Lisa Richardson Bylines

Without textbooks or diagrams, an oral culture shares technology by apprenticeship.  Working alongside a master. A direct transmission of knowledge, person to person.

It’s a slow-paced way to accumulate expertise, and vulnerable, but that sense of steadying slowness infuses the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre from the moment one pushes open the huge carved entry doors and steps inside.

The Squamish Lil'wat Cutural Centre, by Robin O'Neill Photography

The foyer is wide and uncluttered, and staff nod acknowledgement at your entry, but let you acclimatize. You adjust to the light, the height of the ceiling, the waft of cedar. Your heart rate settles. You read the first signs – maps that outline the traditional territories of the Squamish, the Lil’wat, and notice that the territories are anchored by rivers in the same way that a map of the human body is all veins and arteries. You are oriented to the fact, as you make your approach to the welcome counter, that you are now in a place that honours Story.

Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears and nostrils – all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness…  For the largest part of our species’ existence, humans have negotiated relationships with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings, exchanging possibilities with every flapping form, with each textured surface and shivering entity that we happened to focus on… Today we participate almost exclusively with other humans and with our own human-made technologies. It is a precarious situation…

[This is not to] imply that we must renounce all our complex technologies. But… we must renew our acquaintance with the sensuous world in which our techniques and technologies are all rooted. Without the oxygenating breath of the forests, without the clutch of gravity and the tumbled magic of river rapids, we have no distance from our technologies, no way of assessing their limitations, no way to keep ourselves from turning into them.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous

It’s a good feeling place, neither dusty museum nor mausoleum. It’s a space full of possibility. A place you could visit again and again, and come away each time with something different.

When I go to the Squamish Lil’wat Cultural Centre for the first time, the no-rush energy seems benefit enough. I feel the open space and expansion of time and think, if that’s all I get out of this, that will have been worth it.

Later, Squamish Nation ambassador, David Baker explains to me: “we treat our art as biodegradable. That’s how we keep our art alive, because you have to be able to replace it. We let a totem pole fall down, so it’s up to the young artists to replace it.”

This seems radical to me. Radically different from the culture I grew up in – where art is turned into artefact and hidden behind glass, where masters of the past are revered and hover over you to mock your ambition, “what, you think you could be the next Picasso?”

The willingness to let even masterful pieces of art be reclaimed by the earth is an invitation to the next generation to step up,  not to be overwhelmed by history,  but to keep the life-energy moving, keep the culture dynamic. When the storyteller runs out of breath, or begins to fall asleep, the storytelling will fall silent. But as long as someone is willing to pick up the thread and weave on, the culture remains alive.

That newly issued invitation, my locals pass (the price of one general admission entry), and the free wireless downstairs in the cafe, makes me think I might just have found my new favourite place to write.

One year after Jon Montgomery won his 2010 Olympic gold medal, I lower myself face-first onto a narrow metal toboggan.

Called a skeleton because its 1892 prototype resembles a human bone-rack, the 80 pound frame is more like an exo-skeleton and I am counting on it to keep all my bits properly in place, as I squeak “yes” to the man holding me by my feet who has just asked, “Are you ready?”

My track-crew guardian lines me up in the centre of the ice and pushes me into the half-tunnel, as if releasing a beached mermaid back out to sea.

Go free mermaid, go free. Amber Turnau goes for gold.

High up the walls, I can see blade marks from the lugers who train here at the Whistler Sliding Centre, like the etchings you see on a skating rink before the Zamboni comes through and buffs the ice clean.

There’s enough ice coating this track to fill four NHL hockey rinks, and no Zambonis in sight. The 8 person track-crew do the buffing by hand, in addition to pushing human guinea-pigs down the pipe for a thrill-ride and picking us up at the bottom when our legs are too shaky to operate independently, thanks to the huge and sudden jolt of adrenaline that explodes through your body somewhere around the third corner.

The public skeleton sliding program, which starts February 16 and runs until March 20, 2011, uses the bottom third of the Olympic track, so the steep (and controversial) start section is avoided. We slide through 6 corners, from just above corner 11, and though we will approach 100 km/hr and experience two and a half times our body weight in gravitational forces, we won’t come close to Montgomery’s 5 G-force, 146.6 km/hr gold medal-winning run.

with Amber Turnau and Lucy Hyslop, psyching ourself up for speeds of over 98km/hr

Which is a massive relief – it’s hard enough to keep your head up, your toes pointed,  your elbows in, your shoulders down, your arms straight, your hands holding tight, and your shit together, as the sled begins to accelerate.

The ride is thrilling. And the reality is that the only skill-set required is the aforementioned ability to keep your shit together. As our briefing team advised, “Just be a sack of potatoes.”

“Oh, and don’t let go.”

It’s really is as simple as that. If only Evil Knievel had known.

