I have a job!

Friends, I have been in a dark and terrible place. A place where you are powerless, unable to communicate with the world, unable to reach the people around you. Where the comforting sounds and sights of the places and people you know are lost to you.

That’s right, my friends, I have been without internet. I have had a long immersion in the communications technology 1990s, and I have suffered greatly at it hands.

But that’s not really an excuse. I mostly haven’t been writing in this blog because I’m lazy. Also, because it takes a while to build up the requisite level of confusion and chaos in my life to actually be able to write about it. No one comes to read this blog to see how organised and together I am as a human being. They come instead to marvel at my continued existence in the face of strange circumstances and abiding personal incompetence. And so I am proud to return to the internet and say “Yes! I am alive.” And also “My life is impractical and silly.”

There are a few stories I probably should have written here as they occurred, so I will try to fill in the backlog in some kind of coherent way. In the meantime, this is what I have been doing:

In May I quit my job and went to Canada. Quitting one’s job is wonderful and I encourage all of you to try it. In Canada I wooed a lady, climbed a little and sent people emails about monoskis. In June I flew to New Zealand for the winter and waited for it to snow. It didn’t snow and I spent most of my time in Christchurch where the weather was horrible. Eventually I bought a car and could leave, which was very soothing. I think I may have confessed to having a soft spot for Christchurch in the past, but now I think it is a grim and depressing place where it rains all the time. It finally snowed in late June and I drove up to Broken River for another season of skiing and poor personal hygiene. In slightly crazy news, I am working at Broken River. As in having a job. You read that correctly. I perform services in exchange for financial remuneration. It is a strange turn of events. Fear not, I have not completely sold out. I am the backup cook – I cover the real cook for two days a week feeding the staff and guests. This may come as a surprise to many of you who have no idea that I have any kind of culinary skill. It is certainly an ongoing surprise for me. My experience in this job can be best summarised in two adjectives: Terrifying and greasy.

Cooking at BR is terrifying because I have no idea what I’m doing. I am completely untrained in this field and have almost no relevant experience. The only experience I have is cooking as a volunteer in the BR kitchens last year when the chef left the mountain early in the season and there was no one else to fill in. I have never worked alongside anyone more competent than myself or had any real tuition to speak of. The full-time cook, Ray, has given me a bunch of valuable advice which has enabled me to cut up roast chickens and do some other useful stuff. Without him I would be in considerable distress. Each night that I work the guests ask me what we’re having for dinner and I strenuously avoid answering the question because I’m worried that if I actually tell them they’ll know when I’ve screwed up. If I say “Roast chicken” and then we end up eating leftover cake, that looks bad. But if I just pretend that I was intentionally using the chicken to make the oven smell savoury while I reheated some cake that looks like I’m some kind of Heston Blumenthal food genius. Which I am not. People regularly come into the kitchen to ask if I need a hand and I often tell them I don’t just so they’ll go away and I can sob and tear at my hair and swear quietly into my pots in peace. Apparently the food has been OK, which I can only attribute to beginners’ luck.

Cooking at BR is greasy because, well, there’s grease on everything. Especially me. I don’t have enough clothes to change for every meal, and I don’t have time to wash my clothes while I’m cooking so everything I wear gets covered in grease. This isn’t so bad if I’m just doing my usual two days a week, but at the moment I’m cooking for five days to cover for Ray while he goes to Australia to watch a live Pink concert (this is, incidentally, about the most misleading piece of true information I could possibly give you from which you could form a first impression of him – whatever you’re imagining about him, it’s hilariously wrong), so you can imagine what it’s like. Also, I don’t bathe enough. It’s hard to be motivated to do so when you know you’re just going to get covered in grease again. A reliable witness has testified that I smell like felafel, which is a nice way of saying oil. It is actually disturbing how much oil and butter and cream and salt and stuff goes into food when you’re cooking for lots of people. Also, deep frying. Night after night I cannot tell if I have just smoked out the kitchen and dining room (which is often) of my glasses are just covered in a thick coating of fat (which is all the time). There is a block of lard which sits on a shelf in one of the store rooms and glistens malevolently like something from a Stephen King novel. I try not to make eye contact with it.

