“Oh, Sure, I Snowboard”
A True Story Of Deception, Shame, And Self-Discovery
I didn’t have many friends growing up. I was homeschooled, spent several years living on a commune in Oregon, and dressed super weird. When my mom and I moved away to rejoin modern society, it became clear that public school was a bit much for me. The other children made fun of my Milhouse Van Houten glasses and how I adopted my grandfather’s Quebecois-farmer-chic style.
Instead, I went to a private school that was probably the opposite of what you’re imagining if you’re imagining anything even close to Gossip Girl. There were 4 kids in my grade, we learned…nothing, and we danced barefoot around a Maypole each spring.
Despite the uncool setting, my friend Queenie was very cool. We spoke to each other in Kip from Napoleon Dynamite voices and parodied Blink 182 lyrics and I wanted her to like me so badly but she always seemed more or less indifferent, but that was just a mark of how cool she was.
One fateful night, we were at her house, eating rich people food like devilled eggs and chocolate cake and watching Bam Margera do something horrible to his parents when her dad walked into the room and invited me on their weekend snowboarding trip. My heart leapt.
Queenie went snowboarding all the time. I pictured her with her long, shiny, black hair flowing behind her as she stripped past slower boarders, down a terrifying cliff, maybe with a tiny, non-threatening avalanche in her wake. I tried to picture myself doing the same, and as the least athletic, least physically coordinated 13-year-old girl on the planet, it was surprisingly easy to delude myself into thinking that, yes, I could totally snowboard.
I accepted his invitation immediately, and when he asked if I had ever been snowboarding before, I lied with bravado, “oh, tons of times.”
When we arrived at Blue Mountain Ski Resort that weekend, Queenie and I changed into our snow pants. Queenie was tall and slender, and I couldn’t help but notice that she looked a lot more like a human being in her snow pants than I did. I looked down at my short, chubby legs. My huge snow pants made my distinctly pear-shaped frame look like a dropped ice-cream cone, melting over the pavement on a summer’s day. Still, I pretended to feel right at home in my winter sports attire.
They walked and I waddled into the rental shop, where the attendant asked me questions that may as well have been in another language. When I stared at him with a drawn-out “uhhhhhhhh”, Queenie’s dad gave me a gentle shove from behind, and they reached some kind of conclusion about my “bindings”. I was still convinced that my pro-snowboarder cover was not blown.
One by one we were fitted with boots, bindings, and boards, and then we made our way out to the park. Queenie led us to a hill called The Burner, which was marked ‘most difficult’. Hell-bent on maintaining my lie, I followed her. We boarded the lift, and I soon found myself strapping into my shining, slippery snowboard on top of a hill so steep I would hesitate to go sledding down it.
We started down the hill at the same time, only I immediately peed a little and, terrified, fell to my butt, scooting sideways until I was rested against a pole of the chairlift. Queenie became a super cool dot, gliding to and fro as she disappeared down the hill. I waited until she had passed by me a second time, and then a third, before I tried again.
I stood up, hugging the chairlift post, and let myself slide down a few feet.
Nope.
I sat down again, heart pounding, pretty sure that my carefully constructed fiction was crumbling down around me. Surely they would find out that I had not, in fact, been snowboarding “tons of times.” Queenie skidded to a stop on her fourth or fifth pass and asked if I was ok. “Oh, totally” I laughed, and she slid on.
I sat there for a long time. Once in a while, people would stop and ask if I was alright, if I needed help getting down, if I had hurt myself.
“No, no,” I would assure them, waving them on, “I’m just taking a break.”
Hours passed. I tried a few more times to stand up and glide down the hill, never admitting to myself or any concerned passers-by that I simply did not know how to snowboard.
Eventually, Queenie’s dad came marching up the hill to where I sat, leaned back on my hands, watching the sun start to set. He wanted to pay for me to take the hour-long starter lessons on the Baby Bunny Hill. I didn’t need it, I insisted! Why didn’t anyone believe me! I was just worn out from all the snowboarding I had been doing!
“Come on.” He said, giving me a look that told me the jig was up. I resigned. He knew I had never snowboarded in my life. He knew I wasn’t as cool as Queenie. Everyone did. He unstrapped me from my snowboard and held my hand as we traipsed down the hill on foot, my snowboard rested on his shoulder.
I reluctantly, shamefully, joined the beginner’s class. I couldn’t help but notice that I was by far the oldest and biggest student on the Baby Bunny Hill. That remains to be the only time in my life that I’ve been taller than my peers, so I had that going for me, which was nice.
They taught us to stay standing up on our boards as we moved at a glacial pace along a moving sidewalk kind of contraption. They taught us to fall down, to carve, to stop. Finally, they taught us to go down the hill. The Baby Bunny Hill was much kinder and about the size of the mound of dirt where my old cat was buried, but I did it!
That night I took a hot shower and realized that I was frozen solid from my butt cheeks to my toes and I thought ‘maybe snowboarding isn’t that cool’. I didn’t know it yet, but I was definitely on to something.
The next day after breakfast, they made their way to the hills, and I, assuring them I would go to my baby bunny lessons, hid out in the lobby drinking free hot chocolate all day. And the next day we returned our snowboards, boots, and bindings, got in the car, and headed home. Queenie and her family had, I’m quite sure, decided not to mention my lies and failures and ridiculousness (in front of me). I appreciated it.
I was never invited on one of their weekend trips again. I appreciated that, too.
Queenie and I reverted to watching movies, memorizing our favorite set pieces, and practicing our Napoleon Dynamite dance. These were things I could handle.
But, our friendship was never the same after that weekend on the slopes. As we grew apart I vaguely remember being called a liar, not denying it, and flushing bright red as I thought back to those hours on the hillside.
I tried snowboarding again later in my life, and it went marginally better. I learned to slide down a hill without stopping, paralyzed. The desperation to be cool kept me trying, but from a kid who didn’t even like sledding to an adult who hates moving her body around, I never really took to it.
I’m not sure if I learned not to lie that day as my ass got wetter and wetter and colder and colder and I still refused to admit defeat. What I definitely did learn is that my specialities lied in memorizing movie lines and identifying television tropes and rewriting song lyrics. And no, none of those things would ever make me cool, but at least my butt would be forever warm and dry.
