Whistler Winter
Wonderland
The
chaos began as me and my sister giggled like Red Bull on Christmas, dodging
suitcases and travelers in a desperate attempt to find out where we were, and
more importantly where we should have been. We had said goodbye to my mother with confidence as we
strolled into the terminal and soaked in a newfound freedom, and then stopped
in our tracks as we realized that two brains with no knowledge of what we do
next were just as good as one.
Freedom meant independence, which at this point we desperately
lacked. We laughed at our
ignorance and hustled around until a familiar sound peaked my attention just
ahead. It was my dad. He seemed happy to be there to push his
kids out of the nest, as we were quite clearly unable to escape it on our
own.
“Right this way, please.” He acted as though he didn’t know us,
just ushered us off in the right direction.
“Dad!” I screamed. He had provided the air miles that made
our journey possible, and a faulty phone line had prevented me from talking to
him in the weeks since I heard the news.
He looked at his watch and shook his head in mock disapproval, but he
had long ago learned that his anal retentive tendencies were doomed to die with
him, that they had not been passed on to his offspring, who bounced and giggled
around the airport while he fretted at the kiosk. We laughed at him, standard procedure, before following his
directions through baggage and into security, outside of which we said our
good-byes and thank-yous and took a second shot at freedom.
Once again, I didn’t make it too
far.
“Did you empty your pockets,
sir?” The last word shot out like
a bullet and pierced my patience as the security guard looked at me with a
grimace. Her eyes told me she had
been waiting for me all morning and she was finally going to take me down. My shoulders sank and I reached for my
belt. Historically, I’m pretty bad
at security points.
Unsatisfied with the standard
procedure of undoing my belt and scanning the area beneath the metal buckle,
she made me remove the entire thing.
I spread my legs wider, as I felt my pants slipping, but she ensured
that my hands were held just out of reach as she scanned my sleeves and torso. And then my hat. And then my hair, which is the first place
I would keep a bomb, right beside my passport and my cell-phone. I tossed her a look that I hoped would
put her back in her place and picked up my things from the conveyor belt
without taking my eye off of her.
We started a speed walk to our gate
with less than 5 minutes until boarding and I continued to struggle to get my
belt back until we got there. We
had made it. We sat down and I
went into my bag for my boarding pass and passport, only to find that they had
somehow escaped me in between the bitch and the boarding. I retraced my path and a speedwalk
became a jog that brought me right back to my friend at security. I walked past her glare and found a
nice Jamaican man that was happy to return my belongings. He had hair that you could hide a bomb
in.
We
finally arrived in Vancouver on Thursday evening, our bodies three hours more
run down than everyone else’s in the city. A couple of onion rings and a bottomless Coke turned tired
into hyper and before long we were wandering a whole new airport in a whole new
place, no concept as to where we were or where we should be. By the time we found all of our baggage
it was a short wait for my friend Nick, who as it turned out was moving out to
Whistler on a flight arriving just one hour after ours. He walked through the gates with his
undying grin and his Cat in the Hat pajama plants dancing vibrantly beneath
him. There were patches shaved
into his head, which made it much more of a spectacle when he ran past a group
of people to give me and my sister a hug.
A man passing by complimented his pants and he proceeded to explain that
he had fallen into a book and got them from Dr. Seuss himself not too long
ago. The man laughed and shook his
head, unsure of what to do with such an off the wall response to a remark that
would usually only warrant a nervous smile or a polite thank you. Nick told as that he had no real plan,
and no place to stay past tonight, and the airport had lost all of his luggage,
but the smile never left his face as we waited for a friend from UBC to pick us
up at the airport and we laughed and played among the baggage carousels like we
were nine and had gotten away from our parents.
The drive to campus was beautiful,
and I got a twenty-minute tour of a city that it could take years to absorb. We drove along the ocean and stopped at
the Fisherman’s Wharf, where I first experienced the phenomenon of feeling more
at home than I ever have in a place that was completely unfamiliar to me. As I stood on the quiet dock between
fishing boats older than I was and bigger than my house, and took in the water
and the bridges and the buildings and the air and the sky and the mountains and
the lighting and the reflections and the knots in the wood and the chatter in
my knees my body relaxed and blended with the world around me. I belong here, I thought, or at least
in this direction.
Nick’s luggage was delivered at
3:30 in the morning and we finally went to sleep. For a minute, or so it seemed. By the time my head hit the pillow I fell asleep and by the
time I fell asleep I was waking up to make the early drive to Whistler.
