Monthly Archives: June 2011

Mexican Swine Flu Quarantine

Posted on by C.J.

My father told me to never go to Mexico, that it was dirty and dangerous and not worth the money saved over other warm, sunny locations, but I didn’t listen. My friends Dylan and Sarah decided to get married in Playa del Carmen at the Azul Fives Resort, and I couldn’t book my flight to Cancún fast enough. It was the end of another long ski season in 2009 when my friend Margaret and I departed snowy Vermont for the white beaches of the Caribbean.

The wedding was spectacular despite the excruciating case of sunburn that replaced my previously fair-skinned body for the duration of the trip. Dylan and Sarah could not have been happier surrounded by their wedding party and friends.

The weather was ideal, and we spent our days sitting poolside imbibing frozen drinks with umbrellas and orange wedges in them. They had swim-up bars that we decided should become a staple in life. At night, we danced and raged like people in their late-20s can still do without great consequence.

We took walks to the nearby nude beach (much to our dismay) and attempted oceanfront yoga, a class in which I only lasted ten minutes before dropping out. I met Dylan and Sarah’s friends from all over the U.S., and we spent four days in an isolated paradise with no cell service and no connection to the outside world.

My first indication that something was wrong came just before our departure when I decided to activate international roaming on my cell phone to check my voicemail, and I had twenty or so messages. My parents had called several times, as had my friends and coworkers. Everyone was asking if I was all right. I had no reason not to be fine, but this was when I learned of the paranoia surrounding the Great Swine Flu Outbreak of ’09.

The sight in Cancún Airport was equally alarmist as people traveled with masks à la Michael Jackson. When we landed in Boston, my roommate and fellow dormitory supervisor at the boarding school where I worked and lived called to tell me I couldn’t return to the school. People were worried, there were children and the elderly dying, and I could be a carrier. Whole schools were closing. They couldn’t take the risk. I had to stay away, for at least a week, maybe longer, they weren’t quite sure. It was April in New England and all I had packed were beach clothes.

My brother had rented a lake house in New Hampshire thirty minutes from the airport, so I called to ask if I could stay with him. He was barbecuing and told me to come on by. But as I drove to his house, he phoned back to tell me his wife wasn’t comfortable with me staying at the house. People were dying. Nobody knew the extent of the dangers of this illness. And I had just flown in direct from the source.

I checked into a hotel and called my mother in New Jersey to see if I could stay at her place if I drove down. She said it was fine, but then my uncle heard I was headed there and he disapproved. My elderly grandparents enjoyed visiting my mother, and if I stayed at the house and was a carrier of the Swine Flu and my grandparents came over, I could kill them. People were dropping like flies. Didn’t I care enough about my relatives to just stay away?

Life was turning into one of those zombie movies in which the family members tell each other that their loved one is no longer the same person she used to be. Doors were locked everywhere I turned. The stress of feeling quarantined without boundaries, the constant fear that perhaps I was a carrier, that maybe I would get sick in a hotel room all by myself and nobody would know, began to take its toll. I had skirts, dresses and tank tops, and it was 50 degrees outside and raining. I cried.

Then my father, the same person who warned me to never go to Mexico and who couldn’t say, “I told you so!” enough, became the one guy who pulled through for me. He told me to come stay in his apartment. He didn’t care if I got sick or even if I got him sick or if I was a zombie who just wanted to eat his brain. But every time I sneezed that week, he quickly asked, “Are you feeling ok?”

I never contracted any flu-like illnesses that spring or the next fall or winter. About 36,000 people die every year of the seasonal flu, more than double the victims of H1N1 in 2009-2010. But for eight days in April after a long weekend in Mexico, I had nowhere go and a village of angry townsfolk chasing me down with pitchforks and wooden stakes, and I couldn’t run all that fast in my flip flops.

Does MacGyver Ever Get Locked Out?

Posted on by C.J.

