We went on a family ski trip to Australia once. It’s was strange skiing through gum trees in the rain. The terrain flat the snow thin the queues long. But the strangest thing of all was the roadkill - from Canberra to Cooma through sweeping farmland kangaroos sculpture the highway. Roo after roo - a Mad Max cull. Once we started to climb towards Jindabyne up through the national park, rounder more solid marsupials appeared. It took me a few kilometres to work out what these neon-tagged creatures were. I could barely bring myself to tell the kids they were wombats. Dark hairy motionless barrels. My son was free-skiing at the Australian Junior Nationals. He won two gold medals that day. The ski company rep made him refuse his second first prize set of skis on the podium to the second placegetter. The kid’s eyes popped out of his head as he swapped his goggles and poles. Travelling back through the wombat dead, my son said he’d felt happier winning a hundred bucks in a local comp the weekend before. Sweat turned to tears. The Lucky Country is home to a lot of odd decisions. Take the bloke who invented y-fronts with a special scrotum pouch. Separate your balls from your legs, the ad claims. An internal kangaroo pouch in your duds for your crown jewels. Keep em cool. Keep em safe. You’d need big nutz to carry that off, I suspect, much like flipping upside down on skis or taking a prize off a fourteen year old. I found out later the spraypainted letters on the dead marsupials meant Animal Rescue volunteers had checked their pouches for babies. They weren’t best-before codes, at all.
My son gave up competitive skiing the following season.
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