Notes on two weeks in the mountains

Long-suffering readers of this space will know that I’m nuts about an essentially pointless sport – much like golf – where the object of the game is to survive with a smile the pain of strapping a pair of heavy, plastic bricks around your ankles, attaching them to planks and pointing yourself downhill.  And, like golf, there’s the renting equipment, paying for your right to be on the course, dressing for the day, and following certain modes of etiquette.

It’s an addiction that makes no sense, but it got its claws into me before I was shaving and now I can’t shake it.

In Canada, I used to satisfy it in small doses.  How’s the weather look tomorrow?  Looks great for skiing – let’s go!

Living in Britannia Beach less than an hour from a former Olympic venue, you can do that.  In Hamburg, you have to plan your trip ahead of time because unless you fly, it takes the whole day to get down to the Alps.  We started planning for our recent week in St. Anton, Austria more than six months ago by booking a place in Pettneu, a small village 5 minutes from the main village of St Anton but quieter, friendlier, and much cheaper for overnight stays.

Then after a very dry Autumn, the snows hit the Alps this winter with a sudden force that knocked out roads and forced many people to prolong their vacations.  Such massive dumps I’d not seen in 15 years of living here, so I thought hmmmm… Six metres at the top?  Why go for only one week when there’s so much snow?  So I booked another week at Ischgl, a resort we’d never been to though it’s in a valley very close to St Anton.

Ischgl turned out to be a great discovery for us.  With its huge variety of runs laid out in such a way that you’re never far from another part of the area even though it’s spread out quite far – even taking in a tiny portion of Switzerland – it beats St Anton in a lot of ways.

Another discovery was the best part of Arlberg – the region where you’ll find St Anton – is Zürs, a smaller area with some amazing terrain and great scenery only 20km or so from St. Anton.  You can ski there on the same ticket, but for some reason we’d always only gone to nearby Lech if we ever ventured out of St. Anton.  It turned out to have the best skiing of any place we went to this time.

Another new experience was skiing with my daughter all day, every day.  We’d made a deal before leaving that, for the first time, she wouldn’t have to take lessons.  Three years ago – the last time we went as a family – she was in lessons and she’d been on a school ski trip last year, but it had been so long since I’d seen her on the boards, I was unsure whether she’d be able to keep up to me.

First run down I knew that I’d have to give her a few tips to work on, but as for whether she could keep up – hah!  That was often my problem.  On several runs she never stopped from top to bottom.  How could I have forgotten what I heard one woman say on the slopes five years ago: See that girl down there? She’s like a madwoman!

Along the way over the two weeks this year, her skiing improved.  Compare the video here with the one below it.

In this first clip – she’s the one in white in the background at the start – you can see how by swinging her arms and rotating her shoulders in the direction of her turn so much, she’s not only got a lot of unnecessary movement, she’s making the preparation for her turn much more difficult for herself.  So I had her think about getting her upper body as quiet as possible throughout the turn, keeping the shoulders square to the hill and the hands still out in front, with just a touch when planting the pole before the turn.

In this clip, taken on the second-to-last day, you can see she wasn’t doing any of those things nearly as much:

We froze our butts off a couple of days, skied by Braille in fog and flat light on another, but were rewarded on most days with a perfect combination of fresh snow and brilliant sunshine.  For all the snow and the luck we had with the weather, this trip is going to be the one we compare all the others to for a long time to come.

Dutch skating world on edge as 11-city tour may be announced

What the hell am I doing in Paris?

Talk about horrible timing.  Don’t make me wrong, I like being here, my old friend and I are having a great time and we’ve still got lots of  things lined up to do, BUT:

The famous Dutch 11-city skating tour might be announced this week!

There have been thousands of volunteers working to prepare the course.  All that remains is the go-ahead that the ice is safe enough with an overall thickness of at least 15cm.  If the race actually happens, 16,000 people will take part for the first time in 15 years.  The canals have frozen enough to skate a couple of times since then, but never enough to allow the Dutch to re-open this legendary race.

Not that I’d actually be foolish enough to punish myself with more than 200 km of skating in one go.  My  legs were rubber after about 70km three years ago, and that was just leisurely sliding all day.  These guys go flat out – the record is under seven hours!

I have to arrange time off to get over there.  It has to stay cold another few days after I get back.  Damn you, Paris.

Praying for more cold so there’s skating in Holland

It’s so cold here the rivers are starting to freeze up.  But I wish it were even colder, and stayed that way for at least another two weeks.   That way the canals of Holland will once again be safe for miles and miles of skating.

