Why I'm Takin Up Bingo as a Winter Sport
Winter is interminably long here in Manitoba. And cold. And so, driven mad by months of housebound cabin fever and, what is to me, the intolerable wasteland of television, I once resolved to build a relationship with the great white outdoors by taking up a winter sport.
Bad idea.
I had tried snowshoeing years earlier, and was rewarded for my troubles with a badly frostbitten nose. The little white circle with its tiny blue nucleus looked humourous, but there was nuthin funny about the excrutiating pain I experienced when it thawed out. Cross off snowshoeing from the list of possibilities.
Downhill skiing? Not even a consideration, with my wonky knees. Plummetting uncontrollably down a steep slippery slope with two planks clamped to my feet is not my idea of a good time.
Snowmobiling? Unaffordable; and although those poker derby things looked like righteous fun, barrelling around blind corners in heavily wooded areas with a bunch of drunks didn't seem terribly safe. I'm fond of safety.
Cross-country skiing seemed like a reasonable enterprise: not too expensive, plenty of available groomed trails at varying skill levels, and little warm-up shacks where you could enjoy a batch of hot chocolate with marshmallows. Relatively civilized, not too strenuous, and rather idyllic, in a rosy-cheeked sort of way.
NOT TOO STRENUOUS? Five minutes into the trail I was a sweaty, panting, nose-running mess. When I peeled off some of the layers of clothing I had dutifully worn according to instructions, I froze; when I put them back on, I nearly fainted from heat exhaustion. And how do you blow your nose into crusty, frozen tissues when you're wearin slushy mittens?
And another thing: nobody told me that the trails were not all necessarily flat; I thought I could at least have counted on THAT in the prairies, but ohhhhh nooooo. And by the way, that "herringbone" technique of walkin uphill is not as easy as it looks in the illustrations in public library books. When I wasn't trippin over my own skis and doin faceplants in the snow, I found myself slidin backwards and landing like a turtle on its back in the snow. It wasn't easy to stand up again from the prone position, especially as I was usually further weakened by a hysterical fit of the giggles.
Let's face it. I'm no snow bunny.
But I was determined, and slowly, I began to get better at it. And then I got a little over-confident....
Smitten by what could only have been a fit of insanity, I decided to take the "intermediate" trail. Intermediate? For whom - Picaboo Street? This thing had a hill you had to go UP, that was as high and steep as the Empire State Building. What was I, King Kong? Despite my best efforts, there was no way I could navigate even a fraction of the way up that hill without landing on my back. Soaked to the skin, I took my skis off and trudged miserably, sinking thigh-deep with each footstep, a ski under each armpit. As I stopped to clutch my ready-to-burst heart, an octagenarian in a BODYSUIT with "Masters Cross-Country Ski Champion" emblazoned on his back, perkily chirped, "Beautiful Day, eh?" as he sprinted past me. The sucker wasn't even panting. I would've removed the old goat's prostate with my ski pole if I could've summoned up the breath. I couldn't even swear.
I don't even want to talk about the experience of going DOWNHILL once I finally reached its summit. What idiot puts a sharp turn to the right at the bottom of a steep hill, anyway? Around a big spruce tree, yet. Sheesh.
But the end of the trail made me feel like the greatest skiier since Jean-Claude Killy: It meandered gently through a lovely forest, and, since it sloped gradually downhill for a kilometre or so, you could double-pole it with ease. Now THIS is skiing, I thought, my scarf flapping picturesquely behind me as I picked up speed. I felt exhilarated.
And then the trail ended. Just ended. No warning, no cautionary sign that read, "Danger! Clearing ahead, ground surface covered with glare ice from recent thawing and refreezing, three warm-up shacks filled with a couple of dozen skiiers to witness your expression of sheer terror and your catastrophic crash-landing into the rows of skis and poles they have neatly standing in the snowbanks."
I wiped out. Boy, did I wipe out. For one brief second, I thought I could snow-plow to a controlled stop and then, suddenly, I was airborne. I mean flying. Somehow, I landed on my chest, with my skis still on (don't ask me to explain that one), and I was immediately and completely winded. And blinded, as the collision with the ground caused my glasses to leave my face and skid ahead of me on the ice. From the blurs in front of me I heard a mixture of guffaws and sympathetic ooooooh's. I lay there gasping like a fish out of water, trying vainly to scrabble towards my precious eyeglasses. It was then that I heard the gnash-teethed hiss of my ever-sympathetic husband: "Get UP! Get the bleep up, for bleep's sake! You're IN THE WAY!" I was paralyzed, and my left boob hurt like the dickens, but I couldn't even work up the saliva to spit on him at that point.
Finally he hauled me up under my armpits and scolded me all the way to the truck. No hot chocolate for me: he couldn't have endured the amused looks of other, more capable skiiers. I had embarrassed him, and that was unforgivable. I was too wracked by coughing all the way back to the cottage to protest.
The next weekend, I took the amateur trail at a leisurely pace, and drank THREE cups of hot chocolate in the cozy shack, while laughin my butt off at the poor shmucks blistering out of the intermediate trail's sudden exit onto the clearing's sheet of ice. It was hilarious, and I would've paid a king's ransom for a video camera. My ex? Champion athlete that he was, he got lost and returned three hours later, half-frozen, after ending up in some cottage-owner's lot.
Pity.
