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Only 14-year-olds in the snowboard park executing outrageous jumps and spinning like maple propellers just to see how it feels aren't focused on turning, or "carving." To take turns you must, as with skiing, sometimes allow your equipment to point straight down the mountain. Since your feet are strapped on perpendicular to the board's length, they then point across the incline. You hold your knees and arms soft and turn your head to look over your leading shoulder downhill toward where you're going. You should not lean back when you do this, chin tucked into your neck like the dentist is coming at you with the vibrating plaque remover tool. You should stay upright and loose as a hula dancer, lean forward, even, for more momentum. Then, tilting back and forth on the edges of this board, enjoy going 35 miles an hour without a single pole or pillow or flotation device to stop you. A couple of techniques have been created by boarders to get them out of tight situations. The "Fakey," for instance. When going down a chute of snow between trees barely wider than the length of your snowboard, say, you can learn to crisscross forward and back across the tiny space staying only on one edge, not turning, keeping things slow and safe until you reach more open terrain. Another technique, which I have christened the "Slippy," involves scooting downhill on the back edge of your board while facing forward and, again, not turning -- a method as exciting and glamorous as life lived on a recumbent bicycle. I lean back, tucking the last fry into my mouth, and consider the morning. On my trip down I'd been fakeying and slippying and occasionally making a wide turn when I was sure the slope was gentle. The other boarder I'm with has already gotten better than me, and it's easy to see why. By lunch time he had wiped out at least 14 times. After each fall he'd looked back up the hill toward me from the ground with the face of someone trampled by bulls, but it hadn't stopped him from taking the chance again and again, and pretty soon he wasn't falling so much. An amateur surfer, he is willing to wipe out, to suffer bruises and look like a fool. I had taken my first real snowboarding trip last year with a guy who was trying to woo me, a quintessentially Northwestern guy, tall as a spruce and as Type A as Buddha. He moves over the snow like he's part of it, like a wave over water. That particular Saturday was icy, and the bunny hill was thick with snowboarders new to the sport, teetering all over the mountain like Ice Capades Bambis. We went up the short lift and down the hill over and over, and I fell until the vibrations from landing on packed snow had traveled up my spine and reshaped my brain. We stopped for lunch, parking ourselves at his suggestion on a mound of snow at the top of the lift. There we faced the spot where skiers and boarders are dumped from the chair onto a hill formed too steep by some snow-grooming sadist. We pulled our high-piled sandwiches from the sweaty pockets of our parkas and viewed the carnage, like spectators in the Colosseum. One after another they descended. One after another people jumped off too late and collapsed, or too early and were bumped by the chair. Much of the time, people who had come to the mountain to learn to ski together in some misguided attempt at fun and games got off the lift and groped desperately at each other when they knew they were about to fall, like people in the process of drowning. The lift operator shut the machinery down for a minute each time while they dragged themselves off to the side. I felt guilty witnessing this, yet curiously relieved. Now, I realize, those first, head-knocking days were my most daring. We ride up again. And on my way down, again, I am too cautious. By the time I reach bottom the other new boarder has been waiting several minutes, quizzically observing my descent. "You were fakeying the whole way!" he cheerfully comments when I arrive. My heart, too, slips out from under me. NO EASY WAY, I think. The next time I ride to the top alone, and once there I slippy, and fakey, until I feel like I'm at Six Flags and it's my 18th time on the kiddie coaster. I force myself to make one turn on a more gentle slope, and it works, and before I can look down the hill and seize up I make another turn back again and it works! And I turn and turn and determine not to look ahead. I move back and forth like a maniacal sewing machine, stitching my path -- I am Alberto Tomba! I am Picabo Street! -- and I execute one last lovely turn before I discover, head dragging on snow, that I have gone over the steep lip of the universe. I come to a stop beneath a lift full of people on their way to the top. Their skis dangle above me, and their gloved hands cup the center poles of their chairs lightly as they peer over the side to see if I have survived. They quietly analyze my failure among themselves, gliding by. I scoop a small white shelf from the side of the hill and think maybe I'll sit on it forever in these snowboarding overalls that belong on someone else, my feet eternally attached to this board, my albatross. I look at my hands and huff. I squint across to the next mountain and sigh. I pull my hat farther down around my ears. I'd like to cry. I'm disgusted that I still can't turn when it's steep, point downward, let go. I'm strong. I can protect myself. I can do this for hours. I look down the hill at boys half my age, their boards afterthoughts on their feet. I think of friends who brought me up here, boarding junkies confident where I am terrified, graceful where I am awkward. Who bear bruises up and down their thighs and skinny asses from every trip, proof that they have taken chances, proof they have fallen and gotten up. I will never be good at this. How do I hate myself for being bad at something as trivial as snowboarding? I see now, too clearly, how I cling to the easy route, how I am petrified of being outside safety, of heading straight down. Straight into the abyss. I am afraid of making the first move. I am afraid of hurting people. I am afraid to let out the things that clatter in my head. I am lazy. I wait. Sitting on this mountain in the anodyne sunshine of March, it is as if I inhabit a carefree place -- some Swiss village -- and the world is mine. Except for a dark past that I know will catch up with me. I begin to think of the people I respect -- people I've known and those I haven't, who couldn't do this. I don't think my old writing teacher would have managed it, or that Virginia Woolf, however experimental and wild in her art, would have taken to such a diversion. I have heard that Einstein surprised an interviewer by being well-built and vigorous, and I will admit the possibility that Einstein might, yes, possibly have done this. To the top once more. I ride up the first leg with a large man in a bandanna who looks like a bear just emerged from hibernation. He doesn't speak to me, and his bulk sags the chair at an angle so that the whole mountain seems to tilt. I look out over my side of the hill and wonder about the bad names of most ski lifts, like cut-rate carnival rides: "Debbie's Gold," "I-5," "Edelweiss," runs named after long-gone girlfriends, freeways, mythical European vistas. I watch boys one-third my age fall down and ring "Fuck! Fuck!" across the mountainside, already pissed off at the possibility of failing. I ride up the second chair with a large, jovial man who asks what I do, and when I say I write, he asks what I write, and when I answer he asks what I do with that writing, and the questions continue until I think maybe I am not too afraid to just scoot forward and let go into the mound of snow falling away so many feet beneath me. His ski pole keeps touching my thigh and each time it does I turn to look at him, hoping it is his hand touching me so I'll have an excuse to scream. When we are about to stand up from the chair he jostles me, and being a boarder I have no ski pole to hook him into my flailing dismount. I tumble gently to a stop, as always, alone in this mess. SALON | Dec. 10, 1997 Maria Dolan is a writer who lives in Seattle. Have you ever tried snowboarding -- or another daunting challenge? How did you handle it? Share your tales in Table Talk. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -