Baptisms of Fire (on ice)

So here I am again… bruised and battered but still in one piece.

So there we were all together in my house on Friday afternoon… 6 snowboarding virgins (2 snow virgins even) and one ex ski instructor. The peace pipe was smoked as it always is at the start of a journey and we were off in two cars. The snow team included me, my boyfriend S, my housemate T, my friend R and her boyfriend K, S’s friend from work B and our friend V.

Roadtripping with my two favourite allies
Fully loaded, we got snacks and supplies



The drive was nice… for once we didn’t argue about the music and just listened to everything that played. And most of it was singable so quite naturally I didn’t shut up for six hours. I even found this CD that I recorded maybe 4 years ago when I first got a CD burner and it was full of songs I hadn’t heard in ages. You Are My Religion, for fuck’s sake and Unforgivable Sinner. I’d forgotten those songs even existed. And as always, I gazed out the window at the rolling hills and country towns and villages and thought of other trips I’ve taken in the past… trips that start out as this one did, with the smoking and the drinking and the driving and the laughing and the singing.

We saw many sheep along the way. Ah, rural Victoria, is there anything quite like it? Please excuse me, I think sheep are damn cute.



So anyway, many smoke breaks and toilet breaks and food breaks later, we caught a glimpse of some snow covered peaks.

These mist covered mountains
Are a home now for me
But my home is the lowlands
And always will be



We drove up the mountain (Mt Hotham, it was), taking corners at terrifying speeds as always… boys will be boys after all. Eventually, it was 9 pm by the time we had settled in and eaten dinner and started sipping our first drinks. By 10:30 pm, we were SMASHED!

To kick things off, we started playing Fuzzy Duck but I think everyone’s just become too damn good at it these days… fuck-ups are rare and few between. Fuzzy Duck is this highly entertaining drinking game which involves people saying Fuzzy Duck in a circle until someone says Does He. The direction is then reversed and the phrase changes to Ducky Fuzz. After a few drinks most people mess up and say things like Fuck He Does and Does He Fuck, and when you mess up, you slam a shot! So anyway, we’ve been playing this for a long time at my famous fruit punch shot nights but I’ll save those experiences for another day.

We gave up on Fuzzy Duck and started playing Dumb Charades. S, T and I were on one team against the other four and we were on a fucking roll, I kid you not. We’re not normally that great or anything but that night, we just had some kind of connection going and were guessing everything in about 10 seconds and the other team was just losing miserably. And sometimes the most obvious things are the hardest to guess… T was trying to charade a sounds like for ‘brass’ and acted smoking some ‘grass’. We got what he was trying to do alright, but S and I must’ve said every single other word we knew for it from ganga to Mary Jane and just completely missed the basic, first word I ever learnt in the whole business of smoking up. By the end of all this shouting and screaming, we were extremely smashed and decided to go hang outside in the snow.

The photo below was taken to capture my comic attempts at drinking my drink with my gloves on. It made for such a blogworthy pic though since it preserves my anonymity ;)



Outside in the snow we drank and took drunken photos on someone’s parked snowmobile and bonded with various other guests who also came out to hang in the snow and shared the love (the weed love, that is) and smoked many cigarettes (this was also terribly difficult with my gloves). All in all, it was a very fun night and we went to bed extremely late. The "single" boys were in a room full of bunk beds and it was much fun to climb up to the top bunk and pretend one was on the Brindavan Express.

Barely five hours later, we were rudely awoken by the bright morning sunlight. Apparently sunlight is always much brighter in snow towns because of the sun reflecting off the snow – I had not thought of this before!



We showered and dressed in many layers (at least I did, I don’t take chances with the cold) and drank much water to combat our hangovers and spent some time renting our gear. So on top of all my layers, I had a puffy snow jacket and waterproof ski pants, some horrendously heavy snowboard boots, and a very cumbersome snowboard. Thus armed, we set off for the slopes.

As mentioned before, B used to be a ski instructor and he was on skis while the rest of us were on snowboards and he was still able to give us some basic pointers on snowboarding. After about half an hour of gliding around on flat terrain, we became overly ambitious and decided to take the ski lift up one of the slopes even before we had our beginner’s lesson which was some time away.

The ski lift itself is obviously a terrifying experience on its own. I fell trying to get on it (you try getting to the lift from the gate on time with one foot strapped into your snowboard and the bloody seats don’t stop for long enough) and I fell getting off it (again, you try gliding off the lift with one foot strapped in and then having to get out of the way quickly before the next set of people get off it)!



Once I had regained my composure somewhat, the enormity of what we were attempting hit me and terrified me no end. We were at the top of a very tall slope… we couldn’t even see the home stretch, and we couldn’t even stand up on our boards without sliding off in the wrong direction or falling on our asses. If it had not been for B, who very patiently helped me up every time I fell, and who prevented me from falling every time I tried to stand up, and who tried to show me how to stand without sliding or falling, I would’ve surely slipped off the side of that mountain onto the hard road below.

So we attempted the long slide down the mountain. Every couple of feet, I would have a tremendous fall that rattled every single bone in my body. The fun part was that every single one of us was going through the same so once I fell I’d look around to see who was around me because surely one of them would be nearby, also on their ass. Some of their falls were incredibly funny to witness as I’m sure some of my falls were. Getting up (and staying up) after having fallen was certainly the hardest thing to do. And if anyone had told me that I would actually feel hot on a snow covered mountain in 4 degree Celsius temperature, I would’ve laughed scornfully at them. But it was hot and I actually began to regret my many layers because snowboarding is hard work, and the sun was beating down pretty fierce that day. So every time I fell, utterly and completely exhausted, I’d lie down on the soft, clean snow for a while and that was pure heaven. Halfway down the mountain, I completely lost my will to continue. I felt that I simply couldn’t lift myself up again. But more than the pain in my bum and my head, I felt I couldn’t take the heat and dehydration anymore and simply forced myself down the rest of the way, half boarding, half sliding and half falling. Phew… just recapping that all has made me slightly exhausted. Also the story is rather long for me to finish now… so, *to be continued*.

Oh, and if anyone wondered about the title of the post, that line from Brothers in Arms kept playing in my head over and over again as I struggled to snowboard. My fellow beginners were my brothers in arms, that long, tiring and yet extremely fulfilling day…

Through these fields of destruction
Baptisms of fire
I’ve witnessed your suffering
As the battles raged higher
And though they did hurt me so bad
In the fear and alarm
You did not desert me
My brothers in arms