We woke up with razors in our blood and fire in our eyes. It was Gaper Fool’s day, April 1st, and it was time for the derelict locals to run the mountain, to mock all the squares who come to visit for a week of relaxation on blue square groomers and over-priced fireplace suites. I dressed up in a perfect gaper uniform of windpants and a Slim Shady wear thermal; Josh wore a pair of baggy khakis and a Timberland hoodie, emoting the redneck gaper inside of him. We stopped at Bubba’s for their working man’s breakfast – a secret heaping of eggs, sausage, potatoes, and an enormous biscuit, not offered on the menu and reserved for locals. It’s about 4 pounds of food and costs less than 5 bucks – but it’s not for tourists.
From there we rode up the bus, again using somebody else’s pass so I could go for free. At the base of the mountain, in the parking lot, Josh and I took our first shots. We’d packed heavy for today, looking to emulate a feat we’d accomplished 2 years prior. We killed a fifth of rum between us on closing day, taking one shot each for every lift. We also pounded a few beers, smoked salad bowls of kief, hash, dank, and a sprinkling of powder, and by the end we literally felt like we were flying on our last run down the mountain. This year, despite it being my re-introduction to the altitude and only the 5th day of the season back on my snowboard, we figured we should one-up that feat. On us we had a fifth of Captain in a new plastic bottle, 6 PBR cans, a gram of blow, and a fresh joint rolled by the master, Josh himself.
We took the fun to the Gondola where the party had already begun, the locals descending on the hapless rich gapers like the caddie swim session from Caddie Shack. Lots of hideous old neon one-pieces and skiers wearing Starter Jackets and jeans. One guy was jabbering on an old fake cell-phone loudly the whole time he was in the lift line and on the lift, yelling fake stock quotes in a suit while skiing, the prefect joke on all those fuckers looking to turn Jackson to Aspen so their stock broker friends can ruin another perfectly good mountain town and turn the savage expanses of Wyoming into another Disney-on-snow Colorado.
The ride up, two gapers shared the gondy with us and we took turns making fun of them without them realizing we were making fun of them. Talking about how huge the hits in the kiddie park were and how epic the conditions were and how we were gonna tackle some of the epic blues and how we hoped we didn’t fall. At the top we threw on our gear, Josh and I passing the bottle back and forth to take a shot each, then charged down to Thunder lift. We were yelling like jackasses, gouging the snow and riding backwards but pretending it was an accident. There’s something so amazingly liberating about trying to ride as shitty as possible and/or trying to just appear like you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s fun to jump around act like a fucking idiot and in all honesty my favorite thing to do when snowboarding, whether gaper fool’s or not, is to throw myself around and really just play in the snow.
At Thunder we ran into an old friend, Lora, who was riding with Phil, I think. She was a ripping skier, one of the best girls I’d ever met and the only one I knew who actually skied a bit better than her boyfriend when I lived there. She was visiting from France or Switzerland or some shit (what the fuck – I move to Lagayna, CA, she moves to a European mountain – God I need to reassess my values) and wearing a bright turquoise one-piece. She and Phil joined the two of us and we rolled up the lift, a 4-person crew, passing the rum back and forth. Josh and I chased our shots with a beer each, then rolled down to the top of Thunder Bumps. This was where the magic happened. This was where everybody would line up, like some goddamned snowy Mardi Gras, all dressed as absolutely absurd as possible. Some people held to the theme and dressed like gapers. Some just dressed weird or wore ski race suits or some other costume, which in all honesty really fucking pisses me off. Goddamnit, what the fuck is happening to this world when motherfucking locals from a mothercunting ski mountain can’t keep to a motherfucking theme based around mockery of the bitch-asses who were forcing Jackson Hole to re-make their main entrance road because it confuses fucking retards who wonder why the goddamn road is "going past" the resort?!!! I don’t want to see some slore dressed like a moo cow unless overtop she’s wearing a shirt that says "Texas State University" or "Kansas" where the fattest gapers come from.
