Kamikaze Kangaroos!

by Tony James Slater

  It was great fun, although knackering – exertion at altitude is more difficult, and one-on-one combat with a suspended steel chair is about as hard-core an exercise as you can get. At first I would pound away at a chair, making little visible difference no matter how hard I smacked the damn thing. I was aiming at the ice, you see, assuming it to be brittle. But the ice wasn’t the right target.

  After a few days I learned to find the sweet spots on the chair’s superstructure, where a precise hit could set up a chain reaction that would destroy the Death Star! Okay, what it really did was vibrate the frame violently enough to shake large quantities of ice loose in one gigantic avalanche. It was incredibly satisfying to see an iceberg approach, to time it just right, aim and swing – and see a hundred kilos of ice crash to the ground, revealing the shivering form of the chair within. Then, a few good whacks from the next liftie in line would clear the debris, and by the time the chair had completed its run around the base pylon and was heading back up, it was largely frost-free. In theory.

  There were variations to this scenario, all of which I demonstrated admirably in my first two weeks on the job.

  There was the mis-hit; fractionally off, usually due to bad footing, it produced an embarrassingly loud CLANG! from the chair, but achieved nothing more dramatic that the redistribution of a few snowflakes.

  Then there was the flat-hit, when either the angle or the grip-tension was too great; this sent a shock-wave of equal and opposite force back up the arm, typically causing me to drop the bat, fall backwards into the snow, and shout “ARGH! MUTHERFUCKER!”

  And there was the one-in-a-million shot, where powerful contact with unyielding metal sheared the tip of the bat off, and sent it spinning into Keith’s face.

  Yeti sticks broke all the time doing this job, and there was a fairly high turnover of them – but only once did someone require stitches as a direct result of it.

  By the second week, a few minor mishaps aside, I felt I was getting the hang of it. I turned it into a game, competing against the others on a chair-by-chair basis – or, I would have done, if anyone else had cared enough to play along. Most of them just stood there looking bored, giving each chair a lazy clout as it went past. Pah! Not me. I was dedicated to this job, man!

  So I competed against myself, narrating my private game internally (and sometimes externally, when the excitement took me).

  “Chair one-seven-nine approaches, looking heavy… he sights for the sweet-spot… he swings!”

  Only, it was the dreaded mis-hit. NOOooo!

  I swung again – too hastily because the chair was now too close, well within the arc required for optimal power. My bat smacked into the ice with a wet thud, making nothing more than a dent.

  Rookie mistake.

  The mistimed shot had also robbed me of the chance to take another big swing – if I’d waited until the chair was past, I’d have had the perfect angle on it again, only from behind. But now it was gone, pulled out of reach on its chain, full of ice, ready to taunt me all the way back up the mountain.

  No.

  There was only one thing for it.

  Show that chair who’s boss.

  As the other lifties turned their attention to the next chair in line, I brandished my yeti stick like a samurai sword, screamed “BONSAI!” at the top of my lungs, and charged off through the piles of crushed ice after the one that got away.

  I scored another whack as it swung around the supporting pylon, and was gaining on the chair as it began its long trip uphill.

  The accepted wisdom was that the chair would come around again, and until then there were plenty more of them to focus on – but I took it personally that an inanimate object could escape my wrath so easily.

  Learning from my earlier mistake, I concentrated on catching up to the chair rather than swiping ineffectually at it from a distance. A couple more strides and I was on it. I brought my yeti stick down as I came alongside, and was rewarded with a shower of collapsing icicles. Only a few remained, frozen solid around the top of the frame.

  Two more steps…

  One final leap, coupled with a mighty downswing, smashed free the last chunks of ice, and they rained down on me as the chair was swept up, up and away.

  I landed in a crouch, not unlike a triumphant ninja.

  “YES! I GOT IT!” I bellowed, announcing my victory to everyone in earshot.

  But there was danger in this tactic. As with all potentially game-winning strategies, there were risks – and in this case, that risk was the next chair in line, which had swung around the pylon and followed me inexorably up the hill. As I turned to bask in the admiration of my peers, there was a cry of “Look out!”

  And the next chair ploughed into me at penis-height, folding me double around its frigid steel bars, and carrying me with it on its prescribed path.

  “Shit! It’s got Tony!” I heard from the control booth.

  “No worries!” I yelled back, as the lift swept me higher. My feet swung free in the fresh, chilly air as the ground fell away beneath me.

  “JUMP!” someone shouted, followed immediately by someone else shouting “DON’T JUMP!”

  But my hands wouldn’t hold on forever. As amusing as the thought was, of being carried the whole way to the top of the lift, it was a fifteen-minute journey. And my fingers were very, very cold. I braced myself for an heroic plunge, but there was a sudden clunk, and I felt the lift slowing to a halt. One of the others had slapped the emergency stop button.

  I dropped a couple of body-lengths into the snow below me, which was plenty deep enough to absorb my impact. I was still floundering around when Boob reached me, thrust an arm down, and hauled me out of the Tony-shaped hole I’d created.

  “You didn’t have to stop it,” I greeted him. “It wasn’t an emergency.”

