Down the Hill and Over We Go

I’ve never been bold enough for gymnastics. Timidity works against you when it comes to tumbling routines. I did attempt an occasional headstand when I was a child but I never quite managed it. The only cartwheel I ever executed couldn’t really be termed a success as it was entirely unintentional and I was wearing cross country skis at the time.

Cross country skiing is a popular winter activity in the Sudbury area. There are plenty of groomed trails to choose from. I had a friend in High School whose parents had come to Canada from Finland and she introduced me to the sport. Of course, she’d been skiing since she first learned to walk and she made it look effortless. I struggled along in her wake and every time I thought I was finally getting into the rhythm of it my skis would cross and I’d end up tripping myself and falling. It was going to require some serious practice to be able to achieve the kind of grace she displayed.

I bought a pair of skis of my own when I was in College and I was anxious to try them out. Aino-Liisa had moved away by then but my friends, Karen and Don, were keen to join me on the trails. Of the three of us, Karen was the only one who was an experienced skier. Perhaps it had something to do with having Scandinavian roots. Her parents came to Canada from Denmark and she could ski as well as Aino-Liisa had. Don and I were the amateurs.

We were muddling along fairly well and gaining in confidence when we came to a trail marked ‘Intermediate’.

“Should we try it?” I asked.

“Let’s go for it,” Don insisted. “We can do it.”

We set off with Karen in the lead and for the most part we managed it just fine. We were about three fourths of the way through when we found ourselves at the top of quite a steep hill. Don and I waited there while Karen sped down the slope and stopped herself at the bottom.

“Lean forward a little,” she called back to us. “Keep your legs together and your knees bent.”

Never one to hesitate, Don launched himself and fairly flew down the trail. He nearly made it to the bottom but ended in a spectacular crash that left him almost completely buried in a snowdrift. He finally extricated himself and shook the snow out of his hair, digging around to find his missing hat.

“Watch out for the bump about halfway down,” he shouted.

I stood poised on the brink for several seconds trying to work up my nerve with the two of them watching me from below. It was pride that finally pushed me over the edge. Once I was committed I did my best to follow Karen’s advice. I kept my legs together with my knees bent. The wind in my face and the sense of speed was incredible and exhilarating. Then I hit the bump Don warned me about. What he failed to mention was that I would find myself airborne at that point. It startled me so much that I unwittingly stood straight up, all instructions forgotten. I completely lost my balance and I knew in an instant that I was going down. My bottom hit the ground first and I’m a little foggy on the details after that point. My modified cartwheel landed me at the bottom of the hill with all my limbs intact if somewhat tangled. With a little help I managed to ascertain that the only thing broken was one of my skis. The end had completely snapped off and it looked like I would be walking the rest of the way back to the road.

“Well…” I muttered, “That was fun.”

I think Don would have liked to climb back up and try it again but we knew it would take a while to reach the end of the trail with me trudging through the snow carrying the pieces of my skis under an arm. We decided to forego any repeat performances and keep forging ahead. I couldn’t bring myself to be upset about my broken ski when I was so thankful to be able to walk at all. I guess you could say I was never cut out for gymnastics or for racing down hill on a pair of skies, and especially not for a combination of the two.

The Night Before Christmas

‘Tis the season…in two short days it will be Christmas Eve. It’s a time for celebrating with family and friends and a time for traditions that make it special. In my family most of those traditions revolve around food. Christmas just doesn’t seem like Christmas without a breakfast of plum dumplings and I couldn’t imagine Christmas Eve without Russian Meat Pies. You might wonder how we ended up with a tradition of eating those tasty little meat pies on the night before Christmas when no one in my family has any Russian roots.

When I was a child my mother discovered the recipe in a newspaper she was reading and decided to try making them. They were delicious hot or cold. We enjoyed them so much that it became a special treat reserved for Christmas Eve. My Dad was working as a Hoist man in the mines back then and even though no one was working underground on the holiday he often had to work as a watchman on Christmas Eve. If he was working the 3 to 11 shift we would all get to stay up until he got home. We would have a cold supper at midnight of potato salad and Russian meat pies and celebrate the arrival of Christmas by opening our gifts before heading off to bed.

Once, he actually had to work from 11 till 7 the next morning and my mother decided to pack up a  cooler with our midnight supper. Dad asked his boss if he could bring his family to work that night and once he got permission we all went to the mine together. Dad issued each of us with our own hard hats and we camped out in the Hoist room with him for the whole night. When he went to do his rounds my brother, Tom, and I went along with him. We got to see the hoist that he normally operated and the change room where each miner’s gear hung from the ceiling on a chain. We watched Dad ‘punch the clock’ by inserting a card into a machine that would punch a hole in it showing the time he passed at each of the stops on his tour of inspection. We drank tea from a thermos and ate our meat pies and potato salad pretending we were miners ourselves. Eventually we fell asleep on a bench while Mom and Dad passed the long hours of the night talking softly so as not to disturb us. It was the most memorable Christmas of all.

