“Haaar…Oomph!” I am falling and laughing, ripped from a skiing heaven to an icy earth.
It’s a juicy fall; the impact of which bellows half-used air from my lungs and sloshes the water content of my body around like a drunk’s glass. Maybe it wasn’t skiing heaven though. I am falling head first into abundant off-piste snow, casting suffocating ice particles into my mouth, which I vainly try to spit out. My red Rossignol skis are in the sky above me, chopping air like un-tethered helicopter blades. The perverse laughter is because my body is relieved to surrender to gravity after so much toil. I try to set a defiant smile into the gorgeous late-afternoon sun for the sake of both my ego and my friends, as I flash rapidly over their elongated Lowry-like shadows. Pompous parents sneer that pride comes before a fall, but I am not sure I have much.
But you may ask myself, how did I get here? My fall may have started twenty yards back when I tipped off a narrow track, but its source was surely when my stags arranged for me to ski off-piste on Vallee Blanche under Mont Blanc. In hindsight this was unwise when I have so little experience; but I had made so much progress. Maybe the fall was inevitable when I let this stag group come together. My latest fall adds yet more scorn to the disdain, embarrassment, hatred, panic and unerring inevitability that different characters are individually feeling. Perhaps I should blame the fall just on that bastard Robert, who hijacked the destination of this trip from Johnny, my best man. The worst fate I would have befallen there would have been vomiting the whisky produce of a Macallan distillery over trampled Highland heather. But surely I can trace my fall to the moment I was told by Sofia’s dad that we were getting married on Saturday the 22nd of April because he had found a slot at the country club. I accepted this fate far too easily.
My soul travels with unease; I am a pollutant, stripping away the high mountain snow, producing floodwater and misery in the valley below. I curl my neck upwards to try and pivot on my shoulders and pull my skis under me. An unseen hump does it for me, sending me into the air where I can manoeuvre my skis. I now slide faster from the combination of the flip and a more severe slope, but feel more control as I am almost in an upright sitting position. The view would be awe inspiring, mountain peaks jostle for supremacy, some cloaked in patchy snow, some nakedly showing their body of jagged rock. I read a sign way back at the top at the Aiguille Du Midi station that said the glacier below me is moving at a centimetre an hour. Apparently it takes ninety years or so to ride this natural escalator into Chamonix, as proven by the recently discovered skeleton of a climber. The heart of a crevasse defies all expectation; how can something so white be so vibrantly blue? You keep staring at it to build up your belief that you haven’t gone colour blind. This beauty is now a life-threatening beast. Blue lines drop away in every direction, encircling my journey. My flight instinct kicks in. Stop my fall. Alter my fate. I cycle my legs frantically, casting off huge splashes of snow. I turn my torso to the hill, my ski mittens claw vainly uphill at nothing fixed. My late desperate acts are slowing me but not enough. I am sucked towards the cavernous crevasses and shattered seracs. Stalactites glisten a welcome to their wintry desolation; they may soon present their sharpened edges to my supplicant body.
Hell, I fell because of me. I surrendered to this downfall. Pompous parents sneer that pride comes before a fall, and so they should.
I lift off and silence falls, no scraping and clawing just heavenly silence.
Richard Blanchard 