 

I have just one more meal to make to get through this five day stint. I’m not entirely sure what it will be, but I have enough back-up cake now that it doesn’t really matter. God help my arteries.

Back to Work

I have great news. Because it is me, this great news is tinged with a hint of anxiety but I will get to that below. I got another article published! This time in NZSkier magazine, which is the premier means of magazine based snow related communication in New Zealand. Of course I'm quite chuffed, but I actually knew it was getting published ages ago, so some of the excitement has worn off a little. In fact, it was published so long ago that I had vaguely convinced myself that it was a sincere, heartfelt tale of my strong connection to Broken River ski field and its loyal community of clubbies and staff. In fact, I was actually thinking it might be a bit embarrassing to have something serious and honest and emotional in the public domain that was associated with me.

But, dear readers, you ought to know me well enough to be assured that I would never write something that might conceivably come back to embarrass me or my friends in a public setting. Who would be so foolish as to put something potentially embarrassing and awkward onto the public record?

Well, me. Obviously.

To my great relief, the finished article is not at all sincere or heartfelt. But to my consternation and dismay, it's snarky and disrespectful, just as you have probably come to expect. In it I describe Broken River's neighbours, Craigieburn, as "the nicest kind of sexist", list a number of ways to avoid paying for things at Broken River, make snide comments about some of the volunteering habits of the local clubbies and document a few legally dubious activities conducted by my friends. All in a nice way, of course.

Now the BR clubbies will forgive me for my indiscretions, because they're nice and they already know I'm a nincompoop. But when I wrote those fateful words about Craigieburn, a field which takes its reputation pretty seriously, I never imagined that I might be spending any time there. But now it looks like I'll be over that way quite a lot, and not only are they likely to look harshly upon me for my association with a rival ski field, I've now publically dissed their founding fathers in the one publication they're actually likely to look at and read. I may be the only person ever to curse that too many people read NZSkier magazine.

By the by, my bit of the magazine is linked below (pictures by Joe Harrison, BR stalwart, rad skier and all around good dude). But seriously, if you can buy this magazine you should. Or look at the ads or something. Keeping small publications like this alive keeps the dreams of dirtbags like me alive.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxqrPZnL2_zhY3ZtdTYyWWRVNDQ/edit?usp=sharing

Also, skiing in a few weeks? Is anyone else excited?

The Apologetic Hiatus

Poor neglected blog. I have thought of you many times in the last month or so, but only in the fleeting, abstract sense with which one thinks about filing one's taxes, rather than any kind of productive way.

Which is not to say that there hasn't been anything to write about. I have, in the fashion to which you may be accustomed, done all manner of stupid things in the last few weeks. It's actually hard to believe that the last post was a mere four weeks ago. It's a long time for a pokey little interwub blog, but it felt like much longer. In the last few weeks I have crashed a car, missed a flight, driven until 2 in the morning twice, scraped roadkill off the highway with a broken piece of a reflector post, been on a relationship building boot-pack, received an awesome haircut, mailed someone a box containing exactly three pine cones and played a one-time-only acoustic cover of "Call Me Maybe". But not only has the moment for blogging about those escapades passed, if I put those stories in the internet I'll have nothing to talk about with anyone who sees me in person.

In fact, I'm only writing this post to explain an even longer break in posting which is about to begin. I am now back in Canberra where I will settle down to something that approximates a real life in what many people think of as the real world. Many people have said that I've been living the dream. While it's true that my time in the hills has been generally awesome, coming back to Canberra feels more like going to sleep than waking up. But if I am going to sleep here it's just a peaceful beauty sleep. So when I eventually leave town again, with my complexion clear and composed, hopefully the blog will spring back to life. The alternative is to regularly email my parents, which I have not been very good at so far.

