Lost In The Village Lot

December 19, 2005

I was just coming off the ski hill, taking the semi-secret "ski-back trail” from Canyon Lodge to the Village, when who's standing outside the Old NY Bagel but Lyin' Judy Bridger, who—of course—was telling some sort of tale to a small group of gape-mouthed listeners.

“Bump you old Unintelligible,” she cried, “get yer skinny over here! I've got me a story you wouldn't believe, except on account of it's true.”

And so I did, and what she proceeded to tell us was that the Donner party was back in the Sierra, wandering around the Village parking lot, as lost as Republicans in Berkeley.

So this is all according to Judy, whose veracity is, um, well. …

About 7 o'clock Saturday night, just as it was starting to snow pretty hard, this man, his wife and another couple in their car drove into the Village parking lot, intending to get over across the street and have some new-Mammoth kind of fun.

Judy heard one man say, “Lakanuki” and his wife answer, “That's enough out of you, Bub.”

But the thing is, the signage is so poor at the Village parking lot, and the lighting is even worse, that all they did was walk around in circles. If the Village merchants knew how frustrating it was to try to get over at night from the parking lot, they'd have a cow.

At one point, one of the men said he thought he'd found a way out—up and over an icy berm that apparently was an old game trail, then an Indian trail, then a trail that the architects would term a “line (or path) of desire.”

“When I attended college and had an architecture class,” Judy lied, “you always had to make sure you understood where people were going to go naturally. When landscapers screw that up, that's when you see well-worn paths cutting over lawns, and that kind of thing.

“That trail over the berm is a ‘path of desire,' folks, and I don't need to tell Bump over there that I am familiar with many paths of desire my entire adult life, almost all of them involving at least one very poor decision.”

With that, Judy winked at the assembly, licked the corner of her mouth, gave a little smacking noise and continued on with her story, her hands on her hips. Clearly she was picking up steam.

She said these two couples got so bamboozled that they never did find their way out of the Village lot and, after a little while, decided to bag it and go to Slocum's, on Main Street, which everyone knows how to get into.

“So one of the men pulls out his cell phone and calls Slocum's to see if they can get in. Apparently they can, so he shouts his name out: ‘Donner party, table for four!' and I just about tipped over, laughing so hard.”

So I says to Judy that that's the oldest joke in the world, but she stood right up and defended her yarn.

“That man, after he closed up his phone, says to the other guy, ‘I hate my name. You wouldn't believe how many times restaurants just hang up on me.'

And other feller says, ‘What do you tell them then?' And Mr. Donner replies, ‘Well, I tell ‘em I'm John Milton, or some other schmuck who happens to be lost in paradise.'”

With that, Judy got up to leave and we all said,

“Hey, great to see you again Judy. We'll talk to you soon.”

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