By G.D. Maxwell
So, was it worth the wait?
Of course it was. It was worth all the drivin’ and doubt, the sketchy food and bummed beer, the couch surfin’ and cash haemorrhagin’ and that particularly uncomfortable moment when you announced to your folks you were droppin’ out of school, quittin’ your job, borrowing your pop’s aging Toyota and headin’ out to Whistler – "just for a year" – do be a dirtbag, ski-bummin’ skid.
Whatever second thoughts you might have had slipped away like a snowboard off its leash when Blackcomb opened Saturday to more snow and better coverage than most of us suffering budravaged memory loss can remember. The few tourists who went up the mountain must have thought they’d crashed a private party last weekend. However many there were – best guess is somewhere between two and a dozen – they were hopelessly outnumbered by, in order, freshfaced staff, returning staff, locals, weekend warriors, and that annoying guy from Washington who has a condo at Greystone and thinks Canadians drive on the left side of the road.
The hills were alive with the sound of delirium but often was heard a discouraging word, most frequently when someone with more bravado than brains slid too far off the straight and narrow and into a rock garden. It’s early season out there boys and girls and one of life’s cruel lessons is this: Mountains are made out of rock. That’s why God invented rock skis.
Now that you’ve all made it this far, maybe gotten in a few shifts, possibly even received a paycheque and had enough time to recover from its microscopic size, visited the food bank and phoned home once or twice to hit the folks up for money, it’s obviously time to put my Public Service hat back on and, like an elder ‘round the spirit circle, share the Wisdom of Early Season Survival with you. Fraught with more perils than Preseason Survival but sprinkled with way more opportunities, surviving the early season requires deft, grace and common sense, undoubtedly things you forgot to pack.
The most important thing to remember is this: regardless of hype and whatever lies your mama’s told you all your life, you are not Superboy/girl/whatever and having not come from Krypton, do not have X-ray vision. Snow is opaque. The visual difference between a jagged hunk of shale covered by two centimetres of snow and two metres of snow is diddly. The difference those two realities can visit on the base of your snowboard is the difference between carefree riding the rest of the season and calling home again to plead for the dough to buy a new-to-you snowboard. The difference they can visit on your punkin head is something you don’t even want to think about.
This ties in nicely with the second most important thing to remember. It’s a long season. Longer than you’ve ever experienced back in the Old Country. You’ll still be skiing pow when they’re mowing Blue Mountain next spring. Patience, Grasshopper. The alpine, offpiste, bushwhackin’, out of bounds, backcountry, irresistible lines on the other side of the ridge will still be there in two weeks. By then, they just might have enough coverage to slide over without having to make an anguished referenced to your duck or whatever that word is you scream when you take a core shot.
And while it’s good to be green, this is not the time of year to be a tree hugger. Seeing tracks headed off into the sticks last weekend left me wondering if those folks had ever walked in the woods before. Stumps, deadfall, snags, broken branches, undergrowth – that and more rock is pretty much what makes up the mosaic of the local forest floor.
Not too many years ago, a guy stumbled into Guest Relations at the base of the mountain. "Can you call Ski Patrol," he said. He looked like he’d gone a few rounds with Freddie Kruger or been thrown in the brier patch but seemed otherwise undamaged. Until he turned profile. Protruding from the side of his head, right around the temple, was two inches of a half-inch diameter twig. Neither of us knew how much of the twig wasn’t showing. Bushwhacking, the tip of one ski had slid under an invisible snag. He was a little unclear about what happened next.
As gruesome as he looked he was much better off than the Boy Whose Huck Went Bad. Jay McKenzie, my dentist, told me the story of the BWHWB. We were talking about bad ski injuries and he won the contest with this one.
Jay got called into the office on a day off, as I recall. "It was a dental emergency," he said. What got carried into his office and poured into a chair was a snowboarder feeling no pain. He was feeling no pain because he had enough morphine coursing through what was left of his brain to be pretty much comatose. He also had an unreduced compound fracture of the femur – we’re talking protruding bone here – and was having trouble breathing.
He was in the dentist chair for the latter reason. His respiratory difficulties were dental in nature. Having hucked himself into the unknown, he’d met rock on the way down and what teeth weren’t knocked down his throat pretty much had to be removed through his nose, where they’d been driven up into by the impact. At this point in the story, I pleaded with Jay to spare me the rest of the details and he kindly obliged.
The moral of the story is, of course, know your line and especially know where you’re going to land after your feet leave the ground. The corollary is that huck shouldn’t even be in your vocabulary this early in the season unless you’re spending intimate evenings with Mr. Twain.
Finally, and again, it’s a long season. With luck and the occasional white lie, you’ll clock better than 100 days on the hill. If you believe in the inevitability of the odds, chances are pretty good on one of them you’ll pull up lame. There are two important things to know about being hurt in Whistler, okay, three if you count the fabled Beer Therapy pioneered by Longhorn Saloon owner Dick Gibbons and recently written up in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The first is Know Your Physio. If you don’t have a physio, this is a good time to shop for one instead of waiting until you can’t walk. This is the spot where I usually plug Allison McLean, my personal Goddess of Physiotherapy and the only reason I walk erect, but I think she’s getting embarrassed by the publicity so I’ll refrain.
The second is this. If you’re hurt, go see your physio; hopefully she’ll be able to get you moving enough to hide your injury. Bear the pain long enough to show up for work then collapse 10 minutes into your shift. Voila! The WCB gravytrain just pulled into the station.
No thanks necessary; just have fun.
