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Getting the dream back

by G.D. Maxwell It’s happening. Not today and not tomorrow but the day after that and the day after that, it’s happening. Jeez, talk about testing a guy’s resolve, throwing temptation in his path, leading him astray.

by G.D. Maxwell

It’s happening.

Not today and not tomorrow but the day after that and the day after that, it’s happening. Jeez, talk about testing a guy’s resolve, throwing temptation in his path, leading him astray. Might just as well have given me the winning lottery numbers, a case of scotch or a place to call my own.

Everything in my overflowing in-basket’s getting the bum’s rush instead of the usual, thoughtful, occasionally original and even creative spin my editors have come to expect. It was all I could do to sit down long enough to write this column instead of digging into the archives for one old enough no one would remember it first appeared back in the day when people took Candidate Nebbeling seriously.

Even politics is taking a back seat, attention spanwise!

It’s Ma Nature’s fault. Well, hers and the Mothercorp’s. Those heartless manipulators and spinmeisters on Blackcomb Way have opportunistically decided to open one of two mountains this weekend to either tempt fate or reward patience. Bless you gentlemen and ladies, bless you.

I apologize in advance to whomever I sit next to Saturday at the All-Candidates Beauty Pageant and Group Love-In. I’ll be the guy in the dripping, steaming, never-seen-the-inside-of-a-washing-machine ski gear. I’ll share whatever’s left in my flask with you if that’s any consolation and we can heckle together, possibly in harmony if you know how to heckle in harmony. I’ll carry the melody.

Since the press release first appeared Monday, my attention’s been blurred. I think it’s the wax fumes. I know it’s pointless, okay, relatively pointless to tune and wax rock skis, powder skis I probably won’t ride for another month, touring skis I definitely won’t ride for a while, skis I’ll probably never ride again in my life and friends’ skis just so they’ll feel obliged to go up with me this weekend and share the buzz, but I’ve got to do something to keep from busting out of my skin.

I’M GOING SKIING THIS WEEKEND!

Please, if you’re a snowboarder, read the word ‘skiing’ as being expansive enough to include what you do. The season’s just starting; my heart’s big enough to embrace your passion as well as mine. We’re brothers and sisters under the skin, at least until we run into each other.

This is why I moved here. This is, in all probability, why you moved here. Ever wonder why those people you meet every now and then who don’t ski or board moved here? Me too. Weird, isn’t it. It reminds me a little of living in Montreal – all the drawbacks of living on an island with none of the steel band, hot sun, cold rum drinks comforts. What’s with that?

But you and I, we moved here to slide down these mountains and in one more sleep, we’ll get our chance.

That’s exciting. The start of every season, like the start of so many things, is exciting. Nothin’ but promise and hope. If you’re new to town, maybe you’ve heard unsettling stories about last season. You probably haven’t heard about what happened in 1994. That year – c’mon, it wasn’t that long ago – October was very Octoberish, rained some, sunny some, nothing much in the way of snow though. Then the clock struck November and the sunny some disappeared, rain turned to snow and we woke up every morning, or at least almost every morning, to brush 10 or a dozen inches of fluff off our cars or cats or whatever we’d left outside all night.

Ever opportunistic and community-minded, the guys who ran Blackcomb – they didn’t own Whistler then; imagine that – opened early. I don’t think they opened as early as this year but they opened pretty early. It kept snowing, night after night, day after day until finally we were skiing from the top to bottom of Blackcomb on November 11 th , ± 2 days, the coefficient of a faulty, substance-abused memory.

Will this year be that good? Who cares; it’s all good.

Even after doin’ it and writing about it for as long as I’ve done both, I still don’t understand the magic of sliding down snowy mountains. I don’t understand why the onset of winter is such a joyous celebration for people who ski while the same season envelops the lives of non-skiers with a foreboding sense of doom and loathing. I don’t understand how this pastime can bridge otherwise chasmic gaps of class, age and socioeconomics such that a CEO and a workerbee he’s exploited, whose pension fund he’s raided and whose future he’s thrown to the wolves can sit in the same hot tub after a day on the slopes and chatter like kids about the runs they had and their plans for tomorrow.

It’s almost enough to make me forget about the very serious nonsense at hand. Almost, but not quite.

I moved here to ski. I moved here to live. I didn’t move here to write cranky columns about dithering politicians. Or if I did, I meant to write cranky columns about dithering provincial or national politicians. Or better yet, cranky columns about how the dithering idiot sitting in the White House is ruining the country I was born in, bring the world to the brink of political and environmental disaster and generally making me ashamed to be both an American and a recovering Christian.

But that’s not the way things turned out. Somewhere along the way the little town that could slipped off the rails on its trip to Blissville. As unbelievable as is sounds, it was just a few years ago I was writing about how weird it was to not have anything going on in local politics to gripe about, how well the mayor and council were running things, how rosy the future looked. It was like a good dream.

The dream is over. John Lennon said that.

Now we have to get the dream back. And that means we – you, me, the rest of the usual suspects – need to grind out a few more weeks of work. We need to find out what these candidates who want our vote really stand for, what they want to bring to the table, what kind of Whistler they’re interested in helping make happen. That means we need to listen to what they have to say, ask them tough questions, ask ourselves tougher questions and listen to their answers, watch their faces, try to figure out if they’re being straight with us or shining us on.

What kind of tough questions? That’s up to you. Listen, ask, learn. And don’t forget to ski; it’ll make even the drudgery of doing your civic duty a lighter task.