Thanks to all the folks I met along the way. In Rossland there's my winter family, Robbi, Fleur and Maud, plus the rest of the folks I skied and hiked and hung out with; my artistic collaborator, Brad, and my wealthy patron German Anna; my unnaturally patient boss Brian, as well as Chris, Colin and Vickie at Powderhound. Thanks also to the generous and always motivated Ward in Penticton and all the other folks who shared some rope time with me at Skaha - it was vastly better than soloing. In New Zealand there's Barrett, Lindsay, Caroline, Dan, Doug and Irene (who aren't actually in NZ anymore), Dee, Eric, and Lee. Sorry I had to leave early - I hope you're slaying the pow for me in this latest storm and saving the best for last at Broken River. Thanks also to Joe for showing me around some new terrain at BR and Olympus, and for taking some cool photos. I'll see most of you guys again early in the new year. Stay in touch.

I Have an Awesome Towel

I usually try not to toot my own horn, but I think it is fair to say that I own the greatest towel in the world.

Like an alcoholic who cannot hold down a steady job, for many years I have been unable to hold down a steady towel. During the last 12 months alone I’ve been through 3 or 4 towels simply because I leave them behind when I change towns, or in one notable case because I used my towel to mop up spilled wine and it became infested with slivers of broken glass.

Even before I ascended to genuine dirtbaggery I struggled with towel ownership. Back in Canberra I didn’t even own a towel, I just used other people’s. But when I went to Walmart early this year to buy more underpants, something incredible happened. I was about to make an impulse purchase of a regular, monochrome, rectangular towel when my housemate intervened. She had found a towel that had a hood in the middle and could be worn like a poncho. Better yet, when you put the towel on in poncho form you were magically transformed into a tableau of a octopus, sporting a dashing polka-dot bow-tie, adrift in an azure sea. It was slightly more expensive, and typically I am a pretty stingy person, but I decided this was not the time to let a few extra dollars stand in the way of a good idea. The folks at Walmart were all suitably impressed when I chose to wear my towel out of the store and through the car-park.

Because my towel is so excruciatingly fantastic I have made sure to hang on to it through my bumbling travels in the last few months. It has been my most faithful towel ever, and we are looking forward to a long and happy life together for as long as the fabric will last. But owning such an amazing thing comes at a terrible price. Members of the staff at Broken River have begun to covet my towel, and in the absence of anything meaningful to do with their lives they have started plotting to steal my towel. In response to this, I have been forced to hide it after twice having to race from one hut to another to prevent its theft.

In the past, I would have simply revealed my diabolical hiding place to the internet and trusted the obscurity of this blog to ensure that the information never made it back to the staff here, but now that people around here actually check this blog, the location must remain secret.

The issue reached a head last night after a particularly intense altercation. One staff member stole my towel from its hanger and tried to escape White Star Chalet. I was able to dodge past another staff member who was trying to delay me on the track between the huts and snatch my towel back before the thief could make it out the door. To top matters off, neither the thief nor his two accomplices removed their boots before entering the hut. I figured the safest thing to do was to wear the towel in poncho form, at which the thief (by now slightly inebriated) tried to manhandle it from my body. The dastardly trio only left when their boss dropped in. At the time I was convinced this was simply another ploy to steal the towel, and I conducted our ensuing conversation wearing the towel and clutching at it to ensure that no one tried to make a sneak attack. It turns out that he had no idea what was going on, and in retrospect my actions may have made me look a little weird.

The biggest problem I face now in keeping my towel safe is getting it dry after using it. At this very moment, the towel is actually hanging up in a completely stealable place and is not at all hidden, but I’m keeping an eye on the staff to ensure they don’t go nicking it. Once it’s dry I’ll return it to its hiding place, but if it goes into hiding too early it will get mouldy.

But seriously people, this towel is regularly used to dry my junk. I cannot for the life of me understand why other people would want to steal it. Apart from the fact that it’s awesome. But other than that, eww...

