Fate always seems to send me interesting Australians. Why even my ex-landlord has to be interesting, and either Australian or not depending on which bit of which government you believe at any given moment, is a matter completely beyond my comprehension. God is either trying to tell me something significant about our antipodean cousins, or is having a huge joke at my expense.
This may seem like a strange start to an article about a holiday skiing in Canada, but bear with me. All will become clear, I promise, hopefully before the end of the page.
This was one of the "Cambridge" skiing trips, where a bunch of people who may or may not have been in or around Cambridge once upon a time get together, agree that Someone Will Have To Book The Holiday and leave again without having actually decided where it is we want to go. In this particular year the suggestion of going to Canada had coalesced out of the ether. I immediately had horrified thoughts of the expense of a transatlantic flight. Someone countered by pointing out the much lower living expenses out there. All in all, they claimed, a skiing trip to Canada would cost us a similar amount to the previous year's skiing trip to Switzerland. Hmm, maybe I would be able to afford it after all.
By the time we set off for Heathrow the cost of living held a particular importance for me, since I knew that by the time I got back into the country the company that I was working for would be in receivership and I would be out of a job. This wasn't the best frame of mind to start a holiday in, but by that stage I'd already paid most of the travel, hotel and insurance fees, and it seemed stupid to cancel. I could pay for it, after all, I just might have to live off baked beans for a few weeks if the jobhunting went badly. But that's another article…
We arrived in Calgary after the usual flight (long and boring, and I couldn't manage to doze), were taken by coach to Banff with the usual tour company rep (young and inexperienced), learned the usual bits of local custom (e.g. tipping is pretty much mandatory), did the usual bits of arcane negotiation in the ski hire shops ("Was I using 90s or 95s last year?"), found the unusual hotel (we normally go for chalets, them being on the whole cheaper) and crashed out for the night. The following day we spent at the nearest of the three ski areas, the cheerily named Sunshine Village. Naturally it was overcast all day. This didn't really matter to us, since we were just trying to remember how to ski and, on occasion, which way was up. We spent our time amidst the squeaks of protesting muscles and the embarrassingly frequent "Waaaah – >splot<" of the overambitious manoeuvre. Little did we suspect the impact that Sunshine and the adjoining Goat's Eye Mountain were to have on us.
It was the next day, Monday, that we went to the Lake Louise ski area and first met Bob. That wasn't her name, of course, nor did anyone actually call her that at the time. Nonetheless, "Bob" is how I remember her.
We had all decided to go for a week of Ski School, as we pretty much always do. You can never stop learning, theory has it, and anyway we were a very mixed group with a range of abilities from Almost Beginner to Top Class For Someone Who Only Skis Once A Year. As usual, Phil Allcock and I ended up in the same class, being Plausible Intermediates. We actually misread the ski-school brochure and spent the morning in the Pretty Hot Stuff group before deciding that we didn't need that much excitement (or that many bruises) and dropping down a class. And so we were introduced to our instructor, Marianne, and her merry men (and women). She seemed nice enough to start with, joshing around with a group that included not only us strange English intellectuals but also Steve, a mad RAF pilot (is there any other sort?) and Hans, a mad Australian geologist. Or geophysicist, I forget. I must admit, it took me a while to realise that heavy Aussie accent belonged to the Germanic name, but what the heck. Steve and Hans were determined to be the life and soul of the party, and only allowed Marianne, Phil and myself occasional pauses to get our own smart remarks in.
The first sign of trouble came when we discovered that our first run of the afternoon involved going up hill a bit. Now, no skier ever likes getting up hill from a standing start. Sidling uphill (or herringboning, for those with more flexibility than God intended) gets you a short distance in a long time, and mostly just gets you hot and sweaty. Marianne promised us decent skiing and excellent views on the other side of this ten yard rise, but several of us were unconvinced. Then she also bribed us with promises of an easy afternoon, since there was a photographer coming with us to take pictures for the Ski School brochure for the next year. All we would have to do was stand around against the beautiful scenery, pretending to be taught.
The bribe was duly accepted, and we trudged our way up and over the brow. The views were indeed breathtaking (or had that just been the walking?), and we posed in fake "action shots" happily until Marianne lead us over to the edge of the main slope of the run called "Brown Shirt". As we posed again at the top of the slope, Marianne looked wistfully over at the ridge on the opposite edge. "Next time we're over here, I'll take you down that," she said. The rest of us looked at the vertical drop and frankly doubted it.
