Dickieville.... March, 2006

Prelude:

Laying face down in the snow, the harsh glare of the floodlights throwing long, dark shadows from my clenched fists.  I wait for the agony from the knee I just smashed into solid ice at high speed to abate enough to consider trying to move.  The pain almost takes my mind off the warm trickle of blood running down the inside left arm of my ski jacket, where a prior crash had exposed bare flesh to razor sharp ice. When exactly did I decide that taking a snowboard off the top of the mountain after three days… well, half days, really… of learning how to ride it was a good idea? 

Flashback.  The prior weekend at Stratton, standing in line for the lift, a man and his five-ish son behind me.  The man commenting on my skis.  “Wow.  Rossi Stratos.  Those were my favorite skis.  Back when I was a teenager, I mean.”

Ya, it was right about then.

Day one:

We pulled into Wachusetts Mountain lot 3 around noon.  It was already looking bad… lot 3, the remote lot where you have to take a bus to the base lodge, was almost full.  Will was taking a private snowboarding lesson… I was still baffled where his sudden infatuation with the sport had come from, but as long as he was having fun and getting exercise, it was fine with me.  I had my now sixteen or seventeen year old 203 centimeter Rossignol Stratos with me… heavy, long, wood-core skis, but I’ve skied them season after season and there’s almost nothing I’m not comfortable taking on with them.

On the two prior visits to Wachusetts, I’d skied on the first one, finding the mountain small but reasonably fun, and brought a book on the second one, which turned out to be both uncomfortable and boring.  I wasn’t expecting a big crowd this late in the season, and while not what I’d call a challenge, I thought it would be better on the slope than sitting in a hard cafeteria chair trying to concentrate on a book while being jostled from the wall-to-wall crowd. But when the bus arrived at the base lodge, as expected from the crowded parking, the lines for the lifts where insane. 

I decided, on a bit of a whim, to take a snowboarding lesson to avoid the long wait at the end of each run.  The beginner’s snowboarding lesson included five other people, hereby dubbed “the wussies,” and the instructor, who looked to be about fifteen and did his level best not to show how bored he was teaching the class.  We started on the bunny hill, walking half way up and practicing right turns.  Right turn, to be exact, since in the space available you could only do one.

The wussies where very busy panicking and falling while ignoring everything the instructor was saying when it was their turn, and otherwise sitting around.  After a while, I became impatient with waiting for my one-in-six turn, so I hiked to the top of the bunny hill and practiced turning from there, stopping at mid slope where the rest of the crew were busy complaining about falling on their butts so much.  After half an hour, the instructor shifted to left turns, and I decided I liked the sound of “left,” so I did. The next hour was hiking up the bunny slope, snowboarding down, turning right or left, repeat. 

It was kind of fun, actually… not fast, but kind of hard to get use to how much edge and angle you needed to keep control, and therefore challenging.  To do it right took a lot of learning, by which I mean falling.  And falling meant a lot of getting back up, which you do by the simple technique of rotating your board until it is downhill and you are on your stomach, then pushing yourself upright, aka doing a pushup. That day, based on number of falls, I did about one hundred and sixty seven pushups.

Will finished his lesson and found me.  By that time I was linking turns and starting to really enjoy myself.  We continued on the bunny slope for a while, and then took the chair up the newbie lift, up to a very gentle couple of green circle trails back down, one with a newbie terrain park.  I made it down without too much trouble.  It was near the end of the day, but Will convinced me to do one more run… a fast one to try to beat the crowd to the bus back to lot 3.  I was feeling pretty comfortable now, by which I mean way overconfident, and I went down hard two or three times.  It didn’t seem like a big deal, but that night at home, I went to sit up in bed and I could feel something go in my back.  Serious pain.  I worked from home the next day, but by Tuesday I was feeling better after ingesting copious quantities of ibuprofen.  

The skiing was phenomenal.  They had groomed the slopes overnight, and it had frozen, but it was ridged and crusty, fine for getting an edge in.  And it was fast.  I did three trails off the top, Grizzly, Black Bear, and Upper Tamarack six times in the next hour.  The lift lines where non-existent.  Around 9:30, I actually had to take a break; not from being tired, but from, of all things, feeling nauseous...  I’m not sure if it was the lift or the high altitude.  But a twenty minute break at the condo was enough, and I headed back out again, doing another six runs, mostly on Grizzly, the double-black diamond (which I thought was a little overrated).  By then, the lift lines where starting to get long and the runs were getting a little chopped up, one of the reasons I stuck with Grizzly.  While waiting for the lift, I noticed that my skis stood out on two accounts.  They where the only “straight” skis on the mountain; all the modern skis (those made in the last ten years) are shaped, with a bulbous nose and tail, to make it easier to turn.  And they were huge compared to everyone else’s.  I was feeling a little self conscious until a man and his son, standing behind me… well, you know how that story ends.

When I dropped off my Snowboard at the check-in while we were taking a break, the Wachusetts employee, one of the teenage ski patrollers rotating through the job, looked and said "Whoaaa... sweet board, Dude!"