Better Then a Toboggan Hill

I had mentioned in earlier posts about the lack of hills that we could toboggan on. My Dad had the perfect solution to it all. He would pull us around with the car !! We had a 1969 Ford Country Sedan Station wagon. It was long car, 121 inch wheelbase to be exact. I was always good with numbers ! The winters in Saskatchewan of course were nothing less then brutal so we always drove in the winter with studded tires. Underneath there was a luggage compartment, and he would stack that full of wood so that there was a lot of weight on the back tires. Man, could that car go through snow. He would tie a long rope on to the toboggan and he would pull us through all kinds of snow at a fairly high rate of speed !! He drove down snow covered roads and even onto the frozen lake surface and boy did he put the hammer down. The snow would be coming up from the backs of those tires in a flurry, pelting our faces with wet icy snow. The faster he went the worse it got. Eventually he would be going so fast that you could not see a thing but just hung on for dear life. We would go through drifts, over drifts and under drifts. It was a wild ride. I suspect that he disciplined us through the type of ride we got. There were a lot of wet tired children after those excursions.

As I got a little older, I was looking for more challenges. My grandfather had an old pair of skis, and your foot slipped into some leather loops. These skis were not state of the art. In fact, they probably came over on the ark but I thought they would work good behind the car. I convinced my Dad to take me down a snow covered back road in the country. Now that was a ride. He wound that car up and he pulled me down the road. I tried to stay straight and keep those skis from crossing over each other. For a time I did, but there was no way to tell him to slow it down. He wound it up faster and eventually I blew a ski and rolled and crashed into the ditch. I was bruised, broken, and scraped but I felt like I just got the gold medal at the Winter Olympics.

How many kids can say their Dad did that for them? There is no question that it was different culture then but it was a culture that made me realize that fun was what we thought and made up. Anyone care for a ride?