Kamikaze Kangaroos!

by Tony James Slater

  “How the hell can you stand up in this?” Roo had asked one patroller, shouting into his ear from an inch away.

  “We’ve got crampons on,” he replied, looking puzzled. “You haven’t?”

  Not long after this the decision had been made to stop ferrying the customers to their cars. After all, it wasn’t like they could go anywhere. Shortly after that, the decision had been made to go and find the customers now stranded in their cars, and bring them all back to Tor One. See what I mean? Chaos.

  By the time we arrived, Tor One was rammed out with customers. Possibly the worst news was this: the buggers had drunk all the coffee in the vending machine!

  For this reason (probably amongst others), it was decided to try to transfer the customers to the restaurant. Until now there hadn’t been enough staff to make such an attempt, but a whole bus full of frozen lifties was exactly what was needed.

  The plan was for all the outdoors staff to link arms into a human chain, stretching from Tor One, along the driveway, up a flight of steps, across the courtyard, and into the restaurant. We would then pass the customers along the chain – or, to be more precise, they would have to climb us.

  It went well.

  We did it in small bursts, as staying outside for any length of time was incredibly dangerous – not to mention unpleasant. The raging winds tore at us, with sudden gusts capable of throwing us around like rag dolls. Plus, we were all thoroughly soaked and freezing cold; the last thing we needed was an entire crew with hypothermia.

  Most of us had to work tomorrow.

  After being part of the first few chains I started to gain confidence, and was trying to be more helpful. Stationing myself on the steps, which were the worst place – concrete covered with ice, offered absolutely no purchase – I clung to the railings with one hand, and helped people over the trickiest part of the route. I only dared let go of the railings once, to pass a nervous customer up to the next person in line – when a ferocious blast took my feet from under me. I literally flew halfway down the stairs, and had time enough to wonder if I’d be rolled all the way across the car park to the precipice at the far edge – when a gloved hand shot out and latched onto my arm, swinging me back into the railings with some force. I grabbed on, as tight as I could with numb fingers, got my feet back under me, and quietly shit myself.

  Yet again a Ski Patroller had saved the day. These lads were made of real hero stuff, make no mistake; in spite of the cold, his grip on my arm was like iron.

  “Careful mate!” he shouted, sounding considerably more cheerful than I felt, “it’s a bit windy out!” And he turned to help the next customer in line.

  In the restaurant, there was space to spread out, and it was heated. Some customers had been trapped there since the mountain closed, and were overjoyed to be reunited with friends and family they thought were missing. We spent the rest of the evening trying to keep the crowd in a positive mood, as we listened on the walkie-talkies for news. The series of events we heard unfolding were actually quite amusing, to those of us not directly involved in them. It was a classic cascade of cock-ups, which you really had to be there to fully appreciate.

  First up, the snow plough that had liberated our bus had pushed onwards down the mountain, finding a path around the damaged vehicles and making it as far as the first bend in the road. There it had met its match in snow, and had become bogged.

  Not to be deterred, the bosses sent out our monstrous John Deere tractor. This was a titanic machine, with rear-wheels taller than me. Its mission: to pull the snow plough out of the snow-drift. What could possibly go wrong with this?

  The tractor had made it halfway to the stranded snow plough when it had run out of gas. Whilst trying to figure out what was wrong, the tractor driver had gone to get out for a look – only to have the door torn off by the wind as soon as he opened it!

  “Fucking idiots!” was heard over the radio, presumably directed at whoever’s job it was to keep the tractor full of fuel. Then there came a somewhat weaker addendum: “Ah, can someone come and help me? The cab is filling up with snow…”

  So it was the idiot’s turn to save the day. They piled into a ute and, with tyres wrapped in snow chains and a few gallons of petrol in the back, they charged off to the rescue.

  At least until a flying chunk of ice shattered their rear windscreen, showering them with glass and snow in equal measure. They drove a bit more slowly after that.

  But the chain of bad luck had to break. The ute boys refuelled the tractor, dug out the cab, and in turn it freed the snow plough. Then all the vehicles made a solemn, funeral-procession pace, all the way down the mountain.

  It took them three hours.

  That was the worst of it, though. We started filling the staff buses with customers, using the same human-chain method, and they set off one at a time to make their slow way downhill. The buses made better time of it than the snow plough – it only took them four hours to make a return trip!

  And then, at long last, it was our turn.

  As our bus inched its way down the mountain, opinion was yet again divided into three camps. There were those who viewed the day as a complete disaster; they were pissed off at the managers, annoyed with the customers, and were moaning constantly about how terrible the whole ordeal had been. They were mostly indoors staff.

  Then there were the people who thought, like me, that this had been one hell of an adventure! It was the most exciting thing by far that had happened to me on the ski-field. One day, I thought, I might even get to write about this!

  My shift had started that morning at 7am.

  I’d clocked off and been sent home at midday.

