Words and photos – Simen Strandås

It can happen anytime. Chronic sickness. Been with me for years. Most attacks hit while I’m driving. Comes outta nowhere. No warning. Even in the middle of a boiling hot summer day it can strike. I think music is the trigger. Especially one song.

Sun’s out. 28 degrees. The sky is blue, not a cloud in sight. Old classics on the radio. “The sun is shining, and the living is easy.” Wind blowing in my hair. I wish it was because I drive a cabriolet, but it’s just the air conditioning in my 7-year-old family car. Bob Marley’s song from 1978 is over. The radio host is reporting on water temperatures and tomorrow’s weather. Then it starts. The song comes through the speakers in my car.

I see snow blowing in from the distance.

Coming fast.

Suddenly it’s dumping. White everywhere. I look out the driver’s side window and three massive American cars are crawling through the storm. I blink. Rub my eyes. Snow keeps falling.

Passenger side window now.

A snowboarder cuts through the blizzard. Black jacket. Yellow stripes on the sleeves. Beige pants. He is floating through the air. A kind of style Italian design houses have spent decades trying to transform into fashion without luck.

I blink again. A couple more times.

Then it’s gone.

Blue sky. Sunlight. The car rolling down some twisting backroad like nothing happened.

The attack’s over.

Unlike the occasional migraines, these episodes leave behind something good. A weird euphoria. A hunger for November and the season’s first snowfall.

I’ve tried explaining it to my doctor, random people in grocery store lines, even my parents. Mostly they just nod carefully like they’re waiting for people in white coats to come collect me.

But I’ve found others like me.

“The Garden VHS Syndrome Anonymous” meetings.

That helps.

My dad recently moved houses. While digging through old boxes he mentions old family films from Yugoslavia in the seventies. Then he finds the camera.

Instant relapse.

Suddenly there’s frost in my dad’s mustache. Snow in his hair. I hear music nobody else can hear. I drift right back into the trance. I’m in the middle of a snowstorm, in my father’s living room. I feel euphoric. “I’ve been in my mind — It’s such a fine line…” A snowboarder stands on the edge of the kitchen sink. Looks down to spot the landing. Jumps up to get more speed. Jumps, floats, lands…

“Super 8,” I mumble.

My dad looks at me.

Long way to go before the family farm, my allodial land, ends up in my hands, but for the first time I start thinking maybe it’s time for an early inheritance.

I ask if I can hold the camera.

Will my brothers react? No. They just look at me like I’m a stranger.

He hands it over.

That’s it.

The greatest family heirloom of them all. My precious!

Maybe nobody else will ever watch the footage. But one day, sitting in some retirement home, I’ll rewind those reels and watch my friends play in snowdrifts, smiling faces, and me, doing a frontside air thirty centimeters above the ground to the sound of Heart of Gold.