(Thanks to the amazing and fearlessly fast Amber Turnau for sharing her photos. And thanks to Tourism Whistler’s Media Relations team and the Whistler Sliding Centre’s Thunder on Ice Skeleton Sport Experience for the special preview. )

This time last year I was cursing El Nino, stalking the Weasel Workers and realising why the world has such a crush on Lindsey Vonn as I donned my best “I’m a serious sports journalist” face and joined the online reporting team covering the Games for NBCOlympics.com.

It was, in all likelihood, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And I’m glad to have had it.  But we’ve eaten enough Olympic cake.

Any more cake should be sent, instead, to Erik Guay in Garmish Partenkirschen, Germany, where he just took the World Cup alpine skiing downhill Championship.

Guay, who came within 21 feet of the podium in the 2010 Olympic downhill, finished his 2010 season by taking the overall World Cup in Super-G, and has now been crowned the downhill world champion.

His performance builds on a streak of world championship podiums for the Canadian alpine team, which have unfortunately been overshadowed by their failure to leverage the supposed ‘home-snow’ advantage during the Games.

For ski racers, the Olympics is a whole lot of crazy. The most prestigious title is actually the World Cup downhill championship. Which makes it kind of a shame to think that the cake and the cameras are in the wrong place.  (Congratulations Erik.)

I wrote a rant for Skier magazine recently, arguing that ski days should be app-less and device free. I wasn’t being deliberately provocative. I really do think that app-games, of which Vail’s new Epic Mix is the Grand Poobah, take away some fundamental aspect of the mountain experience. But as I wrote,

If you need a gadget to navigate around the mountain, post an effusive woo-hoo! to a virtual audience of Facebook friends and Twitter followers, coordinate après plans, insulate you from the tedium of chitchatting with strangers, and/or to have more fun on the hill, then I have to put it out there: maybe this isn’t the sport for you…

my tenure out on that tech-refusenik limb felt lonely and precarious.

The limb got less lonely this week, when I watched Amber Case, cyborg anthropologist, address the recent TED Women conference. Our contemporary tools, the mobile technological ones, are not extending the reach of our physical selves anymore. Case says they’re actually extending our mental selves. And the speed and scale at which that is happening means that we’re at risk of not balancing the benefits of the tools out by slowing down, taking time for mental reflection without external input, doing the long-term planning required to “figure out who you really are,” establishing what your core self is in real space.

The mountains used to be that real space. What struck me as unique and even sacred about going skiing was the way it forced that mental down-time on us. We stepped out of our bubbles the minute we stepped into our bindings and slid over to the lift-line. We stopped thinking about all the Monkey Mind shit, because skiing is technical enough a sport to require real mental focus.

It’s the mindset, the way we look out at the world. If we continue to elevate ourselves as the highest part of this whole system then we’re in deep trouble. Economics is a human creation, borders are human creations and nature doesn’t give a damn about these things. So if we really intend to be here in the long run, the mindset has to shift from human-centred to one in which we’re a part of this bigger system.

The mobile app that tells you how many vertical you have skiied, which chairlifts have the shortest lines right now, and what weather is moving in, is a kind of mental crack-candy. It tricks us into thinking we are connecting to the bigger picture, while we simultaneously shut out the real cues – the clouds scudding overhead, the person sitting next to you, and the happy-happenstance and small-world buzz of ski serendipity.

We’ll need those tools, too, but used judiciously and with some restraint, understanding how seductive and powerful they are, and that unchecked power is the dangerous human invention ever.

I didn’t decide to wrap up my 4 year tenure as the Communications Director of the TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival because PR is dead. (Although Mat Wilcox closing down her firm rang like a bell from the heart of Vancouver : ding, dong, the the game is forever changed. Start over. Start over.)

Since TIME magazine declared that God was dead, great and unkillable things (that were never actually alive to begin with, to wit: print, the book, the web) have been declared rigor mortis so frequently, that I’ve stopped paying attention to the headlines, and started paying attention more to my gut. (If it smells bad, it’s not a good sign.)

The challenge was not so much the potential death of traditional PR, but the premature death of this PR chick. PR is never done. The wheel never stops spinning. Waking up at 3am thinking, “I haven’t called Outside magazine yet.” “I wonder what MissSnowItAll is doing in April?” “Why can’t I get that Classified song out of my head???” is ultimately a recipe for complete alienation from powder days…

What always fuelled my stoke for the Festival was the way it served as a vehicle for such amazing things – for Kalina Hornsby to launch her fashion career, or for a young local photographer like Geoff Jansen to meet an editor in the Superpipe pit and sell his first image, or for Cathy Jewett and Dano Pendygrasse to spin an online promotional gimmick into a meaningful way to honour fallen friends. That’s what inspired me to work so hard for four years…

But when all your creative effort goes into promoting a vehicle for other people to do amazing things, there is a big bucket of amazing things you’re not doing yourself…  And with La Nina bringing her sexy snow-dousing way to the ‘hood this winter, untethering from my computer and turning “mountain” into a verb, took on a degree of urgency.

