Travel Diaries #30 - Revelstoke
Winter, snowboarding, first taste of freedom and a life of searching for transcendence
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Autumn
I arrived in high autumn, the last day of October, the seasons rapidly collapsing as I travelled by bus from the extended end-of-summer I’d spent a few weeks strolling through in Vancouver. The Greyhound left Vancouver at 5 or 6am, passing first through the city sprawl, then farmlands with grand long primary-coloured sheds, then the first ascent into mountains near the town of Hope, down again and into the desert-bare rolling valleys and vineyards and river-lakes of Kelowna, the landscape rollercoaster winding up before catapulting into the alpine trees and mountains and more mountains beyond that would take us into Revelstoke. I slept through most of it as I believed the journey to be superfluous to my destination, and to be fair, given the grim nature of trans-continental public transport in North America, and the scale of everything that would come into my life after it, in this case, it probably was.
The town of Revelstoke (locally and affectionately known as ‘Revy’) lay in a flat valley on the edge of the expansive and glacial Columbia river, surrounded in every direction by mountains, huge mountains, their peaks already white, just like I’d imagined or had seen in a picture, from afar, from the past, and yet so, so, very different once I saw them up close. The evergreen forests appeared brown under the dull grey skies, in part due to my own innocent eyes which saw them as the mere hills I was used to at home. Even there in front of me I couldn’t comprehend just how big they were.
The Kiwi lads I’d met in Vancouver picked me up from the bus station. They’d offered me the spare room in their house to rent, which I’d share with themselves and a couple more of their friends from New Zealand’s, all of us in the same year-long visa boat, their offer to house me one which they may or may not have been so sure I’d actually end up accepting so readily. Nonetheless, I was young, naïve and enthusiastic about the possibilities of the world, the people I could meet, the improbable magic which might spark my year abroad into life from around any corner I might stumble around, no matter how small and obscure the location; and so here I was, accepting the call to move to a tiny mountain town in rural Canada, a place which I hadn’t even heard of just six weeks before.
My new home was a hundred-year-old townhouse on Downie Street, a mile’s meander left and right down some pleasant right-angled and white-picketed suburban streets from the old frontier-style downtown, the City of Revelstoke having served mostly as a logging town and a stopover on the Trans-Canada Highway prior to the recent construction of the local ski resort. A small selection of local bars, cafes, ski shops and restaurants populated the downtown, where cars rolled through at a rate of about one a minute. Quaint features like the local cinema or railway museum were gently dotted here and there, supermarkets and gas stations flanked the highways running around its peripheries. In the basement of the house my industrious new housemates had built a bar, dubbed The Rusty Nail, a place which it became apparent over the coming weeks and months was known widely around town as one of the go-to places for winter house parties, stories of which would still be whispered in the modern town lore at closing time in pubs when I returned almost a decade later, though the story of my return is a footnote for another time.
I found a job labouring on a construction site where they were building luxury apartments at the foot of the ski hill, just a couple of miles outside town. The site was full of Aussies, Kiwis and Canadians who, like me, had just arrived in town for the winter to snowboard (unlike other ski towns I’ve bummed around in, I don’t think I met a single skier over the whole winter in Revelstoke; Canada is snowboarding territory, and perhaps – now that I think of it and all inter-disciplinary banter aside – far, far better off for it), and gruff middle-aged local men who smoked massive amounts of the potent local B.C. Bud out of pipes in their pickup trucks at 11 o’clock tea break, and again at 1 o’clock lunch break. I’ve no idea how they managed it, especially when we were putting down paving stones on eighth floor balconies where they’d yet to fit the rails, minus any harnesses or safety equipment, though it seemed that the easy-going but effusive people of Beautiful British Columbia tended to smoke weed like we’d go for a coffee back home.
The work day done I began to settle into life in a Canadian mountain town with my new housemates and a growing band of friends and acquaintances. We’d jump in the pickup to follow winding roads up the mountains to drink beers around smouldering bonfires. Pints in the local bars on the weekends with the latest big snowboarding movies looping on the TVs in place of Premier League football. Games of curling at the local hockey rink. All of the things familiar but just a little bit different. A bear popped his head around the corner of the gable wall of the house while one of the lads was out having a smoke. Fat snowflakes the size of two-dollar coins began falling, closing the doors on the outside world.
