The Drop

"Closing time, every new beginning/ Comes from some other beginning’s end" -Semisonic

Photo by Filip Zrnzević on Unsplash

Call me, the text said.

I stood at the precipice staring down at a near vertical drop into a double black at Stevens Pass — the drop, an irony of both my physical and metaphorical location. The quietude and calm were only broken by music drifting from loudspeakers far below, and the shouting in my head.

Intrepid adventurer, heh. Badass snowboarder, heh. Rider of Japan’s biggest backcountry, double heh. Now, Dad… A parent-to-be craves not these things.

For the first time in seven years, I was snowboarding alone. No hype crew. No bravado, no egos, no riding buddies. No potential for being buried alive in an avalanche or slowly suffocating in a tree well. Just a lone man-child trying to out run time.

My frustrated partner had ended our conversation abruptly. She was pregnant, very pregnant. I was standing on top of a mountain trying to resurrect my glory days of riding. My snowboarding trip out west, sanctioned. An unplanned spur-of-the-moment trip to Alaska four weeks ahead of the birth of our child, a bridge too far. My frustration was small, insignificant — the “man suffering in silence”…