But since danger is my middle name, wait stupid is my middle name, either way, here’s my story.
When I say I’ve seen cold, I’m talking frost bite, bone chilling, gimme a SNUGGIE kind of cold.
This frigid nightmare begins when my buddy, Adam, asks if I want to go skiing in the Mountains of Northern California.
Hell yeah, I say without a second thought.
I was young and dumb and full of crazy, and I didn’t have time for details.
Well it ended up being a recreational endeavor that makes water skiing through flaming pools of gasoline look like a Sunday brunch with grandma.
Her’s Adam’s big plan: We are going to hit the slopes for a couple of days and we are going to do it on the cheap.
Being a college student and having little to no cash, I said sure what do you have in mind.
He says “AC it’ll be great. I’ve got this tent we can toss out in the woods right near the hill. We can wake up and fall into the ski lift line.”
Fast. Convenient. Affordable! It’s the WalMart of ski vacations, I think to myself.
Adam made it sound like shangra la in the great White North.
I mean, think about it, we’d be right there at the lodge with snow bunnies everywhere banging on our tent flap asking to come on in and share a warm hot tottie.
This is every school boy’s dream, right?
Adam should have been arrested for aggravated verbal recklessness. He made that tent sound better than a night in the Waldorf Astoria.
But since my brain also doubles as a flotation device, I said, count me in brother.
I was running on adrenaline and little else. I needed to start driving so I threw together a nap sack for the trip. An extra pair of socks. A few sweat shirts for warmth. As much as I could grab with one hand from a dirty hamper and toss into a small sack.
Since we didn’t have the internet back then to check conditions, I of course, didn’t. And since planning was not exactly my strong suit, I didn’t give it much thought. I was in Central California at the time, and it was a sun soaked 75 degrees. To me, that meant pack for nice conditions.
Bad Planning!
I picked Adam up in my 240 Z, a nifty little two seater that had some get up and go but would never be confused with the roominess of a Hummer.
When I met him at his house, he was smiling like a possessed demon ready to suck the life out of some unsuspecting corpse.
He popped open my hatchback and tossed in this nylon tent bag with poles and ropes sticking out from everywhere. It looked like a big blue spider giving birth to a bad mitton net.
Adam smiled and climbed in. He immediately began extolling the virtues of outdoor life, the fun we’d have, the sleeping and camping under the stars.
What Adam forgot to tell me was how the temperature had dropped below freezing in the mountains. The smile he flashed in the car was the last one I would see for three days.
Day one started with gusto. We got to the slopes and hit it hard. We skiied and caroused and treated the neatly manicured slopes as our playground. There were snow bunnies galore and meeting girls was as easy as skiing into them.
As the sun began setting into the mountains bathed in a purple hue, snow bunnies began to leave the slopes. They were sun burned and tired, but secure in the knowledge that revitalization was only a shower away. Into the lodge they went to primp and prepare for a wild night of snow-bunnying.
That’s when our unique situation began to take my mind hostage.
“Hey, where are we going to set up camp?”
I looked at Adam and he at me. A blank gaze covered his face. I didn’t have a mirror, but I am pretty sure my lips had drooped as sadly as his. Neither of us spoke, it was painfully obvious We’d have to find our evening revitalization from something other than a hot shower.
Adam said he’d liven our spirits by cooking us a little dinner. He said all he’d have to do is fire up the little bunson burner we had brought and cook the hamburger I had pulled from the freezer and tossed into the back of the car, prior to leaving.
Food would certainly get me back into a fighting mood I thought to myself. But there was one little problem. The burger was rock solid. I had thrown the frozen chunk of meat into the back of the Z thinking it would defrost on the way to the slopes. Sadly, the brick of hamburger was more solid than ever.
I banged it a few times with an extra tent stake.
Bang Bang Bang!
Ok, we’ll figure out dinner later. Time to put up the tent. It looked so big in the back of the car, now it looked like an accessory to a Ken and Barbie set. How are the two of us going to fit in there?
In the high beams of my 240 Z, we began to assemble the small tent. Getting the thin nylon over the skeleton frame was like putting a condom on a mule. It was an extremely tight fit, and with icy fingers and darkness all around, tt took over an hour.
We stood back in the frozen quiet to admire our work. There it was. home sweet home. It was a half dome of thin material that looked like a good gust of wind would send it into the trees.
I was raw and numb from the cold. Banging stakes into snow drifts 20 feet deep isn’t easy work.
