Page 28 of The Big Race
More Important than Mountains
“Ski resort,” Ray read. “Awesome.” He looked up at the mountains behind the city. How far is it, though?”
“We’ll get a map at the rental car place,” I said.
It was another stick shift. “Imagine how much trouble the other teams are going to have trouble with all these hills,” Ray said, as he applied the clutch to downshift.
“Good thing you know what you’re doing,” I said.
“I can smell the mountains. God, it’s good to be home.”
I laughed. “We’re actually about five thousand miles from Miami.”
“You know what I mean. I’m a mountain boy at heart.”
“You ever feel stuck in Miami?” I said, leaning forward from the back seat. “Where the highest elevation is Mount Trashmore?”
“I hated it at first,” he admitted. “I joined the Miami Ski Club as soon as I arrived in town. Went to Colorado every chance I could.”
He looked over at me. “Then I met you.”
“And?”
“I knew you were more important than mountains.”
My heart skipped a beat, and I was sure that Cody had filmed the look on my face. The words hung in the air between us as Ray navigated a sharp curve, the rental car's engine working harder as we climbed higher into the Maritime Alps.
The landscape transformed dramatically as we left Nice behind.
The Mediterranean's azure expanse gave way to terraced hillsides dotted with olive groves and red-roofed villages that clung to the mountainsides like ancient barnacles.
Palm trees disappeared, replaced by pine and oak forests that grew denser as we gained elevation.
More important than mountains. I turned the phrase over in my mind, watching the scenery change outside my window.
When Ray took a job transfer to Miami, he’d assumed it would only be a year or two, and then he’d return to the mountains.
But he’d given up that chance to go back to stay in Miami with me.
I'd never fully appreciated the magnitude of that sacrifice. How many times had I complained about his weekend races, his training schedules, never understanding they were his way of staying connected to the part of himself he'd left behind?
"Look," I said, pointing to the road below us where it switched back across the mountainside. Two cars were visible, following the same serpentine route we'd taken minutes earlier. "Company."
Ray glanced up through the windshield. "That must be Brandon and Alex, and Desiree and Cherisse. While you were up in the air I checked the flight schedule on someone’s phone, and the flight from Madrid to Nice should only be arriving now.”
The road curved through another hairpin turn, and I felt my ears pop from the altitude change. Snow began to appear in patches on the north-facing slopes, and the air flowing through the vents carried the crisp bite of mountain air I remembered from our early trips to Colorado together.
We passed through a small village—St. Martin-Vésubie, according to the road sign—its narrow streets lined with stone houses and a medieval church whose bell tower pointed toward the peaks like a prayer.
The few locals we glimpsed were dressed in heavier clothing than the beachgoers we'd left behind in Nice.
"This reminds me of the Alps above Montreux," Ray said suddenly, his voice carrying a note of nostalgia I rarely heard. "When I was playing in the Swiss league."
I'd heard plenty of stories about Ray's professional basketball career in Europe, but something in his tone suggested this was heading somewhere new.
"There was this guy," Ray continued, downshifting for another steep section. "Jean-Luc. French, obviously. He was covering our team for some sports magazine, and we..." He paused, seeming to choose his words carefully. "We had a thing. Just one night, really."
I felt Cody shift slightly in the backseat, probably sensing a good story for the cameras, but I kept my eyes on Ray's profile.
"He took me up into the hills above the lake.
Said he wanted to show me the real Switzerland, not just the tourist postcards.
" Ray's hands tightened slightly on the steering wheel.
"It was beautiful, Jeffrey. This little chalet overlooking the valley, mountains all around us, stars brighter than anything I'd ever seen. "
The road leveled out briefly as we passed through another village, giving us a moment's respite from the constant climbing.
"And?" I prompted gently.
"And it was empty," Ray said, his voice quiet. "Physically, it was incredible. The setting was perfect, he was attractive, the sex was good. But afterward, lying there looking at those mountains... I felt more alone than I'd ever felt in my life."
I watched his face, seeing something vulnerable there that reminded me of our conversation in the Venezuelan hotel room.
"I realized that what I was looking for wasn't adventure or excitement or even good sex. It was connection. Someone who would still be there in the morning, who wanted to know what I was thinking about when I got quiet, who could make me laugh when I was taking myself too seriously."
