I failed my driver's test the first time I took it. I was in my dad's old blue truck (a 78 Chevy that used to be a diesel but wasn't by the time we bought it). It had an automatic transmission with an idle speed of about 60. The very first time I went driving (before I even got my Beginner's Permit), I went with my dad in that truck. The whole brake left, gas right thing was not intuitive. I started feeling too fast on the gravel road, and the truck started fishtailing a bit. My dad said to step on the brake. I stepped on the gas. I went into the ditch, out the ditch on the other side, and through the fence. When we stopped, there was a big dent in the bumper, and my dad got out of the cab to retrieve the tailgate. I flat-out refused to drive home after that. The worst part was that our neighbour had witnessed the whole thing, and there were years of teasing (fortunately, he never could keep Marlene and me straight a few years after that, and she got the brunt of the teasing for something she never did).
So, the driver's test. I think two of my bigger sins were an illegal lane change (on, I might point out, a road with no median, never mind lanes - I was told to pretend) and a rolling stop at a stop sign. I didn't go home with a driver's licence. For the weeks after that, while waiting for a re-test (in the city, with a driver's ed car that didn't zoom along if you didn't keep your foot firmly anchored on the brake, thankyouverymuch), I spent my breaks at work watching the traffic on Highway 17. It seemed that every frickin' idiot could get a driver's license, but not me! Clearly, there was something incredibly stupid about me! Obviously, the mouth-breather who can't open his mouth without cuss words erupting from it was much smarter than I was, since *he* had his license!
Yeah, well, needless to say, I got over it. To this day, I would never call myself a "good" driver. I drive. I've done so accident-free for the 15 or so years that I have been driving. My driving concerns Lorenz, who claims to be a nervous passenger, so little that he fell asleep on the way to the Sault last summer - he thinks I suck so little, he can sleep while I'm in control of the van that has both his and his kids' lives in it. But I still think the mouth-breather (who probably cleaned up his language by now) is probably a better driver than I am.
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That's what cross-country skiing feels like to me. Why don't I get it? Where is the magic that I am missing?
Over the past week, I've learned an awful lot about waxing my skis. I have an assortment of grip waxes, I have glide wax, a cork, a scraper, and these things that look exactly like kitchen scrubbies but cost about 10 times as much. I can wax my damn skis. But I can't fly along the trails...
Ok, my trail sucks. It would have been ok, but we had that whole freezing rain, thaw, hard freeze cycle last week, and now there's this massive crust on top of everything. This massive icy crust - so in order for me to be able to grip at all, I put on my stickiest wax (this might be the time to learn a new word: klister). Within about 20 minutes, the wax has worn off - and no wonder, the ice feels as hard as the fancy plexi-glass scraper I have. Before the wax wears off, I shuffle along - until I come to a hill. At which point I do an agonizing combination of herringbone, pushing against my poles, and stomping hard enough to break through the crust every now and then to anchor myself. If I come to a downward slope, panic ensues.
I made it to the top of the hill, and was actually having a bit of fun with my shuffle scrape shuffle routine. Then I thought, maybe the crust will hold me - and lo and behold, I skated along it for a few steps (my flat learning curve did not extend to skate-skiing the one time I went - I had fun with that from the get-go). It was great! Until, of course - don't tell me you didn't see this one coming - I broke through the crust and did a face plant. I wriggled, and I writhed - but I couldn't get up again. If I managed to get my skis under me, they flew out in two different directions on the ice when I tried to get up. I finally, after doing a creditable impression of the cuss-emitting mouth-breather, managed to get out of the bindings. It was only about 25 meters to the packed top part of the hill, which also marked the slope of death that I'd planned to walk down anyway (even Simon, who can actually ski well, wipes out on the hill of death). So I picked up my skis and walked.
Ow. If I had my camera here, I'd take a picture of the bruises on my calves. The crust was not enough to carry my weight, but it was a thick enough crust that it slammed into the part where my leg gets wider - aka my calf - with painful force. 25 very agonizing meters, with the cussing soundtrack. I suck at this skiing thing.
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While I was illustrating my lack of competence at skiing, I really should have done something about the toboggan run on the hill of death. But I procrastinated on that until Sunday morning, at which time I realized that the crust made for a very fast and out of control ride down. This would have been fun, except the run is between two fences. One of them is a high tension wire fence. The kind that can slice parts of your anatomy off if you hit it with enough force. I bailed on the sled a couple of times to avoid such a fate, and then stomped back to the yard to get a metal shovel. My plan was to break the crust and build a slower trench. And between that and the fence of doom, I would use the crust to build a small wall. This way, if you were zooming on the fast crust on the side with the painful but not dangerous wooden fence and you started going over to the dangerous side (which you do, because that hill slopes that way a bit) you would hit the wall and riccochet back. If you were a chicken, you could do the slower ride in the trench. I did about a third of the hill, and that technique worked well.
HP saw what I was doing, and decided to help out with the tractor. At which point I figured my services weren't needed, and wandered to the house. An hour later, with the 13 kiddies about to go out, I realized that HP and the tractor were stuck, the hill was nowhere near safe, and there would be carnage. HP and I worked like fiends with the shovels, but for safety reasons the whole tobogganing party got moved to one of the horse paddocks. They kids could safely careen on top of the crust, and it is thick enough to carry their weight.
As already established, it is not thick enough to carry mine in most places. After I gave up on working on the run I'd spent so much time on, I got a kick out of watching them whiz around on the crust. Then I banged up my shins some more, and that was that. I failed the tobogganing test too.
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It's a good thing I have such a great relationship with my snowshoes.
And I haven't given up on the skiing thing. I'm hoping for fresh snow...
Posted by Johanna at February 9, 2004 12:27 PM