At the Mountains of Madness

In the interest of scientific observation, I spent the weekend at a ski resort somewhere in rural New Hampshire. All involved parties survived.

I took a great deal of cajoling and coercing to get me to go on this trip. Longtime readers of this blog will remember my unrelenting aversion to snow, particularly when found in concentrated amounts in rural areas. When that is coupled with activities that involve hurling yourself headlong into snowbanks and -- if you're unlucky -- trees, we get a very unappealing situation indeed.

However, those concerns were outweighed by two positive factors. One, the opportunity to hang out and drink with friends in a random house in the middle of nowhere. And two, what else was I going to do if all my friends were gone.

So I packed up my snow boots and unearthed my ski jacket and willingly set on the road, escaping the cold spell of Boston for the even colder spell of points north.

It was fun, which I expected, and educational, which I did not. The latter stems from the aforementioned scientific observations of the totally unnatural environment that is a ski lodge. In my eight years in America, I have never found myself feeling out of place, except in ski lodges. For this reason, I find these places fascinating, much in the same way an astronaut would regard a populated Mars.

For instance, you walk into the cafeteria at base camp and everyone is soaked, sore, and wearing suspenders underneath what seems to be more complex than an astronaut suit. Which makes you hope they don't have to go to the bathroom sometime in the next eight hours. And yet they're all happy, despite having to pay thirteen dollars for some chicken tenders and a baked potato the size of an apple. Maybe being thisclose to death turns on the crazy part of their brains.

And then everyone leaves their skis and snowboards outside, on a rack. Are they not afraid someone will steal them? Man, white people really trust each other.

Which they should, because this is isolation in the extreme. I had to drive 20 miles in order to find the nearest store that would sell whiskey. My phone rarely worked. My internet never did. There was no TV.

You know how they don't let anyone on the Jersey Shore use cell phones, watch TV and go on the internet? So all they do is drink and sleep, because there is nothing else to do?

Now I understand. I completely get why they're all insane. It's like they're all trapped in a ski lodge and there's no way out, so they develop the earthbound version of space dementia. The same started to happen to me after two days on a ski trip, so why wouldn't it happen to them after four months?

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No, I'm not on edhardy.com. I ... uh .. accidentally clicked on a pop-up. ... Ooh, a discount on industrial-strength hair spray.