When my schedule isn’t challenging enough to keep me on my toes, I oftentimes enjoy throwing a metaphorical wrench in the daily plan by locking myself out. This applies to homes, cars, offices, or basically anywhere or anything I absolutely need to get inside of quickly. A little over a week ago I was home alone and in a deeply paranoid moment convinced myself that a band of marauding vagabond rapist murderers might be trolling my neighborhood, so at night I dead bolted and locked all of the doors to the house before going to bed. The next morning I walked out the garage door, the handle of which will turn from the inside even when locked, and rode my bike into town. Wouldn’t you know that when I returned that afternoon and was in a hurry to shower and get to a party on time, I was locked out of every door to my home.

In moments like this, I ask myself, “What would MacGyver do?” The answer usually involves blowing something up, so instead of employing any of his standard tactics, I found a flat head screwdriver in the garage, jimmied open an exterior window screen, opened the window, and climbed into the dining room. Fortune cookies give better advice than MacGyver anyway.


One time, however, I could not accept sole responsible for locking myself out. In the early morning hours of Sunday, May 24, 2009, the kickoff day of the Burke Mountain Academy’s traditional Green Mountain Run (a 200-mile relay race up historic Route 100 in Vermont), I was driving a school van full of seniors to the event’s start line on the Massachusetts border along with my colleague, Viv. In honor of the event, the students were allowed to paint the vans for the weekend and we had a particularly awesome, attention-catching theme.

The Starry Night ‘Van Go’

Since we were a little ahead of schedule, we decided to make a quick pit stop at a Dunkin’ Donuts so everyone could get breakfast. Our school vans were almost all older model vehicles with few bells and whistles. They had roll-down windows; it was considered a luxury if the radio worked. So I had gotten into the habit of always leaving the keys in the cup holder anywhere I parked–in ski resort lots, back at school, on trips to the general store. It was the easiest way to keep track of them.

As I stood in line awaiting my large, double-shot latte, one of the students came running up to me in a frazzled panic and said, “You have the keys to the van, right?” to which I replied, “Why do I NEED the keys to the van?” We had lucked out and scored the new van in the fleet and were rocking power locks, and the last kid out of the vehicle had accidentally elbowed the ‘lock-all’ button before shutting the door. I joined in on the panic.

We still had some driving before we could get to the start line here.

The ‘Welcome to Massachusetts’ sign in Heath, MA. It’s seen better days.

It was the Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend, not a prime work day for most locksmiths, and as it turned out, my AAA membership had expired the previous month. MacGyver would have been equally devastated to hear the voice on the other end of the line say, “You are no longer an active member, so we cannot assist you at this time.” I was on the phone attempting to renew my membership while my coworker Viv was on her phone trying to get her husband’s membership number to see if we could be rescued from the idiocy of locking ourselves out of a ridiculously painted van on the way to a silly relay race.

We were told it could take up to an hour for someone to come help us. Kids in our van were supposed to be running legs of the relay in an hour. It was turning into an absolute disaster.

And then Viv casually walked over to me, looked at me calmly, and asked, “Are you sure you don’t have the keys?” That’s when I reached into my pocket, felt a jingle, and pulled out the keys to the van. We had all sat around in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot for a half hour, made numerous frantic phone calls, and were never even locked out.

Twenty-four hours and 200 miles later, we posed for the iconic school photograph at the Canadian border and promptly forgot about how the whole event began.

Stowe Derby Death March

Posted on by C.J.

Let’s talk for a moment about the 2011 Stowe Derby, my first foray into competitive nordic ski racing. The Stowe Derby is not a traditional nordic event because it is the oldest downhill cross-country ski race in the U.S., starting at the top of the Toll House Double Chair at the Stowe Mountain Resort and finishing 12.51 miles later at the community church in town. The start elevation is 3,292 feet and the finish rests at just 690 feet above sea level. It sounds like the alpine skier turned nordie’s dream come true, but one can often lose sight of the forest for the trees.

2011 Stowe Derby Course Profile

I first heard of the Stowe Derby when I was at Skidmore College and one of my classmates who was both a skilled alpine and nordic skier showed up to class one day with his arm in a sling. When we asked Will what happened, he replied, “On the first turn of the Stowe Derby, I forgot I was on nordic skis, and I tried to just roll my edges over to carve a turn like I would on my alpine gear, and—bam!—broken collarbone.” Other events would grab my attention in passing years like the famed Pole Pedal Paddle (alpine and nordic ski legs along with biking and river transit) in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. But the lure of the Stowe Derby was the strongest.

