MEMOIR
Bangkok on Tuesday
You never know when you will meet again
Two river guides left Nepal on different days, planning to meet the following week. They didn’t see each other again for eighteen years and their farewell, “Bangkok on Tuesday,” became a catchphrase for Sobek guides whenever they parted. You never knew when you might actually see each other again.
The winter of 1989–90 Mike Pratt took me under his wing in Vail, Colorado. He secured me a job as a waiter at Lancelot, a prime rib restaurant where he worked as a bartender. We shared a condo, skied, worked, played together, and became brothers. I skied over a hundred days, following Mike Pratt’s fluid telemark turns, and climbing the steep learning curve to master that odd, free-heel, knee-dropping turn of old Norway.
I’ll always blame it on the thunderstorm. On the last day of skiing, April fifteenth, I was as fit as I had ever been in my life. I felt power in my legs and grace in my hips. Hero snow lay everywhere, spring corn that made every turn easy and perfect. I bounced from one turn into the next with an endless supply of strength. I followed Mike as we sailed off Rasputin’s Ridge to land in an arcing turn. The sun was shining and smiles were breaking our faces.
In the afternoon our Lancelot restaurant was throwing a farewell party mid-mountain. Mike and I would be leaving Vail I in a few days to guide a Grand Canyon trip that would start on April 21, my fortieth birthday. While we were drinking a celebratory beer and saying our goodbyes, clouds rolled in and thunder clapped. Soon the lifts stopped running under the threat of lighting. We were stuck, drinking beer on top of the mushrooms we had eaten that morning. I chatted with a waitress from another bar. She had no jacket, so I loaned her my shell and told her I would pick it up from her later.
When the mountain opened again we only had two hours left to ski. Mike and I ducked under a rope on a shortcut he knew into the back bowls of Vail. As we skied down a narrow ridge, I flung turns on each side of the ridge’s spine to a snappy beat. Below I saw Mike break into a snowplow, lift his pole, and click them together in warning. Mike was slowing down radically and warning me it would be dangerous, but, then again, maybe he was being overly cautious. My turns felt so fun I couldn’t stop them now.
Mike swung right and dropped off the ridge as I came upon a bush blocking a small patch of snow above a sheer drop. Just before I would have skied into the bush I dove over it, landed on my side, and skidded to a stop above the cliff. The move, born of desperation and instinct, avoided tangling my skis in the bush and face planting.
Sidestepping up the ridge, I beat the snow off my clothing, and collected poles, hat, and sunglasses. My left hand hurt. I wiggled my fingers. They all flexed, but the middle finger felt odd.
“You alright?” Mike called.
“ Yeah. I trashed my sunglasses and hurt my finger, but I’m okay”
I hop turned the steep pitch down to Mike with caution, but every time I poled, my finger screamed in pain.
At the bottom I peeled my glove off and my middle finger fell behind my hand, dangling by muscle and tendon.
As I stared in shock, Mike took charge. He lined my glove with snow and carefully wiggled it back onto my hand. We still had to ski out to a lift and ride it to the top ridge where we could ski back to town. I dug into my reserves of stoicism.
We boarded the lift and floated above the slopes, I peeled off the glove and regarded my battered hand.
My hand, my beautiful hand, the hand that gave me life as a guide, was smashed. The fragility of my livelihood glared at me. A simple accident and I had nothing. After weeks of calls and careful planning, I had my six-month season all lined up — Grand Canyon to California to Alaska and back to the Canyon, but now it was off to the Emergency Room. Tears turned to weeping, and from weeping to bawling and howling.
When they examined me, I asked if they could splint it in a position for rowing because I would be rowing a Grand Canyon trip in a week. They laughed. I didn’t grasp or accept the implications of such a break. My middle finger bone was shattered. Initially the impact had just fractured it, but the shards fell apart when I skied down. The doctor wrapped me in a huge cast from my fingertips to my elbow and sent me home.
I met Mike at the restaurant where the waitress with my jacket worked. It was happy hour and the end of the ski season. The crowd was raucous. I slumped in a corner with my massive cast. The waitress kept passing me round after round of Jägermeister, eventually kissing me passionately. But the Jägermeister dominated and Mike hauled me out of there to a Chinese restaurant where I passed out, facedown, in my Cashew Chicken.
The next day I called around, deconstructed my guiding schedule, and arranged to drive shuttles in Alaska until my hand recovered.
Two days later, I had my surgery and was discharged with a giant cast that had a loop near my fingertips. Mike cleared out our condo and deposited me on the couch of a Vail friend who just had surgery for her ACL. Mike clipped a carabineer through the loop in my cast and attached my hand to a wall lantern for elevation. He regarded me with pity and sympathy. As he made his way out the door to the Grand Canyon trip we had planned to guide together, he looked back and smiled. “Bangkok on Tuesday.”
