Naked Ping Pong and Other Notes
I’m going on a trip to Colorado with a friend who won entry into a woman’s hunting trip in Montana through an essay contest. She subsequently won the group’s Annie Oakley award for having the best shot. This year, one of the hunting group members invited her back for a camping trip and she kindly asked me to join.
Normally, I write about trips after they happen, but I feel like this one needs a prologue.
We’re going.
Anna once came to visit me in Montauk, New York. She learned to surf in one weekend. I took her out to the usual summer spot and let her practice while trying to keep an eye out. We had gone over the basics and she was ready to dive into it. As the afternoon went by, the intense summer sun had faded into the beginning of the sunset. I realized I lost track of where she was in the lineup.
“Excuse me, uh, Sir,” I got out of the water and approached the tall lifeguard stand. After paddling around trying to find her, then scanning the crowds from the beach, there was no Anna in sight. I looked around to see if she was on the sand, but I didn’t see her giant board anywhere. I was getting worried and about to query the lifeguard about what I should do. Just a quick question of what to do if she still wasn’t around and more time had passed. Her mom is going to kill me.
I had already lost her once that weekend, we met up with some guys and then split for the night, both losing the charge on our phones. She didn’t know my address and I didn’t know where she was. Luckily, before noon the next day, just as I was getting concerned about where she ended up, we ran into each other at a local breakfast spot. “Naked ping pong, Carrie. You missed naked ping pong at a Hampton’s mansion,” she jokingly shamed me for going back to my apartment.
“CARRIE!” I heard, before I could get my words out to the lifeguard sitting up high. I leaned over to see past the white wooden stand and there was Anna, walking towards me, dripping wet with saltwater and sweat. Excited, exhausted, and always with the biggest smile and a story to tell. “Oh my God! I thought I was never going to make it back!” She had drifted essentially around the cliffs towards the lighthouse, got out of the water on the rocks, and walked along the road a few miles back to the beach. “And then, these nice gentlemen gave me a ride to the parking lot, BUT I HAD ALREADY WALKED THE WHOLE WAY. I said, where were you guys a mile ago?!”
She then bought a very nice 9ft longboard so she could keep up with the sport. On Sunday, before returning to NYC via train, she realized there was no way it would fit in her Manhattan studio apartment. The studio had such little space that her refrigerator was close enough to the bed that she could grab beers out of it while falling asleep.
“I can’t leave that apartment, Carrie. I‘m living on the only cul-de-sac in the city, I’m a mid-west girl at heart.” I became the new owner of the board.
Anna and I met, along with the third of the trio, Mary, while teaching snowboarding in our small Ohio ski area. Anna brought some of the skills and all of the energy while Mary brought big snowboarding game and a hardworking, positive attitude.
“Lessons?! It’s Friday night, I’m sorry, Sir, we have to leave early. Dinner reservations,” Anna explained to our supervisor that we were no longer available to teach that night after a long afternoon of ski school lessons.
“I have spent all day ON MY KNEES,” the three of us lamented while walking up the stairs to the lounge area of the instructor hut. Teaching little kids on the icy Ohio snow often left nice purple welts on our lower legs from kneeling and waiting and helping students get up and down.
The instructor hut was next to the main ski lift, had a wooden paneled interior, and about six crusty couches of various sizes and fabrics all donated by previous instructors. “I KNOW, seriously if I have to be ON MY KNEES for another ten minutes, I quit.” We arrived to the top of the stairs to find five male instructors hanging out on the couches and cracking up at our loud and seemingly sexual complaints. “Oh grow up,” Mary rolled her eyes at them. The three of us stuck together through the male-dominated snowboarding environment of the early 2000s.
Mary, the third musketeer, was petit and reserved on the outside, but fiery and determined on the inside. She traveled to the real mountains to keep up with her snowboard skills and entered boarder cross contests, putting other contestants to shame. She was nice to your face, then directed any frustrations into her sport or her work, most recently the founder of the Breadery, after years of experience and education in hospitality. “These kids have NO respect!” she would vent about the occasional lack of work ethic she witnessed after having built her own empire as a Polish immigrant running on her own funds.
Peace, love, and gluten.
The three of us are meeting in Colorado in August for another adventure. Mary will be working, Anna will be trying to help, and I’ll be there as either’s moral support, knowing I’ll probably be trying to find Anna at some point during the trip.