The Chosen Onesie

I mentioned a few posts back that I have been trying out some new ski gear here at Broken River. Today I would like to introduce you to the most daunting and serious item of clothing I have ever worn. Around Broken River, it is known simply as “The Onesie”.

In my experience, the best things in life are rarely encountered as the result of any kind of deliberate search. Instead, greatness occurs when you put yourself in a position where it can find you. So it was with The Onesie, which came to me through a staff member at BR. Somehow we ended up discussing retro day at Red Mountain, and she claimed to have a onesie more awesome than both of the outfits I wore that day. I must admit that I passed this off as idle banter – everyone claims their onesie is the best. I was more than a little surprised when she delivered The Onesie in all its faded blue glory. I could tell straight away that this was no ordinary ski suit. It was, somehow, different. More...

Rad.

I tried it on and found that it fit like a glove. Snug around the thighs, ample in the shoulder and bust. Long enough through the body to not squash my man-parts, but not so long that the crotch prevented me from walking normally. Sleeve length, perfect. Legs tapered, but tastefully so. This was no mere fashion piece made to adorn an après ski bar or catch the eye in a cafe. This onesie was made for a real skier, for big mountains and epic runs. Wearing it I felt stronger, faster, more inclined to jump off things.

But there was something more. This onesie promised greatness, but beneath the incoming tide of confidence and control was a surging rip of fear. The Onesie demanded great skiing. It would not be content with mere tootling down the main basin, or cruising through the open bowls of Allan’s Basin. The onesie hungered for glory, and if I was to wear it, I had to deliver.

A crowd grew and thronged around me in White Star Chalet. They demanded to know: Who was I, where had I found The Onesie, would I wear it tomorrow? But I was daunted by the burden of expectation. Was I ready to don The Onesie? Could I satisfy its desires? Could I do it justice? I dodged their questions, took off The Onesie and made excuses.

I slept fitfully that night, tortured by visions of blue nylon, tight chutes, and big drops. As I sweated in my sleeping bag, the cold light of the moon cast through the windows of the hut and lit upon the onesie crumpled beside my bed. The fluoro pink highlights on the sleeves took on an eerie glow. I shuddered and turned my face towards the wall.

When the sun finally rose the next morning, it was the day after the day after a big storm. There were still plenty of fresh lines to be found and things to be jumped off. The snow would be powder, but stiff and heavy – perfect for skiing aggressively. But after the rigours of the previous day’s skiing, I wasn’t sure whether I could handle another hard day on the hill. I looked long and hard at The Onesie lying by my bed, but I didn’t have the courage to put it on. Sighing, I stuffed it into the bottom of my pack, threw on my normal ski gear and headed for the lifts.

In my first run, I tried a few jumps and stuck the landings. On my second, I opened up my turns and put on some speed. By the time I reached the bottom I was ready. I returned to the day lodge, stripped down to my inappropriately tight and hole-ridden thermal pants, and climbed into The Onesie. At once I felt the heady rush of power and expectation. I put Kanye West’s All Of the Lights on endless repeat, cranked up the volume, pulled down my goggles and got rad.

The rest of the day is a blur. I remember skiing lines I’d never had the courage to ski before, jumping off everything from medium sized rocks to small children and skied as fast and as hard as I could. At some stage I bumped into BR local, ski writer and photographer Joe Harrison who was also seduced by the power of The Onesie. He showed me some new chutes and got a few shots of The Onesie in action.

Picture courtesy of Joe Harrison. Don't go stealing it. Even if it is awesome.

I did everything that I could to satisfy The Onesie, and I probably skied better than I ever have before, and yet it still wasn’t enough. The Onesie knew what it wanted, but I couldn’t deliver. Again and again I stood below a line called “Ten to Five”, a tight chute that leads to a straight line exit with a mandatory cliff. The Onesie whispered constantly for succor. It wanted to ski the line, but I was too scared. Mostly because skiing that line would break lots of my bones and generally hurt a very large amount.

