Just when you were sure you’d figured your father out—understood how he did things and knew what to expect from him—he did something to surprise you.
By January of the year I was ten, the road past our farm had been plowed to a path so narrow that the milk truck making the daily rounds could scarcely squeeze through. The snow piled alongside the porch off our kitchen was so high a grownup would have to stand on tiptoes to peer over it and see the barn and pump house. The snow was almost too deep for sledding on the hill behind our Chain O’ Lake School. The adventurous kids among us still skied down the hill, but if you tried this you had to stay in the well-worn ski track; if you strayed from it, your skis stopped abruptly and you took a header. The result was a face full of snow and an ample amount shoved down the back of your neck—not a pleasant feeling. The paths to the boys’ and girls’ outhouses were piled so high with snow that only the tallest kids with the longest arms could shovel them, a situation not at all appreciated by those who’d grown a bit more than the others.
One school day that January, I awakened to see that the frost that had been accumulating for weeks on the inside of our bedroom windows was melting. I saw a puddle of water on the windowsill, and when I peered outside I could see water dripping from the roof of the house. I rushed downstairs with my clothes in a bundle, dressed in front of the dining room stove, lit my lantern, and opened the kitchen door on my way to the barn. Instead of the expected blast of cold air, the air that met me was warm and moist, and the snow was mushy and melting.
“Woodpecker thaw,” Pa said as I hung up my lantern and grabbed the milk pail and stool to begin milking. I never learned the origin of that phrase, but it was one folks in our neighborhood commonly used to describe a midwinter snowmelt. By the time I was sitting in my seat in school later that morning, watching the snowmelt dripping off the schoolhouse roof, I thought I saw rain falling. Recess was cut short. Even though it was warm—in the high 30s, according to the school thermometer—with the rain and the snowmelt everyone was soaked within minutes. The snow was perfect for packing, and we had hoped to build a giant snowman. But Miss Thompson called us in, saying we’d all catch pneumonia. (She often warned us about catching pneumonia, something we all feared, but I don’t recall that anyone did during my years at the little country school.)
Once inside, we shed our wet outer layers and hung them around the big woodstove to dry. Most of the kids wore wool in those days—wool jackets, wool mittens, wool mufflers, wool caps. By afternoon the schoolroom smelled like a wet dog. It was a smell that no one particularly enjoyed, but we knew if we wanted dry clothes to put on at the end of the day, smelling the wool dry was the price to pay.
The woodpecker thaw and rain continued for three more days. The once formidable snow banks were rapidly disappearing. In the hollows on our farm, especially the big one in the field just to the east of our farmhouse, we began to see black smudges in the snow, and then open water as the snow melted and the water filled the hollow. The water accumulated on top of the frozen ground until the pond in the hollow was at least an acre in size, maybe larger. And then, as abruptly as it had arrived, the woodpecker thaw disappeared and temperatures skidded below zero for three days in a row. What snow was left became as hard as granite. We could walk on it, ski on it, and slide our sleds over it without breaking through.
I believe it was Pa who made the suggestion after we finished the barn chores one Saturday morning just after the hollow pond had frozen to a slippery, shimmering sheet of ice. “That pond would be good for ice skating,” he said. Ice skating was one winter sport my brothers and I had never tried, for two reasons: we had no ice skates and no place to skate. Now it appeared we needed ice skates. That afternoon Pa, my brothers, and I visited Hotz’s hardware store in Wild Rose.
“Say, Dick,” Pa said. “You got any of those clamp-on ice skates—the kind with the little key that you use to fasten them to your shoes?”
“Herm, I think I do,” Dick Hotz replied. “If I remember, they sell for fifty cents a pair. That would be a quarter apiece.” Pa smiled, knowing full well that one ice skate is about as useless as one shoe, one boot, or one ski.
Mr. Hotz disappeared into the back room and soon returned carrying three pairs of brand-new, shiny silver ice skates. He handed a pair to each of us boys. I looked them over, wondering how difficult it would be to use them.
“Well, you boys better go see how those new skates work,” Pa said when we’d arrived back home. “Still got a few hours of daylight.”
The three of us trotted over the hard-packed snow to the pond, sat down, and fastened the skates to the bottom of our shoes with the little key that came with each pair. Soon we were out on the pond, smiling and laughing and falling—falling a lot. I soon discovered that skating was not an easy skill to learn. It took a lot of practice and a lot of trial and error to get it right. I slid my feet back and forth on the icy pond but hardly moved. I pushed off from a snow bank and quickly ended up on my back. I tried keeping one skate on the ice and pushing off with the other and immediately fell. My brothers had similar luck. Ice skating wasn’t nearly as easy as sledding, which took no brains at all, and was even more difficult than skiing, which required a sense of balance. Skating required balance, strong ankles, and a sense of movement on ice that I hadn’t begun to master.
At the supper table that evening, Pa asked how the skating had gone.
“Fell down a lot,” I said.
“Hard to do,” Donald said.
“Not easy,” added Darrel.
Pa just smiled and stuffed another piece of smoked ham into his mouth.
When we got home from church the next morning, Pa asked if we planned to try ice skating again.
“Thought I might go sledding,” I said. “I know how to use my sled.”
“I think you should give your skates another try,” he said. “I’ll come down to the pond with you.” I wasn’t at all pleased to have him accompany us. I was sure he would stand there and laugh while we fell and fell again.
The four of us filed down the hill to the pond, and my brothers and I sat down to put on our skates.
“Mind if I try it once?” Pa asked.
“Sure,” I said, but I wondered why he, an old man of forty-five, would want to try ice skating. He could fall and break something, and then we’d have more chores to do! The more I thought about this, the more I thought it was a bad idea. But I didn’t say anything. Soon Pa had his six-buckle rubber boots removed and my pair of ice skates clamped onto his shoes.
“Here goes,” he said, standing up and moving onto the ice. My brothers and I stood watching and wondering what we’d do if he fell and broke his arm, or his leg, or something worse.
Pa circled the pond, pushing off with one foot and then the other, smiling the whole while. Then he cross-stepped on all the turns, going faster and faster around the pond. He pulled his wool cap down to keep it from flying from his head.
My brothers and I couldn’t believe what we were seeing. Pa had never said anything about knowing how to skate. He’d never mentioned ice skating when he was a kid, although come to think of it, there was a lake just down the hill from my grandfather’s farmhouse.
“I hope you’re watching,” he said. But as I saw how easy he made skating look, I decided that learning how to ice skate by watching someone do it was akin to learning how to swim by watching a swimmer.
Soon Pa was skating backward as easily as he skated forward. And then he was cross-stepping while skating backward. What next, I wondered.
“Okay,” Pa said, skidding to a stop in front of us, a shower of ice settling around his skates. He hadn’t fallen once. “It’s your turn,” he said as he keyed loose the skates and handed them to me. We strapped our skates on again, and all three of us proceeded to stumble and fall, slip, slide, and fall again. Pa explained the importance of relaxing and feeling the motion skating required, and slowly, with his patient tutelage, we began getting the hang of it. After a week of afterschool skating, we could circle the pond without falling. Darrel caught on more quickly than Don or me; while I was still struggling to cross-step while skating forward, he was skating backward with grace and confidence.
By the end of that winter, all three of us were reasonably good skaters. But we learned a more important lesson than skating technique; we learned that there was a lot we didn’t know about Pa. Now we would always wonder what he would do next to surprise us. And I would never forget how happy he was skating around our little meltwater pond like a twelve-year-old. Pa never talked much about his childhood, but I knew it had been short, because his folks had pulled him out of school when he was in fifth grade to work on the farm. He hadn’t had many years to just have fun and be a kid.