In my own family we have hot German Potato Salad and Russian meat pies for supper on Christmas Eve every year. It’s an International meal that I look forward to with a lot of pleasure, mostly because of the memories it evokes. We don’t eat the meat pies cold at midnight or out of a cooler the way we did when I was young but it still brings me back to those happy times in my childhood when the night before Christmas meant picnics with my Mom and Dad. Occasionally I sneak down to the refrigerator after the rest of the family is gone to bed just so I can have a cold one and remember.

Tagging Along

My daughter, Lauren, and her husband, Andrew, are lovers of all things outdoors. When they had a baby they were determined that it would not mean giving up the camping and canoeing that they so enjoyed. They bought an infant life jacket for their baby daughter, Rea, and plan to carry on with their adventures as a family. That prospect might sound intimidating to some parents but it isn’t impossible. It’s just the sort of thing my own parents might have decided.

We rarely got left behind when my Mom and Dad wanted to get out. In their early years of marriage they would sometimes go to a movie on a Friday night. They didn’t have a car so my Dad would pedal the family to the theatre on his bicycle with my Mom perched sidesaddle on the crossbar and Richard, who was a baby at the time, in the basket out front.

By the time my younger brother, Tom, and I came along they had discovered Drive-In Theatres. When Friday night rolled around Dad would pull the mattress off of one of the beds and cram it into the back of our station wagon. We would head out to the Atomic Drive-In with Tom and I already dressed in our pyjamas. We got to play on the swings and merry-go-round that were set up at the edge of the car park as long as we ran back to the car when it got dark enough for the movie to start. When we got too tired to stay awake any longer we just curled up on the mattress and went to sleep. As we got older Dad dispensed with the mattress and we graduated to the back seat. Mom would always make us scrunch down and try to look small as we drove through the gate so she could still get the maximum discount for children.

Back in those days each parking spot at the Drive-In had a post with a speaker on a long cord that you would clip to the inside of your window for sound. Of course you couldn’t roll the window up all the way and in Northern Ontario that meant you ran the risk of getting eaten by mosquitoes before the movie was half over. The management tried to combat the problem by ‘fogging’ the lot during intermission. Someone wearing a contraption that looked like a flamethrower would wander up and down through the rows of cars blowing a billowing white cloud of fog out of the nozzle attached to the tanks on his back. I shudder to think what sort of chemicals it might have contained. It certainly gave the whole place an air of mystery and perhaps it even helped control the bugs. If it was particularly bad Mom would light up a mosquito coil inside the car and set it on the dash. It’s a wonder we didn’t all choke but no one complained. It was all part of the fun. Dad would always buy us a hot dog or some other treat from the snack bar while we waited for the fog to clear and the movie to start again.

We saw a lot of movies that way. Movies like Thoroughly Modern Millie and Lenington and the Ants. That last one may have traumatized me because I remember it fairly clearly in spite of how young I was. It was seriously scary with a massive swarm of African Fire Ants completely engulfing and eating anyone who stumbled into their path. At least we had the option of ducking down behind the seat if the action got too intense. As far as I know, neither of us grew up with an irrational fear of ants so I suppose it couldn’t have been that bad.

Movies weren’t the only outings we got to tag along on. When my parents went to a house party we went with them. I learned to polka by dancing in living rooms with my Dad. My mother was fond of playing Bingo and she often brought me along. She would give me one of her cards to play and watched like a hawk to make sure I didn’t miss any numbers. I was always more fascinated by the strange array of good luck charms that some of the other players surrounded themselves with than I was with watching my card. There were rabbit’s foot keychains, four leaf clovers, tiny figurines of all descriptions, even a turkey wishbone. As far as I could tell none of them made a bit of difference to whether people won or not. I never did care much for the game but I loved being with my Mom. She got so excited whenever she had a chance to shout Bingo or even when she came close to it that you couldn’t help but get excited along with her. Her pleasure was contagious.

It didn’t matter what the activity was. We got to participate and that made it special. We grew up knowing that our parents wanted us with them. That’s probably why spending time together means so much to me now. I’m not sure just how Lauren and Andrew will manage canoeing with a baby but I love the intent of their hearts in it. Rea will tag along with them just the way we did with our parents when we were children and I wouldn’t trade those times for anything.