I was ill prepared for this weather. I was wearing leather high tops and every step I took was a plunge into the frosty depths. Pulling my leg out was like trying to pull a suction cup off of a wet pane of glass.
I was cold, but sweating under my winter layers of sweat shirts and sweaters. I felt like a snake who wanted to shed his skin and leave it somewhere. Snow was melting inside my shoes, as droplets of thawing tundra ran down my ankles. It tickled, but at the same time it burned a frozen pain into my frayed nerve endings.
I climbed into the tent and stared at the roof three inches from my nose. Claustrophobia was the decorating theme of the night. This thin insulation against the elements was not very reassuring. It was like sleeping with a blanket made of toilet tissue. Needless to say that was the worst night of my life. Sleep was nowhere near my conscious mind thanks to the prevailing thoughts of the ski-police finding us frozen stiff in our tiny little hut of death.
I envisaged the evening news cast devoted to our stupidity. I saw some puffy faced Eskimo doing a live shot from the front of our camp saying something like:
“Marsha officials wonder if these two young men might not have had some sort of mentally debilitating accident on the ski hill earlier in the day. The question on everyone’s mind is how anyone could could be stupid enough to think they could camp in that flimsy thing and expect to live?”
It was a legitimate question.
How were we staying alive? Well we were wearing 4 layers of clothing. It was keeping us just warm enough and giving us that sexy stay puff marshmallow man look that ski bunnies go for.
We laid down in the tent to sleep. I felt the brick of hamburger to see if it had melted.
It was harder than frozen marble. I think a tear may have swelled in my eye, but I couldn’t tell because my face was numb.
Cold and fatigue and hunger were beating me down. I started to hallucinate inside the darkening blue of the tent. I imagined waddling into the lodge and pulling off layer after layer. With each shirt or pair of sweat pants discarded another snow bunny would drop her jaw in horror.
We were a ratty, smelly mess with no money or real place to stay. The chance of meeting girls was about as likely as lighting a candle in a monsoon.
At this point, Vegas had odds on us dying at 2:1
The night was a living hell. I tossed and turned relentlessly dreaming of frozen Godzilla lizards roaming the streets of Tokyo killing and maiming multi layered idiots.
I was exhausted. It should have been easy to sleep but the multi layers of clothing was throwing off my equilibrium. Beside the fact that my sweat shirts were damp, I couldn’t lay on my back because I kept wobbling from side to side.
If there are normally 8 hours in a night, this night was 20 hours long. It was hideous and cold and dangerous.
I don’t think I ever wanted to see a sunrise so badly in my life. Not only would light rejuvenate my spirit, but the sun might cast warmth upon my face. My goal was to put the burger in the sun and defrost it so we could eat.
Great plans are often difficult to achieve. This plan was neither great or achievable.
With no breakfast or shower or bathroom to occupy our wake up ritual, we decided to head to the slopes and get an early start on day 2.
Skiing on numb limbs is not very effective. It’s hard to keep your skis under you and find your edge on the ice when you have zero blood flow to your feet.
We tried to check out the chicks, but our eyes were blood shot. We tried to have fun, but our brains were bruised. We wanted to drink at the bar, but we didn’t bring enough money to waste on random cocktails now.
Like two lost souls wandering through a desert of helplessness, we watched the sun creep across the interminable blue sky.
As it sank lower in the sky, so did our spirits. In the forefront of our mind we knew another night was approaching.
How could we survive?
By late afternoon my spirit was lower than the violin player on the sinking Titanic.
With the sun glowing orange, dipping behind the peaks, Adam and I were on the ski lift silently ascending the mountain. I was depressed and unsure If I could survive another night of frozen torture.
“We are going to hit happy hour and we ain’t budging all night long,” I said to Adam definitively.
I didn’t need to say another word. He knew to live, we had to do this.
It’s amazing how not dieing can brighten your spirits. We hit the hills hard a few more times trying to make the most of this incredible vacation opportunity.
“INCREDIBLE VACATION OPPORTUNITY”
Did I just say that? I did. Amazing how a brain saturated with frost bite and a belly gurgling with starvation can alter reality.
So that evening it was on. We were going to party like it was 1999. We entered the Ski Pole lodge; a quaint little wooden structure that had an open hearth fire place in the middle of the room. Attractive patrons were located beside the stone fire place eating, drinking and dancing. It was just what the doctor ordered.
