#BELIEVEinSARAH

Running late, I had buckled my own little princess into her car seat after my wife called to see if I had heard the news…we are connected that way.  I paused, looked him in the eye through the glass and in a moment thought to myself ‘he looks just like that day’…unshaven, solemn, aged…and in the next remembered my son would be waiting outside, raised a hand in the window, and drove on.  I knew he knew.  Sarah Burke was gone.

Driveways and lift-lines, coffee shops and the cash tills at Nesters Market, and the simple places that make this our home share our grieving, the passing and our love.  I see it in the school yard in the parents eyes, me with Kate in her little Helly Hansen snow suit with her head buried in my chest to keep safe from the bitter wind at -17 degrees.  I know, we all see it on computer screens and news casts and old videos popping up on YouTube, but it’s the people that we meet, and how every one of them knows someone who knows a story, who knows her, who remembers when, that make it all so real.  That is our home.

The smiles and laughs rounded the office remembering when she first arrived and for the past week my wife read the stories I didn’t want to read and said the words and here at home we filled the Twitterverse and Facebook with #believeinsarah…hoping, praying, hiding, knowing.

One night between Yearbook and Focussed…2000 something, I honestly can’t remember which, we hosted another annoyingly awesome Matchstick Ski Movie premier and somewhere in the madness I passed on the party where Sarah made heroes of the boys from the Helly Hansen shop crew when she asked them if they were pro-skiers too…and it didn’t occur to me until today that was exactly the type of girl she was, the glowing centre of the room that makes everyone in her view feel like they are super stars too.  That is Whistler, that is our home, where we love and share our heroes like brothers and sisters and they in turn treat us like their own and love us right back.

I told Bernie once, “(my son) Jack doesn’t like dogs.” “That’s OK”, he said, “He doesn’t like kids.”  I don’t know why I told you that just now but I do know he’s not as tough as he looks…Chester or Bernie.  And while this town will drop the gloves and take it on the chin as well as any small town I’ve had the pleasure to call home (and punch it up in), the truth is beneath it all, beneath the glamour and the hype and the logos and the sponsors’ stickers, we are all heart.

We have been here before, more recently and more often than we wish to recall, but never before quite like this.  Sarah was our girl.  She was quietly everything, every reason we put boots on and strap sticks to our feet and fall in love with women and this mountain town, and with that spirit she was an inspiration to generations of women and girls like our daughter who will one day say, “I can”, in her footsteps.

I #believeinsarah.

Life, Death and Voices in the Snow

…Nov 22, 2009 Quiet morning…up way too early waiting for the next snow report in the morning to confirm there’s another foot or two of fresh snow.  I am losing count but the opening week has gone something like this: Saturday 70cm, Sunday 70cm, Monday 30cm, Tuesday 40cm, Wednesday 56cm and now Thursday another 53cm, Friday don’t remember…you do the math…it’s deep!

Can’t sleep… Heard a gentle ‘hwump’ the other morning and thought for a moment it was an avi bomb echoing down the valley but looked out to see a small dark bird twitching on its side in my son’s sled beneath the window, wings folded tight to her chest, struggling to catch her breath and then still.  My wife and I watched silent, I turned to her and shook my head with my eyes and we finished getting our little boy ready for school.

Later that morning I returned, picked up the motionless little body and took her to a hollow in the rocky bank next to our home after holding her long enough to be certain she was not coming back.

I am reverent in these early days in the snow and of our friends who are not here to laugh and smile and tell us tales of just how deep it was or about the stupid trick they pulled or line they skied.  Only a week after Remembrance day and here we are heading up the mountains with that same anticipation we had when we were kids and this year (once again) there are fewer returning after their lives were cut short so suddenly…but if we listen closely between the turns and windswept lines we will hear their voices beneath the snow.

The first 70cm day was epic (what else do you call those days?)…dropping into the same lines I had just skied the last two days that had vanished.  The next 70cm day was beyond…literally too deep to turn on any of the terrain that was open and the usual trees and rocks my size were gone beneath the surface, the cliffs on top of Rat Fink, gone in two days…enough, stop thinking…sleep.

