Snowboarding comes from the same place surfing does: Hawaii. By which I mean it was invented by someone from Hawaii. Or at least, by a person who had relocated to Hawaii and later become a cultural figure there. The island never gets credit. People have done research on the sport’s early history, but somehow this all-important first chapter has been lost. The people in Hawaii went through hell a couple of weeks ago, as many readers know. For about 40 minutes they lived with the belief that a ballistic missile was coming to wipe them out. They started calling one another to say goodbye. Hawaii: Accept this small restoration of roots as a gesture of solidarity, an arm around your shoulder on the curb outside the gas station as we say, “What happened in there was not cool.”

The history of snowboarding, or as it was known then, “snurfing” (i.e., snow-surfing), does not begin in Michigan in the 1960s with boards made by a guy named Sherman Poppen. It does not even begin, as revisionists will tell you, in Colorado in 1939, with a thing called the Bunker Sno-Surf. It happened a full year before, in 1938, in Yosemite National Park. A slight young man named Robert Trumbull, a Honolulu newspaper editor who wrote a weather column under the byline Sol Pluvius (Rainy Sun), was on vacation. Chicago-born, Trumbull had seen plenty of snow, and he had been surfing. That was the all-important crossing of the wires. “Yesterday Sol showed the natives a new trick,” reported The Honolulu Advertiser, “snow-surfing, or as Sol called it, ‘snurfing.’ ” He coined the word.

That may all be sports trivia, but it’s about to become important trivia, because soon, in this very winter of 2018 — 80 years after Trumbull’s breakthrough — will occur the Olympic debut of a sport known as “big-air snowboarding,” which is the snurfing equivalent of big-wave surfing. It is best described as the most beautiful, insane, stupid, dangerous, death-wishing, insane and beautiful sport ever perpetrated on innocent spectators.

Big air works like this: You stand at the top of a high, steep slope. You get going down it exceptionally fast. You hit a ramp, the kind of ramp you might use if you needed to jump your motorcycle over a canyon. When you fire off this ramp on your snurfer, having hit the lip of it with tremendous force, you fly into the air very high and far. Big-air boarders routinely find themselves 65 feet above the slope. They spin around and do tricks and flips. Weirdly, the tricks and flips often don’t even seem like that big a deal, the boarders are up so high. Imagine yourself in one of those zero-gravity simulator planes. You would be flipping all around and making cool moves, but you wouldn’t be proud of yourself, because your great-grandmother could do the same thing.

Death is always near where big air is getting caught. For that matter, regular old small-air snowboarding can be plenty life-threatening. Granted, most of the deaths are avalanche-related. Some result from helicopter crashes, when riders are searching for untouched snow in the high mountain passes. One biggie that is more clearly attributable to human error: collisions — most often between a rider and a stationary object, like a tree or a finish-line pillar (the Swiss champion Daniel Loetscher died in the latter way).

Then there are the weird ones, the isolates. A guy in Colorado was snowboarding along and hit an ice patch, which accelerated him to some ungodly speed, and he zoomed into a “boundary marker rope,” which wrapped him up and strangled him or snapped his neck. Five years ago a snowboarder zoomed into an ice tunnel. He was with his friends, and apparently he said, “I’m going to zoom into this ice tunnel!” Just as he did, the tunnel collapsed on top of him. It had been waiting. His friends tried to dig him out (the friends always try), but the ice was like “concrete.”

By far the strangest and worst, however, of these “general snowboarding” deaths are what safety authorities refer to as Non-Avalanche-Related Snow Immersion Death. Narsid is when a “rider falls into an area of deep unconsolidated snow and becomes immobilized and suffocates.” This is also referred to as a “tree-well immersion accident,” because such areas of deep loose powder are often found around big trees. If you go into one deep enough, you are lost. You can’t breathe or move. The powder entombs you. With that in mind, imagine hitting one off a sizable jump. You soar into the air, and it’s a great moment. You’re smiling, because you’re going to glide out of there as if you just hopped off the lift. Instead, when you land, you vanish.

Don’t let me scare you. When it comes to big-air snurfing, the deaths are rarely that exotic. They almost all happen the same way: from landing on your head. When you snowboard down a long steep hill and then up a short sharp ramp and fly through the air like a flaming squirrel, a hundred feet high and a hundred miles an hour, then come down on your head, there is rarely anything even good friends can do.

You: “At least the women boarders have been spared in this slaughter.” Facts: “False.” We could point to Estelle Balet, a well-known extreme snowboarder lost to an avalanche in the Swiss Alps, swept 3,000 feet down the mountain. In Wyoming a woman went off-track and flew into the trees, where her body was found. At Lake Tahoe, a California woman was sliding down the slope, seated, for fun, but she got turned around. She hit a ski-lift tower. In New Zealand a graphic designer was snowboarding along unaware that an underground stream had melted a 50-foot death-hole in the snow. And there are the ones we can’t explain, like a British Columbia woman who was carving down the slope with friends. The group looked around and saw they’d lost her. They went to search and found her headfirst in the snow.

“Yes,” said the Canadian snowboarder and sports commentator Craig McMorris, “danger is essential.” He may have been thinking of his younger brother, the 24-year-old Mark McMorris, who is considered one of the most exciting and talented snowboarders in the world. But only recently did it become clear that Mark would even be competing in Pyeongchang. This is because, a mere nine months ago, he was doing tricks in the backcountry of Whistler, British Columbia, when, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, he “drifted a little to the side ... slammed right into a tree ... broke his jaw, his left arm, his pelvis, [fractured] some ribs, ruptured his spleen ... and suffered a collapsed lung.” That wasn’t sufficient to stop him. From the hospital he tweeted succinctly, “I almost died and now I’m trying to get better.” And he did. With borderline-robotic determination and the blessing of “a young body,” he clawed his way back to soundness. He had done it before. Indeed, he had just finished doing it! In February of 2016, at Shaun White’s Air+Style competition in Los Angeles, McMorris landed funny and snapped his femur. It’s hideous to watch. He recovered from that just in time for the shattering incident at Whistler.

As for White, snurfing’s flame-haired mascot, long its lone celebrity and now a sort of rascal-turned-statesman, he himself was lately considered iffy for Pyeongchang, having suffered a gruesome crash last October while training on a halfpipe in New Zealand. He fell 22 feet straight onto his face. I will type that again if you’ll let me. He fell 22 feet straight onto his face. But these snowboarders are not like the rest of us. White fought back, too. A couple of weeks ago he scored an ultrarare 100 on the halfpipe at the Grand Prix in Snowmass, Colo. He will be in South Korea next month, to catch big air. To feel as completely, blazingly alive as a person feels only when spinning violently into the very gums of oblivion. Or as young McMorris himself might put it — and has, in the one-sentence motto he provided to Red Bull, a major snowboarding sponsor — “I just want to do well and have a lot of fun.”