No matter really, because I was working full-time as a ski coach which meant that once winter started, my next day off was in April. But this past winter, February 27th opened up, and I considered giving the Derby a go. Before registering, I first talked to some friends who had completed it in the past.

My friend Kraig remarked, “Oh, the Stowe Derby is the greatest ever! You start on top of the mountain, and it’s your first time doing it so you’ll have a really crappy start number in the back of the field, and you’ll go down the trail and there will be huge ruts at all the turns and you just have to do your damned best to stay upright while you haul past people who are crashing left and right. At the bottom of the trail, there’s some up and down, and your legs will be so full of lactic acid that you’ll just want to die, but eventually you hit the Rec Path, and from there it’s smooth sailing. I mean, you’ll be cruising on the Rec Path to the finish, and that makes all the agony worthwhile. It’s the best thing ever!”

It’s a full contact sport/costume party

I’ve only owned skate ski equipment for three years, one of which it sat idle like most overzealous athletic purchases–you know, the kind where you envision yourself utilizing the gear every waking moment of your life until you actually own the stuff, at which time it takes up permanent residence in your dust-ridden closet. My father was the king of making this kind of impulse buy: the fly fishing set-up that was never used in actual water just in our front lawn while he futilely practiced casting to the sheer embarrassment of his children, a single scull that he abandoned after realizing balance was required to keep the boat afloat while rowing, and the Peugeot racing bicycle that never made it further than the Mt. Freedom Driving Range three miles from home. My skate ski gear wasn’t exactly like that. But I bought it, spent a few days following my graceful friend Christin (also self-taught) around on some trails, and that was the full extent of my education on skate ski technique. I toyed around on it for that first winter, never got out on it the second winter, and then became addicted to its use in the third year of ownership, logging over twenty days.

The snow was incredibly soft as Stowe had received over a foot of the white, fluffy stuff in the 24 hours preceding the Derby. My greatest fear before the race began was that I was going to fall getting off the Toll House Chairlift. This was a humorous worry on my part because I get on and off chairlifts all day long on alpine ski gear, but these toothpicks that were attached to my feet were so unpredictable. When I got off the chair without an inkling of trouble, I knew I had this nordic thing nailed.

And then the race began.

I poled like a madwoman off the start line and had the lead in my small heat heading into the first switchback, but dear God, I had picked up so much speed and had absolutely no control over my skis as they drifted between the 4ft. wide bobsled-like track of sheer ice and the piles of powder that were accumulating on each side of this frozen flume. It took me five seconds of aggressive poling and skating to take the lead in my pack and even less time to explode in a heap of flying clothing and equipment while they all skied passed. Had I been a quicker learn, I would have realized in this moment that the Stowe Derby is often one of the clearest living examples of the moral from Aesop’s fable The Tortoise and the Hare. Instead, I continued to enter each sharp turn carrying way too much heat leading to inevitable combustion.

About to eat it, hard

After crashing ten times–yes, ten–and yes, I was counting, I decided that I needed to dig deep for inspiration to get through this miserable experience. Other people crash, too, but I felt like I was continually hitting the deck.

That’s when I remembered what Kraig had said about the Rec Path. If I could only make it to the Rec Path, it would be like coasting on a superhighway to the finish. But the start of the Rec Path was a windblown, ungroomed trail of heavy mashed potatoes, and like those who had come before me, I began to trudge along without the assistance of gravity. There was no glide. There was only mush, mush, mush.

I was in a group of four other folks who were equally disheartened by the condition of the Rec Path, and we began to trade off leads at the front of the pack with the precision of a cycling paceline. After crossing a bridge and being a little unsure of the correct course direction, we identified some markings that lead us out into a cold and windy field of utter misery. At this moment, I thought of the Bataan Death March, and while it was an insulting historical analogy to equate my experience at the Stowe Derby to that of 75,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war, I was at an all-time low. We eventually made it out of the field and back into the protection of some trees, continuing along the path until we came to a very familiar bridge. There was also a familiar photographer standing in front of it, and I blurted out, “Are we going in circles?” When he replied, “Yes, you were supposed to go left after the bridge instead of right,” my heart nearly gave up beating.

