Ten minutes. Let’s play this out and see what happens.

Tonight I made thai chili, which was near-disasterous on any number of fronts. It turned out to be an absolutely gargantuan recipe intended to feed the entire crew of an aircraft carrier, which meant that a lot of vegetables had to meet some slicin’ and dicin’. In the mayhem of knife wielding and onion weeping and terror-alert panicking I sliced the bitty tip off my left thumb. I saw to it that the flesh didn’t make its way into the pot, lest I insult vegetarians with my tainted vegetarian thai chili.

All in all, I fared better than one of my snowboarding students did, yesterday. We were pulling a short run, from "the clump of trees to the chairlift." He fell on his arse, managing to break his tailbone, wrist, back, skull, pride, bread, etc. There’s nothing like standing with your class, watching one of your kids get carted away to Ski Patrol on a sled behind a snowmobile. My fellow instructors were a tad bit concerned for me:

"You doing OK, Dane?"

"Yeah."

"It’s not your fault, man. Don’t worry about it."

"I’m not worried."

"It’s a sport. People are gonna get hurt, ya know?"

"Yup."

"…you seem rather calm."

"I worked at a summer camp."

"Oh. I see."

This cold thing is starting to get out of hand. I’ve been playing it safe and sleeping lots and not playing outside in the cold and drinking homestyle orange juice so it isn’t progressing into something fierce, but it isn’t going away, either. I’ve now missed two bluebird days at the Mountain, which are a precious commodity in the Cascades because the weather is pretty nasty most of the time. Overcast skies, thick fog, blowing snow, wind that tries to rip you from the chairlift, the occasional rainstorm… they’re all a reminder that those 300 inches of snow have to come from somewhere. The Summit chair was open today, which ground my soul something else because the Summit chair typically only opens three days a season, and this season it has already been open three days.

Mentally and spiritually I need to be shreddin’ around the mountain, but physiologically my body suggests that I need to take it easy, lest three days of needed rest blossom into two unnecessary weeks of stumbling angst at the world. The hardest part about not being at the Mountain is that all of my friends are fellow co-workers up there, and since we’ve so far been lazy about trading phone numbers, if I don’t see them on the slopes I won’t see them in town.

Nonetheless, the day hasn’t been a total loss. I swung by the mountaineering shop down the street to learn where all the climbing punks hang out in town, and they referred me to the Cascades Mountaineers, who are based out of the Central Oregon Environmental Center (also right down the street). I dropped by, picked up details on their next meeting, and trucked on down to Bend Map and Blueprint to pour over topo maps and whet my appetite for adventure.

Also, I am seriously pursuing an avenue that would make Bend, Oregon my home for an undisclosed number of years and months. This is a spooky prospect, as I am still a bit uncomfortable with the idea of casting down roots, especially so far from the place and people that feel like home. The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that there could be worse things than living in Bend, Oregon, a town that caters to groovy outdoor folk with its mountains and snow and climbing and trails and rivers and lakes and forests and wildfires. If I do end up hanging out here for an extended period of time, I will become, in essence, a western outpost for fellow rugged Midwesterners looking for a change of scenery.

Even though I needed to blaze fresh trails and often navigated by dead reckoning to find my way out here, there’s no reason that you passionate individuals need to dive headlong into the darkness yourselves. Looking for a cool place to hang for a summer? Looking for an outdoor bum lifestyle post-graduation? Chances are we’ll be here, looking for you.

Let the exodus begin.

Despite strident attempts to convince myself otherwise, I’m getting ill. The sore throat snuck up during night in strange dreams of hanging out with the Nerd Herd, and the weezy hacking summoned itself while dining at Quizno’s. I’ve put myself on a strict diet of water and vitamin C pills, strict as in "That which still allows gentle abuse of Double Stuf Oreos and winter ales." Despite extreme sacrifices to prevent myself from slipping further into the world of weeping relatives and death beds (such as postponing this season’s fourteenth day of snowboarding until tomorrow), my tummy feels rumbly and my tongue is riddled with tell-tale canker sores.

I don’t do well with getting sick because I rarely get sick. For some people illness is as common as mail delivery, but for me it comes around as often as comets, white rappers and clean public restrooms. All seen together. In this I rarely fare well when the angel of grippe finally does pay me a visit, as I haven’t developed any emotional or spiritual strategies for dealing with such things. The lack of cohesion coupled with short-term memory loss ensures that each bout with a bug becomes its own independent battle, complete with improvised rules of engagement.

My faculties for logic and reason are the first casualties, and at my weakest, degenerated state you could convince me that anything will make my body heal faster. A stiff glass of unleaded? Goat hearts strug on an elastic candy necklace? The left-hand suzuki method? Bring ’em on!

