Mitchell Way
“Seat belts on; Doors locked; Brakes set; Circuit breakers in; Fuel selector valve on both.”
Four of us were sitting in a Cessna 172 at the parking area of the Roche Harbor Resort airstrip preparing to depart.
Thou shalt not sit down on T- Bars
For you first time users, T-Bars like rope tows are a means of pulling you to the top of the hill. You must first stand in an interminable line of skiers watching the skiers at the head of the line move into position where the attendant slaps them on the rear end with a T-bar as it comes around. To the first-timer watching the process, it all seems very straight forward. The cable with the T-bar comes around the bullwheel, the attendant slaps you in the hips with the bar and up the hill you go. What you may not know is that the T-bar cable is on a retractable reel and must feed all the way out before it catches and starts pulling you up the slope. It came as a bit of a surprise to me, a first-timer, when I skied into position. I felt the attendant slap my hips with the bar, which I assumed I could sit on. The result was a rather unglamorous flop onto my back in the snow as the cable continued to feed out of the retractable reel. Then, when the full length of cable had retracted, the T-bar shot up the hill, raking down the back of my legs, slapping the skis off my boots and causing raucous laughter from the interminable line of skiers behind me.
Sometimes the best laid plans work too well.
The Screech Owl- Scientific name: Megascops asio. We had many of these smaller owls in our neighborhood. The first 30 years of my life I lived in a house close to the main railroad tracks which stretched from Vancouver, B.C. down the west coast of the United States. We had so many trains travel by daily that we didn’t even notice the noise anymore. The tracks followed the top of a cliff which dropped 100+ feet down to Bellingham Bay. The sides of the cliff had layers of sand and clay. During the summer months, the Angel boys across the street (Craig and Doug) and my brother and I would spend endless hours climbing the cliffs, jumping from the cliffs, and using trails on the cliffs as the shortest distance to travel to explore the beach itself.
Never, never, ever use Rogaine ™ that has gone beyond its expiration date.
Snow skiing ranks quite high on my list of humiliations and though, through the years I have impressed others with an innate ability to humiliate myself continuously on the ski slopes, last year’s little incident which I call, “the getting to know you ride,” sums up my life on the slopes.
Actually the idea should have worked. The premise was this: “The Fall Out Team”, namely Neutron (me), Atom (Myron Voth), Proton (John Zylstra), and Electron (Rex Ely) were highlighted as possibly showing up at a high school rally of 800 kids in the Seattle area.
The story I am about to tell, though it may seem far-fetched and made up, is indeed 100% true. It is important that I protect the names of those involved, so it is for that reason I will be going by the name Mike.