In a previous post, where I listed adventures I’ve had, and adventures I plan to have, I mentioned briefly “Go cross-country skiing under the full moon (I almost died)” as one of my past adventures.
Rev. BigDumbChimp said “I’d like an explanation here.”
So here it is:
Living in Houston in 1974, I had a secure job and the seeds of a career track: work a year, go to college for a year. Major in animal science or biology, get a degree in genetics, go to Vet school, become a horse doctor.
So when my old pal Mark showed up at my door one fall day, I should have been out, or failed to answer the door, or said no. But none of those things happened.
I opened the door. And Mark said “Hi! I’m going to hitchhike out to California and get a job at a ski resort! Wanna go?”
Did I ever! Horsing cases of soda pop around all day, every day, driving a delivery truck for a bottling company, was hard, dull work. And I wasn’t saving much money for college either.
A couple of days later, we were out on Interstate 10. Mark played his recorder and we both danced around and laughed like the young fools we were, stopping only to thumb at the occasional west-bound traffic, or munch on handfuls of gorp from a side pocket of my backpack.
Mark’s backpack reeked. The previous week, when he’d been staying at his sister’s, his sister had demanded he take Burtus the Cat (not Brutus, but Burtus) to the vet for neutering. After coming home the next day, Burtus got his revenge by finding Mark’s big goose-down sleeping bag, laid out on the bed for airing, and spraying it liberally with urine still full of tomcat potency. Despite four successive launderings, the smell lingered.
Two days into the trip, unwashed and tired, stranded on a desolate stretch of road somewhere in Arizona, we’d waited for a good 6 hours for a likely-looking vehicle to come along. Finally, an old pickup stuttered and wheezed to a stop, and a wrinkled old cowboy peered out at us. “Where you boys headed?” he asked. Mark opened the door and leaned in, inspecting the interior of the truck. “Have you got a radio in this thing?” he demanded. “Well, no …” “Then we don’t want a ride!” Mark shouted, and slammed the door.
The angry cowboy peeled out, as much as he was able in the old truck, and left us in the dust. I stood there with my mouth open, thinking of the hours we’d spent standing here in the heat, and the hours that might still come. Mark turned to look at me, and we both burst out laughing so hard we fell over.
Four days after we first stuck out our thumbs, and a few days before Thanksgiving, I was waking up on a redwood deck overlooking the Pacific, to see dolphins playing in the surf. We were at the condo of Mark’s aunt, and she’d offered to drive us up to the ski resort this very day.
Five hours into the trip, I got my first look at Varmint Mountain (The name has been changed to protect the blood-sucking corporate uber-ticks who gutted the small, friendly town nearby and turned it into a truly nasty spot of cultural tar in an otherwise pristine expanse of nature – the John Muir Wilderness.), a soaring expanse of smooth white under an intense blue sky.
Mark reported to the employment office as soon as we got to the ski lodge the next morning, and got his room assignment. He already had the job, having worked there the winter previous, and would be living in a dorm room right at the lodge.
For me, though, there was bad news. “We’ve already hired everybody we need. Come back in just before Christmas.”
It was one of those moments in life when you discover things in yourself you didn’t know were there. For me, in this moment – with $10 in my pocket, no job and no place to live – it was persistence. I sat down and waited. And every time anybody in the employment office looked up, they saw my pathetically hopeful face looking back at them.
A few minutes before 5, the woman in charged looked out at me for the fiftieth time and angrily said “Get over here and fill out this application. I’ll find you something!”
I had a dorm room that night, and the next day started my grand career of sorting silverware as it came off the car-wash-sized conveyor of a commercial dishwasher. Did you know there’s a technique to rapidly sorting silverware in a commercial kitchen? There is. The trick is, you timeshare your attention between your right and left hands, and sort with both hands at once, independently. Probably a pianist could do it easily, having experience in using hands for separate tasks, but it might as well have been ninth-dimensional physics to all my coworkers. I may never develop the coordination to surf, or do radical things with a skateboard – in truth of fact, I never got very good at skiing, despite living at a ski lodge three winters running – but by God I can sort silverware.
Three days into it, the kitchen master walked by and saw me doing it. He was so amazed he promoted me to egg-cracking the same day.
Here’s how egg-cracking goes: You start with a pile of flats of fresh eggs, 30 eggs to a flat, about four feet high, to your left. You have a huge metal pot between your legs, and a short garbage container to your right. You reach over and take an egg with each hand, crack both of them simultaneously on the pot rim, and work a dextrous little trick with thumb and fingers so that the egg shells separate and the glop inside falls into the pot, then you throw the shells in the garbage. And you do it again. And again. Until 70 dozen eggs or so are in the pot. After which, you wash a commercial kitchen’s pots for 6 hours. And day after day, you do it over and over and over.
A week into egg cracking and pot washing, I was promoted to the baker’s apprentice.
A little aside: The guy who took over for me, sorting silverware, was a handsome young man called Little John (so called because there was a Big John already on the crew). Little John wasn’t very good at sorting silverware, but it was literally all he could do. I knew nothing at all about drugs at the time, but this was 1974 and acid (LSD) had already been around for a number of years. Reportedly, John had been a heavy user, and was so burnt out he walked around in an amiable daze all the time, which means he was about as dumb as a wet rock. It was a chore even to get his attention. He literally couldn’t learn to bus tables, stack dishes, work the dishwasher, or to dependably use the spray wand to pre-clean dishes before they went into the washer.
He could sort silverware, slowly. That was it. Dayyum. All these years later, I’m still amazed by that, and I wonder what happened to him. He just didn’t come to work one morning, and we never saw him again. It can’t have been anything good.
Baker’s apprentice was a definite upturn in my fortunes, but before I get into that, let me remind myself that what I really want to write about here is my adventure in cross-country skiing, so I can explain how I almost died.
I roomed with my buddy Mark (before winter’s end, we weren’t friends anymore) in the dorms, but one of the other dorm denizens was Mark’s friend Kurt. Kurt was the daring one of us, a guy who would go skiing in a pair of striped long underwear instead of ski pants, just to see if anybody would notice. I think it was him who showed me how to “ski” down a powdery ski slope on my back – fast! – wrapped in a big plastic garbage bag.
Among his many legendary exploits, Kurt sneaked into the kitchen one night and rearranged letters on the big menu board to spell out “Stuffed goose bladders” as a menu item. For this daring escapade, he was known ever after as Captain Goosebag.
I, on the other hand, ski novice and timid soul that I was, the rank coward who wouldn’t go down the black diamond runs on the mountain with the more advanced skiers I ran with, was saddled early on with the shameful title of “Peabody.”