When you’re on the verge of quitting a physical endeavor, the last thing you want to realize is that you just added an unnecessary loop on your journey and have simply ended up back on course where you had already been 10 minutes earlier. By the time I passed a course official who cheerily informed me there was, “One mile to go!” my verbal filter had completely disengaged and I exhaled, “Oh, f*ck me.”

As I puttered across the finish line, emotionally and physically defeated in 314th place with a time of 1:47:08 (the winner having completed the same task nearly a whole hour faster), I despised everything about nordic skiing. Even the dude who raced the full course in a Gumby costume kicked my ass.

I really hate losing to fictional claymation characters

My friend Elle who had obliterated my time by roughly a half hour offered her congratulations by saying, “That was absolutely brutal. If it was my first Derby, I’m not sure I would have finished.”

I looked at her and replied, “That sucked so much, and I absolutely hated every minute of it.”

And then I added, “But I can’t wait to do it again next year!”

Getting Run Out of a Vermont Cult Town

Posted on by C.J.

Island Pond is a village of 850 residents in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont that most infamously serves as the home of the Twelve Tribes, a religious cult whose property was controversially raided in 1984 by the State Police and social workers who suspected child abuse. No evidence of abuse was discovered, and to this day the Twelve Tribes hold an eerie grip over many of the businesses in the area. None of this was reason enough to deter me from inviting a number of my coworkers to participate in a 5.5-mile charity run there in the fall of 2007.

One of my colleagues was originally from the town (though never a member of the cult), and the rest of us were athletes who could not turn down a fun run twenty-five minutes from home. I had recently prided myself on participating in as many community events as possible because those were the only times I was confronted with hard evidence that there were more people than cows inhabiting Northern Vermont.

Indeed, that thick gray line is the Canadian border

The designated event was the Pond-A-Thon Fun Run to benefit the Taini Mae Kinney Memorial Scholarship, a fund that enabled underpriviledged members of the Northeast Kingdom community to pursue higher education. We drove up in a school van and had six representatives participating in the run or bike. I was most excited for the event because I intended it as a bonding experience for my two new roommates, Amber and Christin, who were avid runners.

After warm-up but before the gun start, eager to take on the pond

The run itself was of little consequence. Christin and Amber completely buried my time, but they were kind enough to lap back on the course to cheer me on through the end. After all participants finished, the organizers invited us to survey the prize table before the start of the raffle. Everyone who completed the event was eligible for a prize, and a nearby picnic table displayed a hodgepodge of donated goods: homemade pies, bags of fresh picked corn, golf umbrellas, gift certificates, cherry tomatoes. Somewhere in the mix was a framed picture of a ballerina, and my colleagues and I were having a tough time deciding if the prize was merely the frame with a stock photo inside (meant to be replaced by your own), or if the picture itself was intended to hold some value. We joked that it was clearly the best prize on the table.


By the time my number was drawn in the raffle, everything edible had been claimed. My choice came down to a plant (which I would kill with utter certainty out of sheer neglect), an umbrella, or the ballerina. Although I had no use for it, I figured it would make for a good laugh, so I grabbed the picture frame and waved it over my head cheering, “I got the ballerina! I got the ballerina!” as I jogged back to my group of friends. They were all in hysterics. I teased that we were going to hang it on the wall in the office of the Director of Development back at the school.

Then a lovely older woman tapped me on the shoulder, and as I turned around, she held out a jug of maple syrup and asked if I was willing to trade prizes with her. She clearly wanted the ballerina very badly. I hesitated for a moment, because while maple syrup is akin to gold in Vermont, I much preferred the humor of the prize I had selected. In the time it took me to utter a response, she added, “Because that’s actually a picture of the woman who this race memorializes.”

Not a prize. Not a picture frame. Not a nameless ballerina, but the poor woman who had died tragically young in a car accident whose name was now attached to this charitable event. We made haste to the van and exited stage left as quickly as possible. I’m surprised people still go anywhere with me.

Just A Little Avalanche

Posted on by C.J.

We all make these small—but no less embarrassing—mistakes in our daily lives that we hope nobody notices: spilled coffee in a café, a misstep running up the stairs, a pile of papers blowing across the park in diverting directions. But some mistakes are so big and equally idiotic that after committing them, you cannot help but be overtaken by the immediate urge to run away to a reclusive island for a very long time.

