Was unable to bribe the judge at the toastmaster speaking content. Came in at #2 I was sitting in a ski lift at the Heavenly resort near Lake Tahoe thinking about that talk about skiing I had to give soon. I know that every good talk needs a fish this big, and I wanted to talk about those great jumps I was going to try. But there are no fish on the mountain! I wondered how I was going to talk about all this when I realized that the lift wasn’t moving any more. I could not see anyone in the chairs up ahead or behind. A friend was once stuck in the lift for hours until they roped her down in the evening. This was not going to happen to me! Jumping straight down 25 feet was out of the question, but I remembered the movie Rambo I once saw where the hero jumps out of the helicopter into a tree. I was going to do the same thing. After removing my skis and carefully dropping them I swung the chair back and forth closer to a fir tree not too far away. I leaped across to the tree, caught a branch and grabbing the next branches down lowered myself gradually down to the ground. Easy. And fun. You should try it too sometimes. I was energized by the success of my jump, and thought about how to do the inverted aerial jump I had always wanted to try - I was a good jumper as a kid, so I should be able to do it. At the terrain park there are signs saying that those are forbidden, so I could not go there. In addition, my teenage daughter was in the terrain park and showing up there would be endlessly embarrassing for her. No. I had to do it in the silence of the woods. I steered into one of the steep canyons in the double black diamond area and saw a great ledge to leap off of. I gathered speed and whirled myself into the air. I realized soon that I had overdone it. I was overflipping and was not going to land on my feet. Out of the corner of my eye I spotted one of the californian condors that feed off of the roadkill on the sides of the slopes soaring above my cliff. It must have had a wingspan of 6 feet! I saw the birds dangling Schwingeldingers, --- his feet --- and grabbed them. Not easy while you’re also holding poles! Slowly the condor took me down to the ground. Not bad for a first inverted aerial I thought - 540 degrees, one and a half turns, and still alive. At my age… It was getting late and I started on my way back to the base when I remembered the fish (this big). That’s when I saw the pond next to the lodge that they use to store water for snowmaking. And there was a bass fishing competition going on right on the pond. In the winter. Now, I am a pretty good pond skimmer - skiing from the snow onto a pond and crossing it in a snow- waterskiing hybrid motion. I saw the shining scales of one of the bass that a fishing competitor had caught and released swimming close to the surface and knew this was my chance. As I skimmed across the pond - the fish looking at me - I bend down and grabbed that bass right through the … mouth and carried it to the shore. Plus, I won the bass fishing competition and got my fish for this true story of a great day out.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 00:56:07 +0000
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