Needled

I’m not much for wearing jewellery so I never felt a need to have my ears pierced as a girl. Why on earth would I want someone to poke a hole through my earlobe just so I could wear earrings? My friend, Karen, was always trying to talk me into having it done when we were in college but the whole idea made me cringe. I did not like needles.

She and I were nursing students back in the 70’s and it wasn’t long before she pointed out that I was going to have to get over my gut reaction to needles. Like it or not, I was eventually going to have to stick one into a patient and it wasn’t likely to inspire confidence if I looked terrified at the prospect. We learned all about the safe handling of needles and syringes in class and we studied all the theory regarding the giving of injections. Volunteers willing to let us practice on them were a bit scarce on the ground. In fact they were non-existent so we had to practice by injecting an orange until it was ready to burst. We also spent a lot of time stabbing mattresses to get a feel for the force we imagined you would need to exert when working with a human subject. Ultimately, we would just have to learn by doing it.

How well I remember the first time I actually had to give a shot to the patient I was caring for. As students we wore conspicuous yellow uniforms and our name tags clearly identified us as nurses in training. There was no possible chance that our amateur status might be missed or overlooked.

“You’ve done this before have you?” my prospective victim asked with a dubious look at the loaded syringe I was carrying on a little tray when I approached the bed.

“Of course,” I replied with a bright smile that I hoped would disguise my nervousness. I felt it would be unwise to confess that my only subjects to date had been inanimate objects. Luckily, the patient was facing the other way and couldn’t see my face at the crucial moment. I managed to avoid verbalizing the litany of ‘3…2…1…fire’ that was sounding in my head at the time. I gave that injection like a pro and was vastly pleased when he insisted that he hadn’t felt a thing.

It wasn’t long before both Karen and I were able to give injections with a confidence that no longer had to be feigned. I certainly grew more comfortable with needles than I’d ever been before. Perhaps that was why Karen thought it a good time to renew her campaign to get me to agree to have my ears pierced. She even offered to do it for me. She insisted it couldn’t be much different than giving an injection after all. She figured she could use a couple of pre-packaged sterile needles from the hospital just to be on the safe side. It wouldn’t cost a thing but the price of the earrings. She was a little startled when I finally agreed to let her do it. She didn’t back down though and we set about making our plans.

The following Saturday found me perched on a chair in the middle of Karen’s living room. She carefully marked a dot on each earlobe to make sure the holes would be evenly spaced. Then we pinched my ear between a couple of ice cubes and held it that way for as long as I could stand it. It was supposed to be anaesthetic of a sort. Once my ear was thoroughly numbed with cold she opened the needle packet and stood poised in front of me for several long seconds.

“What are you waiting for?” I asked.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she admitted.

“You said this wasn’t going to hurt,” I accused.

She pasted on the bright smile I recognized as the same one we used when we were trying to convince a patient that we knew what we were doing. I can’t say I found it very reassuring. Before I could change my mind about the whole thing however, she deftly plunged the needle through my earlobe and stepped back leaving it in place.

“You were right,” I marvelled. “It didn’t hurt!”

We went through the whole process once more with the other ear and I was sitting there like some African tribesman with two 22 gauge, 1 ½ inch needles sticking through my earlobes when Karen’s husband, Don, walked in. He took one look, turned a little pale, and marched straight through to the bedroom with his gaze averted.

“I’m not even going to ask,” he muttered as he swept past. “Just let me know when it’s over.”

All in all, the piercing went well. It was when we tried to put the earrings in that we ran into trouble. It seems they were just slightly bigger than the holes they were expected to go through. That was where anaesthetic would have been useful. We were fresh out of bright ideas so we ended up using brute force to push them through…a most unpleasant experience. Karen hated doing it even more than I hated having it done.

The venture was eventually pronounced a qualified success in spite of the difficulties. The earrings were in at last and Don was given the okay to emerge from the bedroom. Karen discovered that piercing ears requires a bigger needle than the ones used to give intramuscular injections. Too bad she would never need that little tidbit of information. I was her first and last customer. We both decided that the job ought to be left to professionals with proper equipment. The do-it-yourself home version was just far too stressful.

Catch a Beaver by the Tail

My Dad was always full of stories and no matter how far-fetched they sounded we believed them absolutely. After all, we knew him. He talked about killing spruce hens with a slingshot to save ammunition when he was a boy, and teasing trout out of the river with his bare hands. He maintained that if you could catch a beaver by the tail and lift its hind legs off the ground you could walk it around like a wheelbarrow and it wouldn’t be able to turn and bite you. Heaven only knows how he discovered that one to be true! My brother, Tom, discovered first hand that it was no idle claim. He told the story himself at my Dad’s memorial service and I will repeat it now.

