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Outside Magazine December 2004

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Out There
Absolutely Knackered
U.S. students have Cancún and sunburns. The British university elite have Austria and tingling buttocks.

By Tim Sohn

"I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT'S GOING ON!"

It echoed through the quiet lanes and down the valley, through the falling snow and into the houses where Austrian babies in Austrian cribs sleeping peacefully to a soundtrack of Schubert and Kraftwerk were awakened by a boisterous English shout.

Snow-induced giddiness. It was the only explanation for the procession of jubilantly blurred forms cascading down this steep, snow-blanketed road near a hotel in Austria, each on an improvised "sled" more ill-suited to the task than the last. They rode pots and they rode pans, skidded on sofa cushions and raced on yellow kiddie tricycles. They tobogganed on an upside-down coffee table, enlisted an upright vacuum cleaner, and even commandeered a baby's crib. They vaguely resembled the Oxford and Cambridge students with whom I had decamped to Hinterglemm, Austria, two days prior for some pre-Christmas fun, but their intelligence seemed to have yielded to the corrupting influence of fresh powder and bibulously liquid dinners. The various household items they employed testified to a fundamental misunderstanding of the physics of sledding, as well as to the overpowering novelty of snow for a bunch of 20-year-olds reared on a dismal isle in the North Atlantic where an inch of slush can shut down the national infrastructure.

Finally, having emptied the hotel's closets and found their contents insufficient to the task, they did what so many before them have done: They threw snowballs, tackled one another, and tumbled down the hill on their asses.

"You've got to understand," the vacuum rider told me. "We don't see snow or sunshine that often in England, so when it happens, the whole world goes mad."

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Frequent contributor TIM SOHN recently completed his master's in history at Cambridge University.

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