  “It bloody well was! In another thirty seconds, you’d have been twenty metres up! Dangling by your bloody hands!” He shook his head in disbelief. “And that’s the third time this week. You’ve got to stop doing this!”

  Dirty Jobs

  There was no two ways about it; being a liftie was a damn hard job.

  Especially for those of us who took it seriously. I was consciously trying to make up for my complete lack of experience and knowledge with enthusiasm and good customer service – two things that absolutely no-one else in my job gave a flying shit about.

  In the morning, after an hour or so spent beating chairs with sticks, I’d ride up to my assigned lift and start assembling my queue gates. This was a typically low-tech method of organising a queuing system; it consisted of a series of plastic pipes, which I had to drive into the compacted snow with my yeti stick. They were connected by bungee cords, and I had to position them so they formed narrow lanes, one skier wide, and led away from the lift in switchbacks. I’d been doing this by hand for weeks before I discovered RAL possessed a metre-long steel drilling tool called an auger, fitted to an electric drill, for just this purpose. One of the lifties spent his morning skiing around with it slung across his chest like some kind of James Bond villain, helping everyone but me by drilling holes for their queue gates. Apparently at some stage one of the others had watched me attack my plastic pipes with such vigour that they’d decided it was way more amusing than letting me borrow the drill.

  The bastards!

  The rest of the day was spent greeting the guests, and helping them on (or off) the lifts. Mostly this went well, as customers had generally done this thousands of times, but beginners would always struggle, especially if they were five years old. So in the ten seconds between lift chairs, I took it upon myself to greet each row of customers with a cheery, “Hey folks, how’s it going?” and decide if any of them looked like they were about to wet themselves through sheer terror.

  If so, I would reassure them, pull the lever to slow the lift, ring an electronic bell to alert the liftie at the top that the lift was about to slow down, and try to get back in time to help them.

  Fifty percen
t of the time, the lift chair simply mowed them down where they stood.

  This required a sprint back to the control booth to stop the lift (and a double-bell signal to alert the top), back to the child/beginner to help them up and convince them to stop crying, then back over to start the lift up again (with appropriate bell signals). This time I would have to take a more active role in helping them – usually by picking them up and dumping them on the chair, then throwing myself flat to get out of its way before it took off up the hill.

  It was draining.

  And all the while, my liftie partner would stand there with a ‘don’t talk to me, I’m so over this,’ expression on their face. They rarely, if ever, spoke a word to the customers, and most of them seemed to take the opinion that anyone dumb enough to screw up getting on the lift, shouldn’t be on it – and consequently, wasn’t worth their assistance.

  And, for the most part, neither was I.

  In between customers we also had to maintain our entry (or exit) ramps. These were carved (by us) from packed snow and ice, and degraded throughout the day as customers rode over them and the relentless weather either turned them to puddles or piled them high with fresh powder. Either way, it meant that shovelling snow was a constant effort, and thankfully that was one area in which the other lifties deigned to help. Technically, I guess that was our job; keep the lift area safe, and keep the lift running smoothly. Calming crying infants and providing individual greetings and lift-riding instruction probably wasn’t in our job description – but I always read between the lines, and I was determined to do something right.

  And at this point, it wasn’t likely to be snowboarding.

  Because two weeks into the job, I still hadn’t dared try it.

  Roo’s experience was somewhat different.

  All the other roadies loved her, treating her almost like a mascot – and because of this I was afforded the rare honour of being allowed into their staff room. Other lifties wouldn’t dare enter the stronghold of their rivals; they’d claim not to care what went on in there, but the truth was, they were scared. There were only six roadies, but three of them were the size of at least two regular people; towering mountains of Maori muscle, who were every bit as friendly and easy-going as they were intimidating.

  The roadies had it tough; one of the reasons they’d scored such a lush staff room, despite their low numbers. All their gear was in good shape and all their radios worked. This was because the bosses knew that, of all the gigs on the mountain, the road crew had it toughest.

  Sure, it got cold up top, and when the weather closed in I’d be sat shivering in my tiny control booth; but rarely did I spare a thought for the discomfort of the roadies, deployed halfway up the mountain road where there was no shelter at all. It was their short-straw job; squatting in a lay-by just below the snowline, wearing no gloves because they “just got in the way,” fitting icy metal chains to frigid car tyres with their bare hands. They usually did it two days each per week.

  They had fun jobs too of course. In her first week Roo was taught several different ways of breaking into cars with various tools, because every day at least half a dozen customers managed to lock their keys inside.

  They rarely got to do ‘hot laps’, as it took way too long to get up the mountain from the base, where they were stationed, but they had their fun. When the protective padding from the base of a ski-lift pylon blew off and disappeared over the side of the ski area, the roadies were sent to retrieve it. Then they declared it MIA, called a staff meeting at the furthest edge of the car park, and spent an hour trying to ride the thing down the sheer ice-cliff separating the two parking levels. Roo went first, of course, and survived the experiment by the narrowest of margins; which is just another reason why they loved her.

