Bindings

I watched as the unfortunate skier flipped on his last cartwheel and fell hard to the ground. The unfortunate tragedy unfolded just as I had turned into a parking spot at the bottom of the hill.

Paramedics arrived quickly and I watched them work on the injured skier, his broken body lifeless on the stretcher. They lifted and forcefully shoved it in, and I heard the sound of the gurney slamming against the ambulance partition. The damp bottoms of the prone ski boots was the last sight I saw before they slammed the ambulance doors shut, making me shudder. 

Yet my mind was already in chaos from my own calamity. So why did I feel such empathy to that prostrate figure when I had my own pain to consider? Sure, I hadn’t suffered broken bones or contusions or loss of blood. Yet the emotions I felt were excruciating, as damaging as a savage beating or a violent tumble on a ski hill. My own tragedy was unbearable: I had just been turned away by Elle, the woman I believed was my soul mate.

Snowflakes were falling gently, as slow as embers from a stoked campfire. They somehow seemed more like a darkness, as if someone had shaken a blanket of doom on the world. I sat back in my car and turned to the rear view mirror where I studied a somber face, expressionless, fitting for this bleak December day. Then my mind thought back to the ambulance and I became that prostrate figure, that hopeless wretch, wracked with pain and loneliness.

Just minutes ago I had pulled off the autoroute into the ski resort of Saint-Sauveur, less than an hour’s drive north of Montreal, where in my youth I had experienced so much joy charging down those slopes. It was a familiar place I hoped would comfort me, combat my gloom. I sat in my car, idling in the parking lot which strategically lay just 20 metres past the bottom of the mountain’s most popular ski run. The vehicles sat in the lot like trees, every skier’s deadly nemesis; a warning to all, especially novices, to not overshoot the end of their run.

A short while ago I had started the hour’s drive south back to the city from Elle’s cottage, which was tucked away in a small village in the Laurentians, a few kilometres north of the mountains of St. Sauveur. But I realized I couldn’t continue on without breaking down what had just happened. The memory was already becoming a blur, but for random sounds and images, a tumult of confusion, a dream gone badly. My mind now had a problem grasping reality and I felt there was no hope, no future for me.

I calmed myself and took a breath. Closing my eyes, I could see images and heard sounds, it was all coming back to me. I saw myself with Elle as we were a short time ago, when I had driven up to meet her at the cottage. I saw the scene as if witnessing it from outside a window, looking into the living room. There I was, down on one knee and Elle with her hands over her mouth, almost in horror. She was crying and gesturing before swinging her arm out, striking my hand. I saw the ring shoot up in the air, then diving to the floor, making a sound like a church bell at a funeral, a sound I knew would haunt me always.

And there was Elle’s voice speaking words that seemed to come from an unknown place, not from her own lips. ‘I thought you knew how things have changed’ and then apologies flowing from her lips, apologies a man should never have to hear, and then the sight of her running out of the room in tears, while I stayed motionless on one knee. Frozen, pathetic.

I realize now the feeling I felt then, a feeling my mind had rejected at the time, a strange foreboding as I had bent to one knee. I should have known, I should have seen there was no joy in her eyes, but a fear, a fear of knowing what I was about to say. And yet I continued with my plan. In my world, she was supposed to clasp her hands together in joy, shed tears of happiness, daintily put out her hand, the ring finger waiting for me to tie us in love forever. I ignored the foreboding that served as a warning, but perhaps no more than any man would?

I realize now how detached I was from the changes in Elle these past few weeks. The distancing, the excuses, the hesitation when we touched. Was it denial or masochism that made me carry on with my plan to seal our love in spite of these signs? Perhaps I was betrayed by the same impulsive acts I had lived my life by, never stopping to read the warnings in the tea leaves.

I stayed bent on one knee for a while, in shock, drained.   When I regained enough strength to shake off the disbelief that weighed me down, I stood up and stumbled out the door. No looking back, just feeling numb, sliding into my car and driving off.

I came to from this memory and lowered the car window slightly to get some air. There was a voice nearby relaying to someone how the injured skier had suddenly tumbled at high speed before rolling down the hill. ‘A ski must have caught an edge, you should have seen how he cartwheeled - his skis still on! The bindings didn’t release.  Ugly sight!’

The other nodded. ‘Faulty bindings will break your bones - and worse…’ His voice trailed off as as the crunch of the hard snow under their boots spoke louder than their voices.

I closed my eyes to escape again, remembering back to one of my early days at Sauveur and the memory of my first big fall on the slopes. I had skied the day using the beginner ‘snowplow’ technique, that repetitive crisscross at a safe, snail-like pace, winding across the entire breadth of the hill as I barely moved downward, while other skiers zipped by. Until what seemed hours later to finally make it to the bottom of the slope.

On my final run of that first day, impatient with this routine, I now found myself stopped at the middle of the slope after one of many falls, but finally near the last stretch of the run. I could now feel myself for a moment as I was then, young and free on that mountain, no desires or passions to fail at or hinder my morale or threaten my happiness. Only the impulse to abandon safety and blast down the path in front of me.  I had stood up from my fall and then slowly lifted each ski one at a time high in the air, turning and plunking them down so they aimed directly towards the hill bottom. I peered behind and to either side of me to wait for other skiers to speed by until the coast was clear before I bent my knees and urged my body onward, leg muscles digging into the skis as I sped downwards, urging them on faster, faster, as I accelerated in a straight line towards the bottom of the mountain, picking up speed till the wind blew my scarf loose and wildly behind me, my goggles nearly blinding me by the kick-up of the snow powder in front, feeling the exhilaration, the freedom, as I sped dangerously faster and faster straight down the slope, not knowing how to zig-zag, my body now caught in a vortex of motion I had no control over. Then, finally realizing my insane blunder I arrived still accelerating at the bottom of the hill, perilously close to the ominous parking lot, and without the ability to stop safely, threw my body sideways onto the snow. The bindings released, the skis flew off, and I hit the hard packed snow, tumbled to a stop, battered and bruised but feeling victorious.

