We exchanged words quickly and hotly. James pushed his goggles above his visor, his finger tapping my chest. ”I didn’t see the sign,” I said and shrugged, giving up. I couldn’t say anything more because there wasn’t more to be said. We were skiing along at Mt. Hood on a mostly sunny day on a weekend trip to Timberline Lodge. After skinning up to the top of the Palmer Glacier, we blazed down untracked, fresh snow. James made big, wide tele-turns whereas I slipped past him looking for a bit more speed.
The sign that I missed said “Danger: Cliffs” (as James informed me) and was placed along side a 30 foot drop into a canyon that snaked narrowly down the mountain. As I lifted into the air and then began falling, I sensed what stuntmen must feel when they know that the play is going absolutely wrong — the dead air, the hang time, the falling — always the falling – and then the ineffable crunch on the ground. In the expansion of time that happens in a great fall, I tried to recall the formula for acceleration but James’s angry and surprised shout cut my train of thought as he unknowingly followed me into the air.
We landed skis first in a cloud of powder, gathered balance and coursed through the canyon. Damn, the first blow was going to destroy my knees, I thought. There was little time to think at that point. React, react, react. We couldn’t really ski out of the canyon: the walls were too high. And we had too much velocity at this point to find a stopping space on the narrow canyon floor. So we went down, down, down. Until, it opened in a flat plain high above the world below.