  At 2:45 the following morning, I staggered in through the door, still soaked to the skin, chilled, and exhausted. Roo arrived even later, the six roadies having been the last group to leave the mountain, crammed into the battered ute with no back window. I’ll admit, I nearly cried with relief when she clomped in, still covered in snow. Four people died in that storm (which, for New Zealand, represents a significant portion of the population). Luckily for us, none of them were on our mountain; somehow, we’d managed to get everyone down without a single serious injury. We even got a mention on the news for it.

  Oh, and the third opinion? Held by a small minority of veteran staff, it was best voiced by a huge, heavily tattooed Maori bloke who was working his seventh consecutive ski season: “Ah, that was nothin’ eh?” he said, to anyone who would listen. “Y’se shoulda bin here for the Great Storm…”

  Gill For The Win

  We didn’t see much of Gill that season, because having spread her wings at last, she was flapping as hard as she could. Okay, that doesn’t paint a very flattering picture… Hm. I’d like to say she was soaring like an eagle, but Gill’s a bit stubby to be compared to an eagle. I dunno, is there such a thing as a Stunted Eagle?

  Anyway, the point is, she was doing well.

  Very well, as it turned out.

  She was spending most of her evenings at the Turoa Lodge, a pub frequented almost exclusively by the RAL staff. Pretty much every night there was some kind of staff party held there; pool tournaments, fancy dress nights and staff-only beer offers cropped up so frequently it was no wonder half the lifties showed up to work still hammered from the night before. Unfortunately the Lodge was at the extreme opposite end of town, three-quarters of an hour’s fast walk away from where we all lived, down a long, empty road. It was so agonisingly cold at night that I regularly made the walk expecting to come across the frozen corpses of the last few people to leave the pub. All it would take was for someone to be drunk enough to lay down for a nap halfway home… it never happened of course, which given the state of inebriation required to even attempt the walk, had to be a minor miracle.

  Gill made the trip often enough to appreciate its rare benefits – it didn’t matter how hammered you were when you set out, by the time you got home you were stone-cold sober – and had burnt off all the calories you’d consume
d in a night of boozing. It was an extreme endurance event which I rarely felt the need to undertake, as I had everything I needed – which was Roo – right there, in my tiny little hobbit-hole.

  Speaking of hobbit-holes, Gill had finally landed on her feet. After accepting a room in a house that was still being renovated, and acknowledging that she’d have to provide ‘a few things for the kitchen’ – she’d turned up to find those few things included more than just a bunch of pots and pans and a kettle.

  There was no kitchen.

  There was no furniture of any kind.

  There were no carpets.

  And there were no doors.

  In fact, if you were to replace the phrase ‘being renovated’ with ‘derelict’, you’d probably have a more accurate appreciation of the house she’d been offered.

  Still, Gill is nothing if not resourceful.

  Somehow, in a town the size of Ohakune, she sourced second-hand carpets, a bed, a table and some chairs, and was well on her way to making the place liveable – when the owner admitted he wouldn’t be able to install any heating this season.

  Or connect the electricity.

  Or water.

  But he was happy to knock some cash of the rent for these inconveniences…

  Ranting about her situation over lunch to a ski-technician called Chris, she’d been amazed when he told her about an available room where he was living.

  The girl that had originally rented the room had hooked up with another staff member, and decided to move in with him to save cash.

  So, delightedly, Gill abandoned her moth-eaten carpets and took a room at ‘The Penguins’ – arguably the most sought-after accommodation in all Ohakune.

  After serving as a one-woman letting agent, finding places to stay for half the staff in town at the expense of herself, it had a karmic vibe when she moved in; her room was bigger than most lounges, she had a huge bed, central heating, wireless internet and Sky TV. Plus, she was a good twenty minutes closer to the pub.

  She was very, very happy there.

  And as the weeks turned into months, I couldn’t help but notice that Gill was spending more and more time with Chris.

  Because he was short – the same height as she was, amazingly enough – and cute (although don’t tell him I said that); and he was clever, a geneticist by profession, though he much preferred following winter around the world and fixing skis for a living.

  He had blonde hair and blue eyes, which was the icing on the cake as far as Gill was concerned (him having already fulfilled her dream trifecta), and according to all known sources, she spent more time in his room that season than she did in her own.

  And it later transpired that he was studying to become a helicopter pilot in his spare time – so I figured I could stop worrying about Gill for a while.

  The most time I spent with her was on the staff bus, on the way to work in the mornings. That was where we got to compare notes about our lives, and she would try to convince me that her job was even more ridiculous than mine.

  You see, Gill was working as a ticket-checker.

  It was her job to make sure that everyone in the ski-area had paid the right amount to be there.

  It was a source of endless frustration for the customers; partly because the ticket-checkers were so understaffed that only two of them stood by the main chair lift, so they created a bottleneck right in front of it; and partly because a good few of them had no tickets, and were relying on a bit of confusion to slip through unnoticed.

  “The stupidest thing,” Gill told me, “is that we’ve got these super-dooper electronic barcode scanners to check the tickets with. Only they aren’t waterproof! So half the time the bloody things don’t work at all, and I’m supposed to use a pen – a pen, for God’s sake – to write down the numbers on everyone’s tickets! Like I could just nip off for a few hours to run them all through the database, and then come back and catch whoever had invalid ones!”