Tom was about 16 years old and he and Dad were on a five day canoe trip down the Spanish River in Northern Ontario. The trip itself was a wilderness adventure with plenty of rapids to run, some of them quite challenging. At one point they put in to shore in a small cove where there was a stream running down into the river. Dad spotted a beaver in the woods and his face lit up with mischief.

He gripped Tom’s shoulder and propelled him toward the stream. “Stand just there, with one leg on either side of the water,” he instructed.

“What for?” Tom queried suspiciously even as he moved to obey.

Dad’s instructions were brief and concise. “I’m going to circle around and get that beaver moving. He’ll come straight down the stream heading for the deeper water in the river and when he passes between your legs, reach down and grab him by the tail.”

Tom’s eyebrows rose nearly to his hairline and his mouth dropped open.

“Make sure you get his hind legs up off the ground,” Dad called over his shoulder. “That way he won’t be able to reach around and bite you.”

Tom stood where he’d been placed, his mind racing furiously. There’s no way I’m doing this, he thought.

In moments Dad was back. “Here he comes! Get ready now!” he urged.

Sure enough, the beaver was coming straight down the stream. Instinct took over and Tom, his nerve breaking, scrambled frantically out of the way at the last minute. Dad jumped in to take his place and when the beaver tried to get past him, he reached down and caught hold of the broad tail with both hands. With one heave he raised the back end of that beaver off the ground and it instantly became apparent that the awkward position rendered it completely helpless. Dad started to walk it down to the river bank with Tom running alongside. It really was like pushing a wheelbarrow after all.

Once they’d reached the shore Dad encouraged Tom to hold on to the beaver’s tail himself for a few moments. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. Beavers are heavy and this one never once stopped scrabbling with its front paws in a futile attempt to get to the river. Nevertheless, Tom actually got to experience holding a beaver by the tail. How many people can say that?

“Okay, you can let him go now,” Dad finally decided.

Tom released his hold and the beaver made a dash to safety, disappearing into the water almost immediately. He and Dad just stood there grinning at one another, savoring the moment. It was an experience to treasure and remember.

Tom has told the story often and he says that most people don’t really believe it. That doesn’t bother him though. He was there and no one can take that away from him.

Brownie

Our dog, Brownie, came to live with us when our children were just about ready to start school. She was barely more than a pup herself at the time and it wasn’t long before she became an important member of our family. She was a border collie/miniature collie cross which meant she was both smart and protective. Her previous owners had moved into town and were looking for a place in the country for her. I happened to be visiting them and mentioned that we were looking for a dog something like her. In moments the deal was done.

I paid close attention as they outlined the important lessons that they had already taught her. Apparently we wouldn’t need to tie her unless we were going to be away for more than a day. If we told her to ‘guard the house’ as we were leaving she would wait there patiently until we returned. She was accustomed to living outside, snug in her insulated dog house even in winter. We were told that if we did bring her into the house she had been taught to stay out of the rooms with carpet on the floor.

On the day she arrived we walked her all around the perimeter of the property to show her the limits of her new territory and she seemed to understand. She accepted her new circumstances eagerly enough and adopted us as though she’d been born at our house. She took her job as protector of the property very seriously though I suspect it was me and the children she was looking after rather than our worldly goods. She became a constant companion on many adventures. Once the boys started school she would wait with them at the end of the driveway every morning till the school bus took them away. The end of the day would find her sitting back in that same spot staring up the road watching for their return.

We discovered she was terrified of thunderstorms and so there were times when she slept in the kitchen rather than the back yard. Eventually, she spent as much time inside as out. She never made a nuisance of herself by coming to the table when we were eating and, true to her early training, she kept strictly to the bare floors in the kitchen and the laundry room next to it. She wasn’t pampered but she was definitely loved.

Brownie was a hunter at heart. Grandpa Livingston would invite us to visit if we’d bring her along to help him hunt coons in the cornfield. She actually turned out to be a good coon dog. She was less successful when chasing squirrels or rabbits or even deer. She would tear off in enthusiastic pursuit, her frenzied barking pitched high with excitement even though she never managed to catch one. Groundhogs were much easier prey. If she caught one of them out in the open the outcome was inevitable. We would come across the gruesome remains of a partially eaten carcass on the front lawn and someone would have to fetch a shovel to give it a hasty burial somewhere far enough from the house to avoid having it dragged back the next day. She also caught more mice than our cat ever did.

