I recently wrote about the trials of mounting the trails via "tire-fesses" as they say in French (direct translation: pulling your derriere). Today, I was faced with another tribulation. Literally. I was hit in the head with a chairlift.
The gendarme's "sortie" today was at Les Gets. It's known for having a beautiful village and it's more challenging a "station" than Praz du Lys. And it has chairlifts or "telesieges".
I was assigned the two worst listeners in our group. Taking little kids up on huge chairlifts is risky enough when you can fully communicate with them so this was clearly an accident waiting to happen, given my lack of French. I thought the operator was making sure the kid on my left got on the chairlift, so I took care of the kid on the right. Unfortunately, so did the operator. My silly trick that you can make a "G" with your left hand, which means it's the "gauche" side (I taught this to the kids to help them remember right and left, because the "L" trick works in English, too), did not come in handy. The kid on the left got whacked in the head with the chairlift. Seriously, thank god he was wearing a helmet. Luckily, he is 6 and was fine two seconds later. After disrupting the chairlift line yet again, we finally got on our way. I made them both promise to play statue and not move at all, having horrible images of one of them falling into the depths of the snow banks from fifty feet in the air. Then I lectured them on how to get off the chairlift properly and I asked them to recite back my instructions. I thought we were all clear. We were not. Upon reaching the top of the mountain, I lifted up the bar. We had planned to lift the bar, wait until I said "go" and then slide off. Of course, as soon as I lifted the bar, they both jumped off. Panicking, I also jumped off, which was incredibly dim-witted of me, but I was trying to go for a "one for all" teamwork-y attitude. I couldn't abandon my team, despite my horrible directions, could I? And this left three of us in the middle chairlift drop-off point, with chairlifts full of people zooming towards us. The chairlift man started swearing loudly. The kids played dead and lay down, apparently my French instructions were finally correct. They weren't hit with the chairlifts and the man pulled them out to safety. I, however, had star-fished literally in the smallest space between snow and chairlift. I could feel the chairlifts skimming my back. And no, it was not a nice massage. Because I couldn't stand up, I didn't know how to get my skis out of their position in a sprawl in opposite directions. The chairlift operator literally dragged me out face down onto the mountain. A more humiliating experience could not have been had. I was crying of laughter and the kids were crying because they thought I had died. No one was hurt, although I managed to kill what slim shreds of dignity I had left on the French slopes.
Post-catastrophe, skiing went well! We learned to play "mouse and elephant". You play mouse when you are crouching down to make your perpendicular to the slope tracks and elephant when you stand up to turn. It's great that tips for 7 year olds work so well for a 23 year old!
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