The first point I need to make is this: never, not once in my life, have I thought that I would end up involved in extreme sports. For one thing I never really had the opportunity: I grew up out on a dirt road, so skateboarding was out of the question. And I was eight hours from the nearest ocean, so you could forget about surfing. It’s true, I do live in a mountain town now, but unfortunately (or, depending on how you look at it, fortunately), I moved here after I had discovered how nice it is to have the full use of my knees and ankles, and so snowboarding and mountain biking were never my thing, either.
Not that any of this has ever bothered me; in fact, I’m quite happy to have reached middle age with all of my cartilage and extremities intact—especially since my deductible has risen at nearly the same rate as my age. Imagine my chagrin, then, when I realized that I had not, in fact, escaped from the icy/hot hand of the extreme sports reaper, but instead had only delayed the monster from finding me for a few years.
This is because of my foolish choice to involve myself in the most extreme sport of all: parenting. To be precise, Flagstaff parenting. To be even more precise, springtime Flagstaff parenting, with all of the sunburn, frostbite, windchill and heat prostration that that entails (and usually in that order.)
I know, I know: I could have it a lot worse. Climbers on the face of Everest probably face harsher conditions, but at least climbers on the face of Everest get some kind of psychic reward for reaching the top—what do we get for sitting out in the cold for an hour and a half at soccer practice? Grumpy kids, fast food for dinner, and the announcement, half an hour past bedtime, that there is a ton of homework yet to done. Math homework.
And sure, the guy who skied all the way to the South Pole probably faced conditions a little bit rougher than the stinging balls of ice I got pelted with one year during the annual “Easter Egg Hunt” (more like a sugar-fueled feeding frenzy, with little plastic eggs taking the place of chum), but then again, he will probably be able to tell stories about his adventures for the rest of his life. In fact, he’ll probably never have to buy his own drinks again: one look at the frostbitten remains of his fingers and people will be lining up to buy him shots and hear his stories. That’s not likely to happen to me when I tell people about the time I sat on the bleachers in a skirt during a Little League double header and nearly got frostbite on my ass.
I will also admit that trekking to the top of Kilimanjaro might be a little more complicated than organizing a soccer snack list; after all, it does involve hiring (and paying) something like forty porters per climber. But at least you only have to pay them in cash—and you only have to make that payment once. It’s not as if you’re expected to provide each and every one of them with their own juice box and (gluten free) snack every single day. (On a side note: at what age can we legitimately stop bringing snacks? At this rate I feel like the transition from juice box and granola bar to condoms and breath mints is going to occur all in the same week.)
Truth be told, however, I would gladly pay a thousand juice boxes a day to escape the one aspect of springtime Flagstaff parenting that is inarguably worse than Everest, the South Pole, and Kilimanjaro all rolled into one: the wind.
It just doesn’t get much more extreme than that.