We stood atop, 4 stoic bastards exploring just how far down the rabbit hole goes. I had packed all my booze into my Liquid Lounger, a portable cooler backpack with speakers and an iPod jack built in. While we stood there I unzipped the padding over the stereo and switched it on. I turned on my iPod and began blaring hardcore punk music, getting fired up and ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence. Eventually there were people built up around us on the top of the run and we began to descend, like a swarm of drunken bees, weaving into and out of moguls with reckless abandon, consciously throwing out the window all the years of discipline and skill we’d accumulated to slip and slide down the mountain while drinking beers, yelling at each other in thick southern accents, eye up moguls for credit card airs that we patted each other on the back afterwards. 2 days before, on Josh’s skis I had tried a daffy with no air and nearly knocked the wind out of myself; but on gaper fool’s we were throwing our bodies around like rag dolls blowing in the Teton breeze. Josh and Lora specifically kept on running into each other, getting their skis tied up and taking a few legitimately painful hit and tangles.
But with the booze flowing freely, the sun shining bright and the dismal, snowless winter almost over, we felt no pain. Again up Thunder and down the bumps, although Josh and I decided to lose Lora to do a few key bumps in the trees. Crazy creatures were all around, vibrations of debauchery I’d not felt in many moons and as my brain slowly shut down my instincts picked up and there, in those open Wyoming woods, my soul was beginning to return to the wild and for a few blessed hours I was free.
After a few more laps we decided to head over to Sublette and there we ran into Tyler. He was skiing in a big polka dot muu-muu with an umbrella and while it’s not mocking a gaper directly, Tyler’s whole life is one giant affront to gapers everywhere (the only Jackson local I know who lived there for a whole season and clipped or otherwise scammed tickets every day because he didn’t have a pass). He joined our crowd of merry pranksters, Lora disappeared, and I think Tyler, Josh, Phil and I did keybumps riding up the lift – but it’s hard to be sure because my brain was being scrambled and fried like that egg in those old 80’s anti-drug commercials and in reality the whole day was a haze. I remember Tyler hucking one of the rocks right above Sublette lift to everybody’s drunken cheers, holding out his umbrella, and watching as the wind from the drop blue it back and completely ruined it. He came up to us, laughed, threw the umbrella in a trash can and smiled as he said, "It’s my roommate’s." I remember some bowl tokes were in there somewhere. Again with the shots of rum – lots of rum – and more PBR’s. Eventually we decided to make our way to Casper, where the Gaper Day mountain party moves in the afternoon. Already people had lined up on all the picnic benches, big old pitchers of Boozy the Clown’s secret sauce. All the who’s who of the town showed up the freaks and the geeks all sucking on the tit of the Dionysian cow and laughing and smiling because they all knew that finally the miserable snowless season they’d all suffered through was coming to an end and while the year before had been nothing but epic skiing and riding to exhaustion, this season had been one enormous drunkfest from green flag to red. And I was proud to have come up from sea level and to be out boozing all but the best of them. Josh and I disappeared behind the Casper Lodge and restaurant for more key bumps, then came around to rejoin the party, kill the beers in our pockets, and order pitchers which seemed to be appearing out of nowhere as if sent by God to make sure we were good and drunk for Gaper day. Josh and I started pounding the rum, double fisting with a pitcher in the other hand for balance, and then, after all that booze and all those drugs, we decided that the best idea would be to do a few laps of Casper lift. Finally we finished the rum and downed the rest of a pitcher of beer with each consecutive lap. The mountain closed and we took it to the bottom, taking it to the streets, where they’d set up a big free concert in the parking lot.
We decided to duck into the Mangy Moose to buy a few PBR tall boys, the official drink of Jackson Hole, and walked around in the sunbaked mud and ice of the base where other drunken locals sat around, shirts off, sunning themselves and talking loudly and happily. We swung into the VC for a beer or two, the locals official apres nestled between my old jobs at the TGR offices and Wildernest Sports. We were loud and bombastic, drunken fools are we all if nothing more.
The rest of the afternoon was spent wandering around. Tyler had gone to work, I think, and Graham had joined us or something. I really don’t know but what I do know is that that redheaded fucker who was the lead singer for the Spin Doctors was performing, a hippie burnt out musician in a crowd of hippie burnt out athletes, belting out acoustic versions of "Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong" and "Two Princes" and "Jimmy Olsen’s Blues" from the legendarily forgettable "Pocket Full of Kryptonite."
Eventually Josh and I were on the bus back to town, dinged out of our minds, drunk, high, completely twisted, our brains nothing more than puddles of goo sloshing around between our ears. I turned on the stereo in my liquid lounger and played the songs from the Jackson sequences from TGR’s "Soul Purpose" (premiering the year I lived up there) and "High Life" (arguably the best TGR and in that case big mountain ski movie of all time). "Rescue Me" by who the fuck knows and Boy Sets Fire’s "The Rookie".
