad chair at the end of this year’s ski season. Tears began to drip into my beer where I sat at the bar staring into the eyes of my best ski buddy who happens to be my husband. “I don’t ever want to ski again,” I sniffed. “What is wrong with the world?” “Why does the real world keep encroaching on my imaginary world?”

High-speed lifts have been a part of my life for a long time. They are superb when used on big brute ski mountains out west. But a classic, New England ski mountain only needs a few high-speed lifts.

The real reason I hate to see the Valley House Double go is because taking that chair off the mountain is like taking the wide-bench, front-seat design out of cars. When I met my best ski buddy, he had an unfortunate kind of car–a bright blue AMC Hornet. But, the car had a wide-bench front seat that elevated memories of the car to the categories of romance–I was able to sit snug up against my new boyfriend for every mile of any road trip. Cars nowadays are so boring for lovers. There are center consoles in most all of them, and they are as ugly and useless and boring as having a television in the bedroom.

When I first learned to ski, my best ski buddy and I sat on double chairlifts that drifted–in slow motion–through the most brutal weather. We pressed our bodies together, as close as we could without crawling inside of each other’s ski suit. Huddled and shivering, we talked about everything on those long rides. Our hilarious dreams and ragged laughter tracked through the sky with wintry winds that sculpted icicles from the tips of our noses and, by the time we got to the top of the mountain, had frozen our lips into hysterical smiles. We ducked into the woods for relief from the wind only to find that the trees grew as close together as snowflakes in a blizzard, and they clung to terrain so steep, it slid out from under our skis relentlessly–as unforgiving as the slope on the snorting nose of the evil warden who sneered at truants like me, in after-school detention halls.

Powering through the snow and the terrain and the weather exhausted us. Waiting in line to do it all again, and riding the slow chair up, gave me a chance to rest next to the warm body of a boy I hoped to be in love with forever.

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One double chair will remain at Sugarbush after the Valley House Double is laid to rest. It’s the Castle Rock Double. That one is a doozy, though. If the Valley House Double is like riding in my ski buddy’s old AMC Hornet to the ice cream shop, the Castle Rock Double is like riding in a hand-built Jeep to a bonfire in the woods, where all the wildest partiers have hauled in kegs, and set them up next to swimming holes with cliffs and gushing waterfalls.

When I was a fresh and brand-new skier, I rode the old Castle Rock Double for the first time with my best ski buddy. He promised to coach me down those “toughest trails in the east” and add territory I hadn’t yet tried to my repertoire. The lift broke down when we were about midway to the top. We sat there for a long time, falling in love some more, complaining about the long wait on the lift. Then, we noticed that our chair wasn’t dangling too far from the surface of the Earth. Maybe we could jump off. We thought about it, surveyed the jump zone and committed to our flight patterns. We lifted up the safety bar, then we threw down our ski poles, then my ski buddy jumped first–his bravery made my heart flutter as he called up to me, “It was nothing.” I barely heard him over the sound of the lift chugging to life. There was a lurch along the cable and my chair resumed its motion uphill, with me on it, all alone, without my coach and without my ski poles. I remember turning around and seeing my ski buddy’s body get smaller and smaller as he waved at me, smiling, until I lost sight of him behind enchanted cliffs and iced-over rocks.

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After I cried all I could about the loss of the Valley House Double, I decided I never wanted to ski again because ski country is handing over its soul to the real world, little by little, as I get older and older. I sobbed about how romance isn’t any fun anymore–not in the car, not on the chair lift–and everything has to be so fast and so big and so now. My ski buddy listened, then tried to cheer me up by asking me out on a date. He had made a reservation for two at a restaurant we’d never been to, called Peasant in Waitsfield Village.

Every part of the meal was outstanding. And romantic. The chef had been a stockbroker in New York City. After 9-11 he abandoned the city for the Mad River Valley. He didn’t go to cooking school; instead, he learned to cook the slow, old-fashioned way–by growing up in a big Italian family.

Peasant is appointed with tables made from lumber salvaged from Hurricane Irene, a storm that destroyed so many parts of Vermont a few years ago. The townspeople brought their village back to life, slowly, after the storm. Some businesses survived, others didn’t.

And some, like Peasant, took a chance on creating some new magic in the Mad River Valley.

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I’ll have a few more classic rides on the old Valley House Double chairlift this season. And then, I’ll be left with my memories which will grow more and more romantic as the years pass on.

I guess if you’re going to believe in magic, you have to keep looking to find it.

Or, better than that, you have to keep working to create it.

Here’s a picture of the Waitsfield Village covered bridge, lit up at night, down the street from Peasant Restaurant.

See you on the slopes!