Humans of the Lodge: Wife Swaprés
I’m heading to Utah on Tuesday for another week of sometimes skiing but mostly eating chili and getting drunk in snow pants.
In preparation for this trip, I decided it may be useful to actually learn how to ski rather than having a panic attack atop a double black diamond.
Thankfully, I happened to go on a trip to Jay’s Peak in Vermont earlier this month where my lady friend and I took a beginner’s lesson (I’ve gone skiing twice in my life) and eventually did a couple runs down the blues and greens. Am I any good? I’ll let you be the judge:
But this blog isn’t about my natural athleticism, swan-like grace, or the $400 worth of skiing shit I bought after skiing one time. No, this is blog is about the best part of skiing, the aprés, and the humans I meet partying my face off in the lodge.
Some of you may remember this series from last year’s Utah trip. It’s essentially a parody of that “Humans of New York” thing on Facebook, except I tell fun stories about drunk weirdos I meet in ski lodges instead of depressing stories about bad artists living in studio apartments with no bathrooms and 35 roommates. God New York sucks. But I digress.
This week’s Human of the Lodge: The Wife Swaprés
My friend who is a girl and I had just concluded a successful day of shredding pow and acting too cool to wear a jacket (that was just me, turns out it’s colder on top of the mountain). We decided to retire to the lodge to warm up and paradoxically enjoy a cold beer.
As I sat imbibing and being forced to eat 10 wings by myself cause the lady friend apparently views sriracha in the same category as ghost chilis, a man tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to my right and saw a middle aged bald man, sat next to his wife, holding my cell phone.
“Is this yours?” he asked earnestly. “I saw it sitting here and wanted to make sure someone didn’t lose it.” The question was understandable as my phone background is not a picture of me and my family or girlfriend, but Boston Bruins captain Brad Marchand.
I laughed awkwardly and confirmed the phone was mine. The man handed it to me and asked “how it was out there today.” New to this hobby and perpetually unable to remember what I did just minutes before, I stared in confused silence for a second before realizing he was asking how the skiing was. Despite having spent 90% of the day on the bunny hill, I quickly lied and said I got some great runs in then said it was an unreal day on the mountain, as if I had other days with which to compare it.
The man nodded and smiled and I knew I had successfully fooled him. What an idiot.
Not wanting to be exposed as the fraud I know deep down that I am, I thanked the man again, even though all he had done is handled my property without permission, and jokingly said, “You can keep the phone if you want and we can just trade lives.”
It was a lazy joke in a long line of haphazard attempts at cracking wise to avoid dealing with my own emptiness, and I expected nothing more than a polite laugh.
Instead, the bald man ran with it.
He sprung to life immediately affirming that yes, he would be down to trade lives with a stranger roughly 20 years his junior, whom he had met just seconds ago.
Then he got weird with it.
Baldy looked past me at the ol’ ball and chain seated to my left and said, “You’ve got a beautiful wife. Is she into bald guys?” I was concerned only that he called my girlfriend my wife because I knew she would dine out on that for months and I’d have to deal with it. As such, it initially failed to register how bizarre of a question that was.
I responded quickly, removing my winter hat to reveal a luscious head of hair that this guy hasn’t known since the Carter administration. Running my hair through my coarse chestnut locks to give him a sense of the sheer volume I was working with, I retorted that my lady prefers a full mane. I further asserted dominance by refusing to compliment the guy’s wife back.
Dejected but undeterred the man doubled down saying he would get the better of our wife swap, trading up for the “younger model.” Bear in mind, his quite lovely wife is sitting directly next to him this entire time. Not knowing where to take this bit and sensing that this was quickly becoming not a bit anymore, I nervously chuckled and wished the man well.
What ensued over the course of the rest of that man’s evening is anybody’s guess, but I’d have to imagine it didn’t include a lot of affection from his apparently on-the-trade-block wife. Get ready to learn couch sleeping buddy.
As for me, I returned to pretending to be upset that I had to crush a full plate of wings solo and chatting with my girlfriend, aka the younger model. (She was fine btw, just bemusedly weirded out by the man). Two beers and a poutine later, we left, never to see The Wife Swaprés man again. Just another strange interaction with a Human of the Lodge.
