Sartre Must Have Skiied
On a snowboard (or, in the interests of fairness, skis), hell is other people. Back at the beginning of this ski season, Sabrina and I tried out snowboarding. Sabrina wanted to try it last year, but I didn’t want to switch gears mid-season, given how difficult I’d been told it is to learn to snowboard. I think we made the right decision, because as it turns out it really is that hard to learn to snowboard. It took us far longer to pick up boarding than it did to pick up skiing, but by less than 7 days of real, concentrated practice we were honest-to-goodness novices.
We’ve been going as frequently as our schedules allow since before any of the mountains in the area were fully open (sometimes pushing the limits of what “open” really means. There were plenty of days we went that the conditions were just this side of miserable), the plus side of that being that we were learning under the toughest conditions, and any improvements were just icing on our cake. er…powdering? anyway.
We keep getting better (which is good) though we’ve started to get really frustrated by the crowds (which is bad) but we know how to steer now (which is good) unfortunately that sometimes means steering into a standstill or somewhere we can’t turn out of just to avoid reckless skiiers or people who are more novice than us (which is bad). Contrary to the popular opinion, I’ve found that it’s skiiers rather than snowboarders who cause the most problems on the mountain. Sure, snowboarders litter the mountainside like garish rocks, but generally they’re pretty stationary until they try to get up and keep going. I can avoid stationary objects just fine. It’s the ones that go whizzing by or, worse, look back at me and try to avoid me by moving directly into my way. (I see you. I’m avoiding you. I’m aiming for where you are now, because when I get there, you won’t be!) So we want to get onto the harder slopes just to get to areas with fewer people. I’m just slightly afraid that when I get there I’ll be the one irritating everyone else.
I think I would have been willing to try that theory out just the other day…but we just bought all our equipment(!) and it’s a little bit…faster…than we were used to. You’d be amazed at the speed and control you have over a purchased board versus a rental board. And you’d think that control would translate directly into confidence, right? Not so much – because the things you used to have to do just to get the board to go now mean you’re overbalancing and swinging too far in one or another direction.
At this point I’m just hoping I don’t have a repeat of just a month back when I fell on my shoulder and couldn’t move my arm for about a week.
