From my relationship with snowboarding, my bottom has learned the most: how awful it is to fall from above, how hard it is to get up after its owner ate nonchalantly like it was the end of the earth, and how fast it can bruise.
The first time I was like a kamikaze. I threw myself on the slope alone with the board. I’d seen three tutorials on Youtube. What can be so hard? It wasn’t. At least for me. For my ass, though…
I’d carried it up the hill for half an hour, slip for two minutes, fall five times. So I wanted in the ski lift. Let me go up to the top of the slope! Let me have what all the other children have! Except they didn’t have a chairlift. They only had a T-bar lift, similar to a poma/button/drag lift.
Those people asked me if I had ever been on a T-bar lift. I told them no. They said it’s not recommended. I insisted. They said they would help me. That I have to tuck the bar in between my legs. That’s what I’m good at! That if I have a fellow skier, it’s even better. I did.
We sat down nicely to take our turn. It arrived. We fell spectacularly. Both of us. Under the panicked eyes of those handling the lift.
When that cable stretched and pulled me, I didn’t even know what had happened to me. A second later, we were both down with our legs up. Actually, my legs were on the side cause they were stuck in the snowboard. I was dragged from under the installation like a pie from the oven because I couldn’t stop laughing. But my ass did not agree.
Eh, then let’s go to a slope where they have a chairlift, I say. Let’s go. And so we went. I didn’t fall off the chairlift. I went up and down gracefully a few times. I fell with the same grace, but I was already an expert. My ass was happy too. Except for a more difficult part of the slope, where I hit him every time. In the evening, it began to freeze under the snow. When I got to that part of the slope, I stopped, too afraid to go down. I did some tricks until I was trapped like a mermaid in the safety net on edge, from where I was afraid to detach myself. I was not alone. Two more brave people joined me. We were shaking and laughing at each other, on our stomachs, holding on to the net with all our courage. Someone saved them. I was saved by my skier, who was laughing with tears.
But I’m a perseverant person. Once again, I say. I fell so hard, this time on my face, not my back. It’s pretty hard to fall with the snowboard on your face. I succeeded. So much that my hat flew off my head, and snout flew out of my nose. Literally. So hard that I couldn’t turn myself from side to side in bed for two days. Luckily I could turn the pages of the books. The skier was flipping me from one side to another when he came back from the slope. It’s good to have a skier.
The next time I went skiing, I decided that I felt sorry for my ass and that I wanted to keep my fluids in my nose, not in the snow, so I took an instructor. And the man taught me some things. I didn’t know most of them from Youtube. And the people on Youtube don’t tell you the connection between snowboarding and life.
When that man said to me, “Look where you want to go, don’t look at your feet, don’t look at the board! Look where you want to go, put your weight on that leg, and your body will take you there… ”… Man, and there was light!