We sat down, examined our wallets and decided we needed to save all the money we had for drinks. The decision was a simple one.
ALL YOU CAN EAT SALAD BAR.
This choice would accomplish two things. First it would assure us of filling our bellies. Secondly it would let us stay in the warm cozy bar, long after we ran out of money.
To me staying in the bar was the goal. To stay in the bar, meant to stay warm. To stay warm, all we had to do was maintain a seat at the table, and keep eating. It’s an all you can eat salad bar. A = B = C. It ain’t brain surgery, right?
The first few hours went by uneventfully. We were eating radishes and mushrooms and eating croutons covered with bleu cheese dressing. It was heaven, and certainly easier than defrosting a burger brick with a coleman stove.
While we ate, we also downed pitcher loads of beer.
Within hours, we had run out of money. It didn’t take long for the waitress to start hating us. She wanted us to leave. She had pointed us out to the manager quietly alerting him that we were not buying beer anymore.
But we were eating customers.
Still, I was getting nervous. Visions of being tossed into the snow made me break out in a cold sweat.
We needed a plan and fast. I knew they wanted to replace us at the table and get some alcohol purchasing customers into our spot. Not only were we not pleasant smelling, but we looked like homeless people in a rich man’s play ground. We were bad for business on so many levels it was mind boggling.
I didn’t care. We needed to stay on point. We couldn’t afford to make a mistake.
“We need a plan, Adam.”
His face was filled with stress that frozen people show when they don’t want to freeze anymore.
“We need to keep eating and eating and eating until there is no more lettuce in that big salad bowl,” I said.
In hindsight, this is a terrible plan. I mean, really. Eat and Eat and Eat at the bottomless salad bar, solely to maintain two seats at a table inside a warm lodge? Sadly, that’s the only plan I could muster. Surprisingly, Adam was on board.
He quickly began piling another huge serving on his plate. He created a six inch high mountain of lettuce and radishes and green peppers. It was exquisite.
This strategy worked well for about an hour. The waitress would come by and ask us if we wanted another drink, and we’d say no, that’s o.k., we’re just going to finish this bottomless pile of greens and rabbit food.
She’d walk away shaking her head. Her smile was long since gone and she saw us as some kind of food lepers stealing tips from her pocket.
When I formulated this plan, I figured, we’ll eat and eat and eat. The problem is, I never took into account that eventually we’d get full.
OH NO.
After our fourth helping of salad, it was becoming painfully obvious that we couldn’t eat anymore. We were nauseated and bloated like stuffed pigs.
I looked at Adam with a painful obese look on my face. “Yo dude, I’m way too full to eat anymore of this lettuce crap. I think we’re gonna have to give up.”
Adam eye balled the manager who was now watching our every move. I looked into Adam’s eyes and I saw controlled panic. Adam sensed the life or death urgency of the situation. It was either salad or death. Death or salad. There were no other options.
Adam exhaled deeply as he pushed himself away from the table.
“Where the hell you going?” I asked nervously.
With a look of determination he says, “Andy we’ve got to keep eating. Since there is no room left in my stomach for that, there’s only one answer.”
He put his index finger in his throat and began to gag.
Without saying another word, he headed straight to the restroom.
His plan, though demented was brilliant in its single minded focus. To stay warm, we had to continue eating. To keep eating he needed to empty his stomach. To empty his stomach, he needed to induce vomiting. Sad to be sure, but a plan it was.
I stared as he walked into the men’s room carrying a salad dish with him. This is a sorry state of events I thought to myself.
Adam returned in a few minutes with a smile on his face. I knew what he had just done and it made me laugh out loud.
Adam took his plate and moved to the salad bar and began heaping another mountain of rabbit food onto his plate.
I buried my head in my hands and started laughing into the table cloth.
As the Gods of good fortune would have it, we ended up meeting a couple of snow bunnies, and we didn’t have to spend our final night in that frozen nylon death camp.
On the way home, bleary eyed and sadly satisfied, I grabbed the brick of hamburger that was gouged deeply from where I stabbed it with a tent stake.
I remember screaming at it, then throwing it out the window onto the highway.
I watched in my rear view mirror as it bounced and rolled into the culvert.
Some forest critter is going to get a hold of this and never understand what it took to get this frozen chunk of burger here.
To be young and stupid and crazy. That is what makes this such a great country.
I have a picture of Adam and me in that tent in the snow in despair in the woods. It makes me laugh now.