I arrive a bit later in the day than I would have liked, the previous parts of my late morning trek

superfluous, unless one considers cruise control over salt kissed roads and a looping CD of Stadium Arcadium Mars essential material. I, however, do not. Hearing the uncomfortable grating of coarse gravel as I pull into a makeshift lot, I check the time, 12:30. My mind automatically adjusts for the clock being five minutes fast, and I begin the search for an empty spot in the overly crowded lot. Amongst the brilliantly lit cars, I see one boarder, boots wet, board in hand with small patches of melting snow clinging to the bindings, rivulets of water streaking the surface. I lower my window and call out. Are you headed out? Could I grab your spot? my voice is coarse and cracks. It is the first time I had spoken at all that day. Uh, yeah, comes the reply, slightly drawn out, though not out of shock. The delay more akin to somebody thinking in mid-sentence. Thanks! I shout hurriedly, my window closing in tandem, blocking out any possible rebuttal or change of mind. The lights of a blue Honda flash, and to my surprise the stranger places his board down, pulls out first to offer me the spot and only after I pull in does he begin to rack his gear. Thanks again, I project in his direction, as I opened my hatchback, how was the mountain? Not too bad, some icy spots, but its Jersey, he smirks, holding out his hand, Here, want this? I look and take it, the clear markings of a full day lift pass, todays date stamped out in large block letters. A strange feeling takes hold in my gut. Are you sure? How much? I manage to utter, my brain still in the midst of processing the event. Nothing, dont worry about it, I dont need it anymore, have a good ride, and with a non-committal wave, gets into his car and drives away. I walk towards the shuttle stop that will take me from the lot to the mountain lifts, snowboard feeling heavy in hand, as I considered using the forsaken lift pass stowed away in my pocket. The prospect of a free day of boarding is winning over my initial reluctance to just throw it away or not use it, but the unease was still there, growing, dark and malignant. I ease into a seat once the bus arrives, carefully cradling my board between each leg, the back of my helmet hitting the backrest, forcing me to look down the entirety of the ride. My eye catches another board, an expensive brand, I cant see the owner, but the board tells me much more than a glimpse at their face would. The base is severely scratched, the metal rails dentedblunt, and the fringes of the board are frosted and flaked white, not by cold but the lack of wax on the board. Any seasoned skier or snowboarder knows of this; the perfectly normal wear and tear on your equipment requires one to perform regular waxing and sharpening to keep the equipment in proper functioning condition. Seeing an expensive board

in such careless disrepair upsets me, makes me angry. Mirroring the feeling with the unexpected lift pass, the source of this internal strife remained elusive. I eye the bone white patches on the strangers board again and my agitation increases. I begin to fidget in place. Eager to get off the bus, I forcefully kept my leg from shaking, hoping a run down the slope would set my mind at ease as I averted my gaze back to the floor. The bus slows to a stop in front of the resort and I hobble out, weighed down by equipment and the active burden of trying not to think about free lift passes or neglected boards. Unfortunately, its an exercise in futility: just as not trying to think about polar bears usually brings you right back to the white furry beasts. At this point I arrive at the lifts, a staff member scanning lift passes with eyes half glazed over. The happy chirps of the barcode gun has seemingly eroded his higher level brain functions and through his mechanized motions manages to make his way to me in the queue. It is with utmost horror that I do not know what to do. My subconscious has driven my body to this point with slow methodical steps in overly stiff snowboarding boots, and my conscious mind had been left behind somewhere between the bus and where my physical body currently resided. Comically fumbling with my gloves and snow pants I reflexively produce the second hand lift ticket. With a cheerful chime my crime is committed before I can fully understand my actions. Palms coated with sweat, suffocating within gloved confinement, I volunteer myself to solitary imprisonment on a lift up the mountain. Stepping out of my journey for a moment, Im just going to say that theres no real tangible reason why I enjoy snowboarding so much. Its expensive, the trips are long and tiring, its cold, wet, and worst of all I have to deal with people on the slopes. Considering all things, I should hate snowboarding, but I do not. I even take it upon myself to wax and sharpen my own board with equipment that I purchased solely for that reason; other people maintaining my board for me fills me with such an illogical sense of dread that just thinking about it makes me jittery. In contrast, I change the oil on my car, as well as the filters, brakes, plugs and battery, but when its something which I cannot fix myself, I take it to a mechanic and have no problems with them maintaining it for me. The superficial differences are apparent, but the deeper underlying concept is similar, or at least I think they are. Maybe there is more to this than I am seeing. Approaching the top of the mountain, I see signs that demand my compliance in getting ready to dismount off the lift. I carefully lift the guard and angle my snowboard as the end looms near. I always hate this part, especially if I am on the lift with other people. Getting off the lift in harmony with gravity was difficult enough without having to worry about my physical form imposing itself on some stranger. Reaching the point of no return, I push off the ski lift seat and execute a deft hip thrust. Planting my free foot on the stomp pad, I sucessfully glide clear of the lift exit. I exhale, relieved. White mist forms from my breath in the cooler air at the peak. Finding a clear spot to bind my free foot, I plop myself down, taking out my headphones and place them them in my ears, re-securing my helmet flaps around them. I think again about the lift pass and my possible punishment if I was caught using such a thing. But why would I