The road began to climb more steeply again, and Ray shifted into a lower gear.
“I had more sex then, and in Colorado after I stopped playing. But I didn’t find what I was looking for until I was in Miami, sitting in that brewpub, waiting to meet this computer programmer who quoted Jane Austen in his dating profile.
" He glanced at me briefly. "And I knew within ten minutes that it was you. "
My throat felt tight. "Even though I was nothing like Jean-Luc? No mountain chalet, no perfect romantic setting?"
"Especially because you were nothing like that," Ray said. "You were real. You argued with me about books, you made terrible coffee, you fell asleep during action movies. You were a person, not a fantasy."
The village of Isola appeared ahead of us, a cluster of alpine buildings that looked like they'd been transported from Austria. Ray pulled into the parking lot for the ski resort, and I spotted the first challenge station set up near the base lodge.
"So when Russell made you feel young again..." I said, understanding dawning.
"He was another Jean-Luc," Ray finished. "All surface, no substance. I got caught up in the fantasy again and almost lost the real thing."
He turned off the engine and looked at me directly. "I won't make that mistake again, Jeffrey. You're not just more important than mountains. You're more important than anything."
We jumped out of the car and raced to the board, with Cody behind us. “It’s a Weather the Storm challenge,” I said. I looked up at the clear blue sky, dotted with only a few puffy clouds. “Doesn’t look like there’s bad weather coming.”
“There are two parts to the clue name,” Ray said. “There’s no storm, but there’s weather. Feel how much colder it is here than it was down by the Mediterranean?”
As if on cue, a chilly breeze swept through. The clue directed us to find our way to the top of the ski lift, some fifteen hundred meters above us. “This is going to be tough for a lot of teams,” Ray said. “This could take over two hours in the cold, after just being in the heat.”
We were instructed that we could leave the bulk of our luggage by the ski lodge but were to take with us anything we thought we’d need. Desiree and Cherisse pulled up right behind us. They read the clue as Ray began unloading stuff from his pack.
“Come on, Jeffrey, get a move on,” he said. “Drop everything we won’t need on the mountain.”
“What will we need?”
“You’ve done this before. Layers of clothing, bottles of water. Some of those trail bars for energy.”
I watched as Desiree and Cherisse pulled water bottles from their packs and left everything else. “The NBA wives are getting ahead of us,” I said.
“Then move faster. They’ll get in trouble without extra layers.”
The wives had already disappeared up the trail by the time we began following it through oak and pine trees. It was chilly but not too bad and I worried Ray had wasted too much time repacking our bags.
The trail veered sharply downward, cutting across an open expanse of snow dotted by the ruts of downhill skiers, with a chair lift high above us.
From our vantage point, I saw the distant valley below, the powder stretching in glistening waves.
It looked beautiful. It also looked exhausting.
Desiree and Cherisse were already plowing across the ski slope, their boots falling into deeper and deeper snow.
Ray looked around and spotted a rack of snowshoes nearly hidden behind a stand of trees. “They’re not paying attention,” he said, hurrying over to the rack. He handed one pair to me and began putting his own on.
“Remember our trip to North Carolina,” he said. “You don’t want to fight the snow, just step lightly and let the shoes do the work. Wide stance, steady pace. Got it?”
I nodded, but the first few steps felt awkward, my feet suddenly oversized and clumsy. Ray moved ahead effortlessly, his rhythm smooth and practiced. He glanced back. “You’re lifting too much—keep the motion rolling forward.”
Fortunately, we’d done a lot of snowshoeing on our trip to North Carolina with Leo when the slopes weren’t good enough for skiing, so we weren’t complete beginners. I remembered how patient Ray had been with Leo, who kept catching the front of his snowshoes and face-planting in the powder.
“Remember teaching Leo how to do this?” I asked as we set off along the trail, our snowshoes crunching through the top layer of snow.
“God, yes,” Ray chuckled. “He must have fallen fifty times that first day.”
“And you never lost your patience, not once,” I said. “You just kept helping him up, showing him how to lift his feet a little higher, how to find his balance.”
“He was so determined,” Ray said, pride evident in his voice. “Just like both of us.”