Comin’ down the mountain

After inadvertently helping my kids to determine that nature sucks, I, in the hopes of not ending our mini-vacation on a sour note, pointed the car north, and, a short while later, arrived at Attitash ski resort — which, during the off-season, it turns out, is converted into a summer playground.

The main attraction? An alpine slide that, according to the resort’s website, is the longest in all of North America.

Now, not only had Zan and Jayna never been on an alpine slide; I’d never been on one, either. (Wonder Woman claims to have gone on one as a child, but it was in Pennsylvania somewhere, so it was probably about as exhilarating as riding a Big Wheel down a gently sloping driveway.) We watched some of the riders come down the chutes, and asked the kids if they wanted to give it a whirl. They agreed, as long as they each got to share an alpine-slide thingamajig with one of us.

Once we were all in agreement, team Scratches approached the ticket counter and asked for two tickets.

“He might be too big to ride with you,” the man behind the counter said while pointing to Zan. “Have him stand up against that ruler behind you.”

Zan placed his back against the pole on which the ruler was painted, and the top of his head was a little bit above the 48-inch mark.

“Anyone over 48 inches has to ride alone,” ticket man said.

As the quintessential 98-pound (or less) weakling growing up, I never once experienced a situation in which I was actually too big to go on a ride with a grown-up. Yet, despite the fact that I sired him, and that he just celebrated his sixth birthday less than three months ago, Zan is already big enough to play point guard for the Celtics.

After breaking the bad news to us, ticket man tried to help convince Zan that he would be just fine riding alone, but Zan wasn’t buying that rap. Hats off to the Attitash folks, though, because it turned out that behind us was an alpine-slide demo, which consisted of a small section of the chute and a slide-thingamajig resting therein. Ticket man showed Zan how the thingamajig worked, and this seemed to convince him, so we bought three tickets and headed over to the ski lift.

We boarded one of the large chairs, and as we made our way up the mountain, one of my other alter egos — Anxiety Man — became hyper-aware of the absence of a seatbelt or similar device by the fastening of which my young children might have been made more secure, so I kept a firm grip on the two of them in order to help eliminate the already unlikely threat of them accidentally hurling themselves off the lift and plummeting to the ground. Yes, this is the shit that goes through my head.

Other than having to deal with my ever-present neurosis, the ride up the mountainside was grand. The weather was absolutely picture perfect, and I’m still trying to figure out who I’m going to have to blow in my next life for bestowing upon us two absolutely gorgeous days during our little escape.

Now, the kids have gone skiing … but that was at a very tiny mountain … and they didn’t ride the lift; they just went up a little magic-carpet thing and glided down a very modest hill. With that in mind, our view from the top of Attitash (which was spectacular) must have seemed to them roughly the same as the view out of an airplane window.

As we approached the line leading to the chutes, I watched a couple of people begin their descent, and saw the attendant hold back the next riders until the recently departed ones were completely out of view … and it was at that point that something became very clear to me: in the highly unlikely event that we were able to convince Zan to actually board the thingamajig and set off on his own, the best possible outcome we could have hoped for would be for either Wonder Woman, me or one of the Attitash staff to collect his frightened, tearful, psychotherapy-needing ass from the chute a short way down the mountain.

“Zan, do you want to ride down alone, or with me?” I asked.

“With you,” he answered without hesitation. Duh.

The young, slacker-ish-looking attendant seated at the take-off line didn’t seem like the type who’d whip out a tape measure and enforce the whole 48-inches thing, so I placed my thingamajig at the top of the chute, climbed aboard, and told Zan to climb in with me. Wonder Woman and Jayna went ahead of us, and once they were out of sight, Zan and I set off down the mountain.

The ride down was a total blast, and confirmed for me that to send Zan down on his own would have been to initiate a mountain rescue that likely would have ended up involving a helicopter and a cable-lowered stretcher.

They don’t allow any cameras on the alpine slide, so, sadly, I have no photographs of our spectacular view from atop, or trip down, the mountain, so you’ll have to settle for this reenactment:

When we reached the bottom, Wonder Woman and Jayna were waiting.

“We were starting to get worried,” WW said. “We’ve been down here for a while.”

OK, so maybe I had erred on the side of caution during my first-ever alpine-slide experience, but the more relevant factor was Wonder Woman’s brazen disregard for proper alpine-slide safety regulations.

“Did you guys go over the jump?” she bragged.

“‘The jump’?” I said. “What jump?”

“That one part where the track goes over a bump and gets really steep all of a sudden,” she answered.

“You mean the part where all those ‘SLOW DOWN’ signs were posted?”

“I must not have seen those.”

“Yeah, they were pretty hard to miss … especially that 12-foot-wide, three-foot-tall, fluorescent, day-glo-orange banner.”

Wonder Woman’s daredevilish behavior notwithstanding, our alpine-slide initiation went well … so much so that the kids wanted to do it again. Unfortunately, this time around, the lift operator at the bottom of the mountain insisted that Zan would have to go down on his own, to which Zan responded with a hearty “No fucking way” (or something like that).

Jayna asked if I would take her instead, which I gladly agreed to do, but before she and I got on the lift, I really wanted to help Zan feel less disappointed, so I asked my ever-so-cautious son if he would want to instead try the nearby psychotic-looking bungy-trampoline thing. Now, get a load of this:

The kid totally went for it. What a cool dude.

So that was how we capped off our White Mountain excursion: with oodles of high-altitude fun. We’re planning to do it again next year. Perhaps Zan will be up to the challenge of solo alpine sliding by then. We shall see.

P.S.: Jayna said Daddy went down the alpine slide way faster than Mommy … so there.