Outside everything is white. The underneath hasn’t seen the
sky for many months, hibernating beneath a horizontal curtain. I can’t quite
see through my eyes. Time has begun to lose its pace. There is no day or night,
only a tick-tock. I think we have gained a day, but given the tingling in my
toes, I would expect that I have gained very little but for an insatiable
headache.
For a moment I forget where I am. This is certainly a lounge
room. And I am under some sort of blanket, but this is not home. No, definitely
not home. There is no smell of coffee. Someone has forgotten to make any this
morning.
In a moment I have a snowboard under my arm and Richard is
trying gracefully to stomp his way through the white powder all around him.
Just a couple of gays, in the snow.
It is snowing just enough to let us know that that this is
going to get better, and deeper, and colder. But for now, it is time for
Richard to learn how to do this. Emily (my sister) and Steve (her fella) are
chanting instructions like a tag team into Richard’s helmeted head. His goggles
are foggy and he kind of looks like a marshmallow. Cute.
I sit down at the top of the magic carpet and watch Richard
tumble down the hill with Steve and Emily being very patient with him. I
realise that my behind is hurting a bit.
I think back to yesterday, (was that only yesterday?) when
we had a dog and jobs and a life and sentimental hoarded things of a time spent
spending. I think of boarding a big jet plane and drinking final hillsong
coffees in Sydney airport. I think of Richard skipping through the airport and
whirring me around as we sat in the sun in Honolulu. I think of the constant
sneezing of yesterday on account of spending too many hours in a locked cabin
with too many fat people. Or could it be because I was drenched in duty free
colognes?
When we finally arrived last night in San Francisco and hired
a gas guzzling machine, I completed a couple of indicator tests and practiced
my shoulder checks. Without looking at a map (which I assumed I had packed) and
after sitting on a plane for far too long, we set course for Lake Tahoe.
Soon we were whirring along freeways that shit all over Clem
Jones tunnels, and over small bridges that make the Story Bridge look a little
bit novice. Neon lights and flashing signs. Fast and faster food all around us.
Just a couple of gays in a massive truck ready for a quick night drive.
Richard’s belly started to groan with the curiosity that a
thousand fast food restaurants and 24hour diners brings. We pulled into a
lovely little Denny’s on the side of some massive freeway, half an hour out of
Sacramento. And in that moment, doing happy kicks in the carpark and stealing a
few kisses, did we actually realise that we are not heading back to that house,
or that life, or that car or all that sentimental hoarded stuff, no not for a
long time.
Despite all the advice in the world, we still ordered up
big, because everything looked delicious. And, I do love the idea of a
heart-attack induced by pecan pancakes. Yes, yes I will have bacon too.
As the freeway climbed up the mountains, the skies began to
open. White, fluffy powder all around us. I slowed us down and the adrenalin
kicked in. While passing massive semi-trailers fitting snow chains to their
tires, the enormity of what we were about to do suddenly dawned on me a little
further. What should have been a three hour drive suddenly became a five hour
crawl up the remnants of a huge highway, covered in a thick, thick layer of
white. The salt on the road, left there that morning scratched between our
tires and the asphalt, and I began to remember all that I think I probably should
know about driving.
A GPS would have been handy right about now. Or at least
some place that was open and could give us some directions because we were
rightly in the middle of nowhere at 4am. Someone pointed us one way and we went
another, and lost became a bit of a joke. The adrenalin was wearing off and
finally, finally we started to see the lights of a ski resort, the carved white
tracks in the side of a mountain triggering some locked memory of mine, of
holidays spent looking at the same hills, in different countries, different
places.
The resort was all lit up, and the ridiculous log cabins and
chalets that people tell you they own as holiday houses but that you know are
not really something you are ever going to own, despite desperately wanting the
luxuries of log cabins and fires in snowy places, well, they were all around
us.
We found Emily’s house just before the sun rise and this is
where I remember hurting my backside. As I stepped out of the car and onto the
ice, I slid, hard and catapulted myself into the air, slamming my tired, tired
arse on the ice. Up and inside and asleep on a futon in the lounge room in no
time.
I’m not sure that Richard could say he enjoyed his first day
snowboarding. He seemed to spend most of the day with his head in the snow. I
thought I had lost him at one point but, with the grace of an elephant he
seemed to land relatively safely at every turn.
With our tongues licking the metal rails of a chair lift
trying to emulate Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber, well, we did not feel dumb
or dumber. Just awesome.
I wouldn’t say that I am good at snowboarding. I would say
that, like most things I try, I have learned as much as I have deemed necessary
and no more. Well! Apparently, when your sister and her boyfriend are snowboarding
instructors, adequacy is not actually enough. Apparently I lean a bit too far
back, and my little back hand looks stupid. Well! How about that! Rude. So,
just when I thought I was on holiday, it seems I am learning again, and not
actually that good at snowboarding after all.
That first night, after ploughing our way through inches of
snow and ice and rain (oh, I do paint a picture) Emily and I decided it would
be nice to have All-You-Can-Eat sushi. Let’s just say, we ate all we could. And
then some. We were a little scared that we might have to pay the full price for
left overs as stated on their little signs, so Emily and I started hiding the
little nori rolls in my miso soup. At one point I did contemplate stuffing them
in my mouth and vomiting a little into the bathroom. Sheesh. Cheap person. Oh,
where is Richard you may wonder? Where is the other gay? Asleep, at the
counter, in a haze of timezones and jetlag and some mild left-over concussion,
I suspect.