Back at Josh’s house we took Phatty bong rips, then sat in the hot tub as the sun began to set over the Tetons. Slowly the drugs and the booze and all the shit was slipping out of my body and as Josh somehow went off to work, I was beginning to finally nod to sleep. Then Phil rolled in, began lining up some more of the ding, and then I was back in the thick of it, again feeling awake, again not being able to go to sleep until 2 in the morning.
The next day we woke up to a few inches of fresh powder. They couldn’t believe it. This morning was the first day it snowed in months. Everybody was amped, running around like a bunch of banshees, throwing on our gear, grabbing our powder planks, and climbing into Josh’s truck. He had been scheduled to work this day. In fact, he had been suspended from being a ski instructor for the last month for calling some little fucker an "Asshole" (after which the kid whipped out his little Razr phone, called his dad, and complained). Today was supposed to be his first day back at work. Josh decided fuck it and fuck them. No way would he waste the last powder day of a dry season for some little shithead children wanting to learn how to ski. No, we were powder fiends, on and off the mountain, and today we had a beautiful little gift. Today would be my big day of the season.
Graham was working the gondola so he let us up for free – the only person I know who moves to Jackson for half a season and still agrees to work on one of his only powder days – and from there we made our way to Thunder, then to Sublette and finally to the surface lift up Rendezvous Bowl. The used to take people up but now that it was gone, there was only a cold, windy chairlift that blew down most of the time. We thought it would be epic but other than the first few turns it was crud, just dusty on crusty and I was scared so would be the rest of the mountain. Thank God that wasn’t the case.
The Sublette woods were firing and we found knee-high powder stashes with almost every turn. We hooted and hollered, yelling out prayers to the gods for blessing us with one great day and I was sure it was a reward for our previous day’s intense rabble-rousing. If one pushes the human spirit and body to the limit, he is always rewarded, or so says Buddha, the Dalai Lama, and Gary Busey, my three spiritual gurus. Josh and Phil were hucking as was Tyler, decent 5-10 foot drops into a foot or so of thick Spring powder. We lapped Mushroom Chutes under thunder, then back to Sublette for a few Alta chute runs, a line or so down Expert Chutes, and the back to Mushroom Chutes where the snow was its softest and fluffiest. Graham joined us on a lunch break at Thunder and we were charging it, powering through the trees, mini white rooms all over, and I was throwing spray fans like I was surfing a frozen wave. One of our last runs through Mushroom chutes I found myself aat a particularly tight little drop at the bottom of which was a tree you had to turn at quickly and hard right after threading the needle between two trees barely 2 feet apart. I dropped in, layed in my edge to avoid the tree waiting for me at the bottom, and found my little powder trough was just a little dust on crust and instead of turning hard I slid helplessly against an ice patch, slammed into a tree, and scorpioned into an outcropping of pines with a dead thud and a slight snap echoing from my feet.
"Fuck" I yelled out and Graham rode down to ask me if I was okay. I untangled myself from the trees, looked at my board, slid down a little into Amphitheatre and sat down for a few seconds.
"Dude, do you wanna come down with me?"
"No, fuck it. This is probably my last day of the season, might as well push on." I’d hurt my ankle before the trip and had brought an ankle brace which I’d worn every day but this one. Now that ankle was throbbing. I met with Josh and Phil at the base and told them I’d eaten it hard. Graham testified to how bad it was, that he was afraid I was going to die when my helmet crunched into a tree. He continued down but I rode with Josh and Phil for a few more hours, occasionally complaining about my ankle but mostly keeping quiet and quietly wincing with every backside carve and every transfer to my frontside edge. Especially then. We made it over to Casper and ducked into the Palace for a spinach smoke and rode a bit more. The pain went away slightly but it was becoming harder and harder to put any weight on my front foot and trying to push through the pain was exhausting me even more. Maybe I’d finally hit my limit. We finished around 3:30 and I hobbled to the truck alongside Josh and Phil. Back at the apartment I took off my boot, wincing as it slipped over my ankle, and revealed a half-tennis-ball sized swell.
"Fuck dude, you weren’t kidding."
"Yeah. I think I might have broken one of the small bones in it. A navicular fracture, y’know?"
"Damn. Well do you wanna bowl toke?"
