Rip So Hard

Cold pinches the little girl’s face, freezes her skin, and stings. The cold enters into her mouth, throat, lungs with every breath, hurting. The cold numbs her nose to the point that she doesn’t even feel it. 

She thinks of the Calvin & Hobbes comic where Calvin walks out the door in winter, makes a face, and breaks the fourth wall, looking out of the comic panel and asking the reader, “Don’t you just hate it when your boogers freeze?” No, she doesn’t particularly hate that. She hates falling more. 

Halos of white light glow at the edges of her vision. She stares straight up, into a black night sky with not a hint of deep blue or a single star. 

Either there’s too much artificial light here, or her red-tinted goggles are making the sky look like that. 

A scraping sound approaches, and stops beside her. She knows it’s Daddy when his voice says, “You can’t just lie there! You have to get up. More people are coming!” 

The girl struggles to rise, feeling the weight of the world on her. She so wants to impress and please Daddy, to show him she can do this. Finally, after what seems to her a gargantuan effort, she is sitting upright. 

Daddy is standing beside her, looking back and forth up the hill and at her, urging her to get up and keep going. 

The little girl tries to rock forward and stand up like her siblings and her father. It doesn’t work. She tries again, longing to hold her hands up to Daddy and ask him to pull her up, but unsure if he’ll do it. She wants to be able to get up by herself, and Daddy wants that too. 

She flops back onto the hard-packed snow of the bunny hill and rolls over onto her stomach, the big, long snowboard attached to her feet needing extra effort to flip end over end. Why is it called bunny? It’s for beginners. Why did they name it after rabbits?

Getting up off her knees presents a different challenge. If she stands up too slowly, she’ll fall right back down again. But if she stands up too quickly, and doesn’t balance right, she’ll start sliding down the hill, or lean too far back and fall over backwards. 

She pushes up, stretches her arms out for balance, and tries to put her body into the right position between squatting and standing. 

She makes it a yard down the hill before she falls again. 

She growl-groans, the sound lost in the night-skiing activity around her. She wants to cry, but she won’t. She can’t. She said she wanted to learn how to snowboard, and Daddy and Grandma bought her all the snowboarding things: snowboard, bindings, boots, helmet. 

She pushes up again. 

The girl progresses to the point where she’s ready to do more than the bunny hill. Riding the ski lift turns out to be a nightmare, every single time. The worst part of snowboarding, even worse than falling down. The chair could fall. She could fall off the chair: there’s no belt or bar. She once met a man who had fallen off a ski lift while messing around with his friends. He was in a wheelchair, paralyzed. She can’t relax at all, because she needs to get off at the end of the ride. That is one of the most important times not to fall—yet she does, so often. 

The ski lift chair vibrates harder and bounces as it approaches the off ramp at the top. People are coming on the next chair. There’s no room for anyone to dodge her if she’s in the way. She could cause a collision. She will NOT be the one who makes the whole ski lift stop or hurts someone. 

She never does, despite falling nearly every time. It’s a huge triumph when she can stay upright and ride away. Those triumphs are coming easier now.

Years go by. Every winter, the girl goes snowboarding, and every year she improves. But she still falls down much more often than she feels is respectable for her age and experience. 

Riding down the easy green circle trails can be hard. They’re less steep than others, with wide turns. They’re also hard-packed from a lot of use. At the edges, the snow is deep and soft. If she rides off the edge (which is surprisingly and frustratingly easy) she sinks into the unpacked snow, and it’s so hard to get back onto the trail. 

The girl, no longer little, has a hard time going in a fast, straight line, the way people are supposed to. It’s easier for her to move slowly back and forth across the whole trail. She can only really do that when the trail is empty of other people, though, because of course the movement puts her constantly and unpredictably in the way of every other skier and snowboarder. She’s no stranger to having people shout at her, “Hey, watch where you’re going!” If this were the road, people would be beeping and flying the bird. 

One night, as snowboarding season approaches again, and the girl has become a young woman, Dad calls her downstairs. He’s on the computer, shopping for snowboards. She or her brother need a new one, as they now have the same board size, and only one board of that size in the house. 

“I know we don’t pick snowboards based on graphics,” Dad says (yes, she knows the most important thing is if the board fits, not what it looks like), “but take a look at this.” He clicks and points at the screen, and she leans down to look at the enlarged picture.

The board is black. The image outlined on top makes her catch her breath.

It’s a wolf’s head, looking to the left of the board, outlined in bright blue. The wolf’s neck, extending to the right of the board, fades to a darker blue. Then the tufts and wavy locks of fur morph into a royal purple mountain chain. Her eyes dart to the board’s name: Chamonix Wolf. A women’s board. The description says it’s for beginner to intermediate users. 

“That one,” she says. “Please tell me I can have that one.”

It takes a couple months for the new board and bindings—white ones to contrast the board—to arrive, but when they do, the young woman glows with happiness. They’re the most beautiful snowboarding things she’s had yet, and she isn’t going to outgrow them. 

Her dad looks out the window at the snow-covered yard and the clear blue sky. He whoops, “We are gonna rip so hard!” and claps as he says each of the last three words. “Who wants to rip?”

“Me!” she and two of her siblings exclaim, thrusting their hands up. 

Steering is still not always easy, even after nine years. After an uneventful ski lift ride up, the young woman heads down the hill. She avoids hitting anyone and getting in anyone’s way, but goes in a direction she doesn’t mean to. 

She finds herself sliding towards the halfpipe. The snow is mostly undisturbed in there, and she can’t see anyone else in it. She gives up fighting to turn in the other direction and allows herself to ride in.

The halfpipe isn’t enormous like the ones she’s seen in videos, but the sides do go up above her head. It’s early afternoon, so the sun is high. All she can see is sky, sun, and snow. The powder hisses under her board. The cold air rushes against her face, burning the exposed skin around her lips. She’s flying, floating over—as her dad calls it—the pow-pow. Her body feels strong. She doesn’t need to worry about running into anyone else. 

She feels something knock hard against the ankle of her back foot binding. 

She’s not sure how it happens, but the next moment, she’s reeling over backwards, and crashing into deep powdered-sugar consistency snow. It opens to receive her, and she sinks into the cold. 

Struggling to sit up, she catches glimpses of another person doing the same thing. 

Finally, she sits up, caked in snow. A guy, maybe her age, is just managing the same maneuver. 

“I’m so sorry,” they say in tandem. 

“No, it was my fault,” they say, again at the same time. 

“I’m so sorry,” the young woman says. “I must have gotten in your way.” 

“No, no, no,” the guy says. She can see that he’s also a snowboarder, not a skier. “I hit you. This is my first day snowboarding.”

“Oh,” she says. Now she sees the yellow Rental Equipment sticker on his board. “Are you enjoying it?” 

“Yeah, it’s pretty fun.”

Getting up still isn’t the easiest thing, but she’s way more eager to do it than she used to be.