Skiing's Spring Break Redundancy

Spring Break is usually about the three B’s—Beaches, Binge drinking, and things that state school girls will do for Beads. But this is Columbia, and my neck size is 16. What, I was going to hit South Padre and win arm-wrestling tournaments at Señor Frog’s? I get nosebleeds doing the Thursday crossword.

Instead, 10 of us headed north to Vermont for four days at Killington, which already had the best skiing on the East Coast before three feet of fresh powder fell in the week before our visit.

Uh, Nick, somebody already wrote a column about spring break.

Wha—really? I think I would have noticed. What, did Fay-Hurvitz pull the same stunt his senior year?

Actually, it was this year. On Tuesday, in fact. By Carolyn Braff. And it was also about skiing.

Hm. I thought navel-gazing sports tangents were kind of understood to be my turf, but go figure.

Maybe you could take this opportunity to write, you know, a real column, maybe with some analysis of Col—

It’s really too bad Braff blew up my spot—we had some good times in the Green Mountains, despite the huge range of abilities on the slopes.

One person, whose name I’ll omit in the name of mercy, realized too late that being duck-toed was not a good trait for skiing. He tried his damnedest to keep his toes pointed downhill, but after six or eight feet would end up splayed out across the snow.

It can take a while to get down a 3,050-foot vertical drop at that rate. Luckily, this individual is among the most laid-back to ever grace College Walk. Several times, after falling, he sent his companions down the other 95 percent of the run and up the lift again. That whole process takes 20, 25 minutes—but there he would be, in the exact same spot, waiting patiently.

Once, his girlfriend returned to find him playing cards. This impresses me for the same reason I’m impressed that Young Buck (allegedly) stabbed someone at the Vibe Awards—not for stabbing’s sake, but for bringing a knife to the Vibe Awards in the first place. At some point while getting dressed, both must have thought, “I’ll bring a [knife]/[deck of playing cards], just in case.”

On one yard sale of a fall, this unfortunate soul lost his ski with his boot still in it. He’d forgotten to buckle. The ski and boot kept sailing down the mountain, perfectly upright, for 50 yards.

The more advanced skiers didn’t always fare better. My friend Mark botched the very complicated job of sitting down on a chair lift, causing the operator to hit the emergency stop button. That’s fairly common. But five minutes passed, and then 10, then 15. That’s not common. He’d broken the entire lift.

Mark is a nice guy, but his friends are not. “This goes straight to the top of your wall, Mark,” Brooks said. “I knew you were going to do something stupid today, but never did I imagine that it would be breaking a multimillion dollar piece of equipment.”

“There are a hundred people up there—and we can only see halfway up the mountain!” Jason contributed. “Two hundred people you stranded!”

(Mark happens to be an enormous fan of Spectator and reads every word every day. He’s always dreamed of appearing in these pages, but I’m pretty sure he was hoping for a glowing profile or Roving Reporter guest spot, instead of, you know, this.)

“You know, maybe it wasn’t all Mark’s fault—maybe someone at the top screwed up at the same time,” I said. To our left, the chairlift operator—he was maybe 20, pure granola, the sort of guy who would know how to spell “kine”—snickered and shook his head. By this point the entire line was laughing at Mark. Jason gave out his full name to everyone for good measure.

Surprisingly, back at the lodge, Vermont offered as much nudity as the Caribbean. I won’t get into specifics, but if you want hot nude photos (I think I just doubled traffic to columbiaspectator.com) of a certain former editor who has made a previous appearance in this column, drop me a line, and $5. You’ll never look at a snow angel in the same way again.

It was a great senior spring break—we proved that getting up at 8 a.m. and spending all day getting exercise doesn’t preclude drinking and debauchery at night. This one time—oh, well, I guess I shouldn’t get into it. Don’t want redundant columns now, do we?

You’re fired.