Sure Travel Journey Vol 3.3 Winter 2017 | Page 22

DEPARTURE LOUNGE // WINTER 2017
Snowboarding
is easy, they said
BY AMI KAPILEVICH
Despite my very many personal faults and
hedonistic vices, I am not a hopelessly
unfit guy. I surf and I carry my well-fed
three-year-old son up some of the
steeper paths of Newlands Forest. But
this was something else entirely. It felt like
someone had replaced my muscles with
ILLUSTRATION © NATASHA JOHNSON
“So this,” I thought as I lay in the snow,
“is what it feels like to die.”
I had heard stories of people on the
brink of death experiencing euphoria as
their body desperately squeezed out a
final wodge of happiness hormones to
ameliorate its own demise. As the pain
in my legs melted away and a warmth
spread from my abdomen to my limbs, it
occurred to me that dying felt a bit like
peeing in a wetsuit.
I was sprawled on a gentle slope of the
ski resort like a beached sea creature. All
around me were the bright and beautiful
mountains of Austria, but I imagined
myself to be in the Death Zone of
Everest. This was not easy to do, because
every now and then a child would ski up to
me, look down, and giggle.
One of my boots was still clamped
into the bindings, and the snowboard
had twisted it at an angle. My leg was
not broken but part of me wished that it
was. Then they would have to send some
emergency services to pick me up and
carry me down the mountain.
“Hey man, how’s it going?”
Ryan glided up to me, grinning. This
was all his fault. As far as bald-faced lies
go, “snowboarding will be easy for you
because you can surf” is one of the more
22 // MAKE MEMORIES FOR LIFE
painful untruths I’ve ever uncovered.
“Easy slope, my cold wet arse,” I
wheezed.
Ryan laughed and reached out a hand
to help me up, but I waved him off. I just
wanted to lie there for a while.
This was our second day on the slopes
of Stubai Glacier, a family-friendly resort
near the Austrian town of Innsbruck. Day
one was actually very pleasant. You can
get a surprising amount of speed on even
the gentlest of inclines, and the vibe is
merry and accommodating. By tomorrow,
I’d thought, I’ll be busting triple-inverted
rotations in front of all the pretty
Austrian ladies.
That night we had a few drinks at
the bar and gorged ourselves at a
restaurant that served a sort of shredded
meat-and-gravy dish that was profoundly
good. We followed this up with a
few shots of schnapps and slept like
medieval aristocracy.
The following morning I woke up
with a loud groan. My body felt beaten.
sponges soaked in hydrochloric acid and
my tendons with barbed wire.
When I first started surfing I would
fall asleep with my face in the spaghetti
bolognaise I was having for dinner
because my new hobby was so exhausting.
Now I was experiencing the same physical
adjustment to a gruelling board sport with
about 20 more years under my belt (and
above it).
Day two took its toll. I fell and I fell and I
fell. And when I finished falling, I fell some
more. I fell until I couldn’t get back up.
Which is how I found myself being giggled
at by children who looked like they had
skied out of their mother’s wombs, and
stared at by adults as if they’d never seen
a grown man crying on the glistening piste
of the children’s slope.
Getting down that mountain was a blur
of thuds and groans. The next thing I
knew I was being shaken awake by Ryan; I
had fallen asleep at the après-ski bar with
a half-finished gluhwein still in my hand. In
that way, at least, snowboarding was a bit
like surfing.