It just so happens that my family fits perfectly into this archetype. For years, I’ve half-expected to be banned from every single resort in the Lake Tahoe area. Quite amazingly, we haven’t. So at four in the morning, over winter break, we drove up to Boreal Mountain Resort for a day trip.
For you to fully understand this story, I have to take you back 15 years. The very first winter I could stand up on my own, before I could even walk, I was stuffed into a snow suit and strapped into the tiniest pair of skis ever made. My parents seated me on the lift, propped me up at the top of the hill, and my skiing career began.
The next few years consisted of mastering the basic — and not-so-basic — skills of skiing. Because my toddler self could hardly remember the technical terms, my father assigned an appropriate food name to correspond to each skiing technique. “Pizza” was for the A-plow, “french fries” meant parallel skis and “spaghetti” referred to the parallel S-turn. Whenever I sped down the slopes, my father coaching me from above, it sounded like he was ordering off a Denny’s menu.
I started snowboarding when I was ten years old, and for a few years, I juggled the two before choosing to focus on the snowboard. My father has responded to this decision in a highly odd manner. This mainly consists of incessantly reminding me why I should switch back to what, in his opinion, is the superior sport. “Skis are naturally faster than snowboards.” “Skiers can go on moguls.” “All snowboarders do is drink beer and smoke illicit substances.” (When I argued that the last one was a stereotype, he gleefully countered, “Not if it’s true!”).
He has also grown to enjoy purposely embarrassing me to a great extent whenever I’m on a board, apparently so I will associate negativity with snowboarding. This time, my father insisted on piling layers of scarves, bandannas and knit hats onto his head to keep his ears warm, so he couldn’t hear all that well. Our conversation on the lift thus involved his speaking at twice the usual volume for the entire ride up, drawing the ire of the snowboarder behind us. He unleashed an impressively thorough string of obscenities. My father, of course, did not hear.
When we finally reached the top of the mountain, my father — for no clear reason — suddenly began to sing the obscure nursery rhyme “Punchinello.” “Punchinello” is a song about a fat Italian clown. “Punchinello” is probably offensive on many different levels.
After that, the day was actually rather normal. We worked on backcountry and difficult terrain for hours, and when they closed it off at night for safety reasons, my father and I made our way back to the bottom to race. That’s when things started to get less normal.
I didn’t have much of a chance to be faster than my father, since the construction of skis is more streamlined, but I’ve beaten every single skier I’ve ever raced — except for him. So we made our way over to the bunny slope, the only one still open late at night. When I saw my father eyeing all the beginners littering the snow, I set up some ground rules. Correction: I set up one ground rule.
“No knocking over any of the beginners,” I said sternly. “That might scare them.”
My father agreed, much too brightly, so I modified my rule.
“No knocking over, squealing, clapping, scaring, pushing, shrieking, whacking, screaming, tripping or otherwise disturbing any of the beginners.”
He responded with a scowl.
We started our race, and for a while, I actually thought I was going to win. In fact, for about 90 percent of the run, I was ahead. In the last several yards, my father passed me, flapping his arms like a bird before coming to a stop at the base of the mountain, looking pleased with himself.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said. “You won. You didn’t have to rub it into my face.”
“I wasn’t,” he replied innocently. “I wanted to see if I could fly.”
So frustrated with losing yet again to him, I finally caved and said the words I thought he’d been waiting to hear for the past four years.
“Fine,” I sighed. “Next time, I’ll bring up my old skis and we’ll race. I’ll beat you for sure.”
“You can’t,” my father sang, skiing away. “I sold them on Craigslist.”