There’s no such thing as just a little avalanche.

The unpredictability of snow pack is something I would learn more about a year later while living in Lake Tahoe during one of its winters of high precipitation. But I had just moved to California and was still lacking in knowledge on the dangers of unseasonably late snowfall, the likes of which had pummeled the Pacific Northwest in April and May of the year in question. I was also twenty-three years old and, therefore, clearly invincible.

I regretfully confess that alongside an equally carefree colleague, I caused an in-bounds avalanche at the Whistler Blackcomb Ski Resort in British Columbia, Canada in the summer of 2004, and it was at least 95% my fault. Even better, however, was that nobody noticed. I have been publicly ridiculed for dropping a plate of food in a cafeteria, for running myself over with my own car, and for ruining a charity sporting event. But for causing an avalanche? Not one word. Because until now, nobody knew it was my fault except for my partner in crime.

As my father reads this story for the first time, this is the exact point where he decides he’s never going to let me go skiing ever again. These are the kinds of verbal restrictions he places on me that I laugh off with frequency.

Avalanches are caused by the sudden sliding movement of snow that was not stabilized on a slope, released by natural as well as human triggers. Basically, if you move around on top of unstable snow, it could very easily break away from the mountainside on which it rests, and you are headed for an unpleasant, uncontrollable ride of undetermined length, time, and consequence. In the spring of 2004, Whistler received an atypical amount of late-season snowfall after a fairly uneventful winter, so the snow on the mountain was not easily incorporated into a natural base as is the case when snow arrives continuously and evenly spread throughout the season.

The glacier on Blackcomb had just opened for summer skiing. As was the tradition for coaches, at the end of our first day of work on the hill I asked my coworkers if anyone was interested in skiing out the couloir instead of going down the front side of the mountain. Skiing the Couloir Extreme saved you a ride on the t-bar and a circuitous, boring, exhausting trudge through piles of heavy slush on Green Line.

Yes, the couloir was closed in summer. Yes, there was a fence in front of its entrance that you had to shimmy under. Yes, there were signs posted everywhere warning of imminent danger should you chose not to heed the directions to ski elsewhere. It was a cloudy day. It was our first day on the glacier. I couldn’t rally a quorum, and all of my coworkers chose to go down the front side. Except Ben. Ben, of course, was the kind of guy who would slack line between skyscrapers in New York City if you asked him to. And he would probably do it holding a beer.

The Couloir Extreme is a beautiful in-bounds trail that makes you feel like you are as far form a ski resort as you can get. It is deceiving because you are right there, in the heart of Blackcomb. But at the end of a long day of dealing with young adults and performing manual labor, ripping down the Couloir Extreme to the top of the Solar Coaster chairlift was was the perfect way to feel like you had the best life in the whole world.

I made Ben go first, but we ended up carving nearly side-by-side slalom turns at the entrance, dodging the exposed rocks at the narrow top of the trail. We could hardly see each other, or the rocks, or anything other than the thick fog in front of us. And as I smoothly rolled from one set of edges to the next with complete abandon, I felt this indescribable connection to each snowflake beneath my skis. For a moment, I felt absolute flow. And then I realized, it wasn’t flow at all. It wasn’t a connection. I was being pulled rapidly down the mountain in piles of slough up to my waist.

I used all my leg strength to cut out to the left side of the trail where rock outcroppings ultimately protected me from the sliding wave of snow. I couldn’t see much, but I could hear. Snow isn’t supposed to make noise. It’s usually peaceful as it gently falls from the sky to the ground. But snow sliding in a confined couloir is not quiet. It rumbles like thunder.

Once the noise died down and the snow had passed, I called out for Ben. He had used the same instinctive technique to avoid disaster and wasn’t very far from me. We looked at each other and shook our heads. I said, “That might have been the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.” Ben concurred. And then like two moronic lemmings who had somehow been granted a second life, we decided to continue into the valley below the couloir to assess the damage of the slide.

Boulders of snow. That’s what sits at the bottom of a slide path. But if the snow pack slides in the middle of a resort and nobody was there there to see you trigger it, did it really happen?