Metallurgy

"There’s something about stuff and things."

With the kiddies all filing back to their filthy classrooms tomorrow, the holiday season at the Mountain is officially over. I must say it was quite a run of work, revelry and temporary insanity. Nothin’ says lovin’ like spending nearly an hour shovelling snow out from under a conveyor belt built for incompetent young skiiers. Nothin’ is quite so fine as sayin’ how’d ya do? to a treewell on a killer waist-deep powder day. Nothin’ says knucks, blowed up! like making your friend nut up in the terrain park by hitting the C-rails, the A-frames and the flat-down-flat.

More and more is Bend taking shape, coalescing out of a flesh-eating fog into a neighborhood of flesh-eating zombies. I’m starting to really dig on this town and tomorrow everything stands to get flipped asunder. Tomorrow I start my new (salaried!) job (with benefits!) at a web design company, working as a tech writer and web support specialist among an elite crew of hardcore mountaineers, Cessna pilots, Grateful Dead mandolinists and ex-IBM employees. Five days a week I will forge beautiful things in the embers of the Internet, and two days a week I will brave towering volcanoes and brutal winds and 125-inch snowpack to teach snowboarding to snot-nosed kids.

All in all, it amounts to a seven-day workweek until April rolls around. I’m going to be living a life of vibrant intensity unknown since leaving college, but ever since surviving three months of summer camp I can survive anything. Watch as my burly fists crush a handful of squirrels back into walnuts.

Fear my nuts of steel.