At the end of the day I returned to White Star, exhausted. Despite making a respectable effort wearing the ski suit, I had by no means satiated its infernal appetite. But I haven’t put The Onesie away. It sits in the corner of White Star on an unused bunk, waiting for the day when I’m ready to ski the line of death. And when conditions are right, and I’m more rad, I will put the onesie on and complete my end of the bargain.

Reaching New Lows

It has been a long time between posts. For those of you for whom new entries on this blog represent highlights in your otherwise dull work days, or in any way contribute to your general happiness, I am sorry. And not just for the gap in posts - this blog actually making your day is a bit sad. There are two reasons for not updating sooner. First of all, I don't have very much internet access, which makes spontaneous "impulse updates" impossible. But many of the entries on this blog are not acts of impulse, but rather deeply thought and considered entries that I have intellectually sweated over for days. And I haven't written any of those entries because I've been really busy.

"Busy?" you ask, "How can someone who contributes as little to the world as John be busy?"

In all honesty, I am asking myself the same question. Obviously, I spend a lot of time skiing, even more time sleeping, and a quite unnerving amount of time eating. Aside from that there's baking (which is a diabolical way of eating bread without having to pay for it) and repairing my skis (which is required on an all-too-frequent basis). There are also lots of people staying in White Star Chalet at the moment, and they keep going to be early, which means I don't get as much time to sit around and agonise over this blog as I did in the past. In any case, I have recently reached an intersection of busyness and slovenliness where I need to write "Take a shower" on my lists of things to do.

This baffling condition of being busy combined with the fatigue of continued skiing and the peculiar mix of isolation and crowdedness that comes from living in White Star Chalet has produced a kind of alienation from regular society and its norms. I have become obsessed with wiping down the benches in the hut's kitchen, but am perfectly happy to wear the same ski socks for a week. I am personally offended when people wear their shoes inside, but I don't mind eating bacon that has pretty clearly gone off. I regularly check the shower to see if it needs cleaning, but I don't actually use it. The other day I spent almost two hours wandering around the hut in various states of sartorial disarray muttering and hooting to myself like a crazy hobo before I realised there was a another person lying in bed about two metres away THE WHOLE TIME. The only consolation I can give myself is that I still had the decency to be embarrassed.


Like most descents into madness this has been a gradual process where the subtle daily changes go unnoticed. Just like the steady creep of gambling addiction, in which an addict may only realise there is a problem when they have gambled away their entire pension cheque, it can take a moment of revelation and horror to realise just how low you have sunk. For me, that moment came last Saturday, when I allowed a six year old to take credit for one of my farts.

Obviously, this blog is much too high-brow to indulge in fart humour, but for the sake of historical accuracy and personal integrity, I shall recount the story. White Star combines its living, sleeping and cooking areas into a single room, and while standing roughly in the centre of this room I - in a moment of inattention - let out an especially vile and malodorous silent fart. But in the short interval between the emission of the fart and its detection by my companions, a six year old gleefully cheered "I just farted". This at first brought great mirth to all in the room, but as the true scope of the problem was revealed, and the residents of the hut increasingly found themselves pressed outwards by the stench, people began to marvel that such powerful flatulence could be produced by a child so small. Meanwhile I, flooded with both relief and shame, said nothing.

So this is my public apology to Winnie, who probably did fart, but was not responsible for the true horror experienced in that room last Saturday evening. Winnie, I am sorry. However, my promise to keep your teddy bear if it ever falls onto my bunk again still stands.

I am still alive

Yep, still alive. I'm at BR, so I don't have much internet access at the moment. I've just submitted something to NZ Skier magazine's website, so if that gets on I'll post a link. It's quite terrible, but hopefully it's a foot in the door and I can claim to be a ski journalist and people will give me stuff for free.

We've just had two bluebird days after a big storm, so there's lots of good skiing and powder turns hidden around the mountain. I've been skiing hard and jumping off lots of things, but now I'm tired and I've got the hut to myself tonight so I'll walk around in my underwear and play wierd music on the stereo and go to sleep early.

