The Bifrost

Westfield, where this strip mall cum town hall cum taco shop was, was a ski town. This meant that in the winter months, it was full of tourists traveling from large metropolitan areas to do what they did best, wait in line. This was a function of probability. On any given Friday, roughly 50,000 people in Boston or New York, or some suburb in Connecticut have the same idea when they wake up in the morning. I’m going to go to Vermont and have a quaint ski vacation for a couple of days. At roughly 3:30 in the afternoon, they skip out on work early to beat the traffic and hit the road, only to find out that their clever plan was something hatched by the lowest common denominator. They spend the next five hours or so in bumper to bumper traffic with similarly frustrated dipshits.

As they travel further and further north, the crowd thins as cohorts peel off to resorts of their choice. Southern Vermont is full of ski resorts that cater to the easily frustrated and amenity driven guest. More experience factories than actual ski destinations, they provide a nice place to wait in line and have a danish waffle and a hot cocoa, which is really what these guests are looking for. They don’t actually want to go skiing, they want the ski experience.

Traveling north up the rolling spine of the Green Mountains, you will reach Westfield, which is about as close to the geographic center of Vermont as you can get without breaking out a sextant. Being located in central Vermont means that it gets a more discerning brand of customer. People who are a touch more concerned with the actual business of skiing rather than if their condo has a hot tub or what kind of coffee is available in the cafeteria. These people are willing to travel a couple more hours on winding ice covered roads for better terrain and conditions, so they are inherently less amenity driven by nature.

The truly rugged drive right past Westfield and continue into the wild country of northern Vermont, where the skiers safety code is enforced by firing squad and the amenities are a bit more soviet in nature. Central Vermont hits the sweet spot of good actual skiing and decent amenities. That doesn’t change the fact that the skiing experience on any given weekend is mostly waiting in line though. It is an exercise in tempered frustration from beginning to end. Endless traffic, lines to park, lines to buy a ticket, a line to rent equipment if you don’t have it, a line in the cafeteria, and finally a line to get on a lift. Once you make it to the top of the mountain, you are there with the same 5,000 people who had the same idea as you did and the skiing experience is a minefield of failures to merge and unorthodox interpretations of the skier’s safety code. Frankly, it’s a touch suicidal.

Enter the Ski Bum. This is a person who has realized that skiing can actually be fun, and only a complete idiot would ski on a Saturday. To pull off this trick and be ordained as a priest in this hallowed order, it is required that you take a vow of poverty. The economy was bad everywhere, but it was still possible to make a decent amount of money in a city, move to Vermont and eschew all further chances of a prosperous life for the opportunity to get some actual living done. Some people had a leg up in this department, they already came from money and didn’t really need to work. Being a ski bum is easy for these people. Others chose to have a service industry job and cater to the idiots that they formerly were. There is a third class of person who takes this lifestyle a touch too far. These are the Vikings.

With the advent of Shades, it became possible to actually live a fantasy. This is a reality that the Vikings had subscribed to with a problematic degree of gusto. They had thrown away their lives as office workers, or accountants, stock traders, heiresses, to live a life of simple pleasures. Skiing, drinking, fighting, taking what they believe to be rightfully theirs, and more skiing. They spent their days worshiping Ullr, or their convenient idea of him. The actual religious scholarship required to dedicate one’s life to Ullr would require reading a number of Norse Eddas, and that didn’t fit their whole vibe. They just heard somewhere that he is the guy in charge of snow, so that’s their guy.

Their worship of Ullr required frequent sacrifices in the form of burnt skis. They steal these skis from tourists that come up for weekend ski trips. Normally, this sort of behavior wouldn’t be tolerated in a ski town, but when a Viking is confronted about something as important as a sacrifice to their chosen deity, they tend to become fantastically violent. Your average Joey coming up from Boston for a quaint weekend would rather take it on the chin and just buy a new pair of skis than face down a couple dozen of these insane people. Their private delusion had creeped out into reality in a tangible way, but there wasn’t much the locals could do about it beyond all out war. Half of the Volunteer Fire Department were Vikings anyway, so the lunatics were kind of in charge of the asylum.

It seemed to be a rather satisfying life though. Waking up at dawn to greet the sun and ride the Bifrost bridge to the top of a craggy peak. Quaffing horns of mead with your sworn blood brothers, but most importantly skiing. They were undeniably dedicated to the craft and application of spectacular skiing technique. They were undoubtedly the best skiers on the mountain, hands down. That went a long way in a ski town, as dumb as that was. If you were seen pulling off something clever and bold on the hill, you would be worshiped as a god at the bar. Which brings us to apres.

Apres is a French word for after. Apres-ski is a term used for the portion of the day that comes after skiing. This is where you and all of your ski buddies head to the bar after a long day on the hill and throw down a couple of cold ones while you bullshit about the day. Sort of a post training analysis. The Vikings had elevated this tradition to an art, and rolled it into their whole Ullr worship thing. This affected the local economy to the degree that the local taco shop has three different types of mead on tap. One would think of mead as a solidly Non-Mexican beverage to feature, but people have been fermenting honey for a long time and in Mexico they call it Balache. Practically speaking, Apres is just getting hammered with your buddies, but the Vikings took it to a fetishistic degree. Which they did with most things.

This riot that happened to be taking place in the parking lot perked their collective interest in a couple of ways. Way the first: They will take almost any excuse to indulge in a bit of violence. Way the second: This riot could conceivably cause an interruption in Apres. An interruption in Apres would trigger the reaction covered in way the first, so as they piled out of their troop carrier of a vehicle, they were facing a positive feedback loop of reactionary violence. This seething mass of braided beards and animal pelts poured out into the riot reeking of leather and musky body odor.

The rioters were dumb, but they weren’t stupid. Roughly half of them saw the writing on the wall when the troop carrier pulled into the parking lot and ran for their cars. The other half, that happened to be facing the wrong way when the longship beached itself next to this quaint English village promptly got the shit beaten out of them. From beginning to end, the whole thing lasted about thirty five seconds. All in all, what it really looked like was that they just kind of violently walked into the taco shop. A couple of black eyes and some dislocated shoulders on the part of the rioters was all it took to restore the parking lot to its former un-riotous self.

Watching this whole thing from behind the fray was a woman named Lagertha. This was not her real name of course. Her real name was Stephanie and she was a breakfast cereal heiress from Norwalk Connecticut, but here she was Lagertha. She had, through equal acts of violence, political maneuvering, sexual congress, and demonstration of applied skill on the mountain become the Yarl of this clan of Vikings. She was dangerous, beautiful, and about eight months pregnant. Leslie was unsure whether it was his child or not.