Drama on the ice

The Winter Olympics 2010 is on at Vancouver. Seated in the tropics, what better way to symbolize the spirit of participation than coax a few words out of my own misadventures in snow from a few years back?

It was the winter of 2004. I was stationed in a customer site in, yet again, a small town in Northern Japan. I don't know if it is their language or work culture, but global warming seems to keep away from this country. The two winters that I have experienced there were both brutal and unforgiving. As a die hard Chennai-ite, the only time that I ever came in contact with ice, besides licking ice cream that is, was while defrosting our 165L workhorse of a Kelvinator refrigerator. You remember that? Yes, the coolest one. If the thermometer so much as dipped below 25, I'd feel highly uncomfortable and when it did go below 20 during the early mornings of the few non-summer months, I'd be involuntarily feeling for the second blanket to stave off onset of frost bite. I mean, as a tribe, we call 35deg C as pleasant as long as we have a ceiling fan spinning overhead. So for someone with this background, plus the 3 years of surviving Arizona's summers, being pitchforked into the frozen boonies in rural Japan was, to say the least, a thermal shock. Well, one has got to be a Jap in Japan. Or atleast try to be one. I soldiered on, braving blizzards, slippery roads and knee deep snow en route to work, to get something to eat and whatever else that I had to take care of in the great frozen outdoors.

It must have been the fact that I didn't miss a day's work even when it had snowed 8" overnight. Perhaps it was the fact that I did not slip or fall while walking on ice even while wearing my sneakers with a balding sole. I'm not sure what convinced them about my athletic abilities of the winter sport kind, but it came to pass one fine morning when the customer that I was working with on that project, Mrs. I, walked up to me at the cafeteria and asked if I would be interested in joining her and her husband for a day of fun in the ice the following weekend. Since she knew where I was from, I checked if she was indeed talking about defrosting her fridge. No, I'm just kidding. What she had in mind was taking me to the nearby ski resort for a day of skiing. But what does a Chennai-ite know about mobility on snow? The last time that I tried to get from point A to B (~10 yards, in my case) on snow on an early spring night in Boston, I nearly froze myself after falling into a slush (with my leather jacket on) and had a sumptuous Mexican dinner afterwards. So I always maintain a respectful distance from anything cold and slippery. Yet, it was the customer that was asking me and as I was given to believe, early on in my career, that the customer is always right. In the event that they are wrong, they are still right. So in the interest of customer satisfaction (a corporate level value), I agreed to go with them. Hell, I said yes just as soon as she had offered. But I had this nagging uneasiness as the day approached.

Just like the rest of her countrymen, she was punctual and turned up at my hotel lobby at 7am even as I was fighting with myself to appear like someone who had been awake and looking forward to this moment. Both of which I was clearly not. The husband, differently abled in English, was a high-school math teacher and given my general numerical abilities, the conversation was minimal. We drove through scenic countryside and in quick time arrived at the resort.

How does a tropic-vasi prepare for a day out when the temperature was 6 degrees below freezing? Well, I took our family tradition of wearing a sweater for an evening show in Chennai in June and extrapolated it to the climes that I found myself in. I had about 4 layers of clothing under my snow jacket that I had bought a few days earlier. I even took enough care to bring along my woollen monkey cap. In other words, I looked like an oversized rag doll. The couple were near professionals and were fitted out right for the day and owned all equipment. So I waddled over to the rental counter and added an additional layer of clothing and was issued with a pair of ski blades, poles and goggles. I looked every bit your regular skier except for any actual skills or experience. Let the show begin!

The husband, who must be a very patient teacher, spent nearly an hour with me on a stretch that can be called a slope in the same manner that Y Gee Mahendran is a comedian. An hour that he could have spent taming exhilarating slopes in his wife's company. To my credit, in that period, I went from being extremely clumsy to only clumsy. Satisfied with my progress, the master put me through the first solo trip.

Sometimes a set of words that you have read many times over suddenly makes sense when you are reading them on a lazy afternoon. That is when you actually 'get it'. Call it a moment of clarity or realization but that experience hands you knowledge. At that instant, you know what you didn't until then. Well, during my first solo trip, I had the same revelation about Mr. Newton's first law of motion which runs thus: A body (or a man) continues in its state of rest or state of continuous motion unless acted on by a force. I was in my state of rest until I got drafted into ski duties and once I was on the slope, in all its mildness, I entered the said state of continuous motion. Which is not a bad thing if it were not for a bunch of kids who were directly in my path of uncontrolled continuous motion. While I had all the intentions, my Japanese at that point was not mature enough to ask them to flee from approaching danger. Nor was my technique developed enough to bring myself to a stop. So I let out a sequence of full throated "Tasukete kudasai!" Which means, er, help please. Not a good choice, you may notice, under the circumstances. A few of the innocent ones, those that actually paid attention to me, rolled up their sleeves and attempted to arrest my motion. Things came to an end in a melee of flailing arms, equipment and various items of winter clothing. Luckily, towards the end of the dramatic sequence, there was no blood on the snow; only a few disheveled kids swearing to watch out for me in future and their parents who were keen on not missing an opportunity to showcase the richness of the Japanese language in cursing.

