Friday, February 17th, 2006
That was an exaggeration, it’s actually 9,700 feet. This is my final evening of my Colorado retreat. Everyone in the house is asleep (or close) and the already quiet landscape sinks even farther down the aural hill.
I always spend my last day on the mountain by myself. It gives me a chance to work on technique and try new things without being under a microscope. It always offers some reflexive time. There aren’t a lot of distractions here. The phone doesn’t ring off the hook, email use is at a minimum. There’s a TV, but I’m generally too exhausted from being on the mountain to watch anything without crashing on the couch.
Here’s how today went:
Breckenridge - the system of mountains, not the city - is made up of several peaks, with peaks 7-10 holding the most skiiable real estate. I took a couple of lifts up and made my way to one (ironically) called Lift 6. This lift takes you up to powder bowls and some black diamond and double black diamond runs.
Let me interject myself a moment: I am an intermediate skiier. Somehow my family never skiied when I was younger, so I took up the sport two seasons ago. This is my third year skiing, and my 10th (?) day overall. A combination of basic-athleticism and luck allowed me to progress to intermediate terrain - with some forray into single black diamond runs.
For some reaon, I decided to go up this lift. And it was windy. And cold. The ground below me looked like France during World War II. At the top of most peaks there is something called a "warming hut." There was nothing. There wasn’t even someone manning the lift exit.
One of my dream jobs is to be a newspaper headline writer. Such opportunity for wordplay and irony. Add to that the person who names ski runs. As I found myself standing over runs with names like Vertigo, Psychopath and the like. If there was one named "Fuck Justin" I would have called my Mother.
The end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006 has had some of the sharpest and unexpected and wonderful turns I’ve experienced. Over the past week a couple of really shitty points have entered the page - but the pluses still outnumber the minuses in my life.
I made a bet with myself. If I made it down in one piece - alive in one piece - I would try to make sure the following were on my Spring schedule:
- Learn to enjoy broccoli
- Visit my parents in Texas
- Be nicer to dudes
- Knit hats for friends
- Buy wedding gifts for overdue weddings - seriously, though, you have a year to gift
- Take flying lessons this year
The adrenaline started to pump through my veins. I contemplated my morality and imminent injury. A ski school instructor led his class just past me and remarked (in my direction), "this probably isn’t a good idea, let’s take the easy way down." Fuck it, you want to tell me something asshole, do it somewhere other than on the corner of Agressive Rd. and Passive Ave.
I took a look at the clear blue sky and adjusted my grip on my ski poles. My mouth pushed out a few words of encouragement - although they were mumbly. And then I pushed off the edge.
It wasn’t pretty.
I have always described this sport as feeling so alive and so close to death at the same time. This was definitely both at once. The scenery whipped past me as the terrain shifted from icy to powder, to smooth to moguls. As I hopped over an embankment I looked up at Lift 6, there was no one on it. Are you fucking kidding me?
The mental checklist of how to ski cycled through my mind’s eye: stay standing, lean forward, keep torso downhill, use turns to slow velocity, blah blah blah. My mind’s voice took over, in the form of a very charming scream. I crested small cliffs, just large enough to make it look like there was a steep drop-off coming. There was. Don’t ever accuse a cliff of not coming through.
No one will ever find me - that became my mantra. I wasn’t worried about death, far from it. I was worried about the pose I would be crunched into. Would it be flattering? Would people think that I had skiied heroically or that the fetal position I had landed in was immasculine?
Why was there no one else on this part of the mountain? It’s like when you land in Cleveland and it feels like all the cool people just left the city. It was Friday of President’s Day Weekend, I should have been swimming in skiiers.
Vertigo descended into "Lower" Psychopath and things started looking closer to Kansas than they had in what felt like lifetime. I landed at a lift that looked familiar and started seeing familiar faces - or at least the familiar shapes of other skiiers. From there I shot down 4 O’Clock Run which ends up right on the street at the base of the mountain. Not even the parking lot, the actual street. My ride was there, so I hopped in.
In fourteen hours I will get on a shuttle that will take me from Frisco to Denver International Airport and back to Chicago. That’s it 2006 Colorado retreat.
Now who wants to take flying lessons with me?
