One day was enough, thanks

So about this whole snowboarding thing: it costs a lot of money. You either have to be rolling in bling or else have very generous parents rolling in bling to consider it as a regular hobby. A decent snowboard costs around $250 (bling!); boots and bindings will set you back another $250 or so (bling!); jacket, gloves, pants and goggles run around $500 for a good package (bling! bling!); Stevens Pass charges $44 for a single day’s lift ticket, or $270 for a season (bling!); then there’s gas, maintenance and chains for the car you drive, and whatever you choose to spend on food, drinks, and other entertainment at the mountain. All these factors combine to mean that snowboarding, while I enjoy it immensely, will continue to be a once-or-twice-a-year pastime for me, at least for the foreseeable future. The only reason I could go at all is that my considerate friends have attenuated the considerable start-up cost for me by supplying me with clothing (Marta, Dillon and Jared), a board (Michele), bindings (Marta and Bryan), and a ride (Nathan). To all of these individuals, I extend my most heartfelt thanks for the opportunity to join you on the mountain. Now, down to the nitty-gritty.

The first half of yesterday’s outing was, on the whole, fairly unpleasant for me. Some combination of sleeplessness, coffee, malnutrition, and nerves made me feel awful all morning – light headed, weak in the knees, nauseous, you name it. Add to that my newbie status, the stress of renting boots and buying a lift ticket – with no prior knowledge of how to do either – and the fact that we lost Marta, and you can imagine how badly I was boarding before lunch. Yes, we lost Marta, or she lost us – it doesn’t matter which, really, but everyone involved was frustrated with the event. She was waiting for us outside the rental place while I got boots, and somehow she missed us exiting, taking our boards from the racks, and walking across to buy a lift ticket. She saw our missing gear, assumed we’d left to ski without her, and did just that herself. We waited around, looking for her, but since her board was missing (she was whizzing down the mountain on it) and she was nowhere to be found, we eventually just caught the chair to Skyline without her.

The night before, Marta and I put new bindings on the board I’m borrowing from Michele, since the old ones I’d gotten from Bryan broke midway through the day last time. Unfortunately, we failed to test them on my larger feet, and I could barely buckle in securely. After one run, Dillon went to the tool bench to adjust them while I searched all the lodges for Marta. I found her in one of the bars with her friend Rosie, having a beer – she was convinced she’d lost us for the rest of the day, and resigned herself to drinking away her woes. After that, everything was basically fine, except that my bindings were still being difficult. When we broke for lunch at 1:00, I had taken only four or so runs, only one of which had made me at all happy.

We ate lunch at stolen tables in the hallway next to the entrance to a restaurant in the lodge (how’s that for a prepositional phrase) and wrote obscene phrases on the fogged-up windows. The lodge had left us little recourse, every table in the designated eating areas being filled with chattering families and ski bunnies. Marta pilfered a pitcher of ice water and some plastic cups from the lodge and we made do with our French bread (sorry, Freedom bread), cheese, sliced ham, and goldfish crackers.

I felt worlds better after getting some food in me, and did much better for the next two hours. I met up with Kelly around 2, and boarded half a run with her and her friend John before losing them to difficult terrain (difficult for me, not them). I was on my own most of the afternoon, which turned out to be not half as bad as I originally anticipated. With no one playing the role of instructor (“Okay, see that tree? You’re going to cut to its left, then get up a lot of speed because it flattens out ahead”), I was free to experiment and try out routes and moves of my own. Skyline, a blue-square course, is now thoroughly boardable to me. When I wasn’t busy getting wallowed in fresh powder, catching an edge and falling flat on my face, or sitting and waiting for my leg to uncramp, I was linking turns and carving with what began to feel like confidence by the end of the day. My greatest complaint about snowboarding is that every time I start to feel good about it, we have to leave.

Leaving turned out to be harder than I thought. Nathan’s Subaru, which we already have started calling “the ru,” was completely buried under the snow that had fallen while we skied, and the locks were frozen shut as well. Eventually we broke in, dug out, and were on our very slow, blizzard-impeded way down the mountain.

My favorite memory of the trip? Nathan and I are having a beard-growing contest at the moment – the parameters for victory are still a little hazy at this writing – and both of us sported full-fledged icicles hanging from our chins and lips. Sadly we didn’t get a picture of it.

Speaking of pictures… they’re coming, 68 of them to be precise. If you’re clever you can figure out how to get to them directly, before I make pages containing them, but I’ll leave that as an exercise. Now I must read some Al Franken – yes, Stuart Smalley – before bedtime, a piece entitled “Ann Coulter: Nut Case”. Hear that, Dad? The liberals are indoctrinating me!