Concussions and Hotboxing an Igloo

I had five concussions that season at the ski hill. I took a job at a place called Tube Town which was part of the ski hill owned by an Australian company.  Tube Town was a place that had a lift that pulled you up the hill on an inner tube. At the top of the hill, we would find numerous different arrangements of tubes to send careening down the hill at top speeds. At the bottom, it flattened out, and we laid out straw to slow the tubes down. 

Some of the tubes had cloth bottoms, so they were a little slower, and some of them were hard plastic, which were much faster.  I was one of the managers at the hill, and my job was to ensure that all things ran smoothly and that no one got hurt.  

Most of the time, I was placed at the bottom of the hill, as that was where the majority of the accidents would happen, if and when they occurred.  Very few safety rules were built into the business at the time, and I know many were implemented after I left.   We always had people at the top of the hill sending tubes down, and people at the bottom of the hill running lane control. 

As soon as a lane was clear, they’d send more people down.

We were an efficient, well-run team, but occasionally there was a miscommunication, especially on days when it was particularly foggy, and the top couldn’t see the bottom of the hill.  We communicated via radio, but it wasn’t always clear.  Those concussions came from times when I would see a little five-year-old kid come down on his own, forget to get out of his tube, stunned by the spinning speed of his trip down the hill, and they would send a troop of 6 adults flying in behind him.  I would run across the lanes, dive-bomb the kid, and take the hit of the tubes myself as they careened down to the bottom of the hill. 

Despite my boss’s thanks for saving a kid, it was hard on my body. 

And that was only the part where I was actually doing the work.  Another part of my job description was lane testing - to ensure that the lanes were running straight and that there was no debris or weird bumps that would make a tube go flying.  Every shift, I had to be the first one down the lanes to make sure they were safe.  

We got creative on the hill that season. We discovered that if we used Armour All car cleaning wipes on the bottom of the hard plastic tubes they would go faster.  The boss bought a speed gun for the bottom of the hill.  We built jumps.  We experimented with ways to get the tubes to go faster. 

To this day, I hold the speed record at 82 km/hour.  We were fearless. 

At one point, on a particularly cold and blustery day when not a lot of people were visiting the hill, we built an igloo at the top of the lift and created a unique system of rotation for the staff to go to the top, hot box (smoke a lot of weed) the igloo, and then lane test.   The Tube Town staff was notorious for their antics, and their wild behaviour. 

That behaviour translated to the pub on the hill too, and we were found there almost every night, partying with the Australian ski patrol and instructors.  We partied all night and wore off the hangover the next day with hard physical labour and play.  

That’s where I met my Australian guy. 

He was so charming and so handsome.  He didn’t do drugs, and it was the perfect opportunity for me to begin a new life.  We hung out every day, making plans, and imagining a life together in Australia.  We drank so heavily that I often forgot my name, but I justified it with the reasoning that I wasn’t snorting cocaine up my nose anymore.  I was in love, and a plan began to formulate about where I would go next.