  While we lifties were grousing about how hard it was to maintain our snow-ramps, the roadies were calmly getting on with one of their biggest tasks; clearing three feet of snow off the main car park. All of it. With shovels.

  Roo, wrapped in so many layers she was nearly as wide as a regular woman, worked as hard as any of them – only there was one small addition to her outfit. Unable to resist the role of mascot, she regularly went to work wearing her tutu – and a pair of wings she’d found in an op shop and brought all the way from Oz “because you never know”. Well, she knew all right – and within her first couple of weeks (around the time I was earning the reputation for being a cheerful idiot) – Roo was officially nick-named The Parking Fairy.

  And that’s why, when the roadies held their staff party, I was the only liftie they grudgingly invited. Because, as one of them said to me, “it can’t be all blokes.”

  There were stacks of other jobs on the mountain, both indoor and outdoor; regularly I found myself fantasising about what life would be like for the restaurant staff, or someone who worked inside the ski rental building.

  I was taking a rare break in the staff room when Mary, a friendly, blonde, English girl who was working as a cleaner, pushed her mop bucket into the room.

  “I should be a cleaner,” I told her. “I’ve done loads of cleaning, back in Oz. It’s got to be easier than what I’m doing now.”

  Perhaps this was the wrong thing to say to someone currently employed as a cleaner, but I felt that Mary would understand. Her boyfriend had done time as both a roadie and a liftie. She must have known how hard we had it.

  “Come with me,” she said. Her tone revealed nothing. She walked through to the toilets, and paused outside the Ladies. “In here.”

  I was intrigued – as, I believe, most blokes would be. Secretly. The ladies’ loos are one of the last bastions of entirely female-controlled territory on the planet. I’ve seen every kind of public convenience in my travels, from ones that played soft music at me to poo-stained holes in the ground. Yet I’ve always suspected that, as a bloke, I’m being short-changed; if only I knew what it was like on the other side of that partition! There could be anything. Carpeted floors, delicately fragranced air, soft, fluffy towels, free toiletries, slippers, Champagne – sofas for crying out loud! It could be a wonderland, a haven, a place of light and joyous contemplation. With cookies. But, like most blokes, I would never know about it.

  Or would I?

  This could be my chance. Purely to put my curiosity to rest.

  “Is there anyone in there? What if someone comes?”

  “It’s closed,” she said. “I closed it.”

  “So we’re going in?”

  “It’s my next job.”

  Mary pushed open the door – it didn’t creak even a little bit, I noticed – and beckoned me into that forbidden interior.

  I glanced around furtively, in the harsh glare of the fluorescent strip-light. It was… disappointing. And absolutely identical to the men’s loos.

  Except for one thing.

  In the middle of the third hand basin was a gigantic fresh turd.

  It glistened wetly against the stark white enamel of the basin.

  “It’s been going on for a while now,” Mary said. She sounded tired. “No-one knows who it is, but they keep doing it. It must be the latest joke.”

  I stared in disbelief at the turd. Obviously human. And whoever had given birth to this behemoth clearly ate a lot of corn.

  “What the… who the… what the hell are you going to do with it?”

  In response, she pulled a pair of rubber gloves from her belt. “Would you like to help?”

  “Um, no thanks.”

  “Would you like to watch?”

  “Um, no thanks.”

  “Then maybe you should just stick with being a liftie, eh?”

  “Ahhh… yeah. Good idea.”

  So I left her to it. After all, she had shit to do.

  Uneasy Rider

  My first proper snowboarding lesson was a bit of a surprise.

  I’d been ordered to do it by Boob (and yes, that sentence looks every bit as weird to me, writing it, as it does to you reading it).

  Boob was
my boss, remember; he’d noticed me turning up for work in the $200, fur-lined snow boots we’d been ordered to buy on day one, and asked me where my snowboard boots and board were.

  “I don’t have any,” I told him.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because I don’t know how to use them.”

  It wasn’t my proudest moment, admitting to the boss of the lifties that I’d never even been on a board.

  “How the hell do you get home when I station you at the Giant return, then?”

  “I walk.”

  The ‘return’ was the top of the lift, where a single liftie would be posted to help people get off; and The Giant, as its name suggests, was one of the biggest lifts on the mountain. Walking down from there took forever, although I’d been sneakily begging an illicit ride down on the Movenpick, the next biggest lift which went all the way back down to base.

  In response to this new information about me, Boob did two things (well, three things if you count calling me a ‘bloody lunatic’); he booked me (and Roo) onto the first available snowboarding lesson, and he began stationing me exclusively on the beginners slope.

  Standing on a snowboard for the first time was not at all like I expected. If you’ve ever tried to get onto a skateboard, only to have it shoot out from under you, you have some inkling of this – except that a snowboard can shoot out from under you in any direction it chooses.

  And as I had one leg fastened to it at the time, this produced the first completely successful front-splits I’ve ever done. I was braced for the damn thing to shoot forwards, landing me on my ass – so when it shot backwards – and my free leg remained firmly where I’d planted it – I landed on my testicles instead.

  Which hasn’t happened since I was a was a very small boy, and was running too fast around the top of a climbing frame.