Verbier, 1994, I think it was. My father had taken our family to the famous Swiss ski resort for a day trip. My sister and I had only just picked up snowboarding, and most of the day was spent digging our boards out of the snow after yet another fall rather than actually gliding down anything. But we were having the time of our lives.

I remember looking up at the clear blue sky and seeing the big gondola pulling away, carrying a group of people back down the mountain.

Around us, skiers and snowboarders were hurrying past, heads down, moving faster than they had all day. Then I understood: the very last gondola had just left. Without us on it.

I grabbed my sister and we joined the crowd rushing down the slope. But within a few minutes the crowd around us had thinned to nothing, and we were on our own.

We had somehow drifted onto a black run, the kind meant for seasoned skiers, not two kids on borrowed snowboards. I didn’t understand yet how serious that was. I just knew we needed to get down.

The snow that had been our playground all day had become something else entirely. The slope was too steep for either of us to ride, and every attempt ended in another fall, another scramble. Dread started to settle into my chest, and it didn’t leave.

As the light faded, we also started losing the trail. We didn’t know the mountain at all, and with almost no visibility, we couldn’t tell where the marked run ended or where we were supposed to go. Before long, we had drifted off-piste without even really realizing it. The terrain became steeper and more uneven, with no clear path to follow, which made getting down even harder.

The sun sets fast in the mountains. One minute there was still light over the ridgeline. The next, we were standing in near-total darkness. Everything around us had gone silent.

My sister, seven years younger than me, thought the whole thing was funny. She didn’t look scared. I think part of that was simply because her older sister was there. She didn’t have to be the one in charge.

But I knew this was serious, and that I was the one who had to get us both down.

We gave up trying to ride. We unclipped from the boards and half-walked, half-slid down on our backsides where the slope was too steep to stand on. I couldn’t tell you how long that went on for. Long enough that my hands went numb inside my gloves. Long enough that I stopped being able to tell if the ache in my legs was cold or exhaustion. The only light we had was the moon.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit how I actually behaved. I wasn’t gentle or reassuring. I was annoyed, genuinely annoyed, at how blasé my sister was being about all of it. I remember shouting at her to keep moving, to hurry up, to take it seriously.

Looking back, I think the annoyance was just fear wearing a different face. I wasn’t really angry at her. I was terrified for her, and the only outlet I had for that terror was pushing her down the mountain as fast as I could.

At some point I noticed a shape moving toward us through the dark, just a faint shadow at first, before it resolved into a man.

He helped us down the last of the narrow paths and into a small village below. I remember him as a seasoned mountain man, maybe a ranger, though thirty years on I can’t tell you the details of his face or exactly what he said to us.

What I do remember is the relief. That very specific feeling of being safe again after not being safe.

He put us on a bus and told us it would take us to the main village, where our parents were waiting.

What Was Happening Below

While we were making our slow, blind way down the mountain, my father was in a state of panic I didn’t fully understand until he described it to me years later.

He had notified the station the moment he realized we hadn’t come down. The station had put out an alert and sent people out looking for us.

He told me, much later, that he had rarely in his life been so afraid. For a stretch of hours, he genuinely thought he might never see us again.

I had been terrified because I knew where we were.

He had been terrified because he didn’t.

What It Taught Me

That day I felt a kind of fear I’d never felt before. Not fear of a person, or of failing at something, but fear of nature itself.

When I was younger and living in Portugal, I learned to respect the sea. Living in Switzerland, I learned to respect the mountains. They can pull you in, and they don’t care one way or another what happens to you once you’re in. I think of an old phrase sometimes: mountains are mountains, water is water.

The mountain wasn’t really the lesson, though. I was.

I’d always assumed that in a real crisis I’d be the calm one. I wasn’t. I snapped at my sister when I should have comforted her. I was frightened, and it came out as irritation instead of tenderness.

We never talked about it again. Not really. Just the bus, the warm windows, and the two of us watching the dark go by.