There was a palpable energy in the air, and when the snow began to fall it didn’t stop, as if the ceiling were collapsing from a small hole and then the whole house imploding into it. Every day new faces popping up about town, calling into the Rusty Nail through one mutual acquaintance or another. Again, everyone in the same boat: here for the winter. Mostly from Australia, some from New Zealand, many from other parts of Canada. The Canadians had usually left Ontario, (i.e. Toronto) or Quebec to come find their fortunes in the wild west; some to snowboard, many more to mountain bike, or rock climb, or fight forest fires, or chop down trees, or just float on the lakes, just to taste the freedom that the winds of this part of the world possessed all by themselves, without any further need for hectic activity.
The last days of autumn. Grey turned to white, days shortened to nothing. The transition was quick, the seasons themselves more distinct than I’ve ever witnessed before or since, just like they taught you in schoolbooks, but which never materialised in real life according to the neatly defined months, certainly not in the west of Ireland anyway. Autumn – winter - spring - summer; grey – white – grey – green and blue and every other colour you could think of.
The approach of winter relentless. The town changed within days; the surrounding peaks already covered. But it wasn’t winter yet – The Hill wasn’t open. Locals were enterprising, especially when it came to resisting nature, and fighting back against it and shaping it. Parties in makeshift halfpipes and bowls in backyards around the town. A crew assembled one afternoon in our garden to build a ramp, the snowpack at this point already reaching halfway to the roof. A few adventurous souls climbed out my first-floor bedroom window, strapped into their boards and slid down the roof, dropping into the garden below. Beers were had. Enthusiasm was building. Every weekend new faces, new parties, the orphan ex-pat family growing with an intelligence of its own. There was nowhere else to be now, the bright lights and assumed potential of the drizzly city of Vancouver were a distant memory.
“It’s just like home!” I exclaimed, naively, innocently, exuberantly. By which I meant: a small country town full of pent-up energy to be channelled only into devilment, mischief, hedonism and the land. But unlike many such places there was an outlet here for all the crackle of effervescent potential of those with youthful dreams of freedom: The Hill was about to open; winter was here.
Winter
Smoking small Canadian cigarettes at the back door of the house through November, I could see the snow falling on ‘The Ski Hill’ – the two and a half thousand metre Mount Mackenzie – and the shape forming of the whitening pistes carved through the trees which rose most of the way up its sides like a turtle-necked winter jumper, the steel wires of the gondola and chair-lift system visible stretching from the base up the ridgeline to the right.
All I could do was wonder, for I had no real idea what lay in store when it opened. My understanding of snowboarding had been limited to the few family holidays I’d been on as a teenager, already a distant memory of adolescence in places which I uncharacteristically never bothered to remember the names of. Riding pistes, falling over, trying to sneak beers and shots of Jagermeister and shift women in Austrian après bars. I was never any good at it (the snowboarding or any of the rest of it) though I thoroughly enjoyed it (ibid). It was the sort of thing where no matter how bad you were, there was an addictive quality where you just wanted to keep getting back up and trying again. Go five metres, fall over, laugh, get back up (with great difficulty) and go six metres. The reward is relative to your skill level, as long as you go a little bit further each time it gives you a greater thrill than you’ve ever experienced, and unlike, say, surfing, you don’t have to wait all day for the next wave to come. Once you’re up the mountain (with the added technological convenience of a chairlift to take you there), the only way is down. Whether you make your way down gracefully or skilfully, the thrill of the ride against gravity is still there.
Opening weekend obliterated all prior things.
The feeling of riding on dry snow several feet deep is akin to riding on a cloud, or a magic carpet. It is difficult to describe or to get across why exactly this is a good thing, though the giddy joy so effervescent that childish laughter was the only reaction my body could muster, a feeling that I’d in recent years mostly experienced while intoxicated at music concerts, spoke for itself, like a child playing in the garden it needed no further articulation of its goodness. There’s an art also to finding your own line down the mountain, at once restrained by the flow of the terrain and the snow but limited then only by your imagination, your skill and your mastery of fear. Skiing may have been around for centuries as a means of functional transportation; but surfers knew when they took their boards to frozen mountains that it could be more than mere function or pleasure; this was an integration of the physical and the creative, the body and the spirit synchronising to obliterate the mind (which is not killed by fear – it is an expression of fear).
In short it was a path to transcendence.
