I was thinking about the first time David and I really went riding our snowboards together: I had made the decision to move to Utah to go to “college.” What I was really doing was taking my tuition money and enrolling in classes. I would send my Mom the receipt and syllabus, and then roughly a week or so before classes would start, I would withdraw from all my classes and use the money for lift tickets, food, beer, and rent.
I was a cook at the time, making my way from the pantry to Sous Chef at a local restaurant… all night hours, so I was able to feed myself with protein-rich meals and then go riding during the day. In my head, I was certain I was going to become a professional snowboarder.
I lived in a studio apartment. The very definition of “studio”: a room with a pocket door to a bathroom and a kitchen that had surprisingly more functionality than it would appear. I also had two roommates in this studio apartment and was sleeping on a “Rent-A-Center” futon. I think the apartment was $275.00 a month; at the time split three ways came out to something like $100 a person.
My first year out, Mom came out to visit with David… my mom was appalled at the apartment. I was not surprised since the place was a complete shit hole, but it was MY crappy humble abode nonetheless.
We took a a trip up to Big Cottonwood Canyon and decided to do a day at Brighton. I had a couple of my boys whom I rode with meeting up with me. David and I peeled off to take some “skatepark” runs. Basically, these were optimized Millicent lift runs that allowed us to hit every natural feature from top to bottom and maximize lapping to get in a ton of runs, as we used to use half-day passes since we mostly “clipped” tickets. (Clipping tickets was basically using some tourists passes who decided to call it quits, and you would use carb spray or a strong heater to heat up the glue used at the time to un-peel the sticker and re-attach to a new wicket).
Up to this point, David and I had gone snowboarding quite a bit, but we never really pushed each other as much since it was usually a family trip. Also, all we had was some really basic videos to use a starting point to learn tricks, so we weren’t in a place to really push the cusp of our riding. At this point, I was regularly riding with sponsored riders, like Andy Hetzel and Tina & Mike Basich, and when at Snowbird, I would get the occasional runs with MCA from the the Beastie Boys when he was in town. Suffice to say we were were really pushing the edge of the sport at the time. Although, when you look at it by today’s standards, a kid could do more tricks in his first year than we would be doing over the course of several seasons. There were no halfpipes at the time, and the snow park was a local park after a fresh snow. Like, a literal park with swings and stuff.
David was tiny at the time, riding this little Burton… I think Tyler might still actually have this board somewhere in the basement of my aunt’s house. Anyway, David was clearly intimidated as we were really flying that day. I was a bit of a show-off as well, as I wanted to show my brother how much I had improved since moving to NYC—I was pushing myself more than usual.
There was one signature hit at the time where you came out of the woods to this straight shot where you would speed tuck… basically point your board and get as much momentum as possible. The runway was something like a quarter mile, and the “hit” was nestled between these two giant trees. If you speed checked or did anything to wuss out, you risked wiping out into some tree trunks that were something like four-feet thick at the base. However, if you kept your speed, you would be rewarded with one of the greatest jumps the mountain had to offer. It would throw you something like 40 feet with a double digit elevation to one of the nicest landings that never seemed to get tracked out no matter how many times we hit it.
So we are all bombing along this run and David—all 4’ 6” of him—just points the board, determined not to let me down, and just hauls ass at this jump. I could tell he wanted to speed check. I knew his little queues, but he held on and trusted my advice and just bombed the runway.
3…
2…
1…
LIFT OFF… this little 90-pound flying midget is hurtling through the air, and he actually reaches back and does one of the most FUGLY tailgrabs in the history of snowboarding. But he was up there… wayyy up there, way beyond what physics says he should be able to do. He sees the whole thing through, and I see him clear the landing and go cruising beyond, his little hands pumping in the air as if he just won the X-Games (which hadn’t even been invented yet). I followed right behind doing my signature, which at the time was a Cowboy Frontside 3, and when I got to him, he was grinning ear-to-ear.
“Let’s do that again!” That was all he could say to me, so we bombed that damn jump at least twenty times that day, and he just kept going bigger and bigger.
We wouldn’t ride much after that, as David got interested in other things when I got back to CT. But I knew at some point we would be riding again together as I always knew he remembered that day… he was just too lazy to get in a car and drive up to VT, or hop on a plane because he was too cheap to spend the money. But when he did come back around, we rode the shit out of our boards, and he eventually surpassed where I was even at during my prime.
But nothing will ever replace that day for me, as it was the first time David and I really went riding. And even though I was a misguided youth living with three people in a studio apartment making more mistakes than a teenager should be allowed to, something solidified in our relationship that day that I will take with me to my last breath.
