Thank You.

 I pulled into the glacial moonscape parking lot.  They gave up plowing weeks ago.  The three attendants weren’t paying much attention, so it was chaos.  People were walking and parking all over.  I did my best to park orderly but the guy parking next to me almost took my door off and left his car running to power his head-banging stereo.  Why is people’s taste in music inversely proportional to the volume of their stereo. ' Have another Red Bull', I said.  I put my boots on and then the attendant came by and asked me to pull my car up 13 inches.  I said it was too late and would be dangerous for me to drive in my ski boots.  He shrugged, in Portuguese. I’m an A-hole, I admitted in broken English. Obrigado.

Getting on the lift, the ticket taker blithely pointed her Japanese scanner at my chest as I pointed to my leg pocket.  She asked if I was ‘Joe Blow from Kokomo’ and I said ‘no I’m Joe Schmidt, the rag man’ so she asked to see my pass.  I begrudgingly dug it out of my pants and she scanned it.  This charade was repeated on every run, with lots of bowing. Arigatou.

 Then on another lap, people were piled up at the entrance to the self-regulating, magic diamond maze so I was forced to enter the ski patrol line.  The Swiss checker warned me against this, and I explained with a smile that I was on the ski patrol in another life, and I thought I was grandfathered in.  He humorlessly persisted and warned I might get yelled at. This discussion was now in the spirit of a friendly negotiation of our Season Pass contract.   After all, being the customer, I am always right, like Nordstrom's in the 1980s.   I said OK but hinted they might want to have a sign out front to say ‘don’t congregate at the Maze entrance’, which everyone does.  Especially people from South America, it’s a cultural thing (like Brazilians who like to wait for their friends while standing on the loading bar up front).  He indicated that no one would heed the Maze sign since they ignore the No Phone Zone signs and besides that, this enforcement was above his pay grade. So I said ‘OK then stop telling me what to do’.  ‘A-hole’, he smiled in German.  Danke Schone, I squinted back.

It was like the ski-school teacher who chased me into the woods one day and told me there were bathrooms at the lodge, even though they smelled like New York City in July. Misplaced or distended authority.  Ya got a problem wit dat.  What’s next, French-Canadian volunteers in yellow telling me to slow down?  I am an A-hole.  Merci Beaucoup.

On my way out I tried to ski to the gondola to go home but it was clogged up with a ski school circus tent and the magic carpet ride.  I took off my skis and walked the extra hundred yards around the ski school on their nice new heated patio, past the walled in Docs Bar and the fenced in Umbrella Bar.  I got on the Cabriolet and went home wondering who was thinking about circulation and marketing here.  I’ve seen more inviting après ski bars on Temple Square.  But then again, they didn't ask me.  I’m an A-hole. Ya betcha, fer sure.

The moral of the story is: don’t be an A-hole like me, no matter how long you’ve lived here or how well you remember how it used to be.  The local and immigrant working folks out there are doing the best they can.  Maybe they need more training and money or better management and corporate support.  They are here for us to enjoy our indulgent lifestyle and pampered pursuits.  Focus your attention rather on the extractive ski industry that is sucking the money and life out our little ski towns, to distribute to shareholders far away, paying low wages and throwing us a bone but leaving us holding the bag for traffic, housing, wages and overcrowding.  I hear they even bought A-Basin just for guys like me.  Because I’m the A-hole? Muchos Gracias.