In the earlier days of winter the last I’d see of our growing gang of friends was after getting off the first chairlift. “There’s no friends on pow days” goes the saying, meaning that if you can’t keep up, no-one’s going to slow themselves down to wait around for you when there’s fresh snow to be had. Everyone was on their own journey and often the best thing to do to help another is to let them fail and make their own way. I couldn’t keep up. One opening day memory is being so exhausted from trying to stand up again – and failing – by pushing myself up in two foot deep snow up to my shoulders, on all fours like a prostrate new born calf, gasping from dehydration and possibly too many cans of Brava the night before, and giving into the temptation of the dying man in the desert, to drink from the oasis that’s only a mirage, I began to eat the abundant snow that was slowly swallowing me whole and sapping the life from me, in a desperate attempt to rehydrate myself. Some friends saw me from the overhead chairlift, my nickname ‘The Antelope’ – which I’d acquired before ever even stepping foot on a snowboard in an equally un-coordinated attempt at a pre-season game of curling – was sealed.
On Christmas Day I ended up lost in an off-piste section of whited-out forest. The descent flattened out and I rode gently into a bowl with no exit, a snowboarder’s nightmare. The haunting inhale of Idioteque’s synths playing in the earphone in my left ear, before my phone died in the sub-zero conditions. I unstrapped, clambering out of the bunker in snow up to my thighs. It took me a half hour to claw my way, one humbling step and crawl at a time, back to the relative safety of the resort bounds. In that time though, in that isolated white of the forest, I could see nothing, the sound of silence like outer space more powerful than I’d ever experienced, the most beautiful feeling of being utterly lost, and utterly alone.
***
The town appeared quiet in winter, at a passing glance. The environment nothing but white noise. Stacks of snow several metres high from overnight dumps would be ploughed into neat walls down the middle and sides of the neatly-gridded streets. Darkness held firm until 8am or later, returning around 3:30 in the afternoon in mid-winter. Behind closed doors, though the world was as alive as it ever could be. I’d worried there wouldn’t be enough vibrancy in such a place compared to a bustling city like Vancouver. A small town with a large transient winter population of travellers, ex-pats and ski-bums, a chaotic population in a traditional order, the collective heart of the town was wide-open, and what it lacked in the breadth of the city it made up for in depth, not just of the snow but the possibilities to meet and get to know people. By Irish standards, it lacked in quantity of pubs, though the Last Drop and the Regent Hotel heaved several nights a week. Big name DJs toured the ski-town circuit. The questionable drill of B.C. dubstep and Aussie hip-hop soundtracked house parties raging on any given night of the week, all-comers welcomed with open arms and swigs from hipflasks of Fireball cinnamon-flavoured whiskey, though everyone tended to know someone anyway. There was a camaraderie and openness amongst the people there that came with the journey to the world’s extremes to find the ultimate freedom.
Work dried up at the construction site, and I was just as glad really. Working 9-5 doing heavy labour would take up too much of my time and attention from my newfound purpose in life, which was strenuous enough as it was. I got a job baking bread and working in the deli of a local supermarket. My typical day involved getting up, putting on my ski gear and trekking a few blocks to catch the bus up to The Hill, riding laps until lunchtime, getting the bus back and quickly getting changed to rush into work for the afternoon shift, where I’d work until the store closed at 9pm.
By night we drank, at two-dollar beer nights at the pub, or more often at the more local watering-hole of the Rusty Nail, which I’d regularly come home from work to find humming with friends and strangers cheersing cans of beer, waxing snowboards, watching snowboarding movies, sharing stories and making fast friends. Adventurous adrenaline drenaline junkies tend to enjoy many vices, a life of spiritual hedonism in a world where transcendence in whatever form is the only goal, night-time flurries of snow being one thing that would put them to bed, to put down one substance so that they could resume their addictions in the morning, this time in channelling their energies into something bigger, something more beautiful than any earthly pleasures, the godly rush of speeding through trees, hitting pillow stacks and careening off cliffs, carving lines in knee-deep snow, way up in the clouds, the closest place on earth to heaven, up on The Hill.
Within a few weeks I realised it had been a long, long time since I loved anything as much as this daily ritual I’d found myself pursuing. High-speed powder runs through forests, dodging trees, shooting through narrow gullies, hitting jumps and dropping off cliffs, finding lines, every run a unique adventure, a Super Mario speed run in a state of pure flow. In those moments on The Hill, I came to know a peaceful bliss which I hadn’t felt since a time in childhood I couldn’t quite place, only in the hazy memories of exploring overgrown gardens, games of football or hide-and-seek with no end on summer nights, or in the virtual worlds of adventure games. On the wilds of the mountain, fighting nature in a very real way, this was more real than any of it, and it was in the here and now.