The last few days I’ve made it a habit to trek on over to the public library every evening, if only in an effort to infect as many fellow intellectuals as possible. My living conditions in Bend are supercalifragiloovy in that the Deschutes Public Library is huge and beautiful and two blocks from Lava House. A few days ago we had a little snowstorm in Bend that left three inches of accumulation, and it’s still hanging around because it hasn’t been above freezing since then.

In the world I’m familiar with this wouldn’t be a problem because we so salt the hell out of everything that flesh itself melts at 17 below, but in Oregon they use (what I have described before) what they call "cinder". And since cinder is useless for anything beyond breaking windshields and turning roadside slush into bloody hunks of meat, the walk to the library can be slippery and treacherous and wrought with unspeakable dangers.

I have been lucky enough to complete this excursion successfully three days in a row, and each trip has rewarded me with unadulterated access to secular periodicals that I consume ravenously. I have thus far spent an evening with Skeptic Magazine, Smithsonian and Scientific American. Scientific American has always been one of my favorites, even when I was ten years old and really had no idea what in the hell it was talking about. Most ten-year-olds are satisfied when handed an issue of Popular Science, but even then I believe I had an inkling that Pop Sci was a bit thick on the Pop and light on the Sci.

Really, Popular Science should be renamed “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Scientific American.” Most of Pop Sci’s articles are wrought with junky elation over stealth battleships, overpriced satellites and American cars. Not to mention that every futuristic, speculative article is filled with artist conceptions of technology, which are useful in that they show you exactly what the future won’t look like. More than anything, it’s the fight between engineers and natural law that determines the shape of the future, not artists.

Artists are consulted only at the very end, when they get to mold glass into huge salmon murals to hang in libraries. At this the artists do a very good job, as well as at the traffic circle on Colorado where a dozen metal salmon statues swim on little poles. They also do well with the traffic circles in the Old Mill District, where we have huge gears fashioned out of weathered metal. This also leads you to wonder, though, what huge gears in the Old Mill District have to do with salmon. Did the salmon once run so thick that one could cross the river by walking on their shimmering backs, and the mills were powered more by their seasonal migration than by the water? Were the mills where turn-of-the-century workers, after a large salmon harvest was floated down the Deschutes, ground salmon into gourmet cat food, cosmetics and housing materials?

These are the things that command your ponderance whist you descend ever deeper into the yawning void of unhealth.

Are you at a loss for your innovative outdoor Christmas lights display? Does tossing a string of lights over the shrubs not cut it for you, anymore? Want to be the envy of all your neighbors? Have we got a scene for you!

First, gather the necessary materials:

One wireframe, light-up fawn

One light-up animated deer, preferably a type with "feeding" somewhere in its name

One million (or so) strings of red Christmas lights.

One baseball bat

Got it all? Right, then. Clear an ample space in your front yard and set up the animated deer. With the baseball bat, smash the fawn to within a breath of recognition and place it under the deer’s muzzle. Haphazardly scatter red Christmas lights over the entire scene, making sure to concentrate on the space in and around the fawn. For effect, run one string of red lights from the carnage up to the animated deer’s mouth.

And you’re done! With a bit more effort you can enhance the scene with a spray bottle filled with red food coloring, a roll of yellow caution tape, and a whole pack of "feeding" deer.

Anyways…

Snapshots of Life in Farewell Bend

"Hi!"

"Well hello there, little girl!"

"Hi!"

"Your face is covered in chocolate!"

"Hi!"

"…at least, I hope it’s chocolate…"

Standing at the intersection of Wall Street and Franklin this evening, I watched a large fellow in a Chevy Blazer drive by with all his windows down, singing along to country music at the top of his lungs.

Last night we got eight inches of snow at the Mountain, bringing the base up to 61”. It was heavy Cascade Cement snow that gives your legs a real workout, and often causes you to catch an edge and go pinwheeling down the hill (or fall into the trees and end up half-buried in snow). Nevertheless, it softened up things in the terrain park enough for me to 50-50 a few rails, boardslide the funbox, dial in my frontside 180s, try a few backside 180s, attempt a frontside 360, and catch some wicked air off the kickers.

What the hell am I talking about? Transworld Snowboarding has some good video clips of tricks that explain ’em better than I can. The pros will teach you to snowboard with their own eloquent language:

OK, and when you approach the jump, um, just take, ya know, medium speed, umm, just find a jump that you’re comfortable with, that, you know, you can go straight-edge over, just go up like you’re gonna do, you know, just go straight over it, and uhh, just, just twist your shoulders just a little bit when you go off, and it should just float right around, and uhh, just keep your weight centered and, ya know, if you got good hang time, ya know, just keep your eyes on the landing, but you can reach down and grab or, just look for the landing and just ride away clean.

Roight!