TOADTalk by Blossom Beatty Pidduck CdeP 1992: Survival Advice

 

Mr. Pidduck and I are fond of making bets with one another. They go something like this:

 

Mr. Pidduck and Mrs. Pidduck were married in 2003. So, for Mr. Pidduck’s Toad Talk, I’d like to read you a little essay I wrote a while back. It’s called How to Survive an Extreme Sports Boyfriend.

 

Standing at the top of Mammoth Mountain, the wind ruthlessly firing snow at my face, I couldn’t even see my skis below me. Were they there? I remembered putting them on after my awkward exit from the Gondola—How, by the way, can one achieve grace stepping from a moving pod onto an icy floor while being yelled at by a “lifty” to grab one’s thirty pound skis? Simply remaining upright is a moral victory over the arrogance of those apparently born into their forward-lunging, foot-crushing boots and GORTEX jumpsuits.

 

How had I made my way to the mountaintop’s edge? It was all a blur, literally. The landscape had no crisp lines, no features, only shades of dull grey hovering just beyond my nose making everything two dimensional. And the wind. The wind! Why wouldn’t it just STOP, so I could hear, so I could see, so I could think.

 

“We’ll take the cat track to Huevos. Keep up your speed,” my boyfriend’s brother-in-law yelled as they all snapped on their skis and took off, skating by the DANGER!, EXPERTS ONLY!, NO EASY WAY DOWN! signs, into a dense cloud of grey.

 

Cat track. I hated that phrase, such innocuous words meant to excuse the path’s deadly nature. Sure, if you had the grace and agility of a feline, you were fine, but if, like me, you were more of a dumb, lumbering, Golden Retriever, you had no chance. Trail of tears, yes, cat track, no.

 

I had followed the voice of my boyfriend and his brother as I attempted to stay up right and moving. What were they hollering? I’d heard a few muffled “dudes!” an “epic” and something about “dropping in.” Panic. This wasn’t skiing, this was a trek up K2 in the midst of a covert op and my platoon leader was the insane, action-crazed guy also known as my boyfriend. I wasn’t prepared for this.

 

Saying I didn’t grow up in an athletic environment isn’t entirely accurate. It wasn’t that my family ignored athletics; they just had unusual ideas about them. My dad always talked about camping, fishing, being an outdoorsman, but our only real outings were hikes around the Hollywood Reservoir—a flat, paved road following the contours of a man-made lake, complete with chain-link fence. On one of our many meandering tours, I decided to pick up the pace and tripped over a crack in the tarmac skinning my knees and palms. My dad, in-touch with his apocryphal Native American routes, sat me on the lake’s retaining wall and set out to make me a poultice.

 

Except for making a salad from found roots and “lettuces”, nothing brought my dad greater joy than making a poultice. He would search the hillside chaparral for medicinal plants and tell us stories about their ancient uses while the injured party sat silently in pain, unsure which was worse, the wound or the anticipation of dad’s remedy. “This here’s the leaf of the Toyon Bush. Its oils can be used to remove toxins from the body.” Then he would pull out his hankie (a sporadically washed bandana which he and his new young wife often used for nose-blowing) find a small body of standing water on the side of the road, soak the cloth and use it to clean the wound and hold the herbs in place after he’d put them on the cut. Even as a seven year-old, I knew this was all somehow counterfeit. Having read Island of the Blue Dolphins I had too much respect for the native peoples of California to believe they would demonstrate such disregard for First Aid protocol.

Moreover, the sting of those poultices was like so many of my father’s parenting tactics—void of consideration for my pain threshold and missing the rationale and comfort of consequent improvement. He was playing the outdoorsman and we were his de rigueur audience, giving truth to his imagined abilities. Limping along with my poultices, I resolved that my father was the last man on earth with whom I would want to be stranded on a desert island or a remote mountaintop.

 

No doubt, some small portion of the blame for my parent’s divorce lies in my mother’s willingness to embrace the powers of Bactine and Neosporin. When it came to athletic personas, however, my mom was as much a fake as my dad. Having grown up in an academically and artistically driven household, she blamed her lack of popularity and happiness on her inability to play tennis, dive and sail a boat instead of on her father’s disregard, her mother’s sweet incompetence, and her own innate melancholy. In her defense, cause and effect is a difficult logic to master.

 

When my brother and I came along we offered the opportunity for vicarious redemption. As in all good Greek tragedies things quickly got off track.

 

“Tennis is an important social sport. It can open doors,” my mother said one night at the dinner table. “If you can play a game of tennis, you’ll find you’re welcome in any group.”

 

“Do I get a tennis outfit?” I asked eagerly.

