Fight Club of One
Last month I learned how to ski in Canada, at the same place where 12 years earlier I learned to snowboard. In those days, at 30, I suspected I was too old to learn how to do something like ski or snowboard. Still, I put on my helmet and hoped no one would guess my age. I hated how hard it was. Early on, I likened my hard falls to “cement enemas,” but I was committed to learning. Snowboarding was a welcome change from my graduate school work: it allowed me to be worked over by a snow-covered mountain rather than an academic committee.
A year later my father died, and snowboarding became a “Fight Club” of one that was more solace to me than all of the kind sentiments offered by my friends and acquaintances.
This is a version of something I wrote for a writing class in 2004. Enjoy.
Fall is here, and my thoughts turn to strengthening my abs. While many think of spring as a time to seek the elusive six-pack for swimsuit season, a chill in the air reminds me that I’m about to reacquaint myself with my boots and snowboard, the nonexistent six-pack nowhere to be seen under layers of fleece and waterproof Gore-Tex.
I don’t come from an athletic family. It’s more than a little sadomasochistic that, with my non-jock history, I’m embarking on snowboarding at this late date. The “sado” part is that I’ve coerced my husband along for the painful, expensive ride. His family, more cerebral and even more sedentary than mine, has an unofficial motto: “Why stand when you can sit? Why sit when you can lie down?” He has taken up the more dignified sport of skiing, and he’s none too happy with pain and the black toenails that tell him that he’s rented the wrong boots.
Our parents disapprove when we tell them the weekends we’ll be away skiing. Just as when we adopted our first dog several years ago, they act as though we might not be licensed operators of our own lives. They rattle off stories of broken limbs, fruitless search teams, decomposed bodies, and amputated feet. After we tell them we’ve already booked our flights, my mother or his father will say, “Oh well, then. Have a good time.”
Flying from LAX to Reno/Tahoe should be easy enough. But ever since I’ve had a baby, the schlep with the snowboard, suitcase, stroller, and toddler supplies, has become an almost prohibitive hassle. Lugging it all reminds me of the discomforts to come: my back leg cramping with the hop-slide movements forward in the lift line; the packed and overpriced cafeteria selling prefab cocoa and greasy chili; and the labor of hobbling off the slopes, parking the board, and removing layers, just to go to the bathroom.
Last winter my trials began right off the bat, when I drove in a blizzard through Donner Pass at night in a rented minivan with my laughing baby, our babysitter, and her preteen child. They gritted their teeth as we skidded along the highway despite my slow speed and the chains on the tires. I put on a show of bravado to reassure them and myself that we would not die in this stupid manner. Many hours later, past midnight, we arrived at the rented cabin. The babysitter and I spent the next two hours digging out the driveway and hauling our bags and the sleeping children into the house.
The hoards of Californians rushing the gondola at 8 am are another challenge. And then, after traveling up the lift with total strangers, I actually have to ride the mountain. Writing all of this down, it’s hard to believe that I do this voluntarily, when a part of me has more in common with the spouses and friends who spend the day at the lodge, drinking beer and shooting the breeze with anyone who happens to sit on the next bar stool.
What I actually enjoy about snowboarding takes a few runs to experience: the flow and enforced in-the-moment feeling. If I allow myself to begin thinking about messy and complicated things, say, my doctoral dissertation, I fall. I have to use my reptilian brain: eyes on the snow and on the boarders and skiers around me; and my mind on the immediate challenge of whether to go over or around the small mogul a few feet in front of me, whether to take the green run or try that blue one that peels off at the bottom of this hill.
During my second year, just after my father died, snowboarding became my own “Fight Club” of one. My dad and I had not been close; his severe mental illness had been the unwelcome third parent in my upbringing. After a week at his funeral in Taiwan, mourning him and the happy relationship we would never have, I returned to school in and the relentless, incongruous sun of January in Los Angeles.
Soon after I went snowboarding, hoping that, for one weekend, external pain and icy solace could displace sorrow. At the top of each black diamond run I dared, I saw the expanse of frosted, ancient fir trees and the deep, pure lake below, surrounded by mountains.
There’s no place on earth like this, I thought.
I glided down, falling-leaf style, the mark of a beginner. In my mind, there was no past and no future, only riding down the mountain.
