Spring Snow
Scott Mclean
The snow this morning put me in mind of spring snow storms when we were younger.
In the last story I mentioned one during my teen years. This one was at an age of about 12. We had gotten about 9 inches of snow one day early in spring break.
Steve and I took a couple of the old plastic sleds into the lower pasture. It had a relatively steep hill ending in a flatter area. We built a jump or two and it was always an adventure to dodge the rocks.
When we got bored we started a snowball fight with the two neighbor boys. Steve and I had them badly outmatched so they retreated to their house. It started melting that afternoon and we had a slushball fight. I don’t know if there was a winner but we were both drenched.
The next day the melting snow made us a new playground. The runoff from Cowiche Mountain came down a gully by the canal road and ran through our pasture and then into the neighbor’s orchard. We had our own very cold and slightly muddy creek!
We came up with the bright idea to use the plastic sleds as boats. They didn’t float very well with us in them and we got very wet but it was entertaining.
We finally decided it was not enough to keep our attention any more and changed into dry clothes. We were floating various objects down the creek and making a race out of it.
The neighbor kid was pulling his sled down the canal road and saw us. He came over to see what we were doing, which showed a great lack of common sense, and asked if he could join in. Steve winked at me and told him we were just about ready to float down in our sleds again and how much fun it was. We explained that you sledded down the bank on snow and right into the runoff creek.
He fell for it like he usually did.
As I’ve said before, his sense of self preservation wasn’t very good, otherwise he wouldn’t keep coming around us. His start to the trip was actually better than ours had been due to his lighter weight. He made a splash when his sled hit the water but was floating fairly well. I guess we probably should have warned him about the big rock downstream but that would have been less amusing! When his sled hit the rock he got dumped into the cold water and floated about 10 yards before he crawled out, soaking wet and muddy.
We laughed our butts off but grabbed his sled for him before it went out of the pasture. See, we could do something nice!
By the next day, snow and the creek were gone and we had to find other mischief to get up to.
That’s all for now. Bye.