I took my two boys and their friends snowboarding at Trollhaugen in Dresser Wisconsin one night a few years ago. Although I liked to ski, the area runs were unchallenging as I had gone on several ski trips in the Colorado Rockies. So, I decided that the only way to get some fun out of these little hills was to learn how to snowboard. It didn’t take long to figure out that the key was to keep your weight and balance on the uphill edge of the board, whether you were facing uphill or downhill. Turning is a transitioning between the two edges. On the hard packed runs I figured out a basic trick where I could spin like a propeller while shifting my weight from one edge to the other. That was when I fell. Up until that point, I had never bothered to wear a helmet. After all, I wasn’t doing flips on a half pipe. It was all pretty benign stuff -- except I hadn’t figured on how much impact my head would encounter from spinning around and catching the back edge of my board while I was facing up the hill.
It is difficult to describe the experience. First you are out on a slope where there are tons of people all around, riding up the chairlift, getting off, riding down the hill on all sides. The floodlights are beaming down making the white run glow under the dark, star filled sky. Top 40’s music is being played on the speakers mounted on the lift poles. The chalet is lit up and there are groups of people inside and out. In less than a second, when the back of my head struck the pavement-like snow, everything became black and silent, like I was thrown into a dark closet and had the door slammed shut behind me.
As I came to and made my way to the bottom of the hill, my sons and a couple of their friends asked me if I was ok and I said yes, so they left. It didn’t occur to me ask who they were. It all seemed pretty normal. I don’t know if the amnesia began right away, or if it slowly set in. I recall that I had a sense of urgency that I needed to get to my car and find my wallet in case I passed out or something and someone needed to identify me. It was very dreamlike as I walked through a crowd of college aged kids, not making any eye contact but looking straight ahead. I heard a couple of them laugh, but it didn’t bother me as I was focused on one thing – getting my wallet out of my car.
Once I got my wallet, I was a bit more at ease so I walked back into the chalet and sat down at a picnic table with a view of the slopes. That is when I realized things were not quite right. It was sort of a process of discovery over the next hour or two. Here I am, sitting in a chalet, in the middle of nowhere with people all around me who I didn’t know. But what am I doing here? Did I do something wrong and am I hiding? What if I get caught? But what did I do? There is horse of a lady standing next to me looking out at the slope as if she is watching for her kids. Do I know her? Am I supposed to say something to her? Is she my wife? I hope not.
I figured that I better be careful and act as normal as possible. Blend in. Act somewhat pleasant, but don’t overdo it, because that would be obvious. Look up the hill like the lady standing next to me, and maybe chuckle a little bit in a fatherly way at the kid who just wiped out, sort of like one of those “kids will be kids” light belly laughs, but not enough to risk striking up a conversation with her. Look pre occupied with something. So I pulled out my wallet and acted like I had to find something that is pretty important. I took out my driver’s license and looked at the picture.
I knew that the picture on the license was me and the name seemed to be right. Beyond that, I had no clue. The license doesn’t tell you that you’re married and you have two children. It doesn’t give your occupation, hobbies or even a telephone number to call in case you forget.
It was a strange experience, because I was trying to learn something about this stranger. Everything became silent. I no longer cared about getting caught, or who was around me. It was almost an out of body experience as I looked down upon myself through this photograph. I could almost feel myself back away up and above the table and look down upon myself as I was staring at my driver’s license. It’s not the same as meeting a stranger for the very first time where a whole range of sensory stimuli goes into play as you are filtering through first impressions, facial expressions, vocabulary, speech tone and style. Your unconsciously categorizing this person as to someone you like or don’t like, trust or not, whatever. No, this was entirely different, because I could hear an echo of feelings of a lifetime of knowing this person, though I had no clue as to who he was or what he did.
You might be thinking that you could have resolved the issue by asking yourself some simple questions and taking some basic steps to figure things out. For instance asking yourself what you are doing sitting in a chalet in the middle of the night with snowboarding boots? How about going to a telephone and calling information for your home telephone number and calling home? You could go to the gift shop and look at post cards to find out where you are. On the other hand, when this happened, everything was very dream like. Fortunately, unlike some of my dreams, I did have my pants on, but for the most part, I was functioning like in a dream – in a reactive, survival mode. Everything kept going in and out of focus. People say things that make no sense. Who knows, I could have been partially dreaming.
I was starting to get some knowledge of this person, as if bits and pieces started to appear out of the fog. I knew that he was totally involved in a church that was going nowhere and was making him sick.
The thought occurred to me that I could get in my car and drive away. I had the perfect excuse to get out of anything I ever wanted to get out of, but never would do because of my sense of obligation. On the other hand, it occurred to me that I may be leaving something or somebody that I may miss.
I can’t recall how I came back to my senses. It may have been when the kids showed up and were ready to go home. It all seemed very natural and uneventful. We got our boards, strapped them to the car and drove off.
I didn’t easily loose the feeling of confusion that I experienced when I met myself in the chalet – how ridiculous my life looked. It didn’t take long for me to resign from the church. On the other hand, it didn’t instantly give me a sense of wisdom for the rest of my life. Recently, my teenage son said to me “If you could only see yourself you’d realize how screwed up you are.” Normally I would have been upset and defensive by that remark, but I remembered my “trip” to Wisconsin and realized that it could be true.
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