Good Friday
By Billy Miller

"I know it's around here somewhere maybe down by that sign," says Jew, after interminable rounds of pinball at the Rat. Probably where he'd still be if I hadn't found him earlier in the day. All I knew was the first warming of spring was in the air, the corn was still soft, and the lifts close too early.

Mt. Hood Meadows was shut and we were on our way back to drinking Friday beers in Government Camp with the rest of the monkeys when Jew nearly veered for the shoulder, exclaiming, "Wait a minute, we could hike the pipe at Timberline! It's a full moon tonight, we could take the trail that leads you all the way back into Govie, to the back door of the Rat practically! I'm not exactly sure about the line but if it's soft, it could be guh-uuhd!" Then he looks at me sideways which means I either have no reason, or every reason to worry.

"How's the pipe?" Jew asks Euro Eric on our way through Govie.

"Pipe sucks," says Eric in a thick accent, backed up by his bro halfway through with Friday beer.

"It hasn't been cut in a few weeks. Nobody's worked on it, nobody's shaped it. It could be good. It's warm enough. But nobody's done anything to it."

Jew and I look at each other. We're going anyway, it's too early to burn out on a barstool. Too light out to quit just yet.

That's not exactly what we were waiting to hear, though.

"We've got be careful to stay out of this stuff on the way back," says Jew looking down to our thick footfalls in freshly tilled corn. "There's nothing cat drivers hate worse than some yahoo ruining something they just finished."

"They might run us over," I say, shivering with a thought of a few summers back when the brake on a cat slipped and it mowed down and killed a 16-year-old girl sitting pipeside. That's the kind of deterrent keeping me way the hell away from anyone's labored etch-a-sketch rows. I'm too worried to even stop and ask the cat drivers where the pipe is as they zip by. Jew wants me to, but I figure they wouldn't share the joy of a couple of un-ticketed, off-hours kooks. It seemed like just the threat of us fucking up their program would be enough to chase us off. If they did, I imagined shmearing huge, spiteful Ss down their precision drudgery

"I don't know if we should keep going over, go down to that sign, or keep going up so we can get a better look. Eric said it was right by the lift, " Jew says, breaking my seditious fantasies. I notice much of the earlier chutzpah drying up as we are in the middle of a seeming nowhere, trudging out into the white mire with our goal nowhere in sight. This strikes me as ridiculous, though not altogether a bad idea.

We hike up to a higher vantage point but it's still a mystery where the pipe is. Finally, as I play around a lift unloading area, Jew bravely inquires of one of the cat drivers. I expect to be escorted off the hill by grooming blade, but surprisingly, they tell him before zipping off to do their business.

"See! I told you it was by that sign!" Jew announces with the certainty of hindsight. We buckle in.

We roll through the lumpy mounds of the unshaped snowboard park before finally locating the halfpipe. It looks forgotten. Not even cut the whole way down. Walls of decent size but unsculpted in a while and partially melted__sucking, like Eric reported.

"This looks okay," chirps Jew optimistically. "It's a two-hitter maybe," then he drops in.

It's a struggle to find the line. The walls are soft and hittable, but it takes much labor to get out even three times. Jew is the right-hand of Tim Windell's snowboard camps, so he has much pipe experience. He shows me how to roll in at an angle off the wall, and pump down the tranny instead of blowing all your speed in the flats. He can spin a 540 even with only a smidgen of clearance off the top of the wall. Jew also has much experience in making things fun for others. In gabbing about whatever, analyzing the minutiae of technical freestyle, and in laughing with me instead of at me as I blow a grab, bounce backwards off the lip, and flop to the flatbottom on my ass.

"Whoa! Freefall!" Jew gurns lightly.

We took turns hiking that line of two hits__three if you really milked it__as the sun lazily sank in the west and the valley's pollution was backlit with a warm, pink glow. We didn't talk a whole lot, saving our dwindling strength for another shot at a day's personal best.

I wish I could brag it was the most epic session ever. I wish I could say we stayed there until a full glowing disk of a moon hovered overhead, then rode that secret trail all the way back to Govie to shit-talk the story ten times bigger and better. The truth is, it wasn't long before the day's exertion produced weak limbs and pits in our stomachs. We listened to the birds hidden in the trees, harbingers of the Groundhog-predicted early Spring chirping late through days just beginning to get longer. We thought about how even though the winter had gone too fast (always too fast) there were still many blistering days of soft, sweet corn kickers yet to be reaped.

"It was a good day," says Jew, while we ate Frosted Mini-Wheats from the box to combat the low blood sugar shakes, rolling in his van back down the hill. "And nobody told me to have a good day either. You know what I mean? You know how you can be having the suckingest day ever and everyone keeps telling you, 'Have a good da-aay! Have a good day-aaayy!' This was one of those days where I went out and made it a good day and had a good day but not one person told me I had to have one, you know what I'm saying? Hey, what are you doing this weekend? What are you doing for Easter?"

Billy Miller is Senior Editor of TransWorld SNOWboarding Magazine.