"Sure." We packed the bowl and made our way out to the hot tub, smoking in the free Wyoming air with the river running through it and ducks floating down, quacking under the fresh open air and the big high alpine sun. That night we mostly smoked bowls and drank beers. Josh cooked up a spaghetti and and meatball and garlic bread dinner and we relaxed. He and Phil were planning on waking up at 6 to hike Glory Bowl for the last powder faces of the year; I was done. My body was all but broken, my organs were shot, and my soul was going through painful withdrawal every day.
You see I’ve never been as happy, like completely sublimely happy and content, as I was when living in Jackson. Living in the lowlands, I’ve learned to ignore that and to mask my discontent under a façade of cheesy jokes amongst the working stiffs of society, pretending to care about the gapers I worked with’s tales of skiing epic corduroy at Mammoth, and to accept the societal conditioning that a lifestyle not focused on making money is a childish dream. But being back up there, I’m able to put it all into perspective and it’s like all those poisons, the false prophets and social ills that plague our lives when we work the 9 to 5 in the lowlands and still strive for the "American Dream" when we all know it died a good 50 years ago, had started to ooze out of my pores, like a spiritual master cleanse or a colonic for the soul, and all of a sudden I looked at my life and felt horrible about myself. What the fuck was I doing? Why the fuck did I pretend to give a fuck what all those losers at Wet Seal (and yes, basically everybody I worked with at Wet Seal was an enormous loser in the eyes of the grand universal watcher with the exception of 3 or 4 people) thought – why did I even want to keep my job there? Why was I once again pretending to be something I wasn’t? It was like Baltimore all over again.
The next day they left early and I just barely heard them as they stepped over me to gear up for the hike. I woke up, smoked a bowl, and went to work collecting all my shit that had become strewn all over their bare-bones apartment and packing it all back up, made ever more difficult because I couldn’t put any weight on my ankle. Eventually I found a few pain pills after hopping up the stairs to Josh’s bathroom, then forced myself to put weight on my ankle and keep it loose as I knew soon enough I would be hustling through airports and would need the ability to use both legs. Josh and Phil got home around 1 and we smoked a final bowl in the hot tub. I got out, threw my wet trunks in a plastic bag in my ski bag, said goodbye to Phil, and loaded my gear into the back of Josh’s truck. On the way to the airport Josh and I talked about how great it was seeing each other. I told him how envious I was of his life and how so much of me wants to live there but I knew I had to do something big with my life before I could return to the Hole and become comfortable and happy again. He told me he knew, from day 1 he knew Jackson Hole is too small a town for me and that someday, once I’ve achieved Hunter S. Thompson notoriety I’d return.
"But still, I miss you up here, bro. You gotta get back sooner rather than later."
"Well if I haven’t made some good steps by 2008, I’ll be back for the winter."
"First year the tram’s up, nice."
"Yeah man, for sure." He helped me unload my shit from the car. I had put my ankle brace on for the flight, painfully since I had rubbed my ankle and my heel practically raw from its seams and although it supported me it also dug into my wounds with every step. Still, it allowed me to give him a big hug and a wave, then drag my board bag, my suitcase, and wear my Liquid Lounger to the check-in. I got to the wsmall waiting area in the tiny airport and stared. It'’ the most beautiful flight gate ever, with wide open expansive windows that stare hard upon the Grand Teton, the highest point, a 2-day summit (or 1 for the truly hardcore) almost always topped with snow.
I stared out into the majestic peaks and wondered again "What the fuck am I doing with my life? Why do I leave this for the hideous rat race, propagated by the everyday normal and the uninteresting of American society? The gapers? Seriously, why do I turn my back on this happiness and fulfillment for a dream that I’m not even sure is really mine?" I opened my weird metaphysical and anthropological book, "Sex Drugs, Einstein, and Elves", and read about one nerdy guy’s musings about all the random shit he knows and while it had been an eye-opener for some crazy kuunt I knew, it just seemed like a nerd with a little too much time on his hands for research. He was making connections many of which I’d already begun to make without spending years avoiding the arts of socialization and while interesting, I didn’t find it any more special than an encyclopedia. Essentially he connected the dots for those too stupid to figure shit out on their own. OK, the idea that DMT might not be a psychotropic drug but actually a portal to another dimension is kinda rad. And I liked the fact he brought up that the English language is really just a mixture of other languages. Still, I boarded the plane disgruntled, made my switch over in SLC, and ordered a whiskey neat. Good bye, Jackson Hole. Goodbye, my soul. God bless booze. I hate gapers.