In the dream this opening week in Whistler has become, each day repeats like it did for Bill Murray in, ‘Ground Hog Day’…I get off the gondi goggles, gloves and zips all set, click the buckles on my boots and slide unnoticed past the crowds with that silent nod that says ‘Here we go…’ (aka ‘I’m local, trust me, you don’t want to follow me’)…but more than that it says, ‘I’m home’.  I slide past Green, right, a little left of right, nearly out of sight and slip between the markers without a second thought…like slipping into my favorite pair of jeans ‘that fit like  an old lover come back for more’ (Max Blagg).

A short hike over the roll, west wind at my back pushing, driving me to that bottomless familiar escape into the white…and beneath the snow echo the ageless muses of younger days like the soundtrack of my life. The low base of “Love me two times…” sinks in and the voice of Jim Morrison reciting the Graveyard Poems of a forgotten era before my time…and, “the voices of singing women are calling from the far shore and they are saying, forget the night and live with us in forests of azure.  Meagre food or souls forgot.”  The constant sting of the wind numbs and the blur of white that suddenly surrounds is calling me home. ‘A little more right son, you know the way.’  Alone, together, like an old friend pouring one more drink for the drive home.  Punch drunk love-sick ramblings…like it’s the first time all over again.

Higher right, roll, straight line, wind lip…pass a huge bomb hole the size of my body with a moments glance that snaps me back, awake.  No results from the blast, just a perfect round hole like a meteor evaporated on impact and left nothing to show but the crater…safe for now, game on, here we go.  There’s a small group of struggling searchers to my right too close to the tree line, too flat over there for today, and I instinctively cut left, air between the trees, drop weightless, land, and drop again when the ghostly cushion beneath the K2 Kahuna’s says, “yes, now”.  I run straight exhaling through the chest deep compression while the group stands still in time watching as the flash of red disappears into the glade at the bottom of the second pitch. Pine branches loaded with snow brush by and windows between the heavy trunks appear from my dreams and open one after another and I’m certain they close behind me as I pass…but I can’t look back.

I am ‘one’ with the forest, nearing unconsciousness, like Bruce Lee and, “the art of fighting without fighting…it is like a finger pointing to the moon.  Do not focus on the finger or you will miss all the heavenly brilliance.”  I let go, I release the inner turmoil to the wind and deny the inevitable collision of man and earth and focus beyond the trees, beyond the forest, until the voice fades and I am conscious again for a moment on top of a giant log.  I slide up and drop over the hollow gap below and find the muses waiting on the other side.

Five minutes to midnight or 3:28am, I don’t know which, and I am there throughout time with all the dead poets, friends and heroes who left before their time…James Dean, Jim Morrison, Bruce Lee, Trevor Peterson, Craig Kelly, Alex Loewe, Goran Kropp, Denis Fontaine, Heath Ledger, Shane McConkey…my cousin David at 16…and more.

In a world of exceptional people there are precious few who truly inspire and as they fall, each one in turn reminds me of the next.  It is so sad to say, ‘in turn’, like it was meant to be, by design.  The names and voices call us from the snow, and at home, far from the empty dreams we walk the halls as years pass and find our wives asleep and little boys and girls who woke up and crawled into our beds after a bad dream.  It is an all too true reminder that we take them with us when we do these things.  Like Shane said, there was a time when I too wrote I might never see 30 or 40 and yet here I am with their voices. I imagine I see in those stolen moments what they saw and taste ‘the search’ at the tip of my tongue.

Unless you have fallen from a plane (a perfectly good one) and touched that awakening moment that commands you alive, or better commands that you question your life in a flash of white not knowing if you will surface from a wave or be forever one with the white light of an avalanche or slide down the pavement or dirt until the friction of the impact and the bone crushing clash of gravity and normal force make you stop breathing, you can’t imagine what they felt the instant before the inevitable.  It is like they say, your life flashes past in the blink of an eye, no, faster, and I mean your whole life before and beyond the chaos of disaster…the loves, the triumphs, the failures, the regrets, loved ones laughing, the dreams of your own seemingly inevitable funeral, that first ride on the Honda 50 motorcycle that had you hooked on speed, the children you have yet to hold, the dream of growing old with the one you love…all time and place and spirit combine and before you are lost, you are whole, and you know the truth in that fleeting moment before death and then, god willing, you are alive, thanking god (or whatever other divinity  you denied you implore the moment before) that you are alive.

