It appears that, much like the boy that cries wolf, my thick veneer of sarcasm might occasionally cause people to mistake my sincerity for flippancy. So, just for the record, and to get the mundane details out of the way;

Sunday morning, March 13th, 2005. Benjie and I get to the 'wood and head up for another day of riding. It's just us two so far, although Becky and Bryan are meeting up with us as soon as they arrive. We take accursed chair 7 up and over to 6 from the not-so-secret lot, then take a warmup down the main run and through the park and pipe. We get to the bottom and go up to do it again. On the lift, or pehaps just before, I quiz Benjie about his bindings' forward lean. I don't have any to my new Drakes at the moment, but it occurs to me that he and Chris¹ both do. Ben says he has his set about halfway forward, so I decide to try this out. It requires really jamming your foot in there good and cranking down hard on your bindings. I set it up and head down, with the (standard) agreement with Ben that we'll meet at the top of the park.

Forward lean is pretty great. It angles and grabs your foot and lower leg in a way that gives power and decisiveness to your carving. It will also quickly cut off your circulation, which is why when you ride that way, the tendency is to not only unstrap one foot for the downtime of lift riding, but loosen your other foot as well.

Unfortunately, about halfway down 6 - to the right of the trees which are to the right of the slow sign - I hit a patch of icy moguls. I decided to ride through it and speed-check when I got out - no matter how sharp my factory-tuned edges and no matter how responsive my kickass bindings are, ice is a bitch. Unfortunately, I got launched off one mogul, lost it in the air, and came down, ass first and going fast, on the next one.

Snap crackle pop spine krispies.

I didn't know right away, of course. I took a minute to shake off the fall. Then I took another minute. A skiier stopped above me to keep me from being run over. I managed to sit up, although it hurt. At this point, my feet were killing me, so I reached down to unstrap my bindings. Oops. Pain so severe that I ended up right back on my back. It was around this point the skiier asked "are you ok?" and I had to say "Uhh, I don't know." He called (or had someone call) ski patrol.

Montage: Phone calls, ski patrol, oxygen masks, gurneys, xrays, IV mishaps, morphine, concerned friends, ambulance, ER, a doctor sticks his finger up my ass (is it Friday already?), CAT scan, hospital bed, auto-morphine, insomnia, jell-o, vicodin, back brace.

The long and the short of it is that I have a compression fracture of the spine. Spine chunklet T12 go smoosh. Spill out a bit towards the back of the spine, but not enough to require surgery or, you know, paralyze me. I'm sitting around the house out on disability for probably 3 months total, or a little more than two more. Doc says take it easy this summer, but I'll be back on the slopes come next winter.

I feel very lucky.


1. Who, if you throw in Jon, make up the Snowboarding Samurai (I was high, we were wearing facemasks, Burton has that Ronin thing going on . . . shut up), who among my friends are my only real peers, ability-wise, on the slopes.