I am on my way to Sun Valley, Idaho, to cover the first stop of The Ski Tour Festival, a freeskiing contest/concert series that will stop in Aspen, Breckenridge and Squaw Valley, Calif.
Whatever. It’s just another action-sports event on a long list of action-sports events I have attended over the past 15 years in this little niche of journalism I have managed to carve out for myself. I have been to so many of these things you would think I would have it dialed. You would think it would be smooth sailing. It usually is – until something goes terribly wrong.
Like that time I traveled from San Diego to Sugarloaf, Maine, to cover the first-ever Olympic snowboard halfpipe qualifier and my luggage never arrived. Ever. I was traveling with a photographer we called “Super G” because he was 6-foot-6 and thick as a linebacker. I spent five days draped in his extra clothes, with a jacket that fit like a dress, sleeves hanging down below my knees and snowboard pants so big I had to flip the waist over 10 times so it was like wearing an inner tube around my waist. I had to rent snowboard equipment with boots soft and thin as a pair of old sneakers. I stood around the halfpipe all day long in sub-zero weather until my feet froze. In fact, my toes still go numb to this day – even in warm weather – if my circulation is compromised in any way.
The worst part of it, though, were the hours and hours I spent on the phone waiting to talk to someone at United as that grating classical music played in the background. I would sit there and wait until my nerves were frayed, as if this music were part of some demented psychological experiment. After 20 minutes of torture, I would eventually be connected with someone who had no information at all.
“Where are you located?” I asked the agent after what must have been the 15th phone call.
“Chicago, ma’am,” she replied with one of those nasal voices that made it sound like she had a plug on her nose.
“Is there any way I can talk to someone in Portland, Maine, or Boston? I’m certain that’s where my bag is,” I said, trying not to take out my frustration on this poor woman in Chicago.
“No, ma’am. I’m sorry, you can’t. All you can do is wait.”
On the flight home, I decided to swing by the luggage lost-and-found in Boston. It was exactly how I had pictured it, a small room with abandoned baggage piled floor to ceiling, forever lost to some devastated honeymooner or grandmother who had to arrive without gifts. A portly attendant sat slumped in a chair with his baseball hat pulled low over his eyes about two feet away from my “lost” blue snowboard bag. The bag in question was huge and could not be missed, even in a room full of bags.
“Excuse me,” I said, startling the guy awake. “That’s my bag.” I pushed my way through to grab hold of the bag instead of his neck. “How could you have missed it?”
He looked up my file on an antiquated computer and said, “It says here your bag is green.”
Then there was the time I was sent to Huntington Beach, Calif., to interview female pro surfers for the first feature I wrote for Surfer magazine. It was a cover story about whether beauty played a factor for female surfers looking for pro sponsorship, and it was the last thing any of these girls wanted to talk about. My editor, Evan Slater, had thrown me right into the shark pit, so to speak. He knew I had no ties in the industry and was too ignorant to realize how much these women would hate me for prying about this taboo subject.
It all went surprisingly well until I was halfway home and realized I had left the tape recorder in the athlete tent. I drove back, speeding up the 405 like a car chase scene from “CHiPs.” But by the time I got there, they had already broken down the venue, and there was no one there but one of those guys with a metal detector, searching for lost treasures on the beach. I panicked, trying to remember everything I could, pulling over and scribbling lost quotes on napkins, wondering how I would be able to follow up with the 15 girls I had talked to for at least 20 minutes each before my deadline.
I pulled into my driveway and my cellphone rang.
“Hey, Ali, I have something you might be looking for,” my friend Heather said. “It’s your microcassette recorder. I found it on the beach.”
When you go to these events, you just never know what you are going to find. Then again, you don’t know what you are going to lose, either.
Freelance columnist Alison Berkley can be reached at alison@berkleymedia.com.