Just a little over three years ago I raced 550km from Hamburg to just south of Rotterdam for the chance to slip on the skates and slide around the windmills for three days.

And now that a Russian winter has invaded western Europe, could it happen again?  A lot of people are guessing it might.  Every day this past week dozens of people have been landing on this moribund blog after googling skating in holland.

I’d do anything to be able to do it all over again.  There’s nothing else in winter quite like it.

In love with Gran Canaria

It was my first time on Gran Canaria.   Although I knew it was going to be sunny and warm, ringed with sand and rocky cliffs and gouged with the remnants of volcanic eruptions millions of years ago, I didn’t have any inkling how stunningly beautiful I was going to discover the island to be until I rode a mountain bike one morning from sea level to 1,100 metres.

Away from the coast you slowly climb impossibly narrow and twisting roads to stand facing stark outcroppings of lava weathered to craggy fingers topping massive layers of basalt dozens of metres high.  A turn of the handlebars and you’re following a rocky ledge atop cliffs plunging 500 metres to the valley floor.  Climb a little higher and you enter a pine forest.  You stop for lunch with a view to another island more than 50km away, and suddenly realise the air is so pure, so fresh, you could be miles from anywhere.

And you are, because having left behind the walrus colony of package tourists and leather-tanned pensioners lolling around in their thousands down on the beaches, you’re up in the mountains with nothing to hear beyond the wind sighing in the trees like a distant river.   Once in a while at the very top you’ll get caught in fog, a thick swirling blanket as the rising air chills, but it’s never there for long.   I went up there for six days of biking spread over two weeks, and every day it just got better.  I couldn’t get enough of the landscape.

Every morning I’d wake up expecting my body to tell me to just fall back into bed after the pounding I’d given it – and the bike – the day before, but I just had more energy.  I just had to get back up there to discover something new.

Is it possible to fall in love with a place?  To miss it so much after being away for only a week?  I guess this first time was a short fling and destined to remain a sweet memory, but I’ll be back one day with the family.  They should see this.

Here’s a sample of what I saw in two weeks on Gran Canaria.

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Canucks beat Blackhawks, Hamburg balcony explodes

OK, I just whooped for joy and woke up my two ladies, but really… who wouldn’t?

The Vancouver Canucks, the NHL hockey team I’ve been following for so long, no player on the ice was even born when I went to their first league game in 1970, had just scored to win in Game 7 in sudden-death overtime.

That after blowing a three-game lead in the series.

And after blowing a 1-0 lead in the final two minutes of the game.

So after getting up at 4 in the morning to quietly, ever so quietly steal away into the dark reaches of the Internet to capture a live stream and watch – with headphones on – one of the most exciting games I’ve ever seen, well…

Sorry ladies.  I’m sure I’ll hear about it from the rest of the neighbourhood sooner or later.

Skiing and sculpture in St Anton, Austria

This is one of the strangest things I’ve ever come across while skiing:

He stands under a cliff to the right of a major slope at St Anton, Austria, where I spent a sunny week in early April.

Another sculpture, very similar but wearing a light ski jacket, can be found perched on a precipice almost directly under one of the lifts.  I wanted to get a photo of that one, but didn’t want to run the risk of fumbling the camera off the chair.

It’s the work of British artist Antony Gormley and is supposed to be a self-portrait.

Called Horizon Field, it consists of 100 life-sized, cast-iron sculptures each weighing 630 kg.  Forming a horizontal line at 2039 metres over an area of 150 square km in the mountains of western Austria, they at first seem so out of place.  But upon seeing them again and again that week, I came to look upon them as solid, loyal friends steadfast among the anonymous masses streaming by them.  I knew nothing about the installation before my week of skiing, but my reaction to it is pretty close to what the artist has said about  it:

It’s important to me that it’s the viewer who has a direct relationship with the sculpture. It’s important there’s no drama. I’m not putting them into a tableau. It’s called Horizon Field. They’re all facing a horizon, or making a horizon themselves.

I also think they act as a perfect counterweight to the extremely commercial sport of skiing.  Though you’re high up in the mountains and close to nature, you’re still in city mode: constantly bombarded with advertising wherever you go as the industry tries to seduce you with its latest trends in ski clothing and gear.   Upon seeing the sculpture from afar for the first time I thought, OK, what’s this supposed to be an ad for?

An enormous amount of work that went in to setting it up – five years of planning and dozens of helicopter flights so 15 mountain rescue teams could install each sculpture.  Gormley has installed similar projects as far-flung as London and Australia, but says the mountain project will be last one.

Skiers and hikers can see them until August, 2012, when after about two and a half years of residence among the winter snows and summer green, they’ll be taken away.

How we stumbled into a Washington Capitals NHL hockey game

Half-way through our trip to the States we left New York and headed via Chinatown Bus to Washington, DC.  It was a welcome rest from the constant go-go of the big city.

On our third night there we wanted to go out to see a movie.  We chose the horse-racing film Secretariat because it seemed to fit everyone’s taste.   But on the subway to the theatre we noticed all these people wearing huge, red Washington Capitals jerseys.   So, rather dumbly, I asked this guy next to us, “Hey, is there a hockey game happening tonight?”

He says yeah, and then we start talking hockey as if I’ve known him for years.  I start to get really interested when he tells me about how the Capitals are favoured to win the Stanley Cup this year, and how their superstar Russian Alex Ovechkin is the greatest player in the game today.

“So where do they play?” I ask him.

Turns out the stadium is right next to the theatre where we were going.

The little red-haired girl pipes in, “So maybe we could go to the game instead of the movie?”

“I’m thinking about it.”  Of course, I love hockey, and have already made up my mind.

We get to our stop and pour out of the car along with the red-shirt hordes.  Half-way up the endlessly long escalator we catch up with wife K, who went to the theatre before to meet us.

Right then and there I simply tell her.  “Hey!  Guess what?  The movie can wait.  There’s a hockey game happening right here!  This is our chance to see a real NHL game, the three of us!  It’ll be great!”

“What about tickets?” she asks.

“Don’t worry, we’ll find some!”

We get to the entrance hall and we start to look like we need tickets, then make the mistake of telling one of the scalpers we’re looking for three.

Mistake, because they’re on us like wasps, waving tickets in the air, 75-75-75 man, I got the best seats, centre-ice, you’ll nevah gedda chance at seats like this man, until a couple of others intrude with what seem even better offers, all the while trailing us like a media scrum as we try to make our way to the ticket booth.

“Look,” I tell them.  “I don’t even know what a Washington Capitals ticket LOOKS like.  Lemme at least ask at the counter.”

Ouch.

They wanted 360 bucks for the three seats I was interested in.  K. shakes her head and says, “Ian, I’d like to see the movie.  We’ve already seen an NHL game.”  I tell her that was 16 years ago, in Vancouver, and the little red-haired girl was still the proverbial twinkle.  “It’ll be a great time,” I tell her.

“But 360 bucks?  And with tax over 400?  That’s too much.”

The scalpers move in and are waving tickets at us again, and I’m just about to say screw it: we’re on holiday, we’re only here once, let’s buy the seats and have a great memory.

Just as I turn to the counter lady, who’s laughing at our back-and-forth hum-and-hawing, this guy comes up and says, “If you’re looking for tickets, you can have these, cuz I’m just going to throw them away, anyway.”

I look at him rather shocked.  “What?  Really?”

“That’s right.  I don’t want ‘em.”

“Uhh… OK!  We’ll take ‘em! Thanks!”

Two. Free.  Tickets.  To an NHL game!

The scalper takes a look over my shoulder and snorts, making a face as if I’ve showed him a turd.   “They’re way up in the rafters, man.  Mine are low at centre-ice.”

“I don’t care,” I tell him.  “We’re in the building, and the price is unbeatable!”

So since we couldn’t find a third ticket anywhere near the two free ones, K. went to see Secretariat.  She recommends it.

I then took a very excited and happy little red-haired girl to her very first hockey game, and, as I later realised, my first-ever hockey game in the USA.  There was great end-to-end play, a lot of crisp, clean passing, good goals, and tons of razzle-dazzle in the stands to keep the tempo up.  The game even went into sudden-death overtime, and when the Capitals scored to win with only 31 seconds left, I thought the roof would blast off.

Waterskiing and wakeboarding without a boat

Of all the weird ideas, right?  Who ever heard of waterskiing or wakeboarding without a boat?  I certainly hadn’t up until not too long ago.  Having learned to water ski the usual way on summer afternoons at our Canadian prairie lake, it never occurred to me there was any other way to get pulled around the water’s surface.

But the not-so-little-any-more red-haired girl came home from a birthday party a while back with tales of waterskiing at a lake only a few minutes’ train ride from our place.   “There’s no boat – you’re towed along by a cable,” she said.  “It was fun, but I never got out of the water.”

“Don’t worry,” I told her.  “We’ll go back this summer and we’ll give it another try.”

It’s not at easy as it looks.

Once fitted out with your wetsuit and gear you stand in line for the lift, side-stepping down the ramp to the launch area.  When it’s your turn on deck you stand on a plastic grass pad and grab ahold of the handle.

The operator sitting in a booth beside you gives newcomers like us a few tips on how to get ready.

“Stand on that red stripe, sit right down on the back of the skis, and make sure you don’t get pulled too far forward when the rope tightens.”

Sounds all right, but once you get going?  The contraption that sends you skimming around the lake is not much more than a huge cable loop strung around five pulleys suspended about 10 metres above the water. 

As your rope goes around each pulley – assuming you actually manage to launch OK -  you have to position yourself just right in the water so that not too much slack builds up, otherwise the force of the rope tightening again after it rounds the pulley will jolt you forward – if you manage to stay up – or rip the handle out of your grasp and send you for a flying face-plant.

That happened to both of us a couple of times before we got the hang of it.  We each had to walk back from the far end of the lake after having fallen half-way around, but by the time our two-hour ticket was up we’d each made it four times around in one go.  That’s how many turns you’re allowed before you’re supposed to drop the tow for the next person waiting in line.

We could have bought a day ticket, but we also wanted to do a little bike ride through the countryside afterward, so the two hours were just right.  My arms were aching by then anyway, so I was glad to get on the bike and let the legs take over.  But on the train ride home, we already made plans to try it with a wakeboard next time.

For a look at the little red-haired girl’s second time up on the water, I present you one of the shortest videos you’ll ever see on youtube:

If you’re near Hamburg and want to give it a go, you have to get yourself out to Pinneberg, a suburb 25 minutes or so by train northwest of the city.  From the S-Bahn station the lake is an easy five-minute walk through a park alongside the tracks back toward Hamburg.

The hockey game I will always remember

OK, I’ve had a few beers, eh?  So go easy.  But stick an expat Canadian in a hockey game – a Canadian who’s been marooned on the frigid shores of northern Germany for going on two decades -  and 45 years of puck-whacking start to flood back.

Times we’d set out rocks for goalposts 15 yards apart on a road, play street hockey and pretend we were Jean Belliveau, Guy Lafleur, Guy Lapointe…  Can you tell I was a Montreal fan before the Vancouver Canucks finally made it to the NHL?

This is the game I will always remember -  only a part of it, but it’s enough.

A nothing game, the playoffs already decided, the Canucks eliminated weeks before in a badly losing season, their second in the NHL 1971-72 when they finished dead last in the league.

Dad’s office at the copper mine had season’s tickets.  Section 10, Row 15, Seats 9 and 10 in what they used to call the Pacific Mausoleum, a crowd so quiet you could hear The Queen fart.  The seats were divvied up among the office employees and Dad got four games a year.  Our seats were right behind the goalie, and in those days you had to keep awake or get a puck in the chops.  Screw the lawsuits, life was too simple back then.

So it’s late in the third period, game tied 2-2 in a tight contest against the Buffalo Sabres.  For those old enough to remember, the Buffalo Sabres were the Canucks’ main rival because Buffalo and Vancouver ascended to the NHL together the season before.  This is why it was so important, even though both teams had already been eliminated from playoff contention.

The game was tied 1-1 until six minutes left in the third period when Buffalo scores, sending many to the exits as it was obviously going to be just another loss.  Then the Canucks tied it up with about 2 minutes left and those on the way out are rushing back to their seats.   It’s fierce action and it goes down to the final 14 seconds with a stoppage in play.  There’s a face-off near the Sabres’ goal way down across the ice at the far end.

Much like the face-off we saw tonight:

That was taken two hours ago when Canada’s national team defeated Germany’s 4-1 in Hamburg!  It was a lot of fun…. More on that game later.

Back to the game 38 years ago.

This is the scene that is burned in my mind forever:

André Boudrias wins the face-off and the puck goes back to the right point to Jocelyn Guevremont.

They say that every time your mind replays a memory the subsequent memory is changed a tiny fraction, so that what you saw in real life is altered each time you recall it.  Sooner or later, what you retain as a memory has been changed beyond all resemblance to reality.

That may be true for some things, but this is exactly what happened.  It will never change.  It’s in the books.  It really happened.

Guevremont, a defenceman known for his incredibly hard shot from the point, takes aim as the puck approaches. The crowd of 15,000 holds its breath as he  pulls his stick back and, without even stopping the puck, sends it flying up through a half-dozen bodies, sticks and legs to the far corner, over the shoulder of the Sabres’ goalie Roger Crozier and into the back of the net.  I’ll never forget the sight of the net rippling from so far away across the arena.