My heart races…and then, at the open light at the end of the glade I slide to a stop and breathe…it’s nearly morning now.  I look up at the clock, check for daylight through the blinds, see the new day has arrived, and know if I listen closely the voices will be with me.

It’s true a piece of my home is missing this winter…and I miss the faces that remind me and seeing so many of them at Duncan’s memorial brought it all rushing back.  I wonder sometimes if that was really the reason I was there…for them…the reason I built a living room at the base of a mountain and refused to sell anything I wouldn’t wear.  Where do you go now my friends?  Where did I go?

HOME…Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros take me back to the day I scraped 2000lbs of tile off the floors and my sister forgot to move our tools and jackets before she sprayed the ceiling white…or the day the McConkey Pontoons arrived and my son said, “Now the Mama and the little girl are a family”, and Ingrid and Arne together at Squaw in the Matchstick memories of four years on the big-screen over my shoulder, elbows on the counter I sanded and oiled with my own hands, in neon ski pants and sandals with a chai tea and a cinnamon bun from Ciao Thyme next door.

Whistle with me… (ha, ha…OK, better click on the song and get it playing then start reading again…go!)

Walked up once in my ski gear just before noon and a young couple was taking a picture of the sign I left on the door. ’55cm Gone skiing’…in Sharpy marker over the snow report for the day.  ”That’s awesome!”, she said, and they laughed and walked away holding hands.  Ya, it was.

On sunny Sundays and market days the kids would come by with Mama and pizza and the sticky popcorn that fell down between the cushions of the black leather chairs and watch The Drifter with Dad while Kate played hide and seek with Jack and ran outside with the plexi-glass Spy signs from the sunglass cases…or lock the fitting room doors from the inside and climb out on their hands and knees from underneath…and all the nights my wife waited and packed them into the car to bring me home.

And the other days…mostly alone…when the rain thundered on the metal roof and showered down on the plastic bag on my bike seat and I wondered when it would end… like a summer love that left the locals in rain coats and out of work in the seasons between right here at home, I found you there.

Home is wherever I’m with you…and no matter what they build in its place, or what color they paint that wall at the skate park that I keep taking pictures of…it will still be right there where I left it.

I never said goodbye… to so many, to those friends, because like I said, I didn’t ever want to write that letter in the paper, you know the one, and when I meet them on the stroll or at film premiers and memorials they tell me, “I miss your store.”

Me too.

home

Home is wherever I’m with you Whistler.  See you there.

]]> http://streettopeak.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/home-is-wherever-im-with-you-whistler/feed/ 2 whistler skate park - slater blue Hi Whistler blue Whistler red Whistler Skate Park...one more time street to peak http://streettopeak.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/this-is-our-last-goodbye-jeff-buckley-life-and-death-in-a-ski-town-part-2/ http://streettopeak.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/this-is-our-last-goodbye-jeff-buckley-life-and-death-in-a-ski-town-part-2/#comments Sat, 31 Dec 2011 07:12:18 +0000 Hi http://streettopeak.wordpress.com/?p=2607 Continue reading »]]> Jeff Buckley and shades of grey…where to start.  I stop writing to click on the song and the reminders…

“It’s over…just hear this and I’ll let you go.”

It’s over.

Somewhere sad eyes are crying and asking why and here at home, grown men who knew him well enough to say, “hey buddy”, hold them back and can’t find the words to say.

“Did ya say, no, this can’t happen to me…did ya rush to the phone.  I didn’t know him at all…I didn’t know.” from This is our Last Goodbye.

My neighbor’s dog is two years old today and I knew immediately from the look on my friend’s unshaven face before he said, “did you hear…?”  I didn’t want to hear.  They walked down the bank beside the house and my kids kept throwing snowballs at dad while he told me the story in broken words how he was 10 miles away and they couldn’t get there in time to help, no-one could.  ”His name was on the board at the shop…he was supposed to come in this morning.”

The familiar pains of winter words and white death filled his face and he swallowed hard when his voice cracked.  I took a breath and I turned my head and shook his chocolate-brown lab around the scruff of his neck while the kids lobbed snowy reminders of the every day that don’t understand why the clocks all stopped there in the parking lot in front of our house en route to the skating rink in the village.

