At least one reader of this blog will probably not be surprised that my resolve to stay away from the cold didn’t last long. It wore off over the two days that followed my initial excursion into the snow. By Wednesday afternoon, I was ready to rent a board. Flucha encouraged me in this change of mind. “How bad can it be?”, she asked. “Get a three-hour-lift ticket and have some fun. Your hands are going to survive.”
This sounded sensible enough. I almost walked down to the one sports store plus snow gear rental place in town when I realized that my fingers would probably be the least of my worries. With the effort of keeping my aging body on the board, I should stay reasonably warm. More concerning were two rarer effects of the cold that I had noticed when riding my bicycle.
At a certain speed, when the air flows around my glasses and tickles my eyes, tears form that blur my vision. Blinking is the instinctive solution to this. This wipes away the tears and clears the view. As an effect of oxaliplatin, the cold sinks its teeth into my closing eyelids and paralyzes them. I cannot fully open them again. It’s as if they were frozen half-shut.
Seeing becomes difficult. A continued urge to blink to clear the eyes only makes it worse. I can’t see this being any better (but potentially much more dangerous) on a board on a bumpy piste unknown to me than on a bicycle on a paved road I’ve ridden a hundred times.
Then there’s something I’ve experienced only once when I rode my bike to work on a particularly frosty morning. The cold air I breathed attacked my throat and slowly closed it. I had to slow down on the steepest uphill part of my commute because I couldn’t breathe enough air. This was quite scary – until I realized that I wasn’t suffocating – and is not something I want to repeat on an unknown mountain.
Instead of riding a board, I took the girl sledding this afternoon. We took the lift up to the middle station and then lunged down the sledding run, a groomed track steep enough for lots of serious fun and wide enough for little serious risk.
The girl squealed with excitement as I tried to keep our little plastic sled on track. This took all my focus. Only at the bottom did I realize that I had had no problems with my eyes and no problems breathing either. My hands were as toasty as they should be in their heavy gloves.
Tonight, it is snowing as if all the celestial snow cannon were pointed at Braunwald. Tomorrow, I might yet rent a snowboard – for the first proper day in the snow in 13 years.
Turns out I didn’t go snowboarding after all. The day was beautiful, especially in the afternoon, and a ton of fresh snow promised lots of fun, even if it wasn’t Utah powder. But the boy was slightly sick and needed attention. Flucha and I took turns, and in the afternoon I went sledding again with the girl.
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