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The backbone’s connection to the jawbone

I don’t generally consider myself a particularly superstitious person. I don’t believe rituals, talismanic objects, charms or prayers will keep misfortune at bay.
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I don’t generally consider myself a particularly superstitious person. I don’t believe rituals, talismanic objects, charms or prayers will keep misfortune at bay. In fact, to the extent I am superstitious, I have latent concerns such things will speed bad luck and dark consequences to my doorstep.

I managed to navigate team sports without falling under the spell of “winning” sox, T-shirts, cleats, saints’ medals or obsessive-compulsive pre-game routines which, if not followed, worn or rubbed in exactly the same way they were when we won our last game, would mean sure defeat if not outright humiliation.

But I am beginning to get a little concerned and, maybe, even watchful about what I say for fear I’ll jinx whatever I’m talking about. Fortunately, this nascent superstition hasn’t bled over into writing. If it does, I’ll have to quit doing this and find an honest way to make, well, if not a living at least whatever part of a living writing a column cobbled out of thin air constitutes.

I don’t know when exactly I began to notice a strong link between saying I’d sure like something to happen and dooming it to never occurring and the reverse, saying I’d like something not to happen and watching in numb shock as it began to unfold before my very eyes. It might have been when I pooh-poohed the outrageous notion of Whistler and Blackcomb merging operations, or, more accurately, Intrawest gobbling up Whistler Mountain.

“That old chestnut?” I replied when the rumour surfaced. Word of the mountains merging had, at the time, become something apocryphal, like peace in the Middle East. The rumour bloomed about as frequently as skunk cabbage, only to skulk off and be replaced by equally outrageous fabrications… like the Olympics coming to town.

But, as they say, excrement happens.

A couple of seasons ago, after hiking to the peak on a stormy, early December day when the Peak Chair was taking a day off, I brailled my way down to Million Dollar Ridge and, slogging through hip-deep snow, fell into an airy, unconsolidated pocket of bush. Swimming to pull myself out, I muttered, in desperation, “Too much snow.”

Almost before the words left my lips I tried to suck them back in. Too late. Idiot. It didn’t snow again until February. Okay, maybe it did; but it seemed, in my self-made purgatory, like it was February before I’d done sufficient penance to see fresh snow again.

That was it. I was on guard. Superstition had moved into my neighbourhood and I’ve never, ever muttered those words or words like them again. Even last December, when the snow in my yard was eye level — my eye level — when the roads in Alpine were reduced to one-lane tunnels with 23-foot walls of snow, when I started making Zippy the Dog wear a Pieps when he journeyed out to heed the call of nature, even then I could be heard to say, “Sure wish it’d snow some more.”

But try as I might, I can’t figure out what made me say, in response to an oblique reference, “Naw, I never really have back pain.”

Superstition gnawed on my fear centre as soon as I said it. I tried an obsequious reverse play. “What I meant to say was….” But it was too late. There were no words I could come up with that would counteract the ones I’d already spoken. The jinx was floating out there and the best thing I could do was just remain silent.

Which was why I wasn’t particularly surprised when my back started to hurt.

I was pretty sure I’d just pulled a muscle. There are lots of them back there to pull. I was also pretty sure I knew how I’d pulled whichever muscle was now doing its best impression of stabbing me in the back. It was when I’d bent down, without stopping, to buckle my boots. Actually, they weren’t my boots. They belonged to a company who shall remain nameless but who’d mismounted the buckles on a pre-production pair of boots I was testing. They were a bitch to buckle and instead of doing the smart thing — I know there is a smart thing; it just never seems to be the path I choose — I did the thing I did and now my back, which I’d boasted was never sore, was really sore.

I treated it like I treat every malady. I ignored it. But I’d forgotten how integral backs, functioning backs, are to just about every single movement humans make.

So, for something like the hundredth time last season, I placed my wellbeing in the hands of the Goddess of Physiotherapy, Allison McLean. Knowing my self-diagnosis — Olympic Fatigue — was, quite possibly, the last thing that was actually wrong, she found the nerve being pinched and fixed me.

Until I got on an airplane.

She fixed that too.

Until I left town the next day.

Stuck in the Cariboo, five hours from Whistler, with nary a physio in sight, let alone one I trusted, it slowly dawned on me I was going to have to find a more local solution or simply let the wilderness reclaim Smilin’ Dog Manor.

That’s when I entered, forced into may be more accurate, the very scary world of chiropractic. “I’ve made some appointments for you,” my Perfect Partner informed me. Not being certain how I’d responded, she actually made appointments with every chiro in 100 Mile House.

The first was a very kind woman who rode circuit from Williams Lake to 100 Mile House. She listened patiently to my story, gently probed the hurt, explained what she thought needed to be done, asked if I was okay with that and then, ever so gently, mangled me in several places.

“How’s that?” she asked.

“Great,” I lied. Actually it hurt more than when I’d come in… only in a different place. But miraculously, the next morning it still hurt in the new place but the old hurt was gone. Poof.

“Okay, so maybe they’re not witch doctors,” I grudgingly admitted when pressed by my Perfect Partner.

By the time the next appointment came around, I was feeling pretty good. Not perfect but functional… more or less. Still, out of a mix of curiosity and blind belief that I could feel even better, I went to the next chiro.

If the first was a laying on of hands, the second was a wielding of light sabres. The new chiro relied — exclusively — on some whizbang scanner hooked up to a computer to tell him where my problems resided. Before I could say, “Whaddya think?” he’d bodyslammed me three or four times and suggested we should have a semi-permanent relationship for the rest of my life.

I, of course, hurt more when I left than when I arrived.

But the kinks worked out. I can move like a human again. Now if I can just remember to keep my mouth shut.