The tears came when he walked away and I told Jack I was going to get some water and sat at the kitchen table in my boots and jacket for a stolen moment…

Sad songs and rock and roll and the unrequited love of these peaks that call us in the grey bird of a 100cm week find me here alone with the hum of the refrigerator and Jeff Buckley…they call us like love-sick sailors to rocky shores with the voices of singing women curling in whispers between the wind the words we’ll never hear.  They will never kiss our cheeks or hold our hands and say. No, not the way we love them, not the way my children kiss me and say, “I love you Dada”, with words too many too young will never hear, but we call this place home and pray selfishly each time the next time will be one step further from our own.

…and more than that…we pray his friends came to him and said, “it’s going to be OK buddy”, all knowing, and held his hand and wiped his goggles and listened…and held him into the last goodbye of a winter night too dark and too cold to go alone like so many of our friends before him.

I kissed my daughter and held my little boy tight before I sent him to bed tonight.  Do that.  Not because today might be your last but because we can.  Tell them you love them and send a prayer to those we left behind who won’t see the eve of the new year only a day away.

RIP Duncan MacKenzie.

I hear the metal splashes in the dark and I don’t need to open the blinds…I know exactly what it looks like.  Awake, asleep, drip, drip, drip.

Later…

Jeff Buckley joins my walk to the bus stop and I know that song like those old blue jeans and the pale blue eyes in the mirror.  “Lover, you should’ve come over…” Repeat.

The reflections of street lights run down highway 99 to my feet, to my cold fingers, and into my camera.  Christmas is coming and my son was still asleep dreaming when I left for work. 

Stopping soon…”the open window lets the rain in”…

Riding the WAVE.  Words and dreams find us here together.

“Words are deeds”.  Who said that?

Kate is coughing and the sounds of her little 8 month waking down the hall are calmed by Gail’s soothing voice…like only a mom can do…then quiet.  If only words could capture that feeling…the tenderness that is instinct that begins my daughter’s new day with nothing but love.  Children (especially our own children) are a gift of love, magic.

Meanwhile…snow, rain, ice, more snow, crowded buses, shoppers, lift lines, credit cards, credit calls, submitting monthly tax returns for the business, shhhhhhhhhhh…Christmas is coming.

Sometimes when Gail is out teaching I dance with Kate in the kitchen…our favorite lately is Arrested Development’s, ‘Zingalamaduni’ album.  Two decades of hip hop, a century of jazz and the 400 years before that take us back to Africa and we dance in our tiny kitchen.  The lyrics are engrained by years of repetition and solitary escapes in headphones on crowded trains…”I need some time to ease my mind…” like the Sunday morning sermons I never heard and I think, “on this rock, I build my church.”  Christmas is coming and Kate kicks her legs to the African rhythm and sometimes, most times, falls asleep with her head on dada’s shoulder.

Aside: The Americas are a lost tribe, lost people tossed together in a harsh homeless disconnect.  African, Asian, Europeans of all sorts, North, South, East, and West is best, it doesn’t matter -well it does, there are roots in culture – because none but a precious few of us are from here, indigenous, home…and yet we all call this home.  It’s no wonder we struggle.

  ”There is one path and one path only, the path of relentless struggle.”

Beneath it all, somewhere, we are lost, lost in the resentment of a history that is too new to call this home our own…and if it’s not mine, it’s damn well not yours. Peace out America!

Words are deeds…My wife was writing on her computer last night and from the other end of the couch, with the 50th anniversary issue of Surfer Magazine I said, “What are you doing?” “Just writing”, she replied, “you write.”, and with that, I went to bed with a smile and fell fast asleep, and woke up this morning thinking ‘words are deeds’.

‘Words are deeds.’  I cut it out of a magazine ad in university and taped it in a book somewhere.  Words spill out and color the world like brushes and fingers with paint from cans in anything but random.  They are real.  Poetry, songs, love letters, journals, articles, graffiti at skate parks, cook books, the signs on homeless bearded men that say, “feed me”, Christmas cards….all of them, they are healing and revealing and while they seem to escape the everyday (are you there right now?) beneath the pages, signs and letters, below the surface they find us peace in uncertainty, and home where there is none.  I go there, into the words, more often this time of year and I am reminded where I have been and who I am.  Not that I am defined or cast into the mold of my making but that I was and I am ever fluid and alive in every point in time, at the crest of the wave, and right there I capture the otherwise forgotten magic like Clark Little in the aftermath of the north shore break with his camera strapped to his wrist, washed up the sand with the impossible captured in his lens. Words are deeds.

