I’ll Try Anything Once

SKI BLUEWOOD -- I resisted it last year, miraculously.

But my 14-year-old son was relentless at the outset of this year's ski season.

I had to try it. I promised (in a moment of weakness) that I would give it a go. So, last week on a quiet day just before Christmas, I finally did it.I walked into the lodge at Ski Bluewood and signed up for a lesson in snowboarding .

Of course my reluctance to "boost" on a "stick" was somewhat generational. When I first stood on skis at the age of 9, the Beatles hadn't broken up yet and it would be another two decades before snowboards became a common sight at most resorts. It took me long enough to learn alpine skiing, starting with the pizza pie, mastering the art of avoiding mid-slope collisions before we wore helmets and turning on skis that were as straight as a fence post.

I'm still a pretty mediocre skier, but at least I can bomb down a mountain without doing any major damage and I haven't spilled in a while. I enjoy going downhill because I have some sense of control on fairly forgiving modern skis strapped individually to the end of each of my right and left legs.

Not so when I stepped my squishy boots into the snowboard bindings. Almost everything about the experience -- the one-foot hobble, the two-foot strap down, the toe-point, the runaway speed, my total lack of direction -- felt awkward to me, to say the least.

Several times wider than your average ski, the board immediately presented its limitations. My left foot anchored by the big stick, I tried to propel myself into position with my unbound right foot and kept kicking into the back of the board.

I wanted to change my dominant foot only to find out that the completely symmetrical hourglass shape nonetheless has two different sides to it: uphill and downhill. You have to commit to being "regular" or "goofy."

Feeling " goofy?" No problem there. My class was small. Our instructor, Stephanie, took me and another father with a teenage son and daughter under her wing for an hour. She assumed some basic knowledge, which I didn't possess. Was I supposed to stand to strap on my boots or sit like I saw the boarders do? Or was that more of a tribal thing among "grommets?"

I finally got one binding on and practiced walking on a flat surface, something I likened to a two-legged race. We quickly moved to trying turns, complete with a kneebending "athletic" stance and the discovery of various body parts that are supposed to control your direction.

"Hips. Shoulders. Knees and toes. Heels and toes. Hips. Shoulders. Heels and toes. Heels and toes."

I quickly went under on a sissy slope by the Triple Nickel and suddenly animated words of advice reached me from behind.

My son, the "grommet" and his friend had sneaked up behind the lesson area and were dishing it out. Embarrassed already, I asked them kindly to knock it off and followed my class to the platter pull, a device I hadn't touched since that first winter on the bunny hill of an Austrian village some four decades ago.

"Oh, this will be a breeze," I thought, ignoring deeply buried memories of being dragged along in icy ski tracks like an unseated horseback rider whose spurs are hooked to his stirrups.

The operator handed me the stick and plate, which I tucked under my arm. I leaned back and waited for the pull, smiling.

Little did I know. The board began to slide and I was off, veering wildly across the tracks and I went so far off to the left that my body extended and had I not let go, I would have been a bag of screaming meat. So, of course, I let go.

I hit the opposite path of the platter pulls and stood up, only to be hit in the head by a returning platter like the back of revolving door. I had made it 15 feet up the platter pull and got just as far the second time. Stephanie finally gave up. She asked us to un-strap from our boards and we walked up the hill instead.

My downhill (big word for the bunny slope's grade) luck wasn't any better this time. With both feet strapped in and no experience to control the devilishly fast device under me, I was mortally fearful of careening down toward the lodge with unintentional abandon and ending up triggering multiple benefits under two or more health insurance plans on my way.

I was going downhill and fast. The only way I could stop was to fall back intentionally and land hard on my left cheek. After another failed attempt and even harder landing left rear, I wasn't about to turn the other cheek.

I was done for the day, perhaps for my entire career as a boarder.

But who could complain? I was out in the hills. The aquamarine firmament above. The crisp mountain air in my nose. The espresso stand awaiting me in the lodge, not to mention the prospect of strapping on my skis.