 

“Blossom! Do not scoop those peas with your fingers. Left hand in your lap, please. And don’t speak with your mouth full.”

 

“I’m not going to play tennis, Mom. It’s lame.” This from my brother who’d already suffered through figure skating lessons after my mother told him ice hockey was an “unbecoming” sport. “I want a skateboard.”

 

That we lived on the outskirts of Malibu in a crummy apartment draped in enough purple velvet and gauzy window treatments to put Stevie Nicks at ease, made me think my Mom might have a point. Look where an inability to serve and volley had gotten her—eternally on the fringe of the cool crowd, trying too hard to fit in.

 

So I chose to embrace her philosophy and pave my road to social success starting with tennis lessons. At first all seemed perfect. I arrived at my tennis lesson in a lovely red and white, strawberry-themed outfit and met my Farrah Fawcet wannabe teacher. Her golden, feathered hair and perfect tan validated my mother’s claims. Tennis was the key to making it in this world. That my tennis teacher turned out to be more at ease talking about boys than teaching me to serve, only further supported my mother’s notion that it wasn’t so much about athletic ability but knowing the sport and looking the part. As my mother’s plan developed, it drifted further from any notion of real athletics. There were sailing lessons, harp lessons, horse back riding lessons, Polynesian dancing lessons… It was as if she were running a sort of schizophrenic, post-feminist finishing school. And I was her test case.

 

By the time I arrived at Thacher, I had never kicked a soccer ball, but was a champ at croquet. Needless to say, this did not immediately solidify my popularity. My ability to play at playing, however, to pretend to know what I was doing helped quite a bit.

 

So, I wasn’t an athlete, but I was great -–a natural—at faking it. That’s how I’d found myself at the top of Mammoth Mountain in a snow monsoon with my new, extreme-skier boyfriend and his extreme snow-boarder brothers, about to ski down something called Huevos Grande having lost all feeling in my legs.

 

“Ummmm… I think I’m feeling just, like, I don’t know, a little bit scared right now,” I yelled timidly to my boyfriend. After all that training here I was losing my resolve at the critical moment. All I had to do was pretend I was fine, let out a “Sweet, dudes!” and fling myself down the mountain and I would be in. I would be the fearless and fun girlfriend of the extreme sport guy. But terror can be an even more powerful motivator than the desperate search for love of a twenty seven year old woman.

 

After hearing my surrender, my boyfriend turned to me with a quizzical smile on his face as if to say “How could anyone be anything other than psyched in our current surroundings?” Terror won again. “Yeah, I’m just not sure that I’m ready for this and there’s all this snow flying around and I can’t see where we’re going and I know it’s monstrously epic and all, but it might not be for me.”

 

“Oh sweetie,” he finally replied. “It’s okay. You’re feeling some fear. It’s perfectly natural. Here’s what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to get Zen about it. Just imagine that fear is a dude you’ve met at the top of this mountain, and you’re just going to hang out with him for a while. Don’t push him away, just hang with him.”

 

This was, without a doubt, the stupidest thing I had heard in my life.

 

But attraction is a funny thing. Instead of telling this guy what I really thought, that being Zen was the excuse for every dumb, dangerous, insensitive and selfish thing every guy in his twenties ever did, I said , “Okay.”

 

I’ve largely blacked out what followed. I made it down the mountain, slowly, and was congratulated at the bottom and assured my huevos were, in fact, grande. What I do remember is that my boyfriend stuck with me all the way down, talking me through it, hooting and hollering when I managed to connect a turn or two.

 

This is what I had dreaded the most about going on the ski trip—the possibility of being the girl who everyone else has to wait for, the girl crying at the top of the slope, in need of endless encouragement. You’ve seen her. The Debbie Downer who steals everyone else’s fun with her desire to be safe and circumspect.

 

But it’s always a relief when you do what you’re most afraid of doing, isn’t it? I spent the rest of the weekend slowly letting my fears show. Instead of pushing my boyfriend away it seemed to make him take a keener interest in my enjoyment. He started skiing with me and showing me tricks of the trade. I never got up the gumption to tell them all that I needed more than a single peanut butter and jelly sandwich eaten on a lift to satisfy my hunger, but one step at a time.

 

Now when my husband and I ski Huevos Grande together I always tell him that I’m scared and ask if he’s willing to be the Fear dude and hang out with me while I go down. I’ve become very Zen.

 

So here’s my advice on surviving an extreme sports boyfriend. Try it out, but be sure to show him exactly who you are, extreme or not. And if he’s not interested, well, then he can just jump off that cliff all by himself, can’t he?