How My Bud Bit It on a Bunny Slope

We went to Brian Head to ski.

Pokin grew up in Canada. You’d think skiing would be in her blood. It is not. She never learned. So they decided to take a green run. You know, the ones designed for children and people who have recently discovered that snow exists.

So we went to the bunny slope. For Pokin.

Guess who wiped out.

Hint: not Pokin.

Nicholas on a ski patrol rescue toboggan — VIP transport. He always finds a way to get the special treatment.

My bud, who I’m told is a “great skier” and was “definitely not hot-dogging,” somehow launched a ski off his foot with such precision that it sliced his knee open like a samurai katana. On the bunny slope. The one we were on for Pokin.

He didn’t even feel it. Just kept going until he noticed the blood on the lift.

I have questions. Several of them. But I’ll save those for later.

Ski patrol showed up with the toboggan. Three of them. For a bunny slope injury. I’m sure that wasn’t embarrassing at all.

Nicholas getting examined in the ski patrol first aid room — Julia assessing the damage. The ski patroller is assessing the knee. Everyone is assessing Nicholas’s life choices.

They got his boot off in the patrol room and had a look. His sister Julia stood there with the expression of someone who’d just watched her brother get taken out by the tutorial level.

The verdict: stitches. A lot of them.

Now here’s the thing about Brian Head. It’s a ski resort in the middle of nowhere, Utah. The nearest ER is about forty minutes down the mountain. And we drove there in the Cybertruck.

Nobody else knew how to drive the Cybertruck.

Not Julia. Not Pokin. Just Nicholas. The guy who couldn’t bend his leg.

So the truck drove itself down the mountain. Forty minutes of autonomous driving through Utah canyon roads while my bud sat there with a sliced-open knee trying very hard not to move. I sat in the bag trying very hard not to think about it. Technology!

Nicholas sitting in the ER at Intermountain Health — The face of a man who knows he’s never going to live this down.

They stitched him up at Intermountain Health. He survived. The whiteboard behind him says his nurse’s name was “Sunshine.” Even the hospital was mocking him.

The bunny slope remains undefeated.

Now. Pokin’s response to all of this was… interesting.

A store shelf full of Peeps plush toys — She could have gotten him flowers. She chose violence.

She went to the store and bought him a strawberry-scented Easter Peep. As “emotional support.”

An emotional support Peep. For a ski injury. On a bunny slope.

I want to be clear: we already have a Peep. One Peep is already too many Peeps. That yellow menace has been stowing away on trips since 2015 and contributes nothing except chaos and the word “Peep.”

And Pokin’s solution to Nicholas’s suffering was to bring home another one.

I didn’t know whether to smack him or feel sorry for him. Pokin made the decision for me by handing him a scented stuffed animal in an emergency room.

Bunny slope.

Ulgh.