Day Fifty-Six: Snow Tubing

Snow tubing has always been one of those activities that looked like a pretty good time to me. What's not to like? You go down a giant, snow-covered hill in a canvas-covered tube, and you don't even have to drag your vessel (or your person) up the hill to do it again. You get hitched to a wire that drags you and your tube up the hill to the top. But unfortunately, like most things, tubing is much more fun and exciting in theory than in actuality. I learned this last night.

Upon arrival, we stuck those annoying lift tags onto our zippers, and trudged to the back end of the resort to the tubing lift. The air was clean, crisp, and beautiful, and the lights sparkled off the snow and ice in the dark evening. The hill looked steep and exciting, and the mountain was sparsely littered with skiiers and snowboarders.

And then we saw the line for tubing.

A line snaked around the back of the hill, about fifty feet back. It didn't look that bad, but it moved incredibly slowly. It is absolutely not a good activity to engage in by yourself -- bring a friend to talk to for the half hour of time you're in line waiting to be hitched to your inner tube. As we chatted and finally reached out destination, a long-haired, efficient man in a snow hat lifted a tube from a self-made chute that led down from the bottom of the track above us, hurled it in front of me, and waited for me to sit. Then he waited for a hook to whirl by on the line and hitched my tow line to it, and I whizzed steadily up the hill backwards. The noise from below faded away, and all I heard was the sound of tubes whizzing down the track, and the canvas under my butt scraping against the ice and making my bottom end really, really cold.

After about a one-minute ride, the tube plopped and whirled into a landing, where I got up and schlepped it a couple of feet to the top of the track. It looked a lot steeper up high than it did from below. As we waited, a friendly man in a ridiculous snow hat asked, "has everyone here gone down already?". "No!!," we yelled, anxious for a little instruction. He promptly instructed us to lay with our face first , so our least-repairable body part would of course be the first to sustain any damage in case of an impact, and explained that in order to slow ourselves down, to dig our toes into the icy snow the entire way, so we would stop before hitting the inflatable barrier at the end. This would be our only defense against hurling off the edge of the raised track, off a twenty-foot high cliff onto the snow below.

Simple, right?

Actually, it wasn't that bad. It was, in fact, really effing fun. After the initial fear subsided quickly and I actually realized I COULD slow myself down a considerable amount, it was easy. Except, of course, when I hit one or many of the numerous bumps and potholes that had appeared on the track. Fortunately, though, I sustained no injuries. One of my tube-mates fell off her tube, but I'm really honestly not sure at all how she managed it. In one swift minute, I was at the bottom of the hill, walked down some steps, and got back in line. And I started the whole process again, which had taken about forty-five minutes.

My toes were freezing.

My verdict on the activity is that you have to be pretty unbothered by being cold to stay long enough to get in enough trips down the hill to make the money worth it. Save yourself the money, buy a snow tube, find a big hill, and go down that way. It's a lot easier.

Day Nine: I Hate Them Fancy Railroad Cars and Subway Trains...

When most people in my location think of the city, they think of great nightlife and a wealth of history and culture. But when I think of the city, I’m not quite so optimistic. I think of smog, crazy people, angry, impossible driving, and lots of pigeons. After about twenty visits, I’ve determined that I really rather despise the city. Unfortunately, I love everything the city has to offer. Every concert I go to is in the city, and there’s a cornucopia of amazing restaurants and markets with every kind of taste I could ever want to enjoy. I can educate myself with hundreds of museums and educational centers, and there are countless quirky events I wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else. But I still hate the city. I’m the kind of person who enjoys her space. I hate walking, I hate driving in a gigantic, crowded, multi-directional grid of angry people, and I hate coming home feeling like I rolled around in farts and car exhaust. “So take the train!”, you might suggest. Oh no -- I hate public transportation, and I have a terrible fear that I’m always going to miss my stop and end up getting off in a dangerous and creepy area. And along with all the goodness in the city that draws me there every once and again, they are gems amongst a plethora of dirty, neglected, and frightening areas engulfed by crime and poverty. I feel immense sympathy for anyone who lives there, but I still want to be as far away from such places as physically possible. I grew up in the grassy suburbs, where every house had a lamp post and there was a cornfield down the block. Although I love my town and I loved my childhood, I’m not going to call it cultured in any regard. So it’s perfectly natural that I would feel slightly uncomfortable in an area quite opposite from what I’m used to. And the fun little magic that comes with the city is that one wrong turn and you can easily end up in one of these areas before you’ve even realized you’re on the wrong street. Since I’m twenty-four, 100 pounds, and about as street savvy as Little Bo-Peep, I think it’s understandable why the city and I don’t get along. I have a close friend who lived and thrived in the city for four years while she went to college in one of the most dangerous parts of the area. She walked everywhere, spontaneously took mural tours, and took the subway to anywhere it would go to anything from the Italian Market to an Indian Pride Festival. She even lived in a house with drug dealers at twenty-two (having never touched drugs or alcohol of any kind) and lived a happy existence in her room upstairs. What I realized she had that I did not was a sense of fearlessness. She could live and love the city because she wasn’t even the least bit afraid of anything about it. Sure, it has a ridiculously high crime rate, but she didn’t let it get in her way. So maybe one day I can learn to love the city if I become a little fearless, but that isn’t going to help me ignore the smog or the pigeons.