New Year's Day

This morning the bus driver said you could tell I am young because I can run fast. The drivers tend to wait for people if they can see them running, but I didn't need her to wait.

Alicia was supervising today. Twice I went up to her and said, “I’m dead sober, no returns, and can take any class and level you want me to.” I didn’t expect returns today, and would have happily taken the day off, but one girl from yesterday did show up: Laura. I wasn’t on the board because they massively scaled back the instructors on duty. From seven blue classes yesterday, they had two today. Of course, they severely underestimated how many blue kids would show up, though we instructors expected it. I got back into my usual position with seven kids. Two of them I picked up at the shuttle stop. I had six girls and one demanding and impatient little boy. He was a good skier, but a nuisance, and at lunchtime when I tried to move him into Jeff’s class (another blue class that by then only had two girls and one boy) so he could be with another boy, he said he’d rather stay with me in hopes that I’d let him ski fast.

Today kicked my ass. I’m beginning to feel pretty ill, though I eat at least half a gram of vitamin C every day. My group had a pretty big gap in ability level so it was hard to teach, and I got beat up during the day too.

First, Laura slipped and disgracefully crashed right through and under the fence of the learning area. I had to crawl under it to rescue her and help her take off her skis. One binding snapped down right on the tip of my left middle finger, which hurt a lot. Later I let her lead the group a short way down Snowdancer so that I could concentrate on giving feedback to the slower kids, and she just went on for most of the run while I was stuck back trying to speed up the last girl and improve her technique. Needless to say I was very upset when I caught up with her.

One girl dropped her pole from Saddleback chairlift, and dropped the other one unloading at the top. We skied down a few times but couldn’t find the missing pole. She and I even climbed up to under the lift line where she said she dropped it, because I saw two poles there. They were a matched set, not hers, so we retrieved them and took them down to the lost and found.

One of the girls I collected at the shuttle stop was a dropout from Dan’s blue class, named Kailey. She got spooked at the top of Kokopelli run, and regressed to a yellow or low green level, sitting in a super-wide snowplow and inching along at a crippled snail’s pace. I worked hard and tried extreme methods to get her going faster and in a smaller wedge, and we were 20 minutes late for lunch. She repeatedly apologized for slowing the group down, and later thanked me for improving her skiing. I told Dan he owed me a beer for that.

While we were all waiting for Kailey to catch up, I let the others wait at a sign. I skied down to them and did a smart hockey stop, but just hit a patch of snow and sprayed the little boy from head to toe with a big cloud of snow that briefly rendered him invisible. He thought that was awesome. It began to snow at the end of the day, finally.

I got $25 in tips today. I probably wouldn’t have gotten that much but one of the parents saw another giving me a bill and so he gave me one too. A guy named Tom was standing next to me during checkout of his double-blue class, and he was counting and shuffling a big fat wad of bills. I promoted two of my better kids to double-blue, the ones who could do a passable hockey stop. Partly that was so I could get out of blue myself. Tomorrow is my last day of work before I get a day off on Saturday. I’m looking forward to sleeping in on a day off.

After work I decided to stay up on the top part of Elk Ridge and follow it across instead of descending into The Pines, or going into Silver Horse under the chairlift where the cover is very thin. The trees are spaced much thicker together in that top little band of Elk Ridge, and hold a lot of deeper snow where less people dared to ski. It is more demanding but there’s more untracked snow. I didn’t hit a tree, but I winged one while I was paying too much attention to my singing and not enough to my skiing. I turned just an instant too slowly to avoid it and smashed the last two fingers of my right hand into the narrow trunk. There was no damage. From there I timed my turns much more carefully to weave between the trees.

On the bus ride back I stood up and started walking forward as it pulled into my stop. The floor was slippery, and when the bus stopped I flew forward, slipped, and crashed on my back. I was not hurt but got the wind knocked right out of me and couldn’t speak or breathe, only make signs to indicate that I was okay. I took a soak in the whirlpool tub to relax and recover from this hard day.