  “Holy shit!”

  “Of course, pens don’t work in the cold, so that got mentioned to the boss… and then we were issued with – wait for it – pencils! So they have this multi-million-dollar ticketing system, all computer-based and designed to be impossible to forge – and it comes down to us, standing in the snow, trying to copy down 13-digit barcodes with pencils. Onto paper, which just disintegrates anyway.”

  “Okay, you win! Your job is way more ridiculous than mine. How the hell do you cope?”

  She shrugged. “We don’t. It’s got to the point where, once the scanner stops working, I just point it at people and say ‘beep’.”

  “No way! And does anyone say anything?”

  “Sometimes. Yesterday this bloke said to me ‘Did you just point at me and go beep?’ And I said, ‘yep’. And he said, ‘fair enough’. And that was that. Hell, I might as well make a scanner out of snow and use that!”

  And to prove a point, the very next day she did just that.

  As the season drew to a close, our contracts came up for renewal. It was left up to each individual staff member, to decide if they wanted to carry on working until the ski-field ran out of snow, or if they wanted to leave to pursue their own agendas. Roo and I fell into the latter category, as we’d saved up a bit of cash and hoped to spend our last few snowbound weeks careening uncontrollably down a different mountain.

  There were leaving parties every other night at that point, and much drunkenness as new friends and old got together to celebrate before their ways parted once more.

  Roo and I got permission from the Hobbits to hold a party at their place, and the allure of the hot tub drew people we’d hardly seen all season.

  It was a typically raucous affair, although I refrained from my trademark act of streaking on the grounds that a) I lived here, and that would just be awkward; and b) I’d streaked at every staff party I’d been to all season, and people were probably getting bored of seeing me run around naked.

  Hanging around until the bitter end, Gill and Chris were still nursing their drinks when Roo and I apologised to them and went to bed.

  We had to spend the next day packing everything we owned, once again – as the day after that, we’d booked our bus out of there.

  Gill and Chris, noticing that the hot tub was finally empty, had taken full advantage of the fact. Despite not having any shorts or swimming costumes with them, they’d climbed in – fully clothed – and sat in there for quite some time.

  It must have occurred to them that, as they were now sopping wet, it was going to be a very long, very cold walk home. So they stayed a little longer, finishing off a few other drinks that no longer had owners.

  It started to snow as they sat there, luxuriating in the warm water – a bizarre sensation which I’d been lucky enough to experience a few times myself.

  Then Chris, whose surname was Robinson, saluted Gill with a glass of wine and started singing, “So here’s to you, Mrs Robinson…”

  “Ha!” Gill responded, “That’s my song!”

  “It could be, you know,” he told her.

  And whatever else they got up to in the hot tub that night, I’m probably better off not knowing. Because I had to clean the thing the next day.

  “Did that really just happen?” Gill had asked Chris, as they sloshed their way home at five o’clock in the morning.

  It was a while before Gill told me this story, and at first I didn’t quite understand what she was getting at. But it seemed very important to her, so I ran the conversation back through my mind a bit more slowly.

  That’s when it hit me.

  “Hang on a minute,” I said to her, “does that meant that…?”

  “YES!,” she said, “it does! Chris proposed to me that night! He and I are engaged!”

  Countdown

  Leaving Ohakune was a bit of a wrench. It was a stunning, magical place, with the glistening snow-cap of Mount Ruapehu looming tantalisingly above all of it. The town, and the season, had been good to us. Both Roo and I had spent plen
ty of time moaning about our jobs, but then part of the glue that held the ski community together was moaning about their jobs. Everyone thought they had it hardest – at least until their day off came around, and suddenly it was the best place in the world to work! The other component of the community glue was the booze, of course, and this was an element that Roo and I had largely abstained from. Not because we don’t love to party – we’d put in an appearance at every major event – but because the walk to the pub was so damn long and unpleasant, and for the first time in my life I didn’t feel the need to be the centre of attention, the craziest of party animals; I had no burning desire to show off and make a fool of myself in front of everyone. I still did though, but mostly by accident.

  We had learnt to snowboard.

  Neither of us were going to break any records, but neither of us had broken any bones.

  Roo, it has to be said, had achieved a far greater measure of cool than I could ever aspire to. It was time to admit it; that ship had sailed. I was clumsier than ten regular people tied together at the ankles, and twice as likely to earn strange looks from passers-by. But that seemed to be my lot in life, and so long as Roo could cope with it, I was starting to think that I could, too.

  Most of all, we’d been happy, the pair of us, tucked away in our little Hobbit hole.

  But now, new horizons beckoned, and we made our way by bus, ferry and bus again to New Zealand’s South Island. Our destination; Mount Hutt, another ski resort, and one at which we planned to grasp the tail-end of the season and cling on to it for all it was worth.

  Item one on the agenda: jobs, as our savings from Turoa had been spent equipping us with passes to the Mount Hutt ski field, and paying the bond on a room in the nearby town of Ashburton.