There were 11 seconds left on the clock and the Pacific Mausoleum erupted in pandemonium as the red light went on.

I’m 11 years old, and all around me people are jumping on top of their seats, they’re screaming, they’re going crazy, they’re throwing drinks and junk onto the ice, they keep screaming, you think it’s going to stop and they keep on, it seems to last forever, like an encore call that won’t quit until the band finally gets back on stage, until one guy takes a thermos – it was probably filled with whiskey until half-way through the second period – and he hand-grenades it from the second tier.  I can see it now, sailing through the air right in front of me, end over end, a slow loop-de-loop arc, and when it hits the ice, the interior shatters in a spray of glass all over our end of the ice.

The crowd goes whoa!

Silence.

It takes them 10 minutes to sweep the ice clean so they can finally play out the last 11 seconds.

All this before the eyes of an 11-year-old from the sticks. It was the first time I was in a crowd that went absolutely crazy.  I loved it.

It was tribal, I guess.  I miss that.

That’s why tonight’s game was so much fun. The chance to get together with some Canadians to see some of Canada’s best players playing the game we love best.

Thanks for jogging my memory, guys.

Skiing at Whistler: you looking for these?

Lucky I went back for the third ski lesson at that crappy hill.  By the time I was 12, my initial hatred of the sport had changed into such a passion I can clearly remember a friend  out on a summer hike screaming, “Will You Please Shut Up About Skiing!”

We used to pile in with friends into the old man’s 1970 Plymouth Satellite and head up to Whistler on the weekends at least 10 times a season.  Brother Gordon would drive until at 16 I got my license.  We’d get out at first light for the hour-long drive to be ahead of the Vancouver traffic and be the first in line for lift tickets so we could be first in line for the Gondola or Olive Chair lift and, of course, first down the runs.

It looks like a joke now, but the first lift ticket I ever bought at Whistler Mountain cost only three dollars.  When I turned 13 I had to pay more than double that – a whole seven bucks!  You can’t even get a whiff of a sandwich for that these days at Whistler.

We’d pack lunches and throw the bags in the trees near the Roundhouse at the top, making sure they were tied up well so the Whiskey Jacks couldn’t steal our food.  We’d come back to fetch them near noon so we could eat on the lift.  Why stop for lunch when there’s so much skiing to be had?  Near the end of the day we’d time our runs so we’d be at the very bottom for the last ride up the Gondola, then scoot over to the Red Chair for the ride up the top.

If I ever find a decent photo from those days, I’ll post it, but for now, this one from about 10 years before will have to do.

And so to the story of the day everything went wrong.

The weather had been iffy on the drive up, but on the hill it was shit.  Foggy, a  mixture of wet snow and rain, and so windy…  I’m not surprised that they’ve had to postpone the Downhill ski event at the Olympics, and don’t hold your breath until Monday.  Because it sits amid a coastal temperate rainforest, Whistler weather can be awful for days on end.

Anyway, that day brother Gordon somehow LOST the car keys.  We used to split up into two groups – he’d go off with his friends, I’d go off with mine.  While picking up our lunch that day, we cross paths and he gives me the news.  “But don’t tell Dad!” he warns me.

His telling me not to tell Dad gives me the idea to phone him in the first place.   So I fish out a dime and call the operator from the payphone at the top of Whistler to make a collect call home.

Nobody there.

So I pull out another dime and make another collect call to where I’m sure my father will be, because it’s  a Sunday: at the office.  Working.  My old man worked a lot, and when he wasn’t working, he was driving his car.

“Gordon’s lost the keys Gordon’s lost the keys!” I bark into the phone.  He swore, I think, but then says, OK, no problem – I’ll drive up and give you guys the spares.

So at the end of the day I meet up with Gordon and his friends at the bottom of the gondola and Gordon’s foaming with rage at me that I’d phoned Dad behind his back.

To me it made perfect sense.  Keys lost. Dad has spare set.  Dad drives Mom’s car to Whistler.  Then we have keys.

So we’re walking to the car in the parking lot and we see Dad’s bright orange MGB parked behind the Plymouth.  Just as we’re coming up to the car we see him bend over by the driver’s side.  Straightening up, he holds up the keys in his right hand and with a big grin on his face, says to us: you guys looking for these?

They’d been lying on the ground right by the car the whole day.

I told that story near the end of a speech I gave to those who gathered in early May, 2000 for his funeral, ending with: Dad had a temper and let it loose sometimes, but he was always able to see the humour in things.