I know I fucked up when I saw her last, know that I should have been more understanding and less messed up, especially considering how freaked out she was. But I was pretty freaked out myself—am pretty freaked out—and I couldn’t help what came out.
“You ready?” Z calls from the top of the jump.
He’s in position now, his board strapped to his feet and his grin a mile wide. We’re in the backcountry, on a jump we built with our own hands, and nothing makes him happier. Besides going off the side of a mountain with absolutely no warning and no plan.
But he’s stopped doing that since Ophelia came into the picture. Oh, he’s still a daredevil, still a show-off, but the risks he takes are more moderate, less insane now that he has something to live for besides the guilt that’s eaten him alive for way too many years. I’m grateful every day that Ophelia came into his life—and not just because of Cam. I know Ash and even Cam feel the same way.
I’m at the bottom of the hill, my camera trained on him, while Ash is at the top of the jump with another camera. We learned early on to always have a camera focused on Z because you can never tell when he’s going to bust out with something totally broadway. We’ve missed too many ace tricks through the years not to watch—and videotape—him like hawks.
Ash must get tired of waiting for Z to get his shit together, because he calls, “are you going to stand up there like a huge pussy all day or are you actually going to do something?”
Z flips him off, his bright red gloves making quite a statement against the backdrop of white snow. And then he’s jumping in, quickly gathering speed as he boards down the hill and into the upward curve of the jump. He goes off the lip and then he’s spinning backward, backward, backward, backward into a perfect Double McTwist 1260.
He nails the landing, and we’re all whooping and hollering—what a way to wake us the fuck up after a long damn summer.
“Nice move,” Ash tells him. “But I can totally beat it.”
“That was just a warm-up,” Z answers as he glides over to me and unbuckles his bindings before reaching for the camera. “Wait till next time.”
I head up the hill, my board under my arm as Ash waits impatiently at the top for me to take the camera. I get his frustration. Usually there are four of us out here and it makes everything go faster with two of us a the top of the hill, one of us at the bottom and one of us climbing as whoever it is does the trick.
But we’re missing Cam today, will be missing her all season, and it’s throwing us all off our game a little. It’s been years since we’ve boarded backcountry without her and it totally blows. Judging from the looks on Ash’s and Z’s faces right now, I’m not the only one who feels that way.
I think about texting her, about telling her how much we miss her. But that seems too much like rubbing salt in a brand new wound. Besides, it’s not like she’ll answer me anyway.
Still, I grab the camera from Ash and set myself up to shoot whatever crazy shit he comes up with. Z might have only been warming up, but he’s definitely thrown down the gauntlet and Ash can’t help but to pick it up. I focus on him, tell myself I’m excited to see what he does. And do my best to ignore the fact that Cam’s absence is like a hole in my fucking gut.
Ash starts a little slower than Z, but then he always does. Z goes hog fucking wild, does whatever the hell comes into his mind as soon as it hits him. Ash thinks it all through so that every move he makes is planned, deliberate, as perfect as he can make it.
This time is no different.
He’s riding switch when he hits the jump, gliding smooth as silk through the snow, and up into the curl. When he launches himself off, he crosses his arms, does a Cross-Rocket Lando-roll that has him spinning ass over teakettle in two different directions at once. 360, 540, 720, 900, 1080…
He lands with a flourish, popping the nose of his board up and spraying snow in all directions.
“Fuck, yeah!” he yells, punching the air as he cruises down the mountain.
He and Z high-five and I shout my kudos down the hill at him. Holy shit. No one does that trick crisscrossed like that. It’s too fucking dangerous if it goes bad—you’ve got no protection, no way of getting your hands up to protect your face and head. And Ash just throws it down like it’s fucking nothing.
Z’s riding an adrenaline high at this point—when isn’t he, really—so it only takes him a couple minutes to run his ass straight up the hill at me.
“Do us proud, bro,” he tells me as he grabs the camera with one hand and offers me a fist bump with the other.
Yeah, right. Like that’s going to happen. Still, I’m out here with my friends. It’s a beautiful fucking day and the conditions are stellar. I might as well go up there and just have a good time. I may not be able to bang out the tricks they can, but I can still have fun.
There’s a tree not far from the jump, its branches bare of leaves and jutting out straight at us. I think about glancing off of it, pulling out a 540 or a 720 on the way down. But then I decide, fuck it. I’m just going to do the jump straight, spin it out and see how far I get, how many degrees I can spin before the ground fucking rises up to meet me. I’ll pull out before I get too low, but I’ve been strength training like hell and I think I should be able to pull out a Triple Underflip without too much trouble. If the universe—and my body—cooperates.
“Are you gonna go, or are you going to stand there like a little bitch?” This time Z’s heckling me the way Ash heckled him. I give him the same one-finger salute that he gave Ash, then bend down and check my bindings as I visualize the trick in my mind.
The jump has such a sharp curve to it that it’s almost vertical—which is why we’re all going backward off of it. It’s hard to get any good air going frontward on a jump like this. Plus, backward tricks are just way more fun.
I’m not planning on corking this one, just doing a straight Underflip—again, it’s not as sexy as Z’s McTwist or Ash’s Lando-roll, but it gets the job done. Or at least, I hope it does.
“Are you going?” Ash yells up to me, “?’Cause I’m going to start filming one way or the other, and I have no problem putting you on the website looking like a scared little kid.”
Knowing he means it, and since the last thing I want to do is look like a total gaffer on film, I take a deep breath and push off. The moment I drop into the jump I can tell this is going to be a good run—I can feel it in the way my board coasts along the powder like butter, and in how easy it is to pop the front of my board up with barely any pressure at all.
I go into the curve switch, just for the hell of it, making sure to keep my stance clean with my knees bent and my shoulders lined up with the board. Three spins, I tell myself as I launch. I’m fucking not coming down without a 1080. It’s a matter of honor.