Boomtown (23 page)

Janice and I woke up one icy Saturday morning and found a hastily written note explaining where everyone had gone. Ruth was out with her friends working on the Snow Castle. Sarah was out at Fred Cotton's place, and Jonny had gone to meet his buddies at Slippery Slope. Busy was there with seven other boys when he arrived.

“Hey, Jon, watcha got there?”

“It's a rope. Got it from the Reynolds' farm.”

“It's really long. What's it for?”

“Let's go on up to the top and I'll show you.”

Busy and Rocky and the other guys followed Jonny as they hiked up Slippery Slope. This was a huge hill on Lazy Gunderson's farm. By the second or third day of January, after two weeks of sledding during the winter school break, the hillside would be transformed into a solid sheet of ice, one foot thick, slick as glass, glistening like a jewel in the cold winter sunlight. The ice slide was on the lee-side of a hill and shaded by pine trees. Depending on the weather, it could last well into April and sometimes May.

Most kids in Boomtown couldn't afford to buy sleds and probably wouldn't even if they could. It was a lot more fun to make a sled out of whatever flotsam a kid could lay his hands on. One favorite was to build some runners and a deck out of scrap wood. Mount an old chair on top and away you went! Another popular idea was to take a pair of your father's overalls, soak them in water and hang them on the clothes-line overnight. By morning, you'd have a rock-hard sled with shoulder straps for handles. Take it out to Slippery Slope and you could go as fast as a horse buggy on a windy day. Nothing to worry about; Lazy Gunderson made sure the kids were safe; he always built a wall out of hay bales for the kids to crash into if they sailed off the end of the slide.

At the top of the hill, the boys found an old rototiller up-side down and tied to a tree. The tiller blades had been removed and a rubber tire was in their place. Jonny laid out the rope and asked Busy and Frank to help him loop it between the tire and a bicycle wheel hub that had been bolted to the tree.

“What's
this
contraption for?” Rocky asked.

“It's a ski lift, like they got out at ski resorts,” Jonny answered. “You know, one of them rope pullers that can pull you up a hill?”

“That's really swell. You build it? Where'd it come from?”

Jonny glanced around to make sure there weren't any grown-ups nearby. “I got it from
him.
He helped me move it here and set it up. It was
his
idea.”

“Oh,” Rocky dropped his voice. “So where did
he
get it?”

Jonny shrugged. “Don't know. Probably the same place he got all the other stuff. I didn't ask, and he didn't say.”

The boys continued to set up the rope puller. Back at home, Janice and I were putting on our boots and coats and getting ready for the snow. We wrapped Holly in warm blankets and a stocking cap and trudged our way out to Slippery Slope. Several other parents were already there to join in the fun. There was a large bonfire blazing near the end of the ice ramp. Someone had brought along boxes of sticky buns for the kids and folks were passing around coffee and steaming hot cocoa with marshmallows. The sky was blue; the evergreen trees were laced with snow; there was a brisk snap in the air. It was a perfect day.

We stayed at the hill for an hour or so enjoying conversation with fellow town members and watching the kids. Jonny and the gang had built an “ice schooner” out of a sheet of plywood and grain sacks that had been filled with water and frozen solid. These were tied to the underside of the plywood with ropes. There were also ropes on top of the board for handholds. It was big enough for five boys to ride down the hill in one go, which they did over and over again whooping and hollering. Once the rig reached the bottom, they hooked the schooner to a rope puller and dragged it back to the top of the hill.

Quite ingenious
, I thought.
I wonder who came up with that?

On the other side of town at Fred Cotton's place, another group of kids and their parents gathered for the Snow Wars. As with any popular activity in Boomtown, sooner or later it involved explosives, and I wouldn't have been surprised to find Sarah right in the thick of it.

“Let's build our fort right here,” she said to her friends. “There's lots of snow and it's on a little hill. That'll be good.”

“We'll dig the trenches,” Katrina said.

“And we'll build the walls,” Sarah offered. “After that, we can all build our army.”

That's how it worked. One team built walls and battlements and snow trenches at one end of the field. Behind that they lined up an entire army of snowmen, each about two feet tall, thirty snow soldiers in all. Fred Cotton supervised the opposing team at the opposite end of the field. They were busy making ice balls, about eight inches in diameter, each containing a Hen Grenade. Old bicycle tires were stretched between two trees with a leather pouch in the middle. Ice grenades were loaded into the catapult; the team pulled the tires back as far as they could and took aim; the frozen egg missiles were launched across the field. The game was to see how long it took to blow up the other team's snowman army. Then the teams would switch. There really weren't any winners. Like all boys—and most girls—they just liked to blow things up.

This was the entire premise behind the Snow Castle the kids built every year. Captain Trudeau, a retired captain from the navy, hosted the castle on his property and was in charge of overseeing safety. The children spent months building the castle and its surrounding walls and moat. It took thousands of ice blocks; these were made from snow packed into wooden frames and left overnight to freeze. The bricks of ice were stacked and bonded together with wet snow to create walls, doorways, bridges, towers, stairways, and battlements.

