Riding Switch

I was standing in a lift line at a little ski area in Utah during the winter of 2018 when a twenty-something snowboarder standing in line beside me pointed at the Craig Kelly Is My CoPilot sticker on the nose of my board and asked, “Who’s Craig Kelly?”

I couldn’t believe there existed a snowboarder who hadn’t heard of Craig, but then again, I couldn’t believe I was fifty years old and a father of three who had required a hot shower, six hundred milligrams of Advil, and twenty minutes of stretching before I could put on my boots that morning.

Back home after that trip, I went to my family’s storage unit and found the cardboard box I’d buried there a few years after Craig had been killed by an avalanche in the Selkirk Mountains in British Columbia. Inside were stacks of printed papers, articles, newspapers, magazines, microcassettes, VHS tapes, photographs, and a carefully folded silver duct tape armband I’d worn