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The Thrill is back

By G.D. Maxwell There’s a palpable difference in the air this year.

By G.D. Maxwell

There’s a palpable difference in the air this year. Or is that just the rain?

People who don’t usually seem particularly excited by the prospect of another ski season are almost giddy, children caught up in a Christmas Eve that seems endless and teasing, reminding themselves and everyone else they see that Santa’s coming, Santa’s coming.

Heightened anticipation extends well beyond the newbies who’ve drifted into town over the past six or eight weeks. They’re always pumped at the prospect of bumming through their first season in a place they’ve either visited or simply dreamed about. Easily identifiable in their newly-acquired, not quite comfortably fitting phatpunk attitude, they wander the village sneaking quick looks up the slopes, judging for themselves the depth and quality of virgin snow, nearly busting just beneath their skins to get up there and slide back down.

Shoulder season weather teases them. Endless foreplay; no relief. Some snow, some rain and, to underscore the irony in their lives, a bit of sunshine, something otherwise treasured but wholly unwelcome at this very moment. Walking slump-shouldered and toqued, they’ve become supplicants to pagan gods and goddesses of precipitation. Let the heavens open up and unleash their manna. Pray to Ullr. Find a virgin to sacrifice. Let it be me.

It’s expected of them. The drama plays out yearly as every new crop of fresh-faced suckers drifts into town. But when you see the same look on faces etched and worn by age and repeated exposure to hundred-day seasons too numerous to clearly recall anymore, well, maybe this is the new world order, the lens through which events of mid September get simultaneously focused and blurred.

"Get back to leading your normal lives," our leaders extol, all the while changing the landscape of democracy, edging it toward something lying so far beyond the curve of normal no one who remembers their Social Studies lessons can begin to identify it.

"I remember normal," we each think, remembering something perhaps unrecognizable to the person closest to us. Normal is shuffling through the off season with a cadence of expectation. Normal is sweating through the chill of October and November, sweating the snow that seems to come only teasingly if at all, sweating the unsure start of a New Year on the calendar of ups and downs, sweating rebirth at a time the rest of the hemisphere celebrates the season of death. Normal is the painful realization you don’t have nearly enough dough to afford a season pass and new board(s) this year and normal is realizing you didn’t need new after all, just a chance to get the old out, patch the base and let gravity pull you toward a state of bliss where you can’t even remember what you’re riding, just that you’re riding.

The trouble with normal is, as Bruce says, it always gets worse. It gets, well, normal. White milk instead of chocolate. The second profound lesson of Economics kicks in – marginal return. The marginal high of the N th ski season spent in paradise numbs down. The sensory excitation of ramping up for another winter on the slopes is hijacked by the sameness of life repeating its cycles like a scratched, favourite record skipping back instead of grooving ever forward. (Kids: ask your folks about skipping records.) The drug loses its kick and there is no higher dose to administer to get the thrill back.

So why does the thrill seem to have come back to town this year?

Is it as simple as seeking refuge from insanity in the familiar? Does it have something to do with looking at what’s dear through cleansed eyes? Could it be the devil-may-care, live for today for tomorrow we die syndrome so familiar to those facing a scary and uncertain future? Or is it the reality of the first new ski season of the new century, a hungover, turned on its head fin de siècle? Are we no longer world-weary and same-old, same-old but scooting through life with newly-cleaned glasses?

Hell, I don’t know. I just wanna go skiin’. And so does everyone else I know.

Maybe that’s the answer to the contagion gripping our country and our neighbour to the south. Go skiing. Live life. Let your face freeze in the winter’s wind. Feel the pow float up your nostrils and choke your breath away in its icy grip. Lose your sense of up and down as you tumble ass over teakettle down Whistler Bowl, laughing your brains out like a looneytune all the way down. Climb the career ladder in reverse or, better yet, jump off entirely and live your passion.

Surrounded by a town full of snow junkies, of unrepentant winter lovers and adrenaline-fuelled thrill seekers, I wonder why more people – everyone – and especially Canadians whose very definition of self rests on a foundation of winter, don’t ski? Or board? I don’t wonder about it for the same reasons skico execs wonder about it, it’s not a monetary, bottom-line, grow like a cancer cell or die sort of thing. I just wonder how they can know there’s something out there, something they can do in an otherwise dreary, endless, dark season, that’s better than sex, better than food, better than drugs – some would say better with drugs – better than driving a fast car on a twisty road, better than a technicolour sunset on a deserted beach, better than clipping along at 20 knots on a sailing yacht with the leeward rail under water and the keel threatening to come out, better than... chocolate.

Is it the expense? The cold? The fear of falling? The stories of friends and friends of friends injured and broken after a skiing holiday? The learning curve and the visible foolishness felt struggling with something those surrounding you do with such grace and simplicity? Not knowing anyone among your circle of friends who’s caught the fever? Fear of the uncaring vastness of mountainous landscapes? Fear of trying something so powerful it can suck the soul out of who you thought you were and send you careening on a new life path? Fear of fear?

It’s cold and dry in the Cariboo right now. The snow of October has given way to a belated Native American summer. Inexplicably, the pair of bald eagles on Sulphuric Lake are building a winter’s nest and intending to stay while the last ducks are wondering when it will be too late to dash south.

But it’s snowing in Whistler and the rhythm of the season has my body dancing to a downhill beat. In another week I’ll close up the cottage, drain the pipes, stuff up the cracks, hope the deadbeats don’t break into my house looking for booty to pawn and liquor to drink, and head over the Duffey.

I can’t wait.