The drive-to-work Magic 8 Ball says: a beautiful November 10 day in Whistler

So I sit back as the @wssf twitter feed goes quiet. I make a note in my day planner to buy Pro Photo Showdown tickets on-line as soon as they go on sale. And I’m tuning my skis, getting fresh batteries for my transceiver and pulling out my WB pass, in anticipation of plenty of quality time with Ullr. I’m stoked to have half-a-grown-up-job, as a 3-day-a-week copywriter with Origin Design + Communications. And to otherwise open-wide my calendar to live, breathe, eat and sleep winter in the mountains, all the better to tell stories with, my dear. Because whatever happens to PR, print, the book, journalism and the web, our appetite for great stories will never die.

Honest. I’m not an egomaniac. That’s why I thought it was so funny to tell Stella Harvey, the Whistler Writers Festival director that I would present a session called “Me! Me! Me! How to build your social media savvy for wanton self-promotion.” But now the gig is imminent, (and even has a presenting sponsor in Street to Peak) I’m starting to feel that skin-crawling feeling I get when I realise I’ve committed to make a presentation. Self-promotion? Good God. Well, here’s the USP: if I can do it, anyone can.

Excited to check out the other sessions tomorrow including Mike Berard and Allie Jenkinson on Twitter for Writers, and Brian Brett on Writing Your Life.

You can check out my cheatnotes on slideshare…

I celebrated turning thirty by throwing myself off a cliff.

I was in good company – Pemberton paraglide guru, Jim Orava, was strapped to my back. Photographer MC Bourgie shared the thermals to my left, shooting so intently through her lens that she landed with a nasty bout of motion sickness.  I wrote a story in the Vancouver Sun that ran a few days later.

Two weeks ago,  I received an email from a sender I didn’t recognise.

Dear Lisa Richardson, it began.

After saving your Van. Sun. article on Pemberton Para-gliding for five years, I finally followed your example last weekend. Your description was right on so no surprises, just wish we could have caught more “up” time. At 78 years, there was some urgency to do it before I got old!

With three of my kids (one with video camera) and four grandkids, we put ourselves at the mercy of Jim and Corinne Stoltz and flew over the town where I spent my first ten years of life – in the little log house on Beks’ farm (originally Girling’s). My family returns to Pemberton Meadows often, as a son married into the Millerd family, who have a home there – a great family gathering place.

I just wanted you to know that your article was an inspiration for me to fulfill a long held dream.

Sincerely,

Phyllis Mittlestead

Writing is such a strange path – it seems so disembodied and ethereal to sit in a room banging away at a keyboard, writing winter stories in the heat of summer, churning out copy for editors you never see, and rarely receiving the kind of feedback that gardeners and dentists and teachers and event organisers enjoy almost immediately – “did it take?”

But it did take.

Thank you, Phyllis.

This video, produced by Lilli Clark and Thomas Balzer, got a lot of airplay at the TELUS World Ski and Snowboard Festival in April. It was built around a manifesto I wrote for the Festival the previous year, and was a chance to turn the spotlight on some of the people who make up the Whistler, and Festival, community.

Watching another short film featuring Whistler faces, made by Matt Walker, taking long unblinking portraits, reiterated for me how powerful and expressive the human face is… even in stillness. Especially, if the subject can actually maintain stillness, which is apparently a lot harder than you’d think.

From Whistler, With Love from Matt Walker on Vimeo.

It reminds me of Bright Eyes’ video for “First Day of My Life.”

The blueberries are just coming in at North Arm Farm. My friends braved the “little flies” with their fiendish blood-sucking ways, to pick and pose last night for the final shoot in our Choose Pemberton campaign.  They were more intent on picking than posing, so the photographer had to keep yelling at them to stop stripping their bushes clean. You can probably tell from this shot how intimidating Robin O’Neill is. We got our shot. And 13 pounds of blueberries. Sweetness all around.

Which is better? The bike-ride? Or the post bike-ride beer?

Two epic rides are well-rooted in my memory of last summer – same collaborators, same formula – a grinding hike-a-bike up sandy, rarely-used trails that disintegrated beneath each foot-fall and sloughed into socks and shoes.  Bike-frame pressing against knobby little verterbrae… Skittery thoughts, (what the…?), never quite allowed to gain purchase.

Treats and snacks passed around at the highest point, 360 degree views and the last slugs of water  so much sweeter for having sweated out a month’s worth of toxins and sediment.

As for the beers that we cracked open over chips and cookies and chocolate around the tailgate, at the end of that 7 hour day and a whooping, leg-shattering descent… they packed a mighty punch.

What says “Pemberton” to me? Trailhead to tailgate adventures.

That’s the story I wanted to tell with the second ad for our campaign for Pemberton’s Economic Development Commission, to let people in on just one of a handful of reasons they should Choose Pemberton.