Now is the winter of our discontent, made easier, perhaps, by the long-awaited arrival of snow. The calendar says January, the year says 2009, but my psyche says November. The vortex of holidays, the crush — though less crushing than usual — of visitors and that most gentle of dopplering hums as the resort slows down in the new year aren’t enough to shake the feeling that something’s been missing.
I haven’t been getting high enough.
Oh sure, the place has been dripping with alcohol. You don’t have to walk very far to wonder whether the skunk cabbage is coming out unseasonably early. And the glazed look in the clubbers’ eyes suggest no lack of pharmaceutical party favours. But my drug of choice has been late coming to the party. I still can’t believe it’s the second week of January and the closest I’ve gotten to a run down Whistler Bowl has been a trudge up Shale Slope.
With luck, this latest storm cycle will open the alpine for the season. That’s a mixed blessing. As much as I’m relishing a run down Peak to Creek, a plunge into Ruby Bowl and a tramp in the Nearcountry, when the ropes drop and the Peak chair starts running, the likelihood of death visiting our doorstep will approach certainty. And with it, like maggots on roadkill, a ridiculously uninformed — hey, let’s call a spade a spade: absolutely stupid — media circus.
The circus will be preceded by dead men skiing. They won’t know they’re dead until the grim reaper French kisses the life out of them. They’ll think they’re having the time of their lives. They’ll think they’re invincible. They’ll think they can ski anything, anywhere. They’ll think that because they’re very good skiers and have conquered the steepest pitches in-bounds, hucked the highest cliffs, developed their skills far in advance of their knowledge and judgment.
They’ll be wrong: dead wrong. Avalanches don’t care how good a skier you are or how much you think you understand the dynamic forces of tonnes of snow lying temptingly on slopes steeper than the angle of repose. Avalanches don’t care that you think you’re in safe terrain or simply blissfully unaware of the dangers several thousand feet above you.
With any luck they’ll die alone; they won’t have peer-pressured their friends into coming along for the last ride with them. With any luck they’ll be swept over a cliff and die instantly when their acceleration to terminal velocity comes to an abrupt halt on a rocky outcropping. With any luck, they’ll be tumbled through a stand of trees, crushed in a boulder field or have half their head taken off by a sharp slab of shale.
If they’re not lucky, they’ll die a slow, agonizing, self-aware, frozen death. They’ll be tumbled in the mother of all spin cycles. Their world will go all white and upside down. Then it’ll go dark or, worse still, opaque and twilight, hinting at a surface so near yet so far away. Their body will be contorted and pretzeled into at best uncomfortable, at worst tortuous, shapes, frozen but not yet frozen, unable to move the inches necessary to give either relief or stab them with shocking pain. Their chests will feel like a team of sumo wrestlers are sitting on them. Their snowy tomb will feel more like concrete than the snow they’d imagined themselves floating so delicately through.
If they have any air pocket at all, they’ll face the horror show of slowly suffocating to death, hoping against hope someone will find them but knowing no one will because no one knows they’re there or, if they were skiing with others, resigning themselves to the fact their friends may well be in the same predicament. They may cry out for help, or mommy, but the sound will barely reach their own ears, let alone the surface. They’ll use up what oxygen they have desperately trying to squirm free of their icy tomb. If they can move their hands at all, chances are pretty good they’ll rip their fingernails off clawing at the hard-as-ice snow that’s settled in around them.
If their brain is still capable of rational thought, they’ll start remembering everything they’ve ever read, seen or heard about surviving an avalanche. Sadly, most of those things involve avoiding being caught up in an avalanche, very few involve getting yourself unstuck.
Almost imperceptibly, their oxygen will be replaced by carbon dioxide, good for plants, not so good for humans. They’ll start breathing harder but each breath will be less satisfying, less life-giving than the one before it. They’ll realize the end is near and feel the tears rolling down their nearly frozen cheeks. Powerful memories will flood their short-circuited thoughts. They’ll begin to feel weak and sleepy. They’ll go to sleep. They’ll die.
When they’re found — if they’re found — it’ll be by someone whose grim visage has seen this movie before. A patroller or, more likely, one of the Search and Rescue volunteers called out of their warm homes, their loving families, their safe environments, to go search for the dead guy. Maybe the searchers will head right out, maybe things will be too unsafe for them. Doesn’t matter. The decision that the slopes are safe enough is, in itself, a judgment call. Usually, but not always, a correct call. Only the final outcome determines the accuracy of the judgment. The reality is that danger is always a loose slab away.
Meanwhile, the survivors, the ones left behind, will stumble around in shock, make funeral arrangements, maybe plan a memorial service, console each other and ask the unanswerable question: How, why, did this happen?
Sooner or later, someone will mouth the most inane words ever spoken: “He died doing what he loved.”
Brad Sills, who has pulled more bodies out of icy graves than he cares to remember, once showed an uncharacteristic flash of anger when the conversation came around to that phrase. Acknowledging it is meant to comfort, he finds no comfort in it whatsoever. “Once you’ve seen the contorted, tortured, horrified look on the face of someone you’ve just dug out of a snow grave, one thing is absolutely clear. They definitely didn’t love what they were doing.” Like the old saying goes, it ain’t the fall that hurts; it’s the landing.
A couple of dozen times over the holidays someone would ask why the alpine wasn’t open. They’d accuse the MotherCorp of cheaping out to save money. The answer I couldn’t give them was this. “Open your eyes, dude. If you don’t comprehend the danger out there maybe you should take up golf… because you’re too fookin’ stupid to ski!”
Play safe, boys and girls. The conditions will be right someday to play as hard as you can. Someday… not now.
