A Cod in the Woods

Cracker hardly tunes in anymore. But he recruited me to be a maggot years ago. We went to the first Summit together.
Along the way, while skiing at Lost Trail, some funny shit went down. I was thinking about it so I thought I'd share...


Cracker was stoked. He’d done a few road trips in his time, but I promised this adventure would be the shit. And it was, for me. Invited to Montana for three days of snomo-tow skiing, we'd then head down to Salt Lake for some more turns with maggots at the Summit. It smacked of an anything could happen, hittin’ the bricks, backwoods dash of insanity. Three feet of untracked, ‘biler-accessed powder on good terrain above Lost Trail Powder Mountain. What could go wrong? The party favors had expired enroute in Jackson Hole. We were gripping the wheel and reality head-on. Once we arrived, it was everything I’d expected. But a little incident occurred at the end of our second day in Montana.

Phil, one of Lost Trail’s lifetime honchos, had been pulling us up a ridge like clockwork, always ready at the bottom to get us back up the mountain to more fresh lines. At the end of that second day, we hit the lodge with Phil and other members of the crew, just like after the first. We guzzled free pitchers of beer, got wasted, spun doughnuts in the parking lot and hit the road to our room at Jackson Hot Springs. The third day was much the same. Until we got to the lodge at the end of the day. I noticed Cracker trying to make conversation with Phil, who sat directly across from him at the table they shared while we drank our fill of unending beers. Every time Cracker spoke, Phil would turn his head and ignore him. Unable to figure it out and too toasted to care, I brushed it off.

Our Montana adventure accomplished, we headed for Salt Lake City across the backroads of southeastern Montana at 40 mph, nursing a broken axle that apparently didn’t like parking lot doughnuts. Then Cracker brought it up. “Man, am I a cod,” he said. “What?” I asked. “You know that guy, Phil?” “Yeah, nice dude,” I said, “ He was cool.” “Yeah, well, I think he hates my guts,” Cracker stated emphatically. Unable to imagine what Cracker had done, I recalled the tension between him and Phil at the table. “What the hell did you do?” I asked, as we drove through the crossroads town of Wisdom, missing the turn to I-15 and Salt Lake City.

“Well, yesterday after skiing, we were drinking beers and he asked me where I was from,” Cracker said. “I told him Carson City ‘cause I didn’t want him to think I was from the Gay Area if I said Stockton. Then he says he grew up in Carson City and started asking me all these questions about the place. I don’t know jack about Carson City, so I ended up folding and told him the truth.” He just got up and walked away from me and wouldn’t talk to me today either.” I almost lost control of the Jeep laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. “Hey, it’s my first time in Montana and all I’ve ever heard was how much they hate Californians up here,” Cracker said in his own defense.

The shame and embarrassment that consumed him was too much. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t stop laughing until I realized the road we were on didn’t go to Salt Lake. The sun was setting, it was –19 degrees, we were low on gas, driving on an axle that got fucked up spinning donuts in the Lost Trail parking lot after drinking heavily with the guys - it could go at any moment, and Cracker was supposed to be navigating. After consulting a map, we discovered, out in the middle of Montana without a town for fifty miles in any direction, that we were well on our way to Butte instead of SLC. If I hadn’t been so amused at his story, I’d have probably thrown him to the locals. Freakin’ Califanornian.