Burly, Brah

My officemates are talking passionately about Lost, the TV series. Kate is apparently a slut, everyone's met Jack's dad, no one's sure what the deal is with Lock or Sawyer and there's some psychic kid running around having visions. I'm just as caught up in another fiction, the Philip Pullman book series His Dark Materials upon which the new movie The Golden Compass is based, but I have no one here to talk to about armored talking polar bears or world-cutting knives. Such is life.

Over the break, Pants and I went to Lake Tahoe with another couple who came to visit from Texas and I learned to snowboard. I recommend snowboarding if you hate your tail bone and wrists and you're curious about what snow tastes like when your face whips through deep piles of it at ninety miles an hour. I recommend it if you like using words like "sick" and "burly" to mean "really cool" and not "ill" or "large-statured," and if you refer to everyone, male or female as "Brah." And also if you like fun. Despite wracking full-body pain and bruises measured by hand-widths, I had incredible, unreasonable amounts of fun.

Usually this is not the case for me-- I don't like things that hurt. Pants is much the opposite. Jalapenos, hot sauce, wasabi, and anything circled in little illustrated flames on the menu please me not, and yet he is drawn to them happily and willingly. He likes hiking fast and hard through vertical terrain and gazes longingly out the window when the weather is sleety and iron cold and says sad, crazy things like, "I wish I were camping." His showers are lukewarm and brutally short. My biological make-up covets subtlety, variety, and long, contemplative observation-- at least, that's how I've learned to reframe the term "sissy."

So it was a total shock to both us when I strapped into a snowboard and began the long process of learning to stand up in that weird, heel-heavy cro-magnon stance that lets you scrape slowly broadside down the mountain, and after the first sixty ass-plants I was still jovial and cooperative. Mostly it was the snow, which has magically retained its ability to delight me, even when I meet it face first and find shovel-fulls of it crammed into the back of my pants.

[Holy crap, now they're talking about Super Nanny. And getting worked up about it.]

Anyway, I learned to scrape broadside on my heels and my toes, and then to glide from side to side like a falling leaf (I found it actually helped to say "falling leaf! falling leaf!" to my feet and lean with arms outstretched in my intended direction, like I was casting spells, or giving the "hands in the air, like you just don't care" to a large rap audience) and then to point the nose of my board down the mountain, pick up speed, and then sweep my back forward again to slow down, which was called making garlands. I fell again and again and tiny children whizzed fearlessly past on tiny skies. And then I learned to turn, and everything else make way more sense, like the moment in The Miracle Worker when Annie Sullivan splashes Helen Keller's hands with water, only much more frivolous.

Everything was going great until I hit the tree. Actually, it was more like a sapling, or even a sapling-ette because it was less that I hit it and more that I sliced it from the earth with the back edge of my board. Still, I was riding very purposefully on the front edge of the board (snowboarding, evidently, is a lot about declared intentions, which feels cool until the terrain disagrees with you) and hitting the sapling-ette with the back edge entirely flipped my center of gravity whipped me over onto my back, where I became a spectacular fountain of ice and powder and popped off my beanie and my goggles before coming to a halt under the line of skiers on the lift high above me. I saw them, and some red stars, and took a long moment to watch a plane scratch out a contrail across the palest blue part of the sky. Then I started a slow and methodical inventory of my extremities-- wiggle the toes, good, fingers, good, creak both knees, twist hips, now elbows, still good, and finally head, side to side, good. A loud scrape and a "holy shit, are you OK?" beside me and there's Pants, who helps me up and looks perplexed as I try to work out whether I want to laugh hysterically or cry hysterically and decide on both as I pack my snowy hat and goggles back on and revert to "falling leaf! falling leaf!" back down the mountain.

The wrist was later on, and less spectacular. The fall itself was pretty weak, but I landed on ice and caught myself mostly with that hand, even though I'd been hearing all day, "land on your knees!" Right now it's wrapped in a ratty white bandage, which provides little support but is supposed to remind me to open doors and twist keys in locks with my other hand.

Despite this and an additional ten spectacular falls from the lift, which I never mastered, I jumped at the chance to buy good snowboarding boots on sale at REI and clomp around in them at home to break them in even though my ankles are still all bruised and puffy. I can't explain this, but I can't wait to do it all again.