We pulled out of a relatively dry
Vancouver and found ourselves driving through a snowy paradise. The car wound and weaved through
forests and along coasts, each setting shrinking me, putting everything in
perspective, and each new landscape making me forget the one before it. How could I go back home? Why should I go home? I should just stay in the mountains and
write and suffer and survive and snowboard and live. I have my body and I have my mind. What else do I need?
I shivered and remembered.
Heat. Family. Food. Friends. The
phone, television, Kayla, kisses.
Mom. But I knew then and I
know now that I will live there.
And we still hadn’t even made Whistler. For much of the time we all sat and wondered at the world we
had been missing.
By the time we finally made it,
McDonald’s in stomachs and snowboards in hands, I was pumped. My season was cut off early last year,
and I was waiting to go snowboarding ever since the snow melted. Never in my life had I seen snow like
this, and word around the campfire is, neither had Whistler. We hit the mountain. Hard. And with every part of our bodies. The battle raged and the powder conquered, forcing us into
an early defeat by a fireplace with a pitcher of Kokanee and a basket of
Chicken Fingers and fries. Not to
mention the cheese bread, onion rings, chicken wings and chili. As we digested and warmth came back
over our bodies, so did the realization that we had nowhere to stay and no idea
how to find a place. We bundled
back up and began once again, to wander.
No idea where we were, no idea where we were going, and no idea where we
would end up. But we had our
bodies, and we had our minds. And
we had our money, until we gave it to Best Western and admitted defeat to the
commercialism that dominated our paradise. Our first full day had cost me over $200, the use of my
legs, and any hope that I would ever enjoy snowboarding in Ontario again.
We woke up later than planned and
ran (waddled and grimaced in pain) out to the mountain. Our gear was still wet and our brains
were still sleeping, but we committed to another day of thrashing through
powder that ran as deep as our contentment. There were tree jibs, and cliff drops, and powder walls and
kick turns as far as we could see and long as we could last, and by the end of
the second and third day, we had still not been all the way to the top of the
mountain. That was a surprise that
awaited me on day four, when my body was ready to pack it in after two more
nights at a hostel outside of town and more snow than I could ever handle.
Day four began with a frost-bite
warning from the girl scanning tickets at the bottom of the mountain, and
before we had even got off the gondola two more employees had checked in to
ensure that we were warm and healthy in the unusual cold. We covered any exposed skin that we
could and pointed down the mountain, unfortunately in different
directions. I watched Nick
disappear down a trail that I had already passed, and as I yelled at my sister
to follow him and tell him where I had gone, she stumbled and wound up right
beside me, equally committed to this other trail. We went down to the bottom and tried Nick’s cell phone, but
it was no use, he would never think of it. We went back up to the top where my sister informed me that
she was falling apart, her legs and knees had taken too much abuse, and I saw
her off to the Chalet. It was just
me, my shaky legs, and the mountain, and I was going to the top.
I
approached the Peak Chair with caution, looking up at the terrain ahead of
me. The chair raised up over a cliff
and out of my sight toward the tip of the mountain. My body rushed with the excitement of the challenge ahead of
me. I was going to conquer this
mountain and it would be my best victory.
I got to the top, strapped in, took a breath, and gave ‘er hell. It was one of the most exhilarating
moments in my life. My heart raced
as I pounded through the powder, dropping a couple cliffs before I even
realized I was in the air. I found
myself weaving through a forest and crashing down steep terrain, until I
finally came to a rest at the bottom of the chair and turned around to face it
again. My eyes traced the path I
had just come down with an err of disbelief. I was looking a mountain in the face and accepting its
challenge. I went back to the top. This time I headed under some boundary
ropes in search of more terrain and less coverage, and I found myself staring
for the first time at an endless view of mountains around me. A massive rainbow ripped through the
landscape and even the smallest trees stood ten times prouder than any I had
ever seen. The mountains seemed to
wink at me with some kind of understanding as the sun glinted off the snow
below it. I sat and stared for a
time that it turns out was ten minutes, but lasted seconds or hours or my
entire life. I was frozen. I felt alone in the world, or alone with
the world, until I was flooded with images of my girlfriend and my mom and
my step-dad, and my grandparents and my cottage and my dad and I seemed to rush
back into my body. I stood up and
took another look around. A deep
breath launched me back down the mountain… but I took my time.
