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| "Puddle Jumping" |
A
week ago last Saturday, I crossed another small adventure off my bucket list
and visited Arrowhead Provincial Park near Huntsville. There is an ice skating
trail there which is the longest around here (+- one kilometre), and I’ve been
wanting to try it out for the past five winters. Somehow, I never had the
gumption to follow through, especially since I usually skate alone these days.
I enjoy ice skating, especially outdoors. I didn’t skate more than two or three
times in 2016, and when I put on my skates this year at the park, they felt just
a little different to me. I didn’t pay much attention when I was lacing them
up, because I was so excited about skating on this outdoor rink. I
took a lap of the one+ kilometer course, and then re-adjusted my skates. They
still didn’t feel right. It never occurred to me that they were the wrong
skates, until I looked at them carefully the following Sunday, at an indoor
rink. It simply amazed me that I could skate on the wrong skates and not notice that they were not mine! My
immediate reaction was that someone had swapped out my skates for this inferior
pair, but that didn’t make sense. When I go skating, my skates are never out of
my sight. Then I thought perhaps someone had swapped them out at my house, but
that also did not make sense. When I returned to the house I found that in
fact, my good skates were still there, but they were hidden in the back of the
closet. Somehow, I have acquired another, rather new and somewhat larger pair
of skates. It’s a mystery.
Every
year, our neighbor two doors down floods a small rink on the frozen lake in
front of their house. While I have never skated on their rink, over the past
fifty years I have skated on a few frozen lakes and ponds. The irregular surface
of a naturally frozen body of water can be somewhat challenging, but there is
nothing like skating on a frozen lake or pond on a brisk winter day. This winter,
it has become almost impossible to skate on our lake, because the weather has
been so changeable. The ice should be at least 4-5 inches thick before it will
support a snowmobile ( 8”-12” for a car, and 12” to 15” for a pickup truck),
but last Saturday I saw some brave (reckless) souls zapping around on our
puddle-covered lake. Some of these guys like to “puddle jump”, which I think is
insane. They get up a head of steam and hydroplane across open water on their
machines. I heard that somebody had travelled 12 kilometres or more skimming
across open water. It would suck if the engine quit. I wonder how many
snowmobiles are fished out of deep water up here every winter. When I know the
lake is sufficiently frozen, and when I see a lot of activity out on the lake,
I will cautiously venture out onto the ice with my ATV. I’ve become a bit of an
old lady when it comes to risk assessment. I think my biggest fear is the
humiliation, when I have to explain to the guy whose job it is to fish my ATV
off the bottom of the lake.
Occasionally,
the ice in front of our old beach house in Ft. Erie was flat enough to skate on
in the winter, and I remember skating on it as a young boy. We also walked out
on the frozen lake a lot. When I was an infant, my older sister Jill fell
through that ice. She and my now deceased sister Joanne were playing out on the
frozen lake and Jill hit a spot of thin ice. My parents looked out on the lake
from shore and saw just her head sticking out of the ice. There is an
Oppenheimer home movie somewhere of my sister all wrapped up in blankets,
warming up in the car after that little adventure.
Speaking
of disasters on ice, I am now listening to “The First Machine Across The Lake”
by local songwriter Matt Allen. It’s a song about two kids who fall off a
snowmobile on a frozen lake then watch it drive off without them. Perhaps that
is an appropriate metaphor for the world today. Heaven help us all. Keep your
sticks on the ice!
Written
by Jamie Oppenheimer c 2017 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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