Stuck in Whistler
Last week I went to Whistler with KT and our friend Claire for some midweek riding. Claire used to be a treeplanter, but now she's a flight attendant. Every time I turn around she's doing something totally impossible, like running a marathon. Either that or she's trying to feed me or present me with something very lavish that I probably don't deserve. In short, a heart the size of Texas. I know she won't kill me for saying this, because she's on a flight to Honolulu right now.
If you've been to Whistler you know it has the typical gingerbread-community feel of a high-end resort town. (I have something called an Edge Card that hangs around my neck. Coupled to my Visa, it's craftily designed to work like money but feel benignly like a "pass." Basically it dings me for every oxygen molecule I hit while moving about the area). The Village itself has a sort of plasticized, Intrawesty perfection to it that makes me think anything at all could happen. Lizard men could start crawling out of the manholes, for all I know, and it would seem perfectly natural.
Beyond all of this I find Whistler pretty fascinating sociologically. For starters, I think the male-to-female ratio is something like 8:1. This is pretty noticeable on a pre-Christmas weekday, when the "local" population isn't diluted by tourists and visitors from Vancouver. There are thousands of twentyish dudes on snowboards wearing beards and low-riding pants, smoking enough weed on the chairlifts to contribute to global warming. It occurred to me that this is why Kits looks singularly populated by girls in yoga pants and baseball caps. There's simply a guy-vacuum in Vancouver.
We witnessed various on-piste interpersonal rifts caused by the somewhat Darwinian snowriding rule: there shall be no friends on a powder day.
Girlfriend: But I haven't done a single run with you since we got here!Boyfriend: Why don't you find some girls to ride with?--Small boy: Dad, I need you to go behind me. What if I fall?Dad (shouts from twenty feet ahead): You're on your own, son.
We got in the car at the end of the day all noodle-legged and pink-cheeked, only to get stuck in a snowstorm and a four-hour traffic jam caused by some vehicular melee 17 kilometres down the road. They closed the highway eventually. We nosed the car back to Creekside and went in for a drink.
Comments-
ian said:
-
- December 18, 2006
hi charlotte, i stumbled across this post by accident. you write a very apt description of whistler (and kits). it all makes sense now, with the ratio difference between the two places. thanks for the laugh. cheers, ian
Post a Comment
<< home