Chapter 15 #2
Shane and Jon sheltered under the wing of the absent Arlo Oliver, Bram’s largest and most important investor.
Shane was beaming, he and Jon exchanging smug grins at getting first tracks.
Ensuring someone skilled was uphill and downhill for Russ was designed to please Dave, his father’s next largest investor, who nodded and said, “Great idea, Bram, looking out for the boys.” Pike, as the smallest investor, was last to all but Bram, gracious host, and Steve, paid to be there.
Pike grimaced before taming his expression and managing a flat, “Whatever. Fine.”
The group busied themselves removing the skins from the bottom of their skis that had allowed them to hike uphill, carefully placing glue sides together before rolling them tight and packing them.
Their heels, unfastened to make uphill travel possible, were dutifully locked into bindings for descent.
They made sure their backpacks had airbag triggers accessible; flipped on avalanche beacons; radios, switched to the correct channels, sent verifying beeps and static, Steve flitting between them to make sure they were doing it all correctly.
At the chosen spot, the group paused in a lull of anticipation. Then Shane poled himself to the Bowl’s edge. With a smile he said, “Here goes nothing,” and dropped in.
As one, the group leaned over to watch. The initial drop was steep enough that at first they couldn’t see him, but within seconds Shane was visible, arcing clean turns through the open snow.
“Yeah!” Jon pumped a fist in the air. “He’s killing it.”
“Beautiful,” Dave agreed.
When Shane stopped at the grove of trees, he made a happy whoop noise and shook his poles in the air triumphantly. Without a word, Jon followed.
The group on the ridge unconsciously released an appreciative sigh at the flawlessness of Jon’s run, his body at ease even at a speed so fast it veered into the impossible.
Jon cut a deliberate line to his left and launched over a massive hummock of snow on a steeper area of the slope.
He hovered midair, poles wheeling, the group inhaling in veneration, exhaling as he landed smoothly, deftly angling to the right and coming to a stop next to Shane with a casualness that made his daring appear all the more impressive.
“Jesus,” Steve said. “Guess that’s why he’s who he is. But no one else cut that far left, okay?”
“What a show I lined up here, huh?” Bram grinned at Dave as if the storm, the powder, Jon’s ability, were all things he’d planned. “Don’t see that every day!”
Dave chuckled, nodding. “Incredible, Bram, really. Ready, Russ? It’s your turn, kiddo.”
Russ shook his head emphatically. “Uh-uh, no way I’m following that. Zach, you go.”
“You sure?” Dave asked.
“One million percent.”
“Go ahead, Zach, you got this!” Dave said.
Bram gave a curt nod of permission, and Zach made his way to the edge. The oncoming weather was darkening the sky, but even in the flattening light Zach could better see the pitch from his position at the top of its drop.
Yes, it was steeper than it had looked before. But a run always appeared steepest when at the top, the uphill perspective visually lengthening the vertical. And always, looking up afterward a slope transformed itself to something tamed and flattened.
Zach, poised at the cusp of that precipice, could feel his blood uptick and his back stiffen at the anticipation of weightlessness.
Blah, blah, blah, said the mothers, but what had they really been saying?
The seconds went by. Zach’s fear, his reticence, his sudden intuitive certainty that something had misfired in the safety discussion, the pounding of his blood, was drowned out by the prickling, dark crawl of his father’s presence at his back, that latent threat more palpable than any hypothetical danger waiting below.
In a single, fluid motion, Zach pushed himself off the edge, away from his father.
The initial drop was so sudden that for a moment Zach plunged through silence, the wrench of his stomach the only thing tying him to reality.
But his freeskiing competitions, his races, his years of training, had taught him to angle himself just right, and he landed, turning in a poof!
of powder. The snow streamed below him, behind him, around him, up onto his goggles as he flew down, down, down.
He fought centrifugal force, felt the proof of gravity and momentum through his quaking bones, grasped at the realities of his own biology as muscles raged and tears spread from the corners of his eyes with the rush of wind and speed and cold, even through goggles.
The glint of the snow, its sandy sound, the dark clouds rimmed by bright, hidden sun, the untouched slope ahead, and every mountain that pierced the horizon beyond all united into unfathomable wonder.
The purity of that beauty, of the connection between body, skis, cold, snow, mountain, wiped Zach clean.
All his grief, all the uncanny strangeness, all his worry and fear vanished into the everlasting brevity of the now.
As Zach sank and lifted through the powder, he was no longer a thing separate but merged with the snow, the air, the speed.
The mountain, his mother, Bonnie, the rocks beneath him, the immortal earth beyond, the eternally recurring yet utterly unique snowstorm above, the physics that held them, and him, and everything, coalesced into an unbounded oneness.
Yet despite the drawn-out infinity of it, the whole run passed in an instant—a finger snap of ecstatic comprehension.
Zach slowed, then stopped next to Jon and Shane. They slapped him on the back, good-naturedly cuffed his shoulder. “Nice job, what a run, huh? Who knew you had it in you? Who taught you to ski like that?”
He blinked at them, coming back to himself. Immediately things began to tear apart, to revert back to their everyday distinctions, leaving Zach’s mind to lap desperately at the scraps of the beautiful sublime he had just glimpsed.