A weekend of firsts and fancy homes

My first attempt at snowboarding was successful and disastrous in turns, and you can read the parts of it I’ll be narrating to the student body tomorrow a few precious minutes early, if that’s your game. As for the rest, I think we have due cause to bring out the bullets. Have you missed them? I have.

After provoking me into a slather of pre-trip excitement, Bryan, Marta, and Michele showed up over an hour late, and then made dinner and tied snowboards to the roof of Marta’s Golf while I sulked and tried to help. We hit the road a little before nine, and I was angry enough with Marta over the twenty-minute debacle of strapping the snowboards down that I sat in the back and didn’t talk to her the whole drive. I won’t air dirty laundry on national TV, so to speak, so suffice it to say that Marta is very stubborn and strong willed. If you were there, you already know the details, and if you weren’t… better luck next time.

Bryan’s house in Brush Prairie, Northeast of Vancouver, is much nicer than I expected. Most kids you can interact with for fifteen minutes and name the square footage of their parents’ house, maybe even what car they drive. Bryan fooled me – he comes from money. I accused him loudly of being a disgrace to the proletariat, but his Communism phase is long over anyway. The house is well-decorated (this was no surprise) and enormous, but partitioned into rooms whose whole seems much smaller than their sum – the house unfolds before you, room after sequestered room, and each time you think you’ve exhausted the floor plan, it surprises you with another. It’s really an ingenious layout, but I couldn’t draw a plan of it if you put a gun to my head. We all slept in Bryan’s old room, two of us in the single beds and two on the floor on foam pads, and were comfortable enough. Predictably enough, the situation devolved into a seventh-grade slumber party (we had one couple and one pseudo-couple, all of whom are fairly good friends. you do the math), 7am wake-up call be damned, but I eventually grew tired of trying to snuggle with Bryan (I let Michele take over) and we resigned ourselves to sleep.

Bryan’s mother helped us feed and clothe ourselves the next morning, and we managed to make it out of the house by 8:30. Our destination was Mt. Hood Ski Bowl, a good-sized skiing resort that was essentially deserted due to the proximity of the newer, larger Meadows. Of course, I’d never been to a ski resort period, so was duly impressed with the entire affair, from the chairlifts (which Marta informed me were unforgivably slow) down to the slopes themselves.

As I hint at in tomorrow’s article, I learned to snowboard in a single day, which apparently is no mean feat. Bryan started me with the “falling leaf” method of downhill travel, then after I could slide a reasonable way without falling, moved on to toe-side turns. It’s while attempting the latter that I accumulated my most egregious injuries. For those unfamiliar, when executing a toe-side turn on a snowboard, you are facing uphill with your board more or less perpendicular to the slope, sliding backwards. It’s in this position that it’s easiest, especially for beginners, to “catch an edge,” which flings you violently to the ground. It was warm and icy at the mountain, which made it easier to do just that, and also made the landings infinitely harder than in powder. I fell on my ass so hard and so often that I could barely walk when we broke for lunch. I popped three ibuprofen from the bottle that Michele carries with her, and felt good enough – barely – to climb back on the board again. But my persistence paid off; on the second-to-last run of the day, I finally carved my way all the way down a blue-square run without falling. It was incredibly exciting.

Much to everyone’s disappointment (especially my own), it was raining at the mountain when we woke up on Sunday morning, making snowboarding impossible. Bryan suggested a trip to the Ape Cave instead. The cave is on Mt. St. Helens, and is a 1.5 mile long tunnel underground. We didn’t realize, but the road leading to the cave was closed, buried under four feet of snow, so we parked as close as we could, then tromped about a mile over the snowfall, plunging past our knees regularly, to the cave’s entrance. Michele has pictures of the adventure, among other things, here, and hopefully I’ll have the higher-quality versions of them available on this very site before long. We did a lot of scrambling over rock walls, and saw a few Marta-sized holes (MSH’s) that we tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to shove her into, and about an hour later emerged at the cave’s opposite end into twilight. We weren’t about to attempt to find our way back aboveground in the dark when the trail was buried under four feet of snow, so we turned and went back into the cave and returned the way we had come. It was amazingly fun, but I was definitely tired of being underground afterwards. Of course, then we had to hike back to the car, over the snow, in the pitch darkness. We reached the car soaked.

That night we attempted a game of Pictionary, boys v. girls, but the girls quickly rejected the competitive atmosphere, and in any case Bryan’s beautiful but time-intensive drawings made us lose many an all-play. Instead we watched Waking Life, which is an awe-inspiring film you should watch if you ever want to be my friend.

We drove home Monday and ate a delicious and semi-awkward dinner at Michele’s parents’ new house in Steilacoom, which features gorgeous modern architecture and commands an unholy view of the Sound. Bryan played piano for everyone, and I think that act, as much as anything, led Michele’s parents to like him where they scorn almost all of humanity. I chugged away at Emma with a flashlight in the car.

Forgive the incoherence of the above, as I have far too many things on my mind at the moment. Of course, that’s nearly always the case, but the site just keeps rolling along, like a giant ball of tinfoil shoved down a hill into a parade of nuns. See, a nonsensical analogy will save you when clever writing fails.

Yes, the site has kept rolling – in less than three hours, it will be one year old, an accomplishment reached by only 85% percent of the blogging community. I’d like to thank the twelve or so of you (on average), plus the handful of search engine robots, that visit the page every day. You, combined with my huge, unsatisfiable ego, are my reason for going on. I’d like to say that the writing has improved since those early days of bitching about my backpack and cold germs, but let’s be honest here: it’s been a mixed bag. As much as I try to produce only the finest rhetoric for you, my loyal readers, half the time it comes out garbled and unintelligible to all save the few people familiar with my whirlwind method of communication. But! – there’s always a but! – I’m hard at work on a number of additions so delectable that they will probably make your salivary glands spurt streams of goo half way across the room, perhaps to run down your monitor in viscous threads. These include: a photo update in the near future that can only be described as “gimongous”; a very handsome article and short-story page to replace the same getting-to-be-overrun section of the navigation bar on the left; a “best-of-Zach” page where I will assemble my personal favorites from posts, pictures, and other writing; a voting system, whereby you can rate each post on the heavy-metal scale of awesomeness. This last still exists purely in the realm of theory, but the rest are already underway. Just, you know, give me a minute. I’m busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest over here.

Posted in Musings.