‘Did you want another scotch?’ The voice in my head jarred me into another memory, from a couple of weeks ago. Elle’s father held the half empty bottle of Johnny Walker Black as he stood looking down at me, his eyes foreboding for a reason I didn’t then comprehend. Elle had arranged for me to meet her parents up at the cottage. Her handwringing spoke loudly as she explained, the words coming in a nervous, almost childlike tone – ‘they don’t like any of my boyfriends, especially my dad’.

Knowing how she worshipped him, I concentrated my efforts that weekend on charming him, even more than her mom, whether that involved drinking the same volume of scotch, helping him chop wood for the fireplace, or shoveling out the driveway from the six inches that had fallen overnight. Was I trying too hard, I wondered, as her dad seemed disinterested with any of my efforts. He was unrelentingly aloof whenever I started a conversation. More than a little too unconcerned, I thought, for someone who should be taking special interest in this family interloper, this guy wooing her daughter and possibly stealing her away.

I smiled and nodded and knowing he would be filling his own glass, I joked rather badly that I didn’t want him to drink alone. He looked at me with dead eyes before he poured his poison.

I thought at the time I was only imagining Elle acting odd in our drive back to the city. She seemed detached, there was silence in the car. But when I dropped her at her Côte des Neiges flat she seemed fine and even held me tight as we kissed goodnight.

How different was that from our cottage weekend a month earlier? We had driven up to spend time alone, just the two of us. Autumn was in its full glory, and on the mountains the trees had amazing colour as we drove up the autoroute, Elle’s face was bright and happy, her eyes shining as always. The leaves were changing to beautiful shades of red and orange, reaching a peak only rainbows can mirror. We spent a weekend of paradise there, together every moment, hiking, canoeing, drinking wine, making love. And as we lay together with the moonlight streaming into the bedroom, it was the one time I felt no foreboding, just content and happy, thinking perhaps this was how it was meant to be.

Somehow though, I knew Nature, deceitful and heartless, would soon have those leaves take their death leap off the mother tree before quickly turning a ghostly brown and withering away. Then the snows would come and the beauty of the rainbow of leaves would be gone. A mournful whiteness would cover the world.

These memories faded and I settled my head on the steering wheel for about half a minute before gazing up to see the snow had stopped falling. I turned on the wipers for a second to clean the windshield free of it. I looked up at the ski hill and saw gliding figures on the slopes, their heads covered in toques and flapping scarves of all colours, like the leaves of autumn. The figures waved ski poles and carved tracks in the snow as they drifted downwards between the borders of the run, between the straight lines of majestic pine trees, those survivors of the clearing of the mountain forest when the runs were created years ago. I was once one of those figures, in the years after my virgin run, routinely zigzagging down the slope, feeling the rush of conquering the mountain.

I now sat quietly in my car, pondering my fate. I didn’t notice the lot attendant approach, and was startled as he tapped on the passenger window. I lowered it and he bent his head inside, his jet-black hair flew out from his toque and his face narrowed as he peered at me, the eyes practically piercing into my soul. His jaw moved wildly as he spoke, almost like a raving madman.

‘Donc, tu veux stationner ici?’ (Are you parking here?)

‘Non, non merci. Je sorti maintenant.’  (No thanks, I’m leaving now.)

A conciliatory tone and softness took over his features as he heard the dead calm of my voice and squinted as he studied my morose expression.

‘Es-tu correct?’  (Are you ok?)

I waved my hand, fingers spread as a high five without looking at him to let him know I was ok. ‘Oui, merci, ça va.’  (Yes thanks, all good.)

My stop at the hill had provided no escape. I felt as if I would wander without any rest. I turned on the engine and backed out of the space, quickly shifting into first before stopping so the car never quite sat still before switching direction, then turned towards the exit and back onto the autoroute heading south to the city. There was a lineup entering the highway on-ramp so the traffic drifted slowly forward and as it did my mind drifted back again.

This time I recalled the first evening I spent with Elle, how after dinner downtown we walked down Sainte-Catherine and she and I held hands and talked for hours. We talked about the movies we discovered we both loved to watch and re-watch, and how a cabernet tasted so good when paired with a medium rare striploin - seasoned only with salt and pepper! - and how Christmas was way too commercialized but on the other hand why can’t we say Merry Christmas anymore? - and how we both hated those phony suburbanites who kept their SUVs running outside the depanneur when they ran in for beer and chips but celebrated Earth Hour once a year so they could turn off all the house lights and feel good about themselves. And a million other things.

At the end of that beautiful evening of awakening feelings, Elle wouldn’t stop smiling and her eyes wouldn’t stop shining. But later as we held hands and were saying goodnight outside the door of her flat she laughed and said ‘you know this can’t possibly last.’ I hid my feelings at that and smiled as I put my hands around her supple waist and brought her closer.

‘Hey, be nice,’ I said, ‘I don’t have my bindings with me.’

‘What?’ She looked puzzled, but still held on tight to me and her soft hand touched my lips.

‘Nothing.’ I smiled as I held her close and kissed her hand, and wondered if it would be this way forever.