Maybe my expectations had been shaped by the words Paul Simon sang on the title song of his 1986 album, "Graceland": "My traveling companion is 9 years old. He is the child of my first marriage."
Replace the word "first" with "only" and sub "the Great White North," for Simon's "Mississippi Delta shining like a National guitar" and you'll have the setting for a recent father-son trip to British Columbia that had not been planned that way.
If there was one theme that emerged, as themes tend to do during travel that involves family, it was the appropriate (or inappropriate) appreciation of Canadians' stunning ability to curse.
Mind you, they do not do it in a confrontational, New York cabbie (or Uber driver) kind of way. Not in the histrionic, almost operatic fashion of Italians. And certainly not in the guttural and extremely creative Russian lexicon (lordy, those Russians know how to cuss!). No, it was more like a bit of seasoning to spice up the Canuck patois, a vat of sentences delivered in monotone and with a lot of flat vowels.
And thus, in the case of a father and son getting an all-too-rare chance to bond, it was appreciated in a true cultural exchange sort of way.
This particular adventure was supposed to have been a family trip bolted onto the back end of business travel that was to involve both of my kids' first time out of the country (OK, it was just Canada, a.k.a. U.S.-light, but still ...) and their first time ever experiencing snow (a deficiency brought about by their Southern California residence, a mother with an aversion to high altitudes and, well, a bad father).
At any rate, those plans got scuttled by my daughter's rather extensive cookie-tossing session two nights before departure, trimming our party of four to a party of two and turning the female half of the family into incredibly good sports (the daughter was promised, and subsequently earned, a mani-pedi date with her grandmother).
Midway through our plane ride north, my son and I realized that things would go even further off color, as Air Canada was prescient enough to feature Frank Zappa's 1974 album "Apostrophe (')" in its onboard selection of music. Because if you want to send a 9-year-old boy in coach into total hysterics while teaching him an early and invaluable lesson about skiing, few ways are better than a set of headphones with the volume turned up to 11, the better to heed Mr. Zappa's admonishment to "Watch out where the huskies go, and don't you eat that yellow snow."
As for the Canadians, their ability to curse is well documented. Sure, there are certain sections of the U.S. that can hold up their F-bombs with anyone. For those in search of local boasting rights, the advertising firm Marchex in late 2013 tracked customer service calls and found that Ohio residents were most likely to curse, followed by Maryland, New Jersey, Louisiana and Illinois.
When it comes to English-speaking countries, though, a 2010 poll found that the Canadians have us beat, out-cursing both Americans and Brits by a long shot.
Of course, whether Whistler qualifies as truly Canadian can be debated. Sure, the area attracts about 2.7 million visitors a year, many of whom hail from nearby Vancouver and neighboring Alberta. But the resort community's preponderance of lift operators, ski-rental technicians and restaurant workers come from Down Under, a fact that has long earned the town the nickname "Whistralia," lending an even more international vibe to the resort of 10,000 residents.
All of which served as a colorful backdrop to an opportunity to replace a few fourth-grade English classes (he was playing some hooky that week) with a bit of local semantics not found in Webster's. It certainly helped that our trip coincided with the first week of the NHL Playoffs, making nightly television viewing a challenging exercise in figuring out what those well-dressed hockey coaches were saying, or how long they would eventually have to repent for it.
Meanwhile, there was that dish served at Whistler's Southside Diner, the refreshingly retro breakfast dive that would make anyone who grew up skiing in the 1970s or early '80s nostalgic. It was called Big A$$ Pancakes. And then there was the fundraising organization featured on the social pages of Whistler Magazine called "F*&k Cancer," (except that, it was spelled out in all its F-bomb glory).
On the massive Whistler Blackcomb ski mountain, things were no less salty. In fact, the only time we took a chairlift or gondola ride with others that didn't involve an F-bomb or two was our final trip down the mountain (the bottom of Whistler Blackcomb was not skiable because of lack of snow), which was shared with a quartet of Japanese skiers speaking only in their native tongue. (Of course, for all we know, they might have been reciting Richard Pryor lines or George Carlin's seven words you can never say on television.)
Ironically, at the bottom of the "family zone" on the Whistler side of the mountain, a sign had been posted at the lift line of the Emerald Express chairlift exhorting "No Smoking and No Foul Language."
Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Utah anymore.
When folks weren't talking blue, they were smoking green. Not only does the mountain boast an intermediate-level run called "tokum," but our visit coincided with the 2015 World Ski & Snowboard Festival, ensuring a fairly constant eau du cannabis throughout Whistler Village. Thankfully, folks were generally kind enough to avoid blowing smoke directly in my kid's direction (or in mine, dammit!).
Did it put the least bit of a crimp on our trip? F&$k no!
My son went from being predominantly a basketball junkie to a fairly rabid Vancouver Canucks fan pretty much overnight (now a rather dejected fan, since they're out of the playoffs).
His conversion was unquestionably helped by local recording studio WMN and its 15-foot-by-6-foot, one-on-one, mini-stick hockey rink (complete with a piped-in Hockey Night in Canada theme song and an organ version of Daft Punk's "Get Lucky"), which we visited nightly.
As for the skiing, my son's two days of lessons helped him take to the sport pretty quickly, while my decades-old ski lexicon of "snowplow" and "parallel" changed over to the newer terminology of "pizza" and "fries" and contributed to some novel shorthand between myself and my son. Instead of my instructing him to snowplow less and straighten out his skis more while loosening up his upper body, dozens of unsuspecting skiers at Whistler Blackcomb were privy to some idiot father's exhortations to his son: "Less pizza!" and "I want some shake with them fries, boy!"
In fact, our turning point on the trip took place when the kid had the type of borderline meltdown countless parents have experienced when trying to teach their kids to ski, after which we cracked a couple of "yellow snow" jokes and finished the run together.
On the ensuing chairlift ride, the local culture got the best of me when I told my son: "You kicked the s@*t out of the bottom of that run, didn't you."
And, with a curse, he disrespectfully agreed.