We went snowboarding again, but in all fairness, I think there should be another name for the sport when all the snow melts into packed ice and people take it in their heads to go shirtless down the slopes. "High-velocity ice-surfing," perhaps. Or "rednecks riding very wide swords." Twice yesterday I was inches away from being slammed into by teenage boys with absolutely no control over their crashes. One screamed an apology as he tagged the edge of my board and sent me flying; the other just yelled, and I'm hoping it was because he was in pain. Wreck all you like, I say-- it's one of my favorite things to do on a snowboard, especially getting off the lift-- but wreck discreetly, clean yourself up, and don't factor in other people to be part of your crumple zone. It tends to increase the panic factor of those of us trying to learn.
And it's panic I'd like to talk about today, boys and girls. Good old-fashioned, why-can't-I-breathe-right-now panic. I quite nearly lost my shit on Sunday and sustained not a few injuries on which I'm kind of fixated right now, but as usual I'm talking in several layers. Pants deploys this Saturday, as in five days from now. A mountain of Important Administrative Details looms over us-- writing wills, notarizing my Power of Attorney, getting a safe deposit box for our important papers instead of shoving them all into an old box for plug-in curlers, and doing something about the ominous "Check Engine" light on the Honda-- but we decided instead to indulge our sentimental escapist fantasies and head out to Sierra Summit with a buddy from Pants' squadron to get in one last snowboarding trip.
Take note: even if you try to leave the Panic in another zip code, it will find a way to hitch a ride. Instead of fretting and wringing my hands over important adult things, I concentrated and distilled my pre-deployment panic into a much more potent elixir. Instead of getting our paperwork in order, I hyperventilated on a ski lift and thought seriously about jumping off of it, even though it meant a 40-ft. free fall, because I could then avoid the inevitable scene caused when I fell at the tiny getting-off slope. Six out of seven rides, I ate shit coming off the lift. This, after two previous snowboarding trips where I had no trouble with it. The worst of the six scenes was the first, wherein I hugged the chair's railing, despite frantic shouts from Pants and the lift operator to let go, and was dragged crotch-first over a wooden sign. If there's a more desperate and pathetically painful example of emotional transference, I don't know what it is. I'm afraid to let go because I think it'll hurt; I make it hurt far more. Ibuprofen doesn't work on shame.
The ironic thing is that each trip down the mountain I was getting better and better at my turns, speed, and control. And without knowing it, I was tackling harder and harder runs. This was not my plan. My plan was to find a green slope, fall in love with it, and then ride it all day until I knew every bump and could feel like I had improved, but Pants and his friend kept switching it up on me. Several times I got this: "See? You can do a run like that, right?" not knowing that this meant, "Great. Now we're heading up to the craggy top of the mountain where there are only blue and black runs." I should mention that it was a balmy 50 degrees, and as we climbed higher and ridiculously higher up the mountain, the sun caught each of the hundreds of ski and board slices in the snow and they all glinted and sparked in the light: ice, I tell you. Not snow. Melting ice, with terrifying patches of brown rock peaking through.
More than once in the past four years I've been reminded of a trip Pants and I took to climb the Flatirons in Boulder, Colorado back when we were still dating. I suspected then that he was a kinetic kind of guy, more at home in the world when he's hanging off one edge of it or screaming towards it at mach one, but I hadn't yet figured out that he would try to involve me in this physics-taunting, this vestigial cry of the cave people, and that he would mask it with words like "fun" and "relaxing." I was also still trying to come off as impulsive, brave, and confident, when as we all know, my bowels shut down at the slightest hint of upheaval. Anyway. We took the trip, and we climbed the Flatirons-- an 800+ foot rock face-- in about 8 hours, finally rapelling off the back of it in total darkness. This means we averaged 100 feet of climbing per panic attack for me, which I then spun into a more encouraging statistic: I can climb a ten-story building without crying. Line up 8 of them, a mid-sized city's financial district, say, and we're only talking 8 crises of faith before I've stood on top of each one!
I think I ran through my entire repertoire of emotions that day, every last one, every single shade of feeling. At one particularly bad moment, I was clinging with two fingers and a toe to a wall with no other visible holds, and Pants was so far above me and the wind was so strong, that he never heard me yelling for him to let some slack into the rope so I could re-maneuver. I couldn't see what was above or below me, but I knew there was a very real chance I would finally find out if our knots were well-tied. Basically I just cried a little, waited to see if I would lose bladder control, didn't, and somehow found another toehold. He had the rope if I fell, but I didn't fall. Maybe I was too afraid to fall. I trusted him then, and I trust him even more now, but what if my fear of falling is stronger?
And then there was the dizzy, stupid-happy, chest-thumping pride of being able to stand there on top of the rock face and stare down at the night lights of Boulder on one side, and the empty blackness of the rock's hollowed out back on the other, knowing that I was about to just sit back into a rope and slide my way down. There's a sharpness to that feeling, an aloneness that's exhilarating. Not everyone can do this thing I'm doing, is what it says, conveniently editing out the previous crying and bladder-doubting. Better than that, though-- being out on a high, sharp rock edge in the dark with someone who loves you, and who says, "I knew you could do this."
I don't doubt that Pants and the other couple who endured that climb were thoroughly exhausted by the experience of teaching me to climb, but it taught me a lot-- mostly that I tend to shoot way low in what I think I'm capable of. If I had known then how important that climb was going to be for preparing me for marrying Pants, I don't know how I would have reacted. It's possible I would have reconsidered.
Green slopes for repeated practice have been hard to come by in the past four years, and I keep getting tricked into blue ones. I know there's bound to be another high at the end of finally mastering snowboarding, just like I know the end of deployment will feel like a huge accomplishment, but right now I'm all bruised up and the last thing I want to do is let go of the lift.
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