Carving and shredding

I first strapped my feet to a snowboard about seven or eight years ago. So, you’d imagine that after years of slipping and sliding, falling and flailing, I’d be pretty good snowboarder by now. However, with the snow being four hours away, and lift tickets being expensive, my snowboarding practice is about as frequent as my guitar practice – about once annually. Sometimes seasons go by without a trip to the snow at all. And the times that I do go, it’s often icy and, after falling repeatedly and bruising up both knees, butt cheeks and nearly breaking both wrists, I declare that I will never snowboard again. Then a year goes by and I decide to try once more.

Two years ago, when I snowboarded in Vermont, it was so bad it took me until this last weekend to try again. And on the way to Tahoe on Friday, I was dreading it a little bit. I knew that all the people I was sharing the cabin with were expert boarders, and that I’d most likely end up sitting on my ass on the bunny slopes alone.

However, I had never snowboarded in fresh powder snow before. And I’d never gone three days in a row before. And, I don’t know, maybe I just wasn’t quite ready to learn before. But this weekend, something changed.

It started out the same – falling, hurting, complaining, swearing that snowboarding wasn’t my thing and I would never go again. But on day two, something clicked. Suddenly, all the fear went away and the turns made sense. My weight shifted naturally and I started going faster. That isn’t to say that I didn’t eat shit hard, tumbling repeatedly and getting facefulls of snow. But snowboarding went from being work to being fun.

Really, really fun.

I had heard tales of riding powder before, but had never experienced it. Tahoe got over two feet of snow this weekend – fresh, soft, sweet, sweet powder. You know when you look out of a plane and think about what it would be like to jump on the clouds? Now I know.

My friend, Kimberly, and I were riding down the slopes, swishing past each other on our sea of soft powder and you could hear our crossing cries of “Weeeeeee.” We were the Downy fabric softener bear. Every time I fell, it was like falling into a pile of freshly washed bed linens.

But it wasn’t just the snowboarding that struck me this weekend. It was the whole overcoming of the challenges. I was seriously ready to give up on snowboarding forever. And then I rocked it. It’s a good lesson for life, I guess. With my guitar playing, my job searching and more. Now I know I can do anything if I try hard enough. And cover it all with soft white powdery snow that makes it easier to fall.