Avalanches, to many the fantastical stuff of Road-Runner cartoons, were a real thing, a genuine threat on the mountains, and forcing road closures to the only roads in and out of town. We were literally snowed into the valley with a frequency at times of every other day. In the early morning distant explosions could be heard down in the town; after heavy snowfalls mountain rangers dropped grenades from zip lines onto the in-resort bowls to trigger avalanches, leaving only harder-packed snow for riders to plough through with somewhat greater safety. Tragic stories of avalanche casualties from locally and around the province would come through over the winter months, the cause of death suffocation or drowning if they were lucky, blunt-force trauma from being carried over cliffs if they weren’t.
The sombre thought that at least they most likely died doing what they loved more than anything else in the world, it would be unthinkable that the souls of those faithful departed were anywhere else but with God, eternally.
***
People came, people went, the family enlarged and shrunk according to its inherently transient nature. Its spirit remained the same. Ride, work, party, repeat. The quest for the divine is thirsty, energy-sapping work, and despite its obvious rewards it takes a toll on the soul. For a couple of weeks in February there was a drought – no snow at all. The whole town drank heavily in this time, parties raged for days, I’d nip home from work for lunch and a gang would be dressed up in fancy dress outfits fished out of the thrift-store hamper we kept in the bar. With no snow forthcoming everyone had gone a bit loopy, you could see it in their eyes. Winter was long and dark. Once access to heaven was cut off, beneath the layers of dextrous genius once channelled into sanity-defying stunts, everyone was quietly going a bit mad. We were stuck there, on the path, for better or worse, us tortured artists disconnected from our work, and it showed.
There were accidents and mishaps, of course. When you push yourself to your limits in what is known to the general population as an ‘extreme’ sport – not to mention the aggressive weather conditions and hardcore mountain terrain – it was all a bit, well, dangerous. Torn shoulders, twisted knees, bruised ribs, broken tailbones, one lad tore his calf muscle off the bone – and these were just injuries my own group of friends suffered from over the winter. Some, like the broken tailbone (on day 3 of winter), or the separated calf (a month from the end), were season-ending. My own contribution to the list was a bloody and probably broken nose I suffered while attempting backflips on a DIY ramp in the side country with some friends; and the same again on another day after I crashed face first at speed into a tree down a steep and narrow gully in an isolated section of trees. One time I made a flailing backsplash through 40 feet of air after taking on a roller at too great a speed, before sliding 50 metres down the hill; once I’d plucked up the courage to go at top speed it inadvertently happened again. I rose both times in a state of mild shock, though mercifully unscathed thanks to my helmet absorbing shocks from the ice which would otherwise have surely knocked me out cold.
But you recovered, and when you went at it again, you went hard.
Powder days. Floating on wide open bowls. First tracks on pistes. Side hits and fast tree runs. Cliff drops. Groomer bombs on perfect corduroy. After-hill parties and stories, rounding the height of your cliff drop up to the nearest multiple of five, as all surfers do with waves – at this time of day, nobody cares, all bragging was graciously accepted and encouraged. Next time you’ll go faster, harder, you’ll leave it all behind on The Hill.
“If all your friends jumped off cliff, would you?”
So our parents asked us growing up. Now I know that I would. For sometimes it’s the only way to better yourself, by seeing what’s possible and pushing beyond the limits of what you ever thought reasonable. Perfect flow runs through the tension of the line between success and failure.
If you don’t die, you live.
And as long as you live, you’re alive.
***
Revelstoke was the first place I experienced a true winter, not the nebulous variety we endure year-round in the west of Ireland. My first silent retreat. Life in an isolated world, a snowglobe, the world black and white. Cut off from the rest of the world. No escape. The monotony of the sheer white landscape, featureless, reflecting all light away so that all that’s left is what’s within. Snowblind, lost in a silent woods, for the whole winter. All eyes on The Hill and the pursuit of finding the perfect line, existence on the edge of your abilities and your sanity.
Perfection is relative to your abilities, always just out of reach. I caught glimpses of it, we all did. Always close enough to touch from where you’re standing, all of us, just out of reach, a fingertip away. Another line, another run, another day. One more turn – just one more – and you might get there, like the gold at the end of a rainbow, always tantalisingly within touching distance, you’ll make it there, next time. Just one more run and you’ll be satisfied.
Then you will truly be alive.
I didn’t leave the town for about five months that winter, though even if I could have gone somewhere, I’d nowhere else to be. Groundhog Day was real. Get up, go to The Hill, make a desperate attempt at creative, physical and spiritual transcendence, go to work, drink a few beers, sleep, repeat.
We were snowed-in but we dreamt of flying. Stepping onto the blank canvas of the mountain every morning our worlds were wide open, every day was the same old day where anything could happen, an endless winter where you could become whatever you could will into existence, just you, your board and The Hill.
And on those mountains, we were all free.
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