even be punished? Nobody was hurt and nobody would ever know if I kept my mouth shut, but why did I feel guilty regardless? I did not steal anything, rather it was the extreme opposite, the pass was given to me without me even asking. What made this particular gift of a pass feel more wrong than perhaps a gift bestowed upon me on a birthday or holiday? My mind began to tug at the strings of this knot searching for points of weakness, anywhere I could begin to unravel this problem. Then, as the Earths loving embrace starts to tug me down the mountain and Glitch Mob begins to beat into my eardrums, I find a small merciful handhold in the oddest of places: Knottinghamshire. Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, in the most common and cliche reference to the character says that he, steals from the rich and gives to the poor. Take that phrase and apply heat, then like many things it can be decomposed to its most base components: Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves despite all the flowery language is no more than just that, a thief. He steals, which is wrong, yet somehow his actions are more agreeable because its seen as beneficial and acceptable to have the overburdened coffers of the rich relieved of their weighty contents. Stealing with intent to use the illicitly obtained fortune to feed your starving family, treat a terminally ill family member, or perhaps build that desperately needed orphanage is an easier pill to swallow than the rich taking advantage of the middle and lower class. Once again, Im faced with a similar situation. The superficial context of stealing are the same in both cases. Yet something hidden is allowing me to make different judgements on each situation. One could question the fate of Mr. Hood in court compared to that of Mr. Madoff, and here is where the crux of the issue laid before me becomes apparent. My sharpened rails dig easily into the icy slope of the mountain as I approach a choice between an easy green or a not-so-easy blue. Internally making a choice, I shift my weight towards the toe end of the board, knees bending slightly as I cut a line towards the green path. Knowing my own ability as a boarder well, I realize without a proper warm-up run I am bound to fall and risk injury. Easily sashaying down the mountain, I reacquaint myself with muscles long forgotten in the warmer months, a sweet soreness building as I dig s-shaped curves into the slope. This path is blissfully empty, a few obstacles require minimal detours in my trip down the side, only one annoyingly so, which was another boarder relaxing in the middle of the path. Reaching the end of the slope, I perform a heel stop just before the entrance to the lift. I take out the pass. The history of its questionable acquisition mitigated by the passage of a mountainside beneath me. With another happy chirp Im off to the top and a repeat offender. They should be brought to justice. Is the general answer when a heinous crime is committed by a person or persons, as if an avatar of justice is at some locus, awaiting to pass judgement over those who transgress. But then why are there so many problems with bringing somebody to justice? The very idea of justice seems to be disembodied, ethereal in nature, we cannot locate the issue because society as a whole would treat a Robin Hood type criminal much differently than a Madoff. Justice is not absolute, its the exact opposite; justice is inexact, imprecise, impossible to pin to a single determinate location. I figure this is why it is so difficult to understand my own unease. When a crime can be a crime of differing degrees deserving

punishment of equally ambiguous definition, then there is no such thing as a platonic ideal of justice. So, if justice is different for everyone, is it like the path one carves down the mountain? Each path is unique to an individual. However, then that would mean that justice is a physical thing that can be located in the trail left behind by any rider. Thats not possible. Is justice the punishment of some deed? My physical form certainly feels punished when falling. Losing my balance and crashing in to the righteous fist of the mountain is exquisitely painful. Though, even this, I feel that justice cannot simply be punishment itself; many times punishment in our own world is seen as unjust, unfair. Knowing what justice is not has served to compound the complexity of the problem instead of simplify. Traditional ideas of justice have been eliminated. Now, I am left wondering where I should continue. This time, at the top, I choose a much tougher blue route; here I need to be aggressive in my stance, the sharp drops and slope is unforgiving and riding my board shyly will only earn me bruises. I learned early on that snowboarding well requires me to place my weight on my lead foot. This, by the way, is completely counter intuitive to survival. Just as natural selection and evolution has prepared Homo Sapiens to store fat and favor walking on two legs, I can say with near utmost certainty that it did not prepare me for hurtling down a mountain with a board strapped idiotically to my feet. As a beginner, I leaned on my back foot, but that hesitance caused me to fall time and time again. It was not until after I forced my weight on my lead foot did I become better. Leading with an edge clearly cutting into the slope allowed for much better control even though I was going much faster than I should have been at my skill level. Now, balance while riding is automatic, after I learned past the basics, it no longer becomes something actively monitored and adjusted, it sits in the back of my mind, and my muscles respond accordingly. Only when presented with a new situation does the idea of balance come back into the foreground of my thoughts. If I am looking to make a small jump, should I plant the landing on my heels or toes? Aside from that, I cannot locate the idea of balance nor explain exactly how I maintain it except for very vague and likely inaccurate sentence fragments. Which is why I tell any beginner, that they just have to learn to control their fear, the rest comes after. At the end of the blue, I once again head back to the lifts, taking out the pass without hesitance. I only fell twice down that difficult run and it was because I hesitated more than I should have. A Dream Within a Dream, greets me through my headphones and up I go. Balance seems the most apparent and synonymous with the idea of justice, the scales held by Justitia confirming the correlation with cliche comparison. Abrubtly, the lift stops as Im halfway up. Boots and binding groan its Newtonian First Law complaint as my ankle softly pops, the relief traveling up my leg. Balance is always good: balanced budget, balanced diet, balance life between work and play, but still, something is lacking. Justice being reduced to the transient act of balancing on a metal rail or adhering to 6-7 vegetable and fruit servings a day seems like an oversimplification. Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Ive tread too far over this Einstienian line. Balance comes with practice. It seems ludicrous to think that Justice is procured in the same manner. I shift my weight in the ski lift chair, and the