Do I paddle in or float over and wait or does the next wave catch me ducking under?  (Ed. Cut to me at Chesterman Beach, Tofino…5mm of neoprene head to toe, struggling in the late April white water trying to figure out how that dude out there is sitting on his board without paddling.)  The ‘line up’…I’m not in the lineup.  I was in ‘my’ line up, a point off the shore left of the logs at center, in line with the rocky point to the south but I wasn’t in ‘the’ line up.  In the water, like in the mountains, there is a right place to be and it’s right over there (really, it is) but you can’t just paddle out thinking you are there…you have to find it, you have to commit, and you have to work and learn and struggle and…and don’t worry; if you’re not there the ocean will let you know.

“There are thousands of religions, but there’s only one surfing.” Kelly Slater

Where will you build your church?  On a mountain, on a wave, on a canvas, in books with words, with pencils on empty pages…or maybe in your little girl’s eyes when she wakes to find a new day and smiles?  Christmas is coming.

Where do you go?  Where do you go when they’re gone?  Where do you go when you hear their voices and see their smile’s?  Where do you go when the ravens circle high and call  you to that place where hero’s and anonymous are one?  Where do you go to listen to the voices beneath the snow? … CLICK! https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=219950024738505

You won’t want to miss this one.

In the meantime…Sunday reading…

“Writers, Gods and the Death of the White Noise”  READ…CLICK!  http://wp.me/PHKUK-oi

Lava, traffic, trees, smoke, seasons fading into dreams of winter…escape…

Cut to Kye…cornice drop, slide, ski cut…another slide, one more turn to the run out on the ridge line and another slide breaks from above under Kye’s feet.  No.  He bares down on edge, punches through the liquid white madness with his hands and poles and holds on for life.  All.I.Can, Sherpas Cinema…Breathe.

If you’ve been there, under the snow, you know.  Stop.  Cue heli, cameras rolling, nose in, skis in and Kye climbs up past the camera to the only safe place hovering desperately close to disaster.  If you know, you stand up like the local skier I recognize from the shop standing at the end of our row applauding the line that didn’t go and when I look back at the screen through my memories of Kye’s dad in RAP Pictures ‘Burning Winter’ and so many others we’ve lost along the way, I see the boy who has become the man before our eyes in Whistler neighborhoods and big screens and how many ways the world has changed…we are so close to home, to the earth, here in Whistler and so far away right here right now.

Home: A squirrel is running back and forth outside the sliding glass door preparing for winter, my little girl is in pajamas, a new day is there behind the silhouette of Armchair and Wedge and this will be the first Saturday with my home away from home, Street To Peak, no longer there waiting for me.  Like Jackson Crompton said, “It is the end of an era.”

Meanwhile, I see a familiar face outside.  Every morning one of our neighbors walks past with a towel over his shoulders and walks up the bank on the path to 19 Mile Creek.  He is tall, lean, Eastern European…by his accent…and I don’t know his name but like most small town neighbors I know him well enough to say ‘hello’.  I imagine once upon a time and place there was no running water in his post Soviet Ukrainian village and like my mother’s once lost family they trade milk for bread and save gasoline to fuel the one car they share for short trips and emergencies.  I remember the days at the ranch in the Bugaboos and the time the water was bad up Arrow Creek Road in Creston and I walked down to the cold running waters of the Kokanee Glacier to wash before pounding nails with my dad between semesters to help pay for college after spending too much of my student loan money on ski passes and army surplus pants.

The world is as simple as we make it…

Back at the movie, I smiled and held my wife’s hand when Kye talked about wanting a better world where he will have kids of his own one day.   With a home in Whistler and two kids of our own “Trevor would do it”, has a whole new meaning to me now and I wonder if the Trojans behind their  great walls or better yet, Ullyses or Achilles would look back and say, “What if?” I wonder if I would do the same, make the same choices, knowing what I know now.

