When are you too old or snowboard?Or when are you old enough to know better?
A couple weeks ago, my buddy Kevin (who's also starting a new blog about Things to Do in NYC) came up for a weekend. We hung out, did some sightseeing around Portsmouth, NH and caught up on life in general.
We also tried out something new to the both of us—snowboarding.
He'd just bought a board from a guy off Craigslist. The previous owner had run into some leg problems and had to give it up. Since he now owns gear, Kevin's hit the slopes a few times this season and also took some lessons. I've grown up as a skier, but have boarded a couple times so I knew the basics. Or I thought I did, completely forgetting that the last time I was on a board, I was in high school and probably didn't have my license yet. Whoops.
We went up to Cannon Mountain in the beautiful White Mountains of my home state. I wound up buying my own board while I was up there (Renting was $40, buying a used board, with bindings and boots, was $100. All I have to do is use it another time and a half and I get my money's worth. Freakanomics, baby.). It was a perfect day for it, really. Clear skies, relatively warm, and we still hooked ourselves up with student discounts since we're cheap like that.
We hit the bunny slope immediately.
And, immediately, my tailbone became intimately familiar with the packed powder of Franconia Notch. Again. And again. And again.
Eventually, I started to get the hang of it. After a couple runs, I had stopped falling on my butt entirely. Of course, that meant I was falling on my face instead, but it seemed to indicate some sort of progress. At least I thought it did, and then my lips swelled up. But after finishing another another couple runs, I'd managed to get the falling thing under control. Now, I was alternating between having my face smashed into the snow or bruising my pride and my coccyx simultaneously.
When you're learning to snowboard, by yourself, on a bunny hill, you're pretty exposed. Not to the elements—the ground down there is so flat that the wind doesn't whip by, it stops to laugh at you instead. Rather, you're exposed to the mockery of tiny midget jerks flying by on their own pint-sized boards and skis.
That's right, all of the under-four-footers, the beginner skiers who are too short to ride the adult-sized chairlifts to the top of the mountain are all around you, constantly annoying. To their credit, they can sure cut some snow, doing figure eights around you while they giggle at your prone form, ooohing and ahhhing at ever spectacular tumble. Even worse are the parents and ski instructors shooshbooming down the slopes with them, mournfully shaking their heads at mortifying failure after mortifying failure. My face was probably beet red, but you could also chalk that up to furious anger at the inventor of the snowboard and/or scraping it raw on icy patches.
Eventually, after breaking a couple times for cocoa, food, icy hot, pee breaks, and to cry softly into our scarves, Kevin and I graduated ourselves to an adult-sized lift. There, we tumbled off the chair at the top of the hill and realized that things get much steeper very quickly in the northwoods of NH.
You know those cartoons where Wil-E-Coyote falls down a mountain, rolls into a ball, picks up all sorts of detritus along the way, then crashes into a tree? Yeah. That was me. Repeatedly and painfully.
I remember our final run. I'd just taken a spectacular spill and was completely sprawled out, face-up in the snow (a crash made even worse by the fact that I hadn't even been moving when I fell, I just fell over). I ripped off my goggles and lay there, staring up at the puffy white clouds like some kid trying to pick out shapes, when I realized that I wasn't a kid anymore.
My butt hurt. My back hurt. My face hurt.
"Dude," I turned my head uphill to Kevin, who was mimicking me in a similiar state of repose, "I am too old for this."
Thankfully, the next thing my butt hit was a bar stool.
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