The clouds under our feet

by Thami Croeser (Australia)

I didn't expect to find Japan

I'd been thinking about it for months. The 'carve' turn - graceful and arcing, so named as it uses the blade-like rails of the snowboard. Link a sequence of carves, and you can cut a rapid, sinuous s-shape down a mountain. What a simple ecstasy. I dreamt of it, more than once. This fantasy mocked me as I fell on my butt on the foothill 'easy' slope in Furano, Japan for the third time, hot and frustrated in heavy snow gear. I counted the years and realised it'd been nearly a decade since I'd last seen snow. Now the mountain loomed behind me, a vast, stark wall of painfully-bright whiteness against the mild morning sky. Skiiers whipped past me, borne on frightening momentum from steep slopes hundreds of metres above us. I shuddered. "Japan has the world's best powder snow", a friend had told me, back in Melbourne. I'd looked sceptically over her shoulder, through the window onto a baking street, forty degrees celsius and shrouded in a haze of bushfire smoke. Maybe five years ago, I thought to myself, before the climate went beserk. It had only started to feel real the night before, on the three-hour bus that goes to Furano from Sapporo, the capital of Japan's frosty North island of Hokkaido. At a rest stop I'd stepped onto a drift of snow that I imagined would hold me. I instantly sank a foot. I raked a hand through it and it scattered like so much crystalline dust, leaving my fingers numb and my eyes wide with delight. Furano's remoteness proved ideal. Even at lunar new year, which triggers the world's largest human migration in neighbouring China, the slopes were uncrowded; waits for lifts were rare. When I clumsily dug a rail at speed that afternoon and flipped comically end-over-end down a slope, landing crumpled and dizzy, nobody witnessed my shame. Furano isn't a place for wild parties. The local town is small and nondescript - a Japanese Fargo without the blood - but given the demands of the slopes, our limping group of seven was grateful for early nights, usually retiring to long soaks in the local onsen after exploring the town's cosy small bars and excellent comfort food. It was on the second morning that Furano's gentleness began to reform me. I woke with the sun, before the slopes opened, and crunched through shin-deep pillows of pure white powder to the forest behind our hotel. Totally alone, I noted that the only prints before mine were those of a fox. The deep silence of the snowy forest was only stirred by woodpeckers tapping on Birch trees. It was in this moment, and again in the comforting heat of the onsen, and then with the gentle rocking of the ski lifts, that I truly relaxed. The snow started to make sense. As I eased more calmly downhill, my board slowly went from cutting a loud, scraping backslash on the slopes to a gentle, shushing 'sss'. Then it happened, and I had truly arrived: I hit a stretch of fresh, deep powder and felt the board glide over it silkily, like I was riding a cloud. Yesterday I left Furano, after five days on the slopes. The run back to the hotel passes the spot in where I'd sat on day one, counting my years and wondering if I'd made a mistake coming here. I leaned on my rail, banking sharply toward that place, then leaned backwards, burying it in a long, sweeping spray of fresh snow.