Brown Shirt wasn't exactly a hard run. The difficult bit of it consisted of one long mogul field — I should explain here that a mogul is little hillock of packed snow, anything from a few inches to a few feet tall, which crop up in large bunches. Think of skiing down giant egg boxes and you'll get the general idea. Phil Nanson has an attractive theory that they are in fact a form of turtle living under the snow, capable of a surprising turn of speed when your skis come anywhere near them. Anyway, for Phil Allcock and myself, skiing down Brown Shirt was just very tiring and involved falling over once or twice (look, it was early in the holiday…). Steve and Hans attacked the moguls with gusto, completely forgot where we were going and ended up on the wrong side of the slope. Marianne, who barely seemed to notice the moguls at all, was vastly amused and shouted a lot of sarcastic remarks at them. However, for some of the other members of the class Brown Shirt was clearly more like Brown Trousers, and they needed considerable coaxing down. Phil and I looked at each other happily. If this was a sample of what the class was like, we were bang in the middle of the ability range. We should have no trouble coping with the week's lessons, and we might even learn how to ski moguls properly.
That evening, several people made interesting discoveries. First, Hans had a brother, Volker, who was just as mad as he was only a rather better skier (he had been ticked off in the Top Class Etc Etc group for hotdogging down a mogul field). Second, when you got them drunk, the brothers started burbling at you in German. This made getting them home safely an interesting exercise, or so I'm told.
Tuesday morning dawned grey — well, white actually, since it was snowing — and Hans failed to show up for the morning class. Several of us made smart remarks about Marianne scaring him off, but Steve, who had been out drinking with the brothers until pretty late, promptly accused him of having a hangover. "No stamina these Australians, we should never have let the colonies go...." At this point Marianne snarled "Follow me" and headed off to the lifts. She was in a foul mood, we later discovered, because she had had to take the instructor's early morning practice session on approximately no notice. She just wanted to ski it out of her system. Unfortunately, we had to follow her.
Eventually, Marianne led us off one of the usual slopes at Sunshine to the ridge edge. "We're going down there," she said. We looked. "That's a cliff," said Steve, faintly. "No it's not," countered Marianne in a sweet and reasonable voice, "a cliff is something you fall off." "Yes?" we said, unconvinced. "She's got no pity for us at all," mourned Steve. "She's the Beast of Banff, that's what she is."
I won't bore you with the gory details. Suffice it to say that not one of the class managed to get down the "slope" without falling over, and if you fell over once you went slipping and sliding all the way down. To make matters worse, though we didn't know it at the time, one of the beginners groups (with a number of my friends in it) had a perfect view of our descent, and stopped to watch because their instructor said "Oh, that's Marianne's group. This'll be interesting." Marianne, like all instructors, had antigravity devices concealed in her skis, so made the impossible look very easy.
At least the route down to the lifts from where we ended up was nice and easy, though Marianne did her level best to find all the moguls. At the bottom she was greeted by one of the other instructors, who asked which way we'd been. "She threw us off a cliff," we replied before Marianne could get a word in. "I did not," she retorted, and described the run that we had done. "It's a cliff," we insisted. "No it's not," they replied, and just to prove it Marianne took us down several more "interesting" runs that morning. It was a slightly shell-shocked and thoroughly snow-covered party that broke up for lunch, discussing the terrible things that the Beast of Banff had done to us. By the end of lunchtime we had even decided that "The Beast of Banff" was too much of a mouthful, knackered as we were, so Marianne was abruptly rechristened "Bob." She took this in good part — at least I think she did. She didn't get much option, because we leaked it to some of the other instructors at the first opportunity.
After lunch, Hans deigned to rejoin us and was immediately interrogated as to where he'd been in the morning. We soon saw past his pathetic excuse of the alarm clock not going off, since careful questioning revealed that he had had a hangover anyway. No stamina, these Australians, etc, etc. Then, of course, we had to fill him in on how Bob had thrown us off the cliff, and for that matter that she was now called Bob. Rather foolishly, Hans refused to believe that she had done anything so nasty to us, so Bob promptly took us over the cliff again. Hans took one look and agreed that it was, in fact, a cliff. He was a geologist, and he bloody well ought to know. "It's not a cliff," Bob insisted, and made us go over it anyway. This time, most of the class made it down upright through a combination of sheer determination and blind panic. Hans, of course, turned into the Amazing Snowball Man without managing a single turn, like all of us had done in the morning. He received no sympathy at all from the rest of us, who had rather been hoping that we had seen the last of that particular cliff. And it was a cliff, too.
Wednesday was race day, and saw the ski school classes bimbling around the third and smallest of the ski areas, Mount Norquay (pronounced "Nor-kway" despite the best of us English to turn it into "Nor-kee"). Bob had spent bits of Tuesday afternoon, when she wasn't taking us off cliffs, telling us about what we would be doing. It was just a slalom race, honest, and we'd do a bit of practise in the morning before we had to do it for real. It would be a piece of cake. Oh, and they kept the skiing area icy because the racers liked it that way.
