Once Upon A Time In The Snow

I slid down a steep run at high speed, and stopped in a shower of snow, turning back towards the slope to watch Kiana cruise down.

At the same time, from the end-station of a chairlift just near by, a young girl unloaded from the chair by herself, skied down about 5 metres, and wiped out in an impressive stack, losing a ski and wrapping her legs around herself in ways you wouldn't think possible without breaking a couple of femurs and severely straining a good few arteries.

Kiana flew past in a whirl of snowflakes and dead chickens, and pulled up 10 metres down the slope.

I stopped and looked at the girl, assessing whether she needed help or not. She crawled this way for a bit, then crab-scrabbled the other way, then sat down and gave up on life.

I figured she needed help.

So I chook-footed back up to where she was and set about helping her get to her feet.

We got to her lost ski at the same time, so I smiled encouragingly at her while she scrambled to get her hands on it. Then I watched her try to put it back on her foot again while pointing it resolutely downhill. That was never going to happen. I opened up my mouth to supply the girl with advice to that effect, when from down the slope Kiana brought her big mouth around.

‘Tell her ... to put it ... across ... the slope ...!’

‘Yes, thank you. Shut up and stay out of it.’

I turned to the girl and drew a line in the snow, horizontally across the fall-line.

‘Here, put your ski on that line, and you'll be able to put it on again.’

She stared up at me with the kind of dull, lifeless eyes most usually associated with cows watching trains pass by in Ye Olde Englishe Countryside, while midway between shifting a load of half-digested crud from one stomach to another. I tried again.

‘See this line here in the snow? Put your ski on that and then try to put it on.’

She stared at me some more, then tried to twist her one remaining ski and the leg it was on into a position exactly opposite to the one I was indicating. If she did that she'd fly downhill on one ski a hundred miles an hour. There's no telling where she might stop. A first, educated guess would be the town of Nagano, an hour and half down the mountain.

‘No, not that way,’ I said, with all the patience of an experienced raiser and educator of kids who don't listen to a word anyone says. ‘That way.’ I drew another line.

Understanding slowly passed across her face like a slow-motion sunrise behind a bank of clouds building up to a good old fashioned knock-em-down cyclone. Better late than never.

She turned herself around in a series of body-contorting twists that made the eyes water just to behold, and finally manoeuvred her skis around in the right direction. She stood up on her one ski. A pretty good start, I felt.

She tried to shove her boot into her binding. It wouldn't go.

From down the mountain came Kiana's foghorn.

‘Tell her ... to scrape the snow ... off her boot ...’

‘Shut up and stay out of it, you're not helping.’

I turned back to the girl, and noticed that her binding was locked. She'd be able to try to click her boot into that for the next 10 years, and nothing was ever gonna happen like that. So I bent down and unclicked the binding for her. She stared at me again with pale blue eyes.

I stared back.

‘What's your name?’ I asked, half expecting her to not be able to talk.

‘Emilia’, she answered.

Ah. So she did have a voice, and was possessed of the power of speech. An improvement all around.

‘I'm Steve.’

She nodded in acknowledgement.

‘Here, give me your boot.’

I bent down again and started to scrape the snow from the sole of her boot. Most annoyingly Kiana had been right about that.

‘Now try again.’

Obligingly she wiggled her boot around in the binding, without aligning it properly. Nothing happened. Clearly this girl had not had a lot of instruction in the arcane art of Negotiating Skiing Equipment.

A loud scraping noise came from behind. “Chhhhrrrrrchhhhgggghhhh.” It had a distinct sound of someone scraping the snow off the mountain sideways.

‘Thanks, I'll take it from here,’ came a voice from behind me.

I looked around. A bloke had turned up, middle aged, a beard, a gut on him. A constipated expression on a bloated face. He looked pissed off and put out.

‘Are you her dad?’

‘Yes, I am. So thanks, we're good now.’

I nodded, and turned away.

‘No worries, good luck.’

I skied down 10 metres to where Kiana had been standing the whole time, and looked back. Father and daughter appeared to be locked in a Mexican stand-off, both pushing and shoving in different directions at the same time, and, not overly surprisingly, not getting anywhere.

The girl must have been around 12 or 13. Either at the end of primary school, or just out of it. She did not have a clue in hell about what she was supposed to be doing. She had peeled off a chairlift by herself, unaccompanied, and clearly not able to deal with being on that grade of slope, in that situation.

The snow was coming down steadily. She was wearing neither a hat not goggles. The fresh snow would hyper-cool her head and brain before very long indeed, and give her hypothermia, while, if it stopped snowing anytime soon and if the sun came out, she'd be snowblind within half an hour.

I looked at the father figure, proud symbol of careful and conscientious parenting.

Next to him on the ground lay a snowboard, the source of the snow-scraping sound I had heard just before.

Kiana informed me that the bloke had come walking back up the slope from a long way away to go to his daughter's rescue.

So not only had he dragged her up there without a hat and goggles, and had he left her miles behind to cope on her own, which she obviously was not able to do.

But he had strapped himself to what was undoubtedly his favourite snowboard, presumably to shred some Serious Japanese Powder, in the process destroying the slope and rendering it useless for anyone else, while sticking his absolute-beginner daughter onto a set of skis, which he would not be able to teach her anything about while he himself rode a snowboard. You can't teach someone to ride a horse while you yourself are bungee jumping. It doesn't work that way.

But there was a clue as to why they were so precariously out of their depth, both of them.

When the bloke opened his mouth to brush me off and get me out of the way, he had spoken with a loud, obnoxious American voice. The kind of voice that thinks it's a good idea to shoot schoolkids with assault rifles, bomb and invade sovereign countries and kidnap democratically elected presidents, and refuse to take vaccinations, because they cause autism, all the while steadfastly believing that the Earth is flat and the moon is made of cheese.

That explained it all.

And here was I thinking they were human.

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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