It took some explaining, this we’d-never-gone-skiing thing. The questions piled up: But your kids, they’re surf rats, right? Skate rats? They’re the ones turning full-twist front flips at the pool? And don’t all four of you practically live outside?

I don’t know why, was always my answer. I never skied as a kid, and so it’s not baked into my DNA. Go to the beach, and I’m ready to surf. But my relationship with the mountains was always hiking — distance hiking, even. Or, better yet, curling up after hiking, a fire in the fireplace and something on the stove. Even living within day-trip distance for the boys’ entire lives, we’d never gone skiing, not once.

First-time snowboarders and full-time adventurers Tomás (left) and Nico Ramirez-Perry quickly found their footing at Appalachian Ski Mountain in Blowing Rock. photograph by Drew Perry

Maybe it’s the fact that the boys were little until they suddenly really, really were not. But just look at them now, these surfer boys. These go-fast-and-crash-into-anything boys. These boys who love snow days, love sledding, love winter.

Can we go skiing this year? they asked.

Yes, we said. Let’s just make sure we have the right — wait, what do we even need?

• • •

We go to Appalachian Ski Mountain because it’s close, and because it’s good for a first time out, a friend tells me, which seems ominous. The view from the parking lot is certainly ominous — to some of us, anyway. The slopes look very much like they run right down the side of an actual mountain, I point out to the boys, who are like: Sweet! I repeat this to my wife, who is also like, Sweet, because although she is from Miami, she went on a teenage ski trip to Colorado and walks around with a quiver of competencies that apparently includes downhill racing.

I need to mention that after a winter in the Piedmont that was barely a winter at all, it is pouring snow and blustery on the mountain. I need to mention that I have a fear of heights that’s about to intersect with a chair lift. I need to mention how very, very lost I feel.

After an hour-long lesson with an instructor from the on-site French Swiss Ski College, Tomás and Nico graduated to the black diamond slopes. photograph by Drew Perry

That doesn’t last, though, because inside the lodge, I find that surfing is very much the correct analogy, or at least the correct community. I know these people, I think as they outfit us with boots and helmets and bibs. These are people who want to be outside, and who want you to be outside. These people see you, a person who’d like to ride something in the great outdoors, as, quite literally, a fellow traveler. The people are kind, the people are generous, the people are practical: They check my boys’ helmets carefully, not wanting to bring into question any of the scenarios we’ve signed away in the waiver.

They check mine, too, which is good: After my lesson, though I can ski almost right away, I cannot correct for speed, cannot turn, cannot stop. I am so sorry, 4-year-old girl who I will ski right through — multiple times — on the bunny slope.

Oh, and the boys, you ask? The boys are gone. Later, when they’re less gone, they’ll tell us that their instructor (in its infinite wisdom, the very cool French Swiss Ski College on-site provided separate instructors for parents and kids) actually held his coat out like some kind of cloak to shield them from the fiercest snow and wind. This instructor also, once he figured out who he had on his hands, left the bunny slope immediately. By the end of their hour, the boys are snowboarding a black diamond slope. Of course it was snowboards, and of course they had it right away. There are not words sufficient for me to explain how much they loved it, but this is a magazine story, so let’s try.

The trails at Appalachian Ski Mountain run up to half a mile long.  photograph by Lynn Willis

By “gone,” I mean we don’t know where they are on the mountain except for when they come to sliding, perfect stops at the bottom of whichever slope they’re riding, shout a breathless, goggled hello and goodbye, then go flying back off to ride the lift a quarter-mile up into the dark. They go and go and go, bro. Bro, they tell each other, that was so sick! Orchard Run is so sick! Let’s go to Upper Big Appal! And they do, one thousand times, until it’s time for us to leave.

There is, as it turns out, a correct amount of snow for a ski mountain evening: measurable, but not so much as to make the roads minivan-impassable. We head back down the hill to Blowing Rock, where the Meadowbrook Inn has not only accommodated our request for a rollaway but also provided a bottle of champagne for our après-ski. I pick up dinner from the Town Tavern, the only place still serving food this late, and where there is a full-bar karaoke contest underway. We picnic on the hotel floor. We get our blanket situation squared away. We fall asleep as though shot down the side of a mountain.

• • •

The morning dawns, or whatever the right verb is for 10 a.m., cloudless, a high blue dome and new snow and a day moving from below freezing overnight toward 45 or 50 degrees by noon. Back on the mountain, the bros are gone immediately, of course, pro bros who know exactly how to open our locker and clip in and helmet up and ride the lift toward grave danger. The gravest danger is their favorite kind. They have gone native, never want to leave, will ask once a week all the way through next June when we can go back. Both are suddenly considering App State for college. Add ski rat to the list of rats, please.

And what sort of rat will I become? Last night, my wife and I stuck to the bunny slope, but this morning, a slightly steeper hill with a motorized handle pull is mostly empty and beckoning. My wife rides up the pulley, and then gracefully slaloms right back down as though she’d been doing it her whole life. I take my fear of heights to the top of the hill and execute a breakneck straight-line downhill run that ends in a pretty spectacular crash. I now understand the term breakneck, though I am, mercifully, unbroken.

A stranger — and how many times have I done this for other kids in the ocean, even for other parents — takes pity on me, suggests one or two things I could do to not die, but rather to ride. To be rather than to seem, if you will. Ditch the poles and ride down with your hands on your knees, he says — and it works.

Nico cut across Candied Appal — one of the bunny slopes at Appalachian Ski Mountain — on his way down from the more difficult Orchard Run. photograph by Drew Perry

Magically, I can turn, sort of. I can slow down, sort of. At the bottom, inches from some safety netting and some kind of rock-filled ditch, I even stop. And here come the boys, rocketing past me from a neighboring slope, and one of them pays me the ultimate compliment: Bro! he says, and then, to his actual brother, he also says, Bro!, pointing at me, meaning, I think, Look! Daddy’s doing it! Back up the mountain they go.

I loved it plenty. My boys loved it so much that even after I got it, figured out my own skis, I mostly stayed at the bottom of the hill, aching to sight them as they came around the curves at the top, to watch them glide down like experts, effortless, catching air on the bumps and cruising into long, sliding stops. We tried to take pictures, videos. We tried to remember our days up there as best we could. My memory, though, is of them being gone, then getting found, then being gone again. They were so very at home.

As soon as it’s cold enough again, I tell them all summer long.

Do you promise? asks my little one, that nickname not really sticking to him anymore.

Yeah, bro, I tell him. I promise.

Appalachian Ski Mountain
940 Ski Mountain Road
Blowing Rock, NC 28605
(828) 295-7828
appskimtn.com