A ham and cheese sandwich costs $3.50 in Lake Placid, N.Y. But since you can't eat snow, you consume and the marathon begins. You consume Lake Placid, the village, buying the food and the buttons and the stickers and the hats and the scarves. Everything that is officially Olympic costs $5. Two very high students walk down Main Street shouting, "You're walking on an Official Olympic Sidewalk, that'll be $5 please," and everyone laughs with them, like theirs is a big in-joke. Laughter fills the streets all the time in Lake Placid:

It's all a blur. You can hear the laughter, but the rest is too much to take in at once. Television tunnel-visions the real Olympics, the stuff that goes on in the streets. Stop for a second and two U.S. ski team members walk by. They are celebrities and they flaunt it, waving at everyone, smiling at all the women. There is music blaring from the speed skating rink. There are scalpers everywhere. You just want to know everyone here-all the athletes and athlete lovers and students arm in arm.

It's freezing beyond comprehension but it's perfect, like a big Hollywood production, full of appealing and unbelievable stimuli--too many faces and noises and victories and cameras and rumors and foreign languages and famous people--and too little real stuff like food and warmth and places to sit down. It's impossible to grasp. Watching it on television is easy by comparison.

***

Just a little past Albany, civilization disappears for good, except for the HoJos. The length of the trip to Lake Placid is overrated--it's really just five or six hours long--but in some ways it's a harbinger of the lines to come and the waiting. But it was warmer waiting in the car.

***

No one can drive into Lake Placid. You are bused in from the closest available parking lot, 40 minutes outside of town. When Lake Placid reverts, so will the parking lot: Lake Placid to a small resort once touched by greatness, the lot to an airport on the side of a mountain called Marcy. Marcy--it is a name heard again and again in Olympicville.

"Is this the line for Marcy parking lot?"

"How long is the line for Marcy parking lot?"

The first official Olympic words we heard were these: "The wait from Marcy parking lot will be two hours at the least."

Saranac is another parking lot. More buses go to Saranac than to Marcy. Buses are a big thing in Lake Placid.

***

The ride from Marcy to the events is 11 miles long, but the twisting back roads stretch the trip to nearly an hour. The passengers on the bus go crazy when we pass the flame, everyone squeezing to one side, pressing his face against the icy windows. No one says a word--it is more important just to look and absorb and think. The gasping starts when we pass the ski jumps. At first they look so steep no one knows what they are. A little blue speck is descending on the taller jump. He flies. The bus is silent. Then applause.

The busdriver has no idea where he is going but some people toward the front of the bus are trying to give him directions in their school-book French, and the driver inadvertantly smiles. He thinks we might be lost. The disorganized Official Olympic Organizing Committee hired Canadian drivers to fill in for the American drivers who walked out when the Committee hired Canadians. That's the story circulating in the bus and around town; the transportation mess is so confusing it's hard to blame anyone, but sometime during the weekend, the Committee officially blames itself.

But there are very few people who couldn't care less, except for the press, of course. "ABC tried to get a group of us to turn over a car for their television camera," a young woman from New Jersey announces to the Marcy and Saranac lines. "But we wouldn't do it." Applause and cheers. Lake Placid is actually a big love-in; everyone is in a good mood, slowly freezing to death smiling like Cheshire cats. And in perspective waiting in line is okay because you get to meet people and talk about the lines and the games, too, and Eric Heiden.