This was the coveted Fourth Form ski trip that the class spent half the year fundraising for.
Of course, it took place in August… Winter in New Zealand.
About 40 of us 14-year-olds were bussed down to the mountain from our country town 6 hours away and we stayed in some sort of huge lodge on the mountain.
We all were outfitted with skis. Snowboarding was very new and openly mocked
“Gays on trays”. I guess that’s like Elf on a shelf but way before memes.
I didn’t want to be a Gay on a Tray, so I did not push the idea of getting a snowboard.
It went as you can imagine. A few kids got so sunburned their skin fell off.
Ankles were broken. Skiing was done, and nerds were teased mercilessly.
Some of the weaker kids quit after finding it too hard on day one and spent the rest of the trip back at the Lodge playing cards.
I found myself skiing alone most of the time… but I learned fast and spent day after day whizzing down the mountain.
On one of the nights back at the Lodge, I spotted a huge 1-kilo bag of instant coffee.
I thought “I wonder what effect that would have if sprinkled on the snow?”
So I stole it and the next morning stashed it in my jacket.
In the morning on the ride up the chair lift and with no one in the few chairs behind me, I opened up the bag and wafted out the contents onto the ski field below me.
A wind picked up the brown dust and blew it into the form of a large cloud.
As each tiny crystal of instant of coffee hit the snow it bloomed into a vivid brown shit stain.
To my horror, it spread and spread and spread to the snow below.
The shit stain was gigantic. Like 4 football fields worth.
My eyes bugged out at what I had done.
The extent of the shit stain and the tracks that formed later that day.
I just carried on with my skiing…. feeling detached and ghost-like.
I skied through the giant shit stain, observing people’s stunned reactions to it.
When I got to the bottom of the run, I looked back and saw that as people were skiing through it, they were tracking long brown skid marks down the mountain.
I heard one of the lift guys say, in response to a question…
“Some fuckwit genius dumped a bunch of instant coffee on the mountain, it will look like shit for days, until the next big snow.”
I was that fuckwit genius.
It was there for the rest of the trip becoming sadder, dirtier, and more diffuse.
I would see bits of brown snow tracked into shops, and down in the mud room of the lodge… poopy reminders of my crime.
Two years later at school, we were talking about how much of an amazing trip that was. Someone said “Yeah and remember that big shitstain that appeared on the mountain?”
I decided to confess…
“It was me. I emptied a big bag of instant coffee on the mountain, that I stole from the lodge.”
No one believed me. By that time at school, my reputation was firmly entrenched as a bullshit artist, as what I said was often so outlandish.
No one believed me. Wow.
Maybe one of them will read this 33 years later… and believe me now.
I read this to my son and asked,
“Would you do something this naughty?”
He said, “No, I would wait for someone else to do it”.
That makes me a bit sad.
I need to start being a worse parent.
END
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You did better than I did. When I did that school trip, I sprained my ankle in the training session and sat by the fire for the rest of the day. Come to think of it, that was a good day!
I miss skiing⛷ I haven’t been in a few years. There’s no feeling in the world like skiing down a mountain. You just float on those white fluffy clouds of snow, flying through the sky, feeling like your part of the heavens. ❄️ ☁️ 😇 🎿