After more than thirty years of this annual tradition, you can only imagine the size and beauty of the castle once it neared completion. Framed against a pink winter sunset or lit by cold beams of sunlight, it was a sight to behold. Still, that was nothing compared to the official beginning of the Spring Fever Festival, when everyone in town gathered in the field to watch the mayor push down the plunger and set off the dynamite and fireworks embedded in the ice. The sky would be filled with glittering fragments of ice and sparkling rocket bursts and shooting flares and booms and blasts and cheers from the crowd.

As much fun as it is to play in the snow, everyone finally reaches a limit—even children. That's why the residents of Boomtown celebrate the annual Spring Fever Festival with such enthusiasm. They gather anxiously at their windows and check the thermostat every day waiting for the temperature to climb above thirty-two degrees. On the day the ice on Lake Caona cracks—the day the creeks and streams begin to run again, the day the steady drip, drip of melting icicles can be heard all over town—the Snow Castle goes up in flames, and the festival begins.

The gazebo in Farmers' Park features performances from local singing groups and musical ensembles such as the children's orchestral group we saw at the Boomtown Museum.

Booths are set up where you can buy roasted chestnuts, hot cider, homemade cookies and pies, hot dogs on a stick, and sparklers and firecrackers. Folks gather in knots to catch up on news. The kids have snowball fights in the streets. Music and bands play. Everyone is in a festive mood.

The Slush Olympics are held on the first Sunday after-noon of Festival Week. They feature a variety of events with white, blue, and silver medals given out to the winners (silver being the best). The hardest event is the Slush Swim;

the outdoor public pool in Chang Park is filled to the brim with slush, and competitors swim laps in the freezing slushy water. The swimmer who lasts the longest is the winner.

Another big event is the Slush Pull. Competitors build whatever makeshift sledge they can dream up and strap it to the back of a horse. A few use something as simple as a sheet of plywood with rope handles. Others get quite elaborate, like the team who took the hood from a 1936 Buick Century and welded runners and wheels underneath. Another team took an aluminum fishing boat, pounded out the bottom until it was flat, and polished it with wax. They were the winners that year.

Starting in the park at the end of Bang Street, each team of two racers looped around the statue of Chang in Town Square and headed west on Boom Boulevard past the hard-ware store and the Nuthouse Restaurant. Right on Blasting Cap Avenue, right on Dynamite Drive, and right at the pow-der factory. The racers finished with a quick dash along the river and back to the park. People lined the streets cheering on their favorite team. They shot off firecrackers and Roman candles at the finish line and bragged about the winners.

Then there were the inner-tube races over at Slippery Slope. The hay bales were moved to the side, and the goal was to slide as fast and as far as your inner tube would take you. There was the Slush Eating Contest, where contestants attempted to eat as many bowls of lime-flavored slush as they could without getting up from the table to use the outhouse. Then the Slush Bucket Relay, where teams of four people scooped up buckets of slush and took turns running back and forth from the starting line until they filled up the bed of a pickup truck. Then the Slushbarrow Race—fill a wheel-barrow with slush, a musher pushing in the back, a slusher riding on top, dashing through a slushy obstacle course. And Slush Hockey—teams of six players with straw brooms trying to score goals by swatting a block of ice past the goalie.

The most important event was the wildly popular Cross-Country Slushathon. It required the use of a modified bi­cycle that had a studded tire in the rear and a wooden ski in the front. The event called for the participation of the mayor, the sheriff, the fire chief, all the male teachers from the school, and all the pastors in town. As always, I was the last to know. I didn't realize what was going on until Jonny came running over pushing a bicycle. Then he handed me a helmet.

“What's this for?” I asked.

“It's your Slushcycle. And helmet. For the race.”

“What
race?”

“The Cross-Country Slushathon. This is your number . . . 13. Not very lucky.”

“I'm not riding in the race!” I protested.

“But you
have
to!
All
the pastors are doing it, Dad. The Reverend Tinker. Even fat old Reverend Platz. The mayor's gonna race. So's Burton Ernie.”

“Maybe
they
are, but
I'm
not. I'm a pastor, not an athlete.

I'll sit this one out.”

Jonny's face fell. “You're
always
saying that, Dad. Why don't you ever have any fun? The other guys, all their dads do stuff. You just sit and watch. You won't even
try.
”

Reverend Platz was standing nearby watching the exchange between Jonny and me. He patted Jonny on the shoulder and then took my elbow and pulled me aside.

“Listen, Arthur, don't be nervous. I do this every year. I never finish, but I always start. My people expect it. They look forward to it. Right now they're taking a pool. You're not doing too badly. If you survive, they expect you to come in third or fourth place.”