contraption hangs lower to the left, out of balance, I think and its expected, Im sitting offcenter. Then, there it is, the one spark that sets the tinder ablaze with understanding. Justice is not balance itself, but is the feeling of balance between the expected outcomes in life and the actual outcomes. It is experimental error! The deviation between actual and expected results! The lift shudders to life and Im back on my way up the mountain. In any kind of scientific experiment there is error, it is always there. No matter how precise or accurate the instrumentation is used to collect that data. Sometimes there is a certain tolerance for error. In that case, as long as the actual value falls within that percent range of the expected value, your original predictions or experiment is considered a success. Most recently, with the supposed confirmation of the God Particle, the Higgs Boson, this percent error is enormously important. This threshold is the determination of whether the particle actually exists or whether its simply noise in the equipment. The difference between a Nobel Prize or humiliation in the scientific community. In the experiments of everyday life, this error determines whether the event feels justified to an individual or not. Take this common example: A student has a final and studies a month in advance. The student reviews their notes, creates flash cards, asks the teacher questions, and even attends the final review. There are two general outcomes to which this Justice can be applied. If the student performs well on the final, then the actual outcome matches the predicted or expected outcome. Much effort by the student was placed upon preparation to perform well, so they expect to do well. If this is the case, the student feels justified. However, if the student performs exceedingly poorly or even average, the student would feel that the outcome is unjustified. The actual outcome is outside the 5% error range of the expected turnout. The same could be said about the outcomes of a student that simply wings the test. Doing exceptionally well is unexpectedly outside of this error bound and is unjust, even called unfair by his peers and friends. On the other hand, failing with flying colors is expected and therefore just. Generally nobody is surprised to see a person do poorly if they did not put any effort into studying. My difficulty lies not with the events of the day themselves but the uncomfortable feeling festering at the back of my mind, the injustice, the error between expected and actual. I expected a parking space, I instead received that and a lift ticket that was free despite my offer to pay. My mind is screaming at the injustice, the error between what should have happened and what did. The issue is that even though there was such a huge discrepancy, I benefited more from the actual, it was completely unexpected. If I had not gotten the parking space and had a more colorful verbal response from the man with the blue Honda, I also would have been unjust, but I could have handled that much better. The same happened on the bus, looking at the stranger with the designer board. I expected that it would be well taken care of, instead the injustice of it being neglected burned deep within me. Doing well on a green at my skill level is presumed, falling excessively will not be tolerated. Falling more on a blue or a black is understandable, I still had much more to go in order for myself to master difficult trails. Gliding off the lift with a furrow in my brow hidden by my helmet, I realize that this is why Justice was so hard to locate before. It is neither internal or external to any one

person, the expected outcome is a combination of both. Additionally, it is different to every person since every person has differing moral aptitudes, values, and experiences. The only thing that does remain constant between people is the actual. Corporal punishment for a child is the same whether in America or China, but it is largely frowned upon here yet accepted in China. Now, I wonder how I can alleviate the injustice I feel. I cannot take back what has happened so I must focus on what I expected, I can change my expected outcome. In science, this is called reevaluating your assumptions. Drifting down the slope, I realize that obtaining anything that would normally require monetary compensation on my part for free was tantamount to stealing. I should have been punished, however when that did not come I was further thrown into disarray by that additional error. I have to change my own assumptions, my own values and morals to compensate for this runaway error that is piling up. Luckily I find the reason why I like snowboarding so much at this moment as well. It is one activity where this error can be measured in discrete amounts of pain. It forces one to become reflective in order to avoid such pain; to reduce injustice that one feels with bruised muscle and bone and increase the feel of flowing down the mountain, within the warm grasp of Justice itself. Snowboarding allows me to believe that some small part of the world is within my predictive capabilities, within my tolerances for error; that the world is a just place. I leave the park as the sun sets and the sodium lamps lining the slopes begin to flicker on. The night is descending rapidly along with my desire to ride on increasingly icy slopes. I remove my helmet, a barely perceptible smile on my face as I make the long walk back to my car, skipping the shuttle. I spot a small handful of riders walking up to the mountain lifts probably looking forward to some night riding. Hey, I direct my voice to a young man no more than 20 years of age, did you get a lift ticket yet? What? Nah, not yet, he replies, eyes suspiciously on my face as his friends attention are drawn to me. Here, take it, have a good ride, I say not waiting for a response as I hand him the well used lift ticket. With a non-committal wave to no-one in particular, I disappear into the darkness towards my car.