If it were 35-40 years ago, I would be stressing out about the lack of ice at the parks. We have not had much snow, and the temperatures are unseasonably warm for this time of year. In their youth, my two sons spent much of the winter either skating at Academy Park or sliding down the hill on their sleds across the street from it.
Those were fun times for them and for their dad who always encouraged them to skate and enjoy the outdoors. When I was their age, I would spend every minute that I could playing outdoors with my friends. We were always sledding or spending time at the slough or at the pond skating. I remember one year when my parents did not have a lot of money to spend on Christmas and I ended up getting a pair of used skis and a game for Christmas. I was old enough to understand the situation, but it was still kind of a hard pill to swallow. I had gotten a super nice toboggan the year before, so I reasoned that it would have to tide me over until better times rolled around.
One Saturday we, meaning us neighborhood kids, decided to trek over to Green Lea Golf Course and do a little sledding. Now, I had never considered myself a skiing type of person and I actually had little interest in it. I rationalized that, since I had these skis, I’d better learn to use them. After a few attempts, I was starting to get the hang of it when Lynette, the neighbor girl, went flying down the hill on my toboggan and ran right over my skis, which stopped them in their tracks and sent me flying down the hill without said skis. Not only did she run over the skis, but also ran into my foot which sent me rolling down the hill in pain. She apologized many times over, but after the original hurt, I told her it was no big deal.
Once that day was over, those skis found a permanent parking place in the rafters above our garage. I figured that I could find a lot of different ways to injure myself that were much more fun than learning to ski.
As we moved into out teens, we would have toboggan parties and ice-skating parties which were a lot less dangerous and also involved hanging out with members of the opposite sex.
There was one particular night that I will always remember. It was when some of us guys decided to do a little tobogganing behind a car on a moonlit winter’s night. My friend Pat Smith had his folks' Jeep Wagoneer while they were out of town. There were four of us, including myself, Pat, Kenny Ofstedahl, and Dick Springborg. We had a nice long rope and my toboggan. We took turns being pulled on the toboggan. There was plenty of snow on the ground, so that made sledding easy. After awhile we decided to take a break and drove up to this farm place where this girl that one of the guys was kind of sweet on lived. Her dad did not take kindly to visitors, so we got out of there as fast as we could. Pat turned down a side road and shut the lights off, which didn’t seem like a very good idea at the time. Even with a full moon you had a hard time distinguishing between the road and the ditch because of all of the snow. We ended up going in the ditch and rolling the jeep onto its top. Everyone was okay, except I broke my glasses. Pat was still sitting upside down in his seat with his foot on the gas thinking that he could drive it out. After reality set in for Pat, we walked to a neighboring farm, and the farmer came and towed us out. After putting some gas and oil in it, we were able to drive it home.
The next morning, we took it to my dad’s gas station and tried pushing the roof out with our feet. All Pat kept on saying was, “My dad’s going to kill me.” That was a time when nobody would ever have accused us of being overly intelligent. The sad part about this story is that I am the only one left to talk about it.
Until next time: There are times when things seem like a clever idea, but they can go sideways in a hurry.
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