Why I Won’t Meet People Over There

Reading this blog, which usually discusses other people as abstracted generalisations, you could easily reach one of two conclusions. Either I’m overwhelmingly self-centred and simply don’t bother to report on the actions of the people around me, or I’m travelling alone and there aren’t actually any people around whose actions I ought to be reporting.

It turns out that both are true, but the reason why you don’t hear lots of stories about how my posse and I rolled around town in our low-riders is because I don’t have a posse (and if I did they wouldn’t be allowed in my low-rider because they’d probably start stealing stuff). Being a loner has its advantages – you can head somewhere new at the drop of a hat (or if people work out you’re Australian), you can sleep in the car, you can listen to Taylor Swift on the radio while driving and no one will ever know, you can turn up in a new location speaking with a terrible French accent and claim to be a French installation artist and no one will accidentally blow your cover. The list goes on.

On the other hand, there are disadvantages to being alone. It’s harder to successfully ambush people, it can be difficult to find and open snack food while driving alone, it’s very difficult to see whether you’ve just started going bald and if you ski off the beaten track and hurt yourself you’ll die a cold, lonely and painful death. This list is pretty much exhaustive.

Aside from the problems with skiing alone, the advantages clearly outweigh the disadvantages. Despite this, people who like other people often seem concerned by the thought of loner-travel. For them, the thought of not realising they’re going bald or lying in wait for an ambush without a friend to outflank their target is hard to bear. And for these people a special mantra helps them stay strong in the face of potential unnoticed hair loss: “You’ll meet people over there.”

A special kind of hell is reserved for the “You’ll meet people over there” people. In a sense, statements like these are stating the obvious. Just about anyone who goes travelling will meet people. Even in the fairly sparsely populated South Island of New Zealand you’d have to do some pretty sustained sneaking to avoiding meeting a single person on your trip. You’d probably spend your time hiding out in your own luggage during the flight, then maybe post yourself somewhere remote and hide under a rock. In any case, it would be a fairly rough trip and you wouldn’t get much skiing in.

However, what these people really mean is that you’ll meet people, and then those people will want to spend time with you, and vice versa. Coming from those that don’t know me very well, this is a heartwarming – if somewhat naive – misconception. From those that know me, this is either a spectacular lapse of judgement or some kind of cynical, thinly veiled insult.

It would probably be nice to meet people to ski with. Since I’m not big into ambushes and I’m more likely to be murdered by my own hair in the night than to have it secretly fall out, the skiing alone disadvantage is the only one that carries any real weight. It is, however, something of a pain in the arse. If you head off the beaten track without anyone to look out for you and something goes wrong it’s not pretty and there’s a good chance you’ll die a cold and lonely death. This can mean that when the good skiing is outside the ski area boundary and you can’t tag along with someone else you can miss out. Perhaps if you’re a total gun skier and you know the area well you can get away with it, but if you’re a muppet and you don’t know the area at all it’s just not a good idea.

Believe it or not, the biggest obstacle in the hypothetical search for a ski buddy is not that I’m a terrible person. It usually takes people a little while to work that out, and I can fake a little human decency for just long enough to go skiing. Instead, the biggest obstacle when looking for a ski buddy is the vicious dichotomy of terrible skiing. Sadly, the following propositions are both true:

1) Proposition 1 (it's really two propositions, but analytic philosophy sucks): I’m ambitious. I want to ski cool stuff.

2) Proposition 2: I’m a terrible skier.

The people who want to ski cool stuff don’t want to wait for a terrible skier, and the people who ski at the same level as me don’t want to hike or skin or whatever else goes along with skiing cool stuff. In France I was lucky enough to meet a bunch of people who skied cool stuff and were happy to have a muppet skiing around with them. Indeed, they took great joy in seeing me turn up at the bottom of runs with my beard and helmet full of snow. This balance of skill and patience is rare. People here really do try to give you the benefit of the doubt. (Just today I had two people encourage me to enter a big mountain skiing competition tomorrow. They have not, of course, seen me ski.) But these people are also skiers, and usually skiers with limited time and limited good snow. As yet I have not found anyone whose desire to ski as much hard terrain as they can is outweighed by their delight in watching other people fall over.

So plan A right now is to become a better skier, and I’m actually making some progress. Once that’s working out, I’ll just need an effective way of masking the fact that I’m a terrible person. Hopefully the people here like Parisian installation artists.