I've also found two talismanic items of clothing - a lucky white jacket and an intimidating onesie - which I have been wearing this week. I'll get some pics and write something more detailed to explain.

Who Will Feed Me Now?

It is perhaps fitting that this, the 100^th post on this blog, is being written from the White Star Chalet at Broken River Ski Field in New Zealand. It is also fitting that I don’t have internet access here and that I’ll have to take my computer on some kind of road trip to actually post this to the blog. My journey of skiing, climbing, committing social faux pas and generating strong body odors effectively started here, and it is at once immensely satisfying and deeply disappointing to return to where things all began. Satisfying because coming back to Broken River, with its strong sense of community, ramshackle facilities and diabolical skiing feels like catching up with an old friend - one with a crazy beard, faded jacket and determination to get rad. And deeply disappointing because there have been a number of changes in the staff here, and I don’t know the new cook or ticket office person.

You might be saying (although it’s incredibly unlikely, since you probably know nothing about Broken River and its staff) “John, many of last year's staff are still there – you still know Doug the snow safety officer, or Barrett the ski patroller, or Dan the guy who fixes the grooming machine all the time even though no one seems to ever intend to use it”. And you’d be right, those people are still here. It has been great to see them and I’m looking forward to various forms of shenanigans with them during the season. But to truly know and master the beating heart of a ski field there are two people you must schmooze above all. First is the ticket office person (which is a euphemism for ticket office lady, which is a euphemism for ticket tart), for they hold the power to charge you for things, to ensure you pay for everything in advance rather than building up a large tab, and to save you a bed if the accommodation fills up and you haven’t made a booking because you’re an idiot. A good relationship with the admin person can mean turning up just before a storm and knowing that you'll get a bed. A bad relationship can mean spending four days in a 14 bunk hut with 13 high school boys from Queensland who balance their raging homophobia with bouts of late-night wrestling in their underwear*. Second is the cook, because the cook controls the food. A good relationship with the cook can mean scrubbing dishes like a high school dropout and eating like a prince. It can mean that extra loaves of bread or bottles of milk find their way to the dodgy hut with the cheapskate guests rather than to other less worthy places. But a bad relationship means that no matter how many vegetables you chop or cakes you bake you will never taste the wonders of BBQed chicken or hot muffins while night skiing.

It is also very handy to schmooze the ski instructor, because they can provide you with helpful ski advice for free. But in the grand scheme of things having somewhere to sleep and something to eat must take priority over video analysis of your turns even if that analysis is very helpful.

It was, then, with some dismay that I learnt that neither Giuliana, the ticket office person, nor Ray, the cook, would be returning from last season. I have to start all my schmoozing from scratch – a grave and concerning situation.

Also of concern, it appears that Broken River has made a concerted effort to have more women at the ski field. Last season, Giuliana was the only female staff member for most of the season. This year, the ski instructor is also a woman, and there seem to be other women just hanging around – possibly even as guests. Women choosing to be at Broken River for employment is understandable, but their presence here in a recreational capacity suggests something is amiss. Barrett recently informed me that earlier in the season he was at one point the only man in the daylodge (I can only assume from his tone of mixed awe and terror that he was not alone in the daylodge, because that would not be at all exceptional). The prospect of there being multiple women at the ski hill, some of whom are not staff, is unfamiliar and unnerving. After so many months of non-stop sausage partying, the thought of the party ending in one of the sausageiest places I’ve ever been is like returning to your home after a long absence to discover that, unbeknownst to you, your best friend from childhood is in fact imaginary, and that everyone has been humouring you all along.

I should probably say that I look forward to meeting all the new staff members, but most of you know me better than that. I am of course completely terrified of meeting them and having them dislike me. I would desperately like for things to go well, and indeed have a considerable emotional and financial investment riding on a positive outcome, but lack the capacity for self-deception required to believe that this is likely.

Wish me luck people – I don’t want to be expelled from here and end up spending the season at Mt Cheeseman.

*Thanks Giuliana.