BOTULISM ON THE TUNA OF LIFE

It was while parking it in The Cirque, staring down a 55 degree pitch, when I began to understand Albert Camus' treatise on the struggle of man against history, or what he called The Myth Of Sisyphus.

As a judge at the Kirkwood Western States Extreme Championships I had dutifully dropped into the hairy wide expanse to inspect, along with other judges and competitors, the different lines and approaches that could be attempted down the course.

"Hey, bra'ah," one competitor, a calm sparrow hawk of a person, said to his friend as they stared down a 40 foot hucker, "Sick, way sick."

All week long I¹d been getting indoctrinated into the "extreme" culture. These days , because everybody has played the grooves out of the term extreme, they call this stuff "free skiing". "I'm a professional freeskier," I'll always here somebody say, trying to act a bit more sophisticated, like a regular Joe-mailman type fellow. But then, all day long at the Western Extremes, I'd heard enough tongue that sounded something that George Orwell would say after a speed and Sterno binge.

"Supersick, went agro, dude," this snowboarder judge, a Hawaiian looking fellow with yellow hair had piped to other judges. "Lucky he didn't get a new paint job jumping into grapepit cleavage. What a pinwheeling freakhucker. Major pointage on that nectar huck. You agree bruudah?"

By definition, extreme skiing, as it's been explained to me, is skiing on slopes so steep that if you fall, you die. Something you definitely want to take the coathanger- out- of- the- jacket- before- putting- it- on and attempting, and while it would be a sport to avoid for most sane folks and in most places, extreme skiing, along with extreme anything else, is sometimes the order of the day at Kirkwood.

Kirkwood may have a tranquil meadow, but its alpine domain bridges three peaks, full of rock and tree covered slopes which erupt like skyscrapers into granite cliffs and towers. The Cirque, looming southeast below Thimble Peak, a normally 365 day closed-to-wingnuts section of the mountain, reigns supreme among all the left hooks which drop in on the point of Kirkwood¹s jaw.

But high risk means high pleasure and, though negotiating down the Cirque in places is tantamount to digesting a bowling ball, to extreme skiers and boarders, who chase cliffs the way a dog chases tires, called and crazy, willing to be hit, ripping into this out of bounds area is kind of like having groovy sex and nosebleeds at the same time.

The day before, competition had been put on hold because of a storm, but not before course inspection. As if skiing into The Cirque wasn't enough to give most sane houseguests a case of the crawling purple kundalini chills, the visibility had been bad enough to remind one of staring through four inches of yellow bulletproof Plexiglas at a no ID check-cashing center. Wet as a speckled trout, I was thinking that this judging thingy could prove to be a mistake, kind of like Churchill¹s attempt to take Gallipoli in 1915, but at least it would be the kind of mistake that would look good in my memoirs. And the poor visibility would be an excuse for flailing. Unlike my supposed breathren, who on snow resembled a Great Dane hearing the word "bone", I was from the conventional tutelage of skiing, i.e. after six broken ankles, I lived for the groomed. Already, some of the other judges were perplexed by my often non-aggressive demeanor.

Like the time Eric DesLauriers, a legendary extremist and co-judge, had asked me on day two what I thought of the previous competitors run. I'd replied, "I don't know, I was so scared for him my eyes were closed."

But I'd begun to loosen up, too, turning up the extreme-charm-o-meter. As the week of competition progressed my psyche began feeling like it had been pulled out and laundered by beings of higher intelligence. When Carolyn Reuter ate mega tamale time in a chute, leaving a garage sale up the mountain, I'd felt for a moment, like Dom Giovanni when the Commendatorie Statue grabbed at him or like Ahab in horror when he saw the Whale take down Fedallah, harpoon and all. Instead, all I said out loud at the judges' stand was, "What tech nord!"

My first descent in bad weather down The Cirque had actually steeled me a bit, rekindled a bit of fire in the old bones. By week's end my eyebrows rose like storm clouds over the Sea of Azov and at the mention of hucking my eyes glowed like dark coals. I¹d learned a bit about Kirkwood¹s terrain, too; that this was one boss place. Each day competition had been located at a different section of the mountain. Skiing each area then cured by the competiton hours on end I'd been bitten by a special kind of kindred spirit to Kirkwood and for that matter, to extremism..

Now on the final day of the Western Extremes, once again in my mountain-goat immigration into The Cirque for course inspection, I was no longer a supreme bellecanto who saw himself crowded out of an opera house, but instead the harpoon aimed at the White Whale. Under a sky as wide as the face of time, Kirkwood closed around me tighly in its fickle gaze, hotly whispering how wonderful life is, even if it¹s a flailer's life. Kind of spooky juju, sort of like how Sisyphus must have felt when he began to get the idea he couldn't roll back the rock, but there is no greater feeling when you can get rid the spirit of some collywobbles and replace them with something fresh and exciting, and wouldn¹t it be nice to think so?