Lessons

I taught myself to ski when I was 17 years old.

You tell people that you grew up in the mountains in British Columbia, and they make assumptions. Truth is, I've been skiing maybe a half-dozen times in my life, and I'm not very good at it.

All my contemporaries growing up in the Sticks skied, or played hockey, or whatever. I never did. I always presumed it was because the gear was too expensive. For one reason or another, we grew up poor-middle-class, but that's a story for another time.

We could actually skate on the street most days in winter. The snow was usually compacted to the point of ice, and the plows didn't scrape it down so as not to rip up the gravel shoulders of the streets. The Municipality installed gutters on the streets in the early 80s, and that signaled the End of That.

At the time, not skiing and not skating didn't really bother me. Well, that's not true; the not skating kind of did. I had Dad's old hand-me-down skates and they obviously fit me horrendously badly. I tried going skating on my own a handful of times in the Sticks... but those stupid skates had nothing for ankle support, and were more a detriment than anything else.

At least I always thought they were Dad's; they may have been my brother's once - that would certainly make sense. Suffice to say they were very old, and a little too big.

I suspect that a good skate swap for kids - like we have practically everywhere now in North America - would have really done well for me. It's one thing to build a bike out of spare parts... but there isn't much you can do for skating.

Looking back, I know for a fact that if I really wanted skates, I would have got them. But, as stated - I didn't care enough.

We've been taking the little kids out to Brimacombe for skiing lessons on Saturdays.

This is something I'd never did as a kid - organized lessons in a sport - except for swimming lessons at the wading pool at Kin park when I was five. I rather like the fact that we are able to provide things for our children that I never had... but then I think about it.

I spent winter weekends icefishing. And snowshoeing. And hunting. Snowmobiling. Sledding. Shooting. We played shinny on frozen ponds with rough-cut hockey equipment that dad made on the fly. Meals involving roasting home-made elk sausage on willow sticks over the open fire (yes, lit with One Match). Winter drives to explore. Camping occasionally.

Whatever my childhood lacked in financing sporting lessons - my Dad more than made up for in time and effort. Nobody could ever complain about that.

The result of that breadth of experience, courtesy of Dad, is that I've done - and am comfortable doing - things that make some of my Contemporaries go all bulgy-eyed. Butchering an elk on the kitchen table and making sausage comes immediately to mind - but I digress.

So I taught myself to skate on rollerblades at 27. I bought good ones. I still have them. Funny thing - the difference between Ice Skating and Rollerblading is Hills. I believe I still have the scars...

But when I was 17, I went on a school skiing trip to Fernie. As I indicated, it was my very first crack at skiing. It turns out they teach kids what they called "snowplowing" - nowadays they tell kids it's a pizza.

I never did that. Couldn't for some (knees) reason. I went straight to the proper turning method by watching people who knew what they were doing - and mimicking them.

Of course the down side is when you're a novice, they set your bindings to come off the boot really easily so you don't hurt yourself - even if you are roughly gorilla-shaped. They don't expect you to turn properly. I sheared my skis right off my feet a couple times before I figured that out.

I'm hoping that in a year or two my eight-year-old will be a better skier than me. It's not much of a stretch.

Maybe he'll teach me how to ski backward. In the mean time, the Saturdays out have been excellent.

Winter Pursuits

A couple weekends ago, my brother-in-law, Ardy, and I took the kids out tobogganing.

As it was the first time in about 22 months that we had enough snow, it was kind of a big deal. The kids in question are his 7 1/2 year old daughter and my 7 3/4 year old son, who are more like brother and sister than any kids exactly three months apart could reasonably be.

We've been raising them like that. It's one of the reasons we moved out here.

We roasted down a nice bowl hill for 90 minutes in different configurations of pairs to much shrieking laughter, and almost no complaining about cold or climbs. Somebody had a campfire going off to one side - out of the way - at the bottom of the bowl. It smelled marvelous.

I can recall a couple times Dad took us out like that - but the tobogganing was usually ancillary to the trip. Trips out usually involved ski-doos, dogs, campfires, snowshoes, and - more often than not - frozen stretches of water, with tree limbs cut into hockey sticks and pucks. In later years there would be backpacks, bush cabins, and mulled wine, but these are stories for another time.

You only sat around for a winter weekend in The Sticks if it was actively raining. Which - In Winter, in the Sticks - was pretty much never.

It was a glorious afternoon - and all Ardy's idea. So I told him about Twister.

Serious tobogganing in the Sticks didn't require a car; everything in the place was walking distance, even for a pre-adolescent.

It's remembrances like this that make me feel like I grew up in a different dimension. We no longer let our children cross the street alone at an age where we were out of sight of the house from dawn till dusk... but I digress.

You had pretty much had three standard options for sledding when you lived in lower Sticks. The hill behind the row houses was okay, and it was really close, but it was a short rise at only sixty or so vertical feet... and the slope was fairly terrifying at between 70 and 80 degrees. It was also a standard path for a lot of kids to go to school... so very often it was either worn to dirt, or chopped-up and refrozen ice - which rattles your teeth while sledding.

The water tower was better - across Highway three at the top of the hill, and it was a good 150 vertical feet - but still 70 to 80 degrees vertical. It was so steep that snow very often didn't stay on it all that deep, and it was popular enough that the tracks would be worn to the dirt.

The speed you could reach on it would also flay your skin in cold weather.

By far, the best hill around was Twister.

It was an old cut road that wound its way down from Old Highway 3, and opened up to a small meadow at the base of the causeway that was built up to support New Highway 3. The climb was something like 200 vertical feet, but since it was originally a road it was cut into the slope with S turns and switchbacks to minimise the slope. It took a good 15 to 20 minutes to walk up from the bottom.

The result? Add a little snow and you had 3 minutes of steep-banked wide-track bob-sled-inspiring greatness that was populated every snowy weekend available.

And seriously - the more kids, the better. Lots of them would bring inner tubes from the mine trucks  - once punctured, they couldn't be used on the trucks any more, but patch them and fill them up, and you can seat up to five 10 year olds on one.

The season after my brother first took me to Twister, Santa delivered a pair of plastic formed sleds. They were basically a rectangular tub with a catamaran shaped front slope, and a seat pressed into the form. They were also the fastest sleds on the hill the next 4 years running.

We were lightning. In one of those interceptors you could let the tubes go first, and get around the top corner, and you'd still pass them before you were half way down. One of the best places to pass was above an innertube on the outside of a turn embankment. If your timing was bad, the tube would bounce you right out of the gully into the trees. Which of course was all of the fun.

The hill was like riding down a drainpipe.

Somebody built a golf course on the end stretch of Old Highway 3 in the mid 80s. A couple years later, someone noticed guys on dirtbikes were using the Twister cut road to get on to the 9th hole of the golf course, and tearing up the fairways.

Several huge roadblocks of deadfall were constructed across the path of the cut road at various intervals almost immediately after that.

And a Legend passed into the mists of memory.