Interlude One: Colorado Skis

2018.MAR.O2 - Friday

Winter has rolled in late, and they're predicting up to 10" of snow in the next couple of days. The wind is absolutely brutal, and ice pellets borne by it sting like buckshot. We have decided to postpone any travels until Monday.

Dad came down to see what came in the mail, and stayed around long enough to discuss the latest presidential disaster and the sorry state of the Union, which lead him to share a long dissertation about a friend's ineptitude for driving a motorhome through Canada, complete with a comprehensive description of the internal workings of a powerful diesel engine paired with .... something blah blah blah ... sorry, it's a quirk of my brain that disengages at the introduction of mechanical information.


One piece of his mail is advertising for helicopter air lift insurance. "They sure waste a lot of stamps on me. I'm never going to buy that. There was a guy up by Elko that broke his leg skiing, and he had that. So they called for that helicopter to come out and pick him up, and they went up there, and they said that they couldn't land. At the airport in Elko was a pilot that had flown in Vietnam, and he said, "I'll go get 'im". So he did."

"When I was a kid we used to ski right from our front door to school. Sometimes we skied off the roof of the schoolhouse. It was a short run, but you could really fly!

"At recess we'd ski off of there, and ski all the way up to the end of the street, and when the bell rang, we'd ski back to school."

1938  (Michigan)

"The snow plow had a big rotary blade on it, and it cut the banks just sheer straight up and down. The bank would get crusted with ice, and you could really go on it, but you didn't have any control.

"One time we were skiing along on that bank and this one kid messed up and went over the bank, and he came down right in front of a car. And the guy got out of the car and paddled his butt. He still had those skis on ... (Laughing, he flips his arms up and down like a paddle boat.) And the guy was (shaking his finger), "You stay out of the street!"

"The kid was Bobby Meyers, and he was a lot older than me - maybe three or four grades... We left there in the fourth grade, so I was just a little bitty guy ..."

• "You were skiing like that in the third grade?!!" (That would make the year about 1938.)

"Yeah. I had these big old skis ... they were eight feet long and made of pine. They must have been this thick (holding his fingers apart wide enough to insert a 1x2, by my reckoning). They were really heavy. But I had skis."

"I had snowshoes, too." he says. ""They were great big wide things. They were called 'trapper's snowshoes' and they were really long. They had a big long tail in the back, and the front curved up.

"One time I was sent to the store to buy some hamburger for supper, and I was wearing those snowshoes. I got the hamburger and started home. The snow was really wet, and it started building up on those shoes and they kept getting heavier and heavier til I could barely walk.

"There was a toilet (outhouse) along the way there, so I stopped and went into that toilet and I cleaned off my shoes, and then I was able to keep walking by pulling on the strings to lift my feet up out of the snow.

"When I got home  [I realized that] I had left the hamburger in that toilet.

"I got in a lot of trouble for coming home without the hamburger.........
It was a lot easier going back (to get it) because those snowshoes made a pretty good trail."


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