In the lobby Jack and Mike were talking surfing, my best friend was looking for his pregnant wife, my sons little classmate who was in the film signed a poster for him, and somewhere in the wake of change I swallowed hard, smiled, shook their hands and my wife, my Whistler love, hugged them for me when I didn’t.

The world as I know it is gone and it has remained the same in the same breath.  The king is dead, long live the king.  The Sherpas have finished the most anticipated ski movie ever, fathers have turned to sons on the big screen, the effects of global warming have sent us winters like we have never seen, the effects of recession and the ever emerging globalization of our economy has left small businesses gasping but here we are.  A week ago I donated a Chili Thom print and $500 to Whistler Friends at Swell 2 and today I am holding my wife’s hand in a different way as we move on from the dream that was our local living room for the past four years.  The world is spinning between seasons, between premiers and elections, between $7 beers and stealing parking and the Sherpas are showing us all what we already know, we all make the world the way it is…and winter is coming Whistler.

iSUP or iSuck?  NEW BRAND ME PAGE!!

My 3 day summer love review of the C4 Waterman 10.9 XXL and a reality check for anyone thinking of getting a new SUP board in Canada.

CLICK!!  http://wp.me/PHKUK-CW

“I want to show you the shots you never see…”

Cue the lights, cut to Jimmy Hendrix, the room full of big screens lit the capacity crowd and 5000 wide eyed 2010 TWSSF junkies had their minds blown at the pinnacle of the festival.  A surf photog at a snow, er, a Pro Photo Showdown?  Why not?  ‘Cause he’ll win that’s why!’  BOOM!! (CLICK)

$10K later a humble sun bathed Brian Bielmann with 25+ years of photos and memories and his family in tow accepted his prize and thanked God and the people of these mountains.

Fast forward nearly two years to a rainy September night far from the festivals and the crowds…the longest winter anyone can remember has passed followed by one month of summer, Brian’s good friend and surf hero Andy Irons has left us (CLICK), my son has learned to swim under water, the 2011 Tahiti swell that rocked the Billabong Pro and riveted Whistler locals to computer screens for days is the stuff of legend and SWELL 2 has landed Brian back in Whistler tonight, only this time, unplugged.

‘Everyone sets up for the same moment, or the moment after…I look for the moments between the moments.’ 

Brian stood mostly out of the spotlight as he spoke tonight. There was only one screen and there were just enough chairs in the foyer of the Conference Centre for the couple hundred (?) familiar faces that made their way between the seasons.

Dave and Wendy Clark were our hosts, as usual, local artists, Brian, TNF, and local businesses we all recognized donated auction items for a great cause.  My buddy Sean was bussing between seasons guiding and we both laughed knowing +8 in the valley overnight means there’s snow up there above the clouds.  Harvey from Art Junction showed an amazing collection of stainless Airstream trailer acrylics (sorry – don’t know the artist Harvey) and my wife and I fell in love with Brian’s 1978 Bob Marley photo and Molly Paterson’s ‘Ocean Fresh’ laundry pic.  Jack Crompton called me out quietly on the upcoming election and with beer and wine in hand we all debated whether Mark Richards’ pieces were photos or paintings (the answer is both).  All of that, and the silent “battle of the Andy Lambrecht paddle” will surely become the stuff of Whistler livingroom legend as the dust settles and we make our way home to our babysitters a little later than we had planned.

I know, I know.  You’re expecting photos of Tahiti and the story of Brian’s self-proclaimed best shot ever and a bunch of mind-blowing ‘Dude’ talk…but I apologize if I don’t wax poetic surf tonight because while it was a indeed trip into the realm of the watery fantastic for a people rooted in the majesty of Coast Range peaks, it was more so a tribute to friends and neighbors and our own ‘moments between the moments’ in a town where the spotlights so often shine in so many places so far from home.  Tonight was our ‘Aloha’ for a familiar face from just over there somewhere west of never.

Post script:

Brian shook my hand in the parking lot at the elementary school today while Dave and I picked up our boys after school.  He had no idea…

hours later after the show…

‘If you haven’t made the connection I’m the Street To Peak guy who wrote the story last time you were here.’ (CLICK)

‘My wife really loved your story…it means so much to know I met the person who wrote that.’

Thanks Brian.