When I was a teenager hitch-hiking all over America — being a wandering wastrel as my friends and I called it — it was pretty common to wind up sleeping on someone’s floor, in an abandoned barn, a church or school basement, even sometimes under the archetypical bridge abutment. But that was a long, long time ago.

Yesterday afternoon my family and I, plus a friend, rode up to the local ski hill for lessons. The pass had been closed that morning for avalanche control but it re-opened in plenty of time and the highway reports and webcams looked great so off we went.

There’s been tons and tons of snow up there this week — looked like maybe eight feet of new since the last time we’d been. And for such a coastal environment it was surprisingly dry and fluffy.
Photo by Flickr user wsdot.
Used under a Creative Commons license.Not what you’d call powder exactly, but definitely something you could sink to your waist into if you got off track… and heavy enough to pretty much stop you if you weren’t… way more experienced with that stuff than I am anyway. (I do live in the Northwest after all.)

Anyway, with all that recent snow, plus the recently avalanched pass, plus the several-inches-an-hour it was snowing when we got to the hill I probably shouldn’t have been surprised that none of the ski instructors had showed up. They know what they’re doing. Nor should I have been so surprised to learn moments after getting there that another avalanche, a real whopper this time, had buried the interstate under at least ten feet of snow and debris. The roads had seemed fine on the drive up and we didn’t find out it had closed until hours later.

Anyway, around 7:00 we learned about the snow slide from a tersely worded note on a whiteboard in the area “service center” that said “I-90 closed both directions till morning.” I put scare quotes around “service center” because the nice vaguely Austrian-sounding teenager at the desk had no idea WTF except “T’ere iss an inn, vould you like t’er naaambarr?” Sweet kid but clearly not in the loop. (For the record by then there was no room at the inn.)

Photo by Flickr user Hamed Saber.
Used under a Creative Commons license.Anyway, a few hours later the state patrol began escorting groups of stranded cars back down on the wrong side of the interstate (an eerie experience — ordinarily who gets to look at the backs of exit signs?), at 20 miles an hour, through driving snow.

Anyway, I bring this up in the same serious-but-light-hearted spirit as my previous posts comparing society’s different attitudes towards the pain, discipline, hardware, and mentality of BDSM on the one hand and snow sports on the other.

The point here being that we think it odd that kinky people into humiliation or dungeon play would voluntarily put themselves in a position where they’d have to sleep in odd clothes, in uncomfortable circumstances, on a cold hard floor. All I can say is hey, at least kinksters have better sense than to bring their children with them! :-)

Photo by Flickr user Cool Librarian.
Used under a Creative Commons license.We eventually made it home safe and sound. Past the avalanche the police escort directed us back across the median through a cut in the snowbanks and we were on our merry, if still reduced-speed way home.

Now that all the stranded vehicles are down the pass remains closed and may remain closed till noon.

I’m glad we made it home, but snow-lifestyle kinkster I am, I’ll know better next time: bring sleeping bags, toothbrushes, my laptop, a couple of Starbucks DoubleShots, and enough books and stuff to keep the kids comfortable on the ski-lodge floor till morning… when we can go skiing again till they reopen the highway. (What, you thought we’d learn some different lesson? :-))