Fading Down the Slopes
All I see is darkness. Slowly, it starts to fade with shades of light coming in. I feel myself moving my lips and my jaw as if I am talking, but don’t really know what I am saying, or if I am even talking. I am starting to finally be able to see and my friend Skylar is sitting across the table. I figure out that I am talking and asking, “Where am I, what just happened, what is going on?” with Skylar just looking concernedly at my face and asking, “Sarah? Sarah...? Sarah?”
It was a wondrous snowy evening on the ski hill of Marquette Mountain, with my friends Sophia and Skylar and Skylar’s younger brother and sister, Joe and Mckenzie. The five of us just sitting on the side little area where people have fires by the top of the hill. We get up to go down Ridge-one of the easy ski slopes- and make our way to the bottom. That is what we normally do when we are skiing, just go up the ski lift, get off, and go down Ridge easily. I would say all of us are pretty mediocre at skiing and snowboarding with Skylar, Sophia, and Mckenzie on boards and Joe and I on skis. Joe is probably the best of us and he usually go off on the slightly harder stuff while Skylar, Sophia, Mckenzie, and I just stay on the easy path. We go down Ridge over and over again. Going faster than we were at the beginning, getting used to our equipment and getting comfortable and confident with what we can do, even if it is just easy beginner skiing and snowboarding stuff. All of us just flying down Ridge doing “fancy” turns and weaving back and forth from one side of the slope to the other. After that we did the usual-which consisted of hanging out in the ski hut to warm up a bit, eat some pizza and drink some hot cocoa- then went out and skied at little bit more. After skiing for a while and watching Joe going on jumps and doing tricks, I was thinking to myself ‘If Joe can do that, I could do that.’ I went over to Joe and asked him that if I wanted to try a jump, which one should I go on. He pointed me out to a pretty easy jump and went off of it to show me how to do it, so I went up the hill a bit and went to where the beginning of the hill started to go down this jump. I would estimate that the hill was probably forty feet high with about a fifty degrees incline, until you reached the hill that would be considered a jump that was about fifteen feet tall with a small little 5 foot hill after it. When Joe was going down the hill, it seemed a lot slower than when I was going down the hill to go off a jump-something that I have never done- but it felt easy, I was thinking to myself ‘yeah, I can go this fast, this jump won’t be that difficult, piece of cake, I can go this fast’, which I could. I went off the jump just fine. Well I guess not just fine, the landing hurt a bit and I was a little wobbly but I felt accomplished but, in the span of what felt long but was probably less than a second, came the smaller jump that was right after the big jump. I do not even remember going off that jump, I just remember starting it then ending up in the ski hut with my friend Skylar staring at me saying “Sarah? Sarah...? Sarah?” I look around me and everyone is staring and me trying to talk to me and looking concerned. Confusion just strikes me and I think to myself ‘How did I get here? What just happened? What is going on?’ which apparently I wasn’t just thinking that to myself, I was also saying that out loud because as I kept repeating myself, the look of concern on my friends faces was just getting to be more of worry and less amusement-as they were before. Joe just looks at me and sees that I am fine and finally somewhat coherent and says “Alright she is good, I’m going to ski more before the lift closes.”
After a while of sitting in the hut, Joe gets back and I wonder what he saw and thought as I smashed my head into the snow and I ask, “Joe, What even happened up there?”
“Well you started just bombing it down the hill really fast and