I'm sure you can image just how much she reassured us with those words. The practise session in the morning was conducted in unprecedented levels of paranoia as we all tried to work out where the icy bits were. Not that it helped us, mind you, since we weren't allowed to ski where they were setting the course up. It also didn't prevent Steve from suddenly teleporting in front of me at one point, causing me to leap sideways and commune with the trees for a bit. The trees weren't moving, at least, which made them a whole lot safer than Steve was as far as I was concerned.
Eventually it came to be our turn to race. The first hurdle to negotiate was the man standing at the top of the course with the video recorder, who asked each of us the sort of questions the serious sports reporters ask you just before you start a slalom race. Our job, obviously, was to respond with the best mock-serious answers. Inevitably, it was Phil Allcock who came up with the killer. He was peering down the slalom course with his usual faintly worried expression when Mr Video asked if he was nervous. "Oh no," said Phil absently, "when you've spent all day cliff-hopping with the Beast of Banff, nothing scares you any more." Bob, who was just in the shot, creased up in hysterics. She only stayed on her feet through one of those major miracles that instructors seem to pull off twice an hour. Steve's eyes lit up…
We shot down the course in pairs, there being two sets of gates for us to use, and got our timings. Also, our old friend the Official Photographer was standing at the side of the course to take real action pictures that he could sell back to us at only slightly inflated prices. All of this meant that we would have to go back up the lifts, faff around for ten minutes or so while the other classes did their racing, and then do our race all over again. This was fine in my book; I hadn't been photographed yet, and besides my timings could do with some improvement. Unfortunately, when we got back to the race course we found that they had called off any more racing for the day. The bottom stretches of the track were getting icy, and they had had three serious falls already. Well, we were at the top of the run, so we agreed to ski down beside it to fake an action shot for those of us as yet unphotographed. Steve shot off first, and rather than waiting at the end of the course as told, he skied the extra twenty yards to where Mr Video was discussing something with the assistant director of the ski school. Bob was busy packing someone else off down the slope, so she didn't see the way that Steve practically sidled up to them. I was pretty much the last one down, so I passed the assistant director as he sped uphill — I swear instructors have antigravity devices! − to collar Bob about something or other. This gave us the necessary half minute to line up and say our piece to the camera. But more of that later.
Thursday and Friday were more of the same, really, with Bob taking us out to different bits of Lake Louise and Sunshine, getting cold in snow storms, learning how to ski in powder and hopping off more cliffs. This latter did include Bob asking if anyone wanted to try that nice ridge on the other side of Brown Shirt. Steve agreed enthusiastically, Hans (who had skied up to the group last) automatically echoed him before discovering what he had agreed to, and the rest of us wimped out on the grounds that we had grown quite attached to our limbs over the years, thank you very much. We had quite enough fun getting down the moguls, but much more fun watching Steve and Hans fall down the ridge. "They'd have been fine if they had started where I told them," said Bob, "but no…" We didn't believe her.
Friday night, on the other hand, was party night. The ski school invited all the classes to an all-you-can-eat buffet, for a bit of relaxed partying, a spot of prizegiving, and of course the opportunity to watch (and buy) the video that they had made of the racing. I almost didn't recognise Bob at all. I know that people do look different when they are wearing heavily padded ski suits and bundle their hair up under a woolly hat, but in a dress and with her hair down Bob looked like someone else entirely. I hadn't realised quite how short she was, for one thing. Can you get platform ski boots?
To start the evening, we just wandered round socialising as the video played in the background. Bob clearly knew that we'd been up to something with the video cameraman, if for no other reason than the other instructors started drifting closer as we spotted ourselves on video. One by one we delivered our witticisms and raced off down the hill. Then the crowning moment; a dozen faces shouting at the camera, "Our instructor, the Beast of Banff, is the cutest ski-bunny in the Rockies!"
You have never seen someone curl up so small and turn so scarlet in your entire life. Bob probably wasn't helped by the thunderous applause from all the instructors, and as every eye in the room turned towards her she hid in the middle of her class. We, being true-born English (and Australian and Canadian), did the only thing we could. We scattered.
Well, that was pretty much that for our skiing holiday. We did spend another week in the area, skiing about and doing things, but it wasn't really the same. Not that it didn't have its excitement, mind you; determining the principles of "pinball skiing" down a slope made out of sheet ice was interesting enough, as was Kari's delight that you could apply the principle that Your Instructor Knows Everything to finding the cheapest supermarket in town, and Phil's amazement at finding out just how large a Canadian restaurant thought a 16oz steak was. And we won't even mention the discovery that we could spot a white hat in the shape of a goat's head a full half mile away against a snowy background. No, it's just that none of it held quite the same utter terror as hurtling off a cliff just because Bob told us to.
I'd hate people to think that all ski school classes are like this. Usually it's just the Top Class Etc Etc people who come back with tales of sharing intimate moments with Christmas Trees or hurtling down some vertical egg-boxes just for fun. No, I'm convinced that we only got Bob because we had an interesting Australian in the class. That's just my luck.