She was in the house with me one winter day when I pulled open the drawer in the bottom of my stove to discover that a mouse had filled it with dryer lint and built a nest among my baking tins. Horrors! I could feel my skin crawl at the thought of what might be lurking under all that fluff. Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t just close the drawer again and pretend I hadn’t seen anything. I was going to have to deal with it so I steeled my nerves and leaned down to shout a challenge into the pie plates in the hopes that any resident mouse would die of a heart attack before I uncovered it. I kicked the drawer a few times for good measure and then Brownie sat watching with head cocked to one side as I used a pair of tongs to reach in and gingerly pull the pans out one at a time.

I’d almost reached the bottom when a terrified mouse shot out from under the stove and skittered across the kitchen floor. I dropped the tongs and jumped to one side nearly tripping over the stack of pans I’d piled there.

“Get it, Brownie!” I shrieked. She’d already seen it and the chase was on. Chaos ensued with the mouse finally racing straight into the living room to disappear under the couch. Brownie skidded to an undignified halt at the edge of the carpet and even with me jumping up and down crying, “The rules are off!” she refused to cross over into forbidden territory. She just turned her reproachful eyes on me and I could almost hear her thinking, ‘you’re trying to trick me aren’t you?’ I sighed in defeat and went to fetch the broom. I was going to have to get this mouse the hard way. Furniture got shoved here and there as I chased that pesky rodent around the living room with Brownie watching intently and barking encouragement from the sidelines. It was hopeless.

The mouse got away and I tried to console myself with the thought that perhaps the whole experience was so traumatic for it that it would leave the house altogether and never return. Even so, I found a new home for my baking tins and for the rest of the winter the drawer in the bottom of the stove stayed empty except for the mouse trap we set there. Brownie had to content herself with hunting outside. At least there were no carpets out there to spoil her fun.

Have Bus Will Travel

On one of our trips this past summer we came across two elderly gentlemen in a campsite near ours. They had converted an old horse trailer into a camper by building a couple of cots inside and adding some shelving to store their supplies. They say that necessity is the mother of invention. Certainly, in my family there has always been a ‘do it yourself’ mentality seasoned with both imagination and ingenuity. We often made do with homemade versions of those things that were beyond the reach of our limited pocketbooks.

That was how we came to be the proud owners of our own version of a Winnebago, the latest in RV’s back in the early 70’s. When my brother, Richard, heard about an old school bus that was for sale he immediately saw the potential. It was a short bus, only half the size of the regular buses that we rode to school every weekday. It had been sitting unused for some time so he got it for a very good price. He reckoned that with my Dad’s help they could really make something of it and so in due time it ended up in our yard.

They spent the whole summer on the project. The first order of business was to strip all the seats out of it. The floor was then covered with linoleum and bunk beds long enough to accommodate the tall men in our family were built along both sides at the back with a curtain that could be drawn across in front of them for privacy. The top bunks were set on hinges so that they could be lowered to transform the beds into two couches facing each other across the centre aisle.

Two of the original seats were reinstalled with a table between them. It looked like a restaurant booth set just behind the driver’s seat. They built cupboards along the opposite side to hold the camp stove, ice box and other supplies. It may not have had running water or a bathroom but by the time they were done it could pass for a cottage on wheels. They painted the outside grey and added some detailing in black to spruce it up and give it a whole new look. We thought it was gorgeous.

It did have a few drawbacks though. The first time we took it out on the road we discovered that with most of the seats removed there wasn’t enough weight to smooth out the ride. Every bump was magnified to such a degree that anything not tied down got bounced all over the bus. That included us. Any encounter with a pothole would see us lifted right out of our seats to land on the floor if we weren’t holding on for dear life. We also took to joking about our gas mileage being measured in gallons per mile instead of the other way around.

Nevertheless, Richard and some friends drove that bus all the way to Mexico and back and pronounced the trip a great success even though they ended up having to replace all the old tires before they got halfway. When they finally reached their destination the geriatric bus coughed out its last gasp and they began to think they would have to abandon it in Mexico. Richard managed to find a mechanic who promised to completely rebuild the engine for a ridiculously low price and they decided to take a chance on him. Never was a hundred dollars better spent. By the time he was done with it the engine had a whole new lease on life. The journey back to Canada went without a hitch.

Ultimately, the bus got retired in our backyard and became a sort of guest house. My younger brother, Tom, and I would have friends over to hang out and sleep in the bus and the novelty of it never wore off. It may not have been much fun to ride in but we thought it first rate as accommodations. It was one of a kind, better than a real Winnebago in my mind. It had Landry stamped all over it.