Vitally Crucial Finger Crossing
January 9, 2015
Collecting The Laughs (Part I)
February 6, 2015
This is an essay that was originally posted in January of 2013. Right now I’m organizing various non-fiction writings to publish in a book I’m hoping will come out in June. This one is turning out to be one of the favorites picked by the essay readers for the book and since we’ve entered into the heart of the winter season seems rather appropriate to re-post this one.
Word Count: 847
The Ultimate
Snow Cave
I often tell people rather nostalgically that we used to have a lot more snow in the wintertime here in Silverton. This brings up my memory of the greatest snow cave that a fourteen-year-old kid and his friends have ever built. I confidently say this because very few, if any pre-teens, can tell you they worked on an enlarged ice structure every day after school for three straight months. These days they don’t even make Xbox Games that are able to maintain the fascination of kids that long. Besides, we only had one TV channel and the Internet hadn’t been invented yet, so what else was a kid in this town supposed to do back in the 70’s?
From the very beginning construction of the ultimate snow cave was aided by outside forces. An uncle was the San Juan county road maintenance overseer and had his crew plow up a huge mountain of the white stuff. Chance would have it that the pile was right across the street from the family home. Perhaps it was the fact that this was also an empty lot staring us right in the face every day. Subsequently my friend and I spent the better part of a blustery afternoon looking out the living room window at that mountainous pile of solid liquid.
Whatever it was, we started construction of our masterpiece in late December. At first we didn’t have a plan, come to think of it we never had a plan. Since we made it up as we went along, I didn’t have any sort of pre-conceived expectations about what the finished product might look like. All I remember is that we dug a pit, then started digging a tunnel that we hoped would lead to a larger cave where seven or eight of us could congregate. Specifically to carry out serious discussions about how our older siblings were indeed spawn of the devil.
Soon the pit that accommodated the tunnel linked up with the cave. We didn’t want to stop our imitation of groundhogs so we started digging a secondary tunnel, which led out of the main cave. That tunnel extended for another twenty or thirty feet. Makes me wonder, had I known all these years later that I’d be writing about this I might’ve done an exact measurement of the distance? Eventually we decided to link-up the entrances to the two tunnels by digging a trench between them.
Then I got a new snowsuit for Christmas. Was this a sign telling me that I needed to increase the size of the structure across the street? Did the White man in America expand westward in the 19th century out of a sense of Manifest Destiny?
Soon plans for a secondary cave were formulated. After construction of that phase was completed, more trenches linking the tunnels and an enlarged hole were built. This expanded cellar-like cavity was in response to adult concerns that the structure was getting too elaborate and therefore a threat to the safety and welfare of its architects and builders. Maybe I’m wrong, but I doubt that the designers of the pyramids in Egypt lost any sleep at night worrying about the safety of their construction crews.
Teenagers in Silverton used to have this odd habit of driving their car back and forth from one end of town to the other at night. We can chaulk this practice up to lower gasoline prices, debates concerning their homework assignments, or boredom. Whatever the case, my buddies and I decided to take advantage of this odd behavior one night by showering these passing automobiles with snowballs. If the car would slow down or stop and it’s passengers disembark, we’d rush back into the tunnels to avoid the wrath of the semi-adults. This practice went on for a week until an actual grown-up told us we should stop or some of us might suffer the folly of our actions.
Over the course of the next two months the ground level Taj Mahal included an additional cave and a few more trenches linking all parts of the structure. I attempted to contact theArchitectural Digest Magazine people to see if they could send a representative to survey our masterpiece. They never responded back to my query. Maybe it was the fact that I wrote it in crayon?
Spring rolled around and besides the fact that large segments of the tunnels collapsed because of warming temperatures, parts of the main structure itself began to turn to ice. At that point we made it a regular habit to walk across main every evening to take in the sun’s handiwork from that day.
Recently I watched a documentary about these elaborate ice castles people in Scandinavia, northern China, and Russia build. The architects of these structures said they felt a twinge of sadness when the building melted in the spring. In my own sort of way I sympathized with their plight. Then again, their construction was also work related. Therefore it wasn’t as much fun building it.
