I REMEMBER THE EXACT MOMENT WHEN I REALIZED I'D FINALLY LOST MY FIRSTBORN SON TO THE CLUTCHES OF THE CULT. IT WAS IN Whistler, British Columbia, four years ago, on a warm green day in July. I decided to take the lift up to the top of the mountain. My son McCall, then nine years old, was up there in the mists somewhere, on the Horstman Glacier, at a summer snowboarding camp. Like a good Presbyterian inspecting my investment, I decided I should go check out the scene.

McCall is a natural snowboarder. From the beginning, he had one of those gifts that can come only from the icy-bearded Norse gods. (My wife is half Norwegian.) He learned to shred on the brawny slopes of Telluride when he was six, and from that point on snowboarding pretty much wouldn't let go. He began to obsess on the subject or, as the child psychologists call it, to perseverate. He spent whole afternoons bouncing on a trampoline in our backyard while strapped to his board. In class, he doodled designs of fantasy snowboard companies in the margins of his notebook. When he was eight, he wrote a school paper in which he said he loved snowboarding "as much as life itself." He started wearing outrageously hideous beanie hats, and his door became barnacled with shredder stickers. His friends called him Air Mack. He even began composing odes to the mountain, like this bit of inspired doggerel, dated 12/12/02:

I am the tall strong mountain, king of the snow.
When people slide down my face they tickle me so.

I knew he was good, but on this bright morning in Whistler I was about to find out just how good. The humming express chair whisked me upslope, over heathery meadows where fat bears prowled for berries. I reached the station, took another express lift, then boarded a clunky bus that chuffed up to yet another lift, which deposited me in a snowy-white world of endless winter, more than 5,000 feet above town.

@#95;box photo=image_2 alt=image_2_alt@#95;box

From the catwalk, I peered down into the immensity of the Horstman Glacier. The mists parted to reveal an arresting sight: a thousand jittery dots in the snow, all launching and buzzing and looping down salt-crusted slopes.

Good God a'mighty! It was a mosh pit of determination down there, an X Games incubator. Every inch of the glacier was roped off to create lane after action-packed lane where hundreds of juiced-up kids from a dozen camps ran gantlets of jumps, hips, boxes, tabletops, and rainbow rails. It was the Institute for Advanced Aerial Studies, the Academy of Amplitude, the Summer Symposium of Goin' Huge.

A gamma-ray burst of adolescent energy assailed me as the mighty riffs of Ted Nugent's "Cat Scratch Fever" came blasting up from concert speakers parked on the bowl's icy floor. As the Nuge bragged that he could make a pussy purr with the stroke of his hand, I realized that my nine-year-old little buddy was down there in all that baggy-panted bustle of delinquents.