The master and his consort, in spite of watching this episode, hurriedly pronounced me proficient to take on some actual slopes. Customer satisfaction, remember? We went to the cable car station. They were benches on which you sit with your skis on and at the summit, you jump off the car and slide to the top of the slope. Fueled by an intense wave of self preservation and in blatant violation of corporate values, I defied their request and refused to go down that slope. I mean it was an open invitation for danger. Unconvinced by their verbal assurances, I stood at the edge of the slope unsure of my next course of action to reach the safety of the lower altitudes. After long deliberation, I refused to take the plunge and instead chose to come down that slope in the cable car and wait for them at the cafeteria. The embarrassment? Only the injured came down by the cable car. It took me a while to convince the guys manning the cable car station below that the only bruised entity in that car was my ego and nothing else. I sat in the comfort of the cafeteria and nursed a cup of hot chocolate, wondering how the rest of the day would play out.

After they had come down the slope, the husband sought me out and immediately yanked me out to the original training slope and went to work on my technique. In his opinion, for some reason, he likened me to a near finished product that required only a few final touches while in reality, I was nothing more than a lump of raw material. He suggested a few changes to my posture, push and two solo slides down the slope later, declared for the second time that I was ready.

We then proceeded to take another cable car up a second mountain side. This ride was much longer than the previous one and though I wouldn't exactly call it a tall peak, there was a board warning people of low flying aircraft. You know that I was making that last part up. But it was much taller than peak no. 1 and the gathering darkness didn't do anything to ease my growing apprehensions. I stood at the edge faced with the cold logic that I still did not know how to ski in spite of their coaching efforts. That was when the teacher, in the ultimate gesture of ski-kindness, offered to "guide" me down; which would mean holding on to his hips while he skied down the slope slowly. I meditated on the offer and what it held. Yes, it was a risky proposition alright. Not to mention the prospect of holding on to, in my opinion, a sensitive part of a man's anatomy. Yet, it would give me the once chance to get bragging rights till it is my turn to keep my grandkids amused as they prepared for bedtime. Moreover, who knows if life, the way I knew it, would hand me yet another chance to actually come out to rural Japan, in winter, with strong enough limbs and willing teachers. So I decided that it was worth the risk that it came laced with.

Thus began our slow descent in what was clearly a very embarrassing posture. While I may not be a champion skier, I can hold my fort when it came down to the art of clinging on to dear life under extenuating circumstances. I held on to him in a fashion that could have made him turn blue from lack of circulation and his wife green with jealousy. We had made good progress and things were going fine till about half way point. Emboldened by the fact that I hadn't fallen down, he increased the pace by just a notch and I took a nasty fall right away. If there is a second purpose to the ski blades, besides aiding motion, lending balance or whatever they are supposed to offer, it is that they deny the learning skier a good, comforting fall. Robbing the beginner of any bodily grace that may be possible in a moment already laden with enough insult and potential injury. Right after the fall, my body and the blades held diverging flight paths, each hindering the other's progress. My right knee, by virtue of being attached organically to the rest of my body and synthetically to the ski blade, wasn't entirely decided on which side to take, and got twisted badly in the process. I came to a rest in a heap of metal and extremities.

As my hosts and a few skiers by gathered around to extricate me from my new found intimacy with powdered snow, the question foremost on my crowded mind was: What are we doing for dinner? For, my faculties had started coming back by then and I registered hunger, cold and pain, in that order. The ski blades were made to come off, tenacious snow was patted off my hair and then began damage assessment. Except for the right knee that was paining (but not swollen), I was found to be OK. I was helped on to my feet as getting up on my own efforts sent jabs of pain. I did a MK Gandhi-on-his-way-to-prayer and came hobbling down the slope on one knee, with one arm around the husband's shoulder and the other around the wife's.

The rest of the story was a series of exchanges between us - their expressing their bad feeling about making me go through this and my assuring them that all is well. I was sitting in the rear of the car, legs stretched and the twisted knee resting on the seat as we sped towards the nearest Pakistani-Indian restaurant. My second attempt at skiing also had, in equal measure, elements of drama, bodily harm and culminated in a sumptuous meal.

All I wanted to say was: Had a minor ski injury in 2004, did fine. But it was a very long weekend here...