A short reflection on how to love memories...
You ever get moved by movies? I mean... that’s the idea isn’t it? - It says so in its name after all. But, paah! Movies get trounced every day by one thing only... reality. Ok, so not every moment of every reality for sure... but some of its
electric. Now let’s get on to the day that occurred a while before now but not so long before and we’ll begin to travel...
The radio slips into the atmosphere and jiggles its waves - I tune in to find a Scandinavian pressing an aged traveller for quintessential trimmings from his 75 years of escapism, his mind oozes recollections and in a shattered old English voice he tells of his life, which of course, is drawing to a close - you can veritably visualise the tears brimming in his eyes. The upbeat Dane pales in comparison... so, jealously, she turns to another writer seeking to see if she can outshine him (which she does with ease such is his mauve mood). He has followed the paths to the greatest snow the world can crystallize and he (albeit falteringly) draws the listening public back to those bright silent moments when, upon waking in the buff warmth of down covers, the curtains blaze with crisp iridescence and you know the world has been transformed overnight... the snow queen’s work is magic labour. The program eventually ends and I silence the radio. That snow man had (of course) mentioned the surfing of the white stuff and my mind picnicked... I had been looking at the kitchen window which was finely condensed such that the world could indeed be a blur of whiteness outside and the intense feeling of uncontainable joy strained at the tape that held it boxed inside me, that memory sensation of knowing the sledge slopes were mere moments away, so I rode it out... and ploughing deep into the cranial depths I found myself hoofing along a snow arête, one arm slung round a thin cable that stretched between posts that marked a high mountain ridge... I was lost in this, the kitchen faded; I looked round but the chairlift station had already disappeared from sight and instead, all around strode great snowy crags, saw-toothing the big blue. In La Plagne in the French Alps, there is a chair lift that goes down before it goes up. As far as I know, it is unique in this manner. It makes little sense until you embrace the scenario it tackles (after all you can ski down and that’s the whole point of catching a chair lift up!). The main lift system carries thrill seekers up to the top of the initial ski sloped mountain, where it deposits you for your swift ride back home... but a second mountain, higher still, rises up close by... yet, crucially, separating the two - disconnecting them utterly, is a sheer and desperate long tall cliff of rock and ice... hundreds of metres high. So you sail down this cliff face, bound to your flying chair, in order to reach a position where you can rise up the other side... that’s the deal! Actually, I know of another lift in the three valleys that goes up to then go down (to get across) but that’s different, you can’t ski up!... But back to La Plagne, whilst melancholically sofa surfing the aforementioned sky chair, I spotted a small couloir some distance from the cliff and saw that it might just open onto a large bowl of virgin powder. And so there I went... off in search of this probably unfindable way down, and there I was too, still sat in my kitchen, dipped in melting memories like bread into hot cheese... On the day, back then, I was near paralysed with trepidation, I was surely going to die but kept going - back in my kitchen I talked it through in my head; described it to myself with my imagined narrators timbre of profundity - and then I sat down for i’d actually found the top of the couloirs, the cliff long passed. I strapped my board to my feet and took out a small plastic bottle of black currant and apple squash and a mini mars bar... it was my last supper... I sat for a long time. I took it all in, every drop of rugged eternal beauty that enveloped my locale whilst my mind flicked through the best of my memories one last time... Then I stood up and slipped off down the steep rock bound corridor that would take me to whatever I faced...
Jumping, to turn from one edge to another - twisting in the air and cutting deep into the snow and packed ice to restrain my descent down the fierce slope, I was presented with an exit - a small lipped, cornice like verge - to where, I knew not, but my board turned to it and together, we skated over and off it... To my immediate horror I found a lot of not much and began to drop like a rock, but I was also graced with the remarkable sight of the second mountain again, glowing beacon like in the evening sunshine and then the vision was gone and all was white. My legs buckled beneath me but so as to cajole the impact and the depth and lightness of the snow did the rest as I disappeared into the top of the snow bowl, like a pebble in a pond, I plopped in. My face, the only exposed part of body, was quenched with a fine mist of icicles that peppered my face as I felt myself accelerating through the cloud of white wander that vanished as I burst out of the neige nebulous and surfed up onto the surface of the great frozen wave beneath me. Summoning my strength back, which had been wisped away by the shock of the moment, and leaning back, I pressed my energy down through my legs to the board beneath me and it responded, carving out my turn which whipped up a great crest of spray that arced away from me, thundering down from its lofty kick to the slope beneath and I whooped out to the world, my voice shrill in my ears. Leaning over I reached out and trailed the snow with a finger as it raced back up the slope away from me and I leant heavily into my next turn which circled out and out, going on and on - and my fingers were shaking back in the kitchen - and I turned again and again until I raced under the descending chairlift with the imagined envy of my fellow skiers above me hurling me faster still into my hurtle down to towards the end where upon I was ejected onto some corduroy and drifted down to a chairlift below - my body heaving as it grasped for breath, sweat dripping down through my drenched underclothes and my red red cheeks painted up like a Japanese actor. I smiled nonstop for a week... and stood up in my kitchen, tears at my eyes, filled with the utmost vitality. I wanted to go at it again... with a different memory’s indulgence... and I will, will you?
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