Part One

It’s that time of the year again when we occasionally see snow on the ground.  Although it looks like this year we may skip the snow entirely.  Makes me think that if I were a bit younger and more agile, I’d be tempted to pull out a battered and beaten-up tow board (yeh, you read right, tow board, not snow board, as that is how it started out) if for no other reason than to look at it for the memories it would conjure up.

 I would need some extra agility, though, to wrest it from some dark, forsaken corner, bending either around or over what seems to be an extra bulge in my midsection that is a recent addition.  I told the lady at the pharmacy the other day, when she commented that she liked my shirt, that it was getting harder to find ones that fit.  “Apparently,” I said, “I had broad shoulders in my day, but they seemed to have slid down a bit and it’s really hard to find a shirt that accommodates shoulders in one’s midsection.”  She looked me up and down and then burst out laughing.   I expect the bulge to go away any day now, as it came on quite rapidly which signifies, to me anyway, a most likely temporary existence.

I should probably charge a small fee for the next discourse, should you venture on to read it.  The fee would cover any harm saved to your person from some of the risks we took, could we say, in R & D.  (Research and Development) But I’ll waive the fee, as reading thus far has probably exacted coinage enough in general forbearance.

Winters in southwest Kansas can be tiring.  You may be wearied with endless snowfalls, or you may be wearied with stiff, raw north winds without any snow, howling away for weeks on end.  Then again, you may swing between late summer temps and outright winter weather several times each day, forcing you to carry your entire wardrobe in the back of your truck.  All of this can verge on driving one to distraction. 

So one day, my friend Ron and I hatched a plan to drive away some of the madness.

We would go snowboarding. 

Bear in mind, that the nearest hill with even the most remote snowboarding tendencies was a good thirty miles away, and the total glide distance might be sixty feet or so, if you managed to snake it back and forth on the way down. 

But our plan didn’t include hills.  It planned on harvesting the vast flat expanse of open wheat fields.  Ron would furnish a four-wheeler, we would find some rope, and all we lacked then was the tow board.  Neither of us were in the mood to spend a lot of money, so we set about building one.  Afterall, it may be, we reasoned, that we will happen upon a fantastic new design that will take the world by storm. 

Our first effort was simple.  A 1 x 10 board approximately four feet long with flashing nailed to the bottom, front cut at a forty-five to the center and 1 x 1 strips nailed on perpendicular to the tow board proper. 

We set out to learn the art.

Within 30 minutes, we had to make modifications.  The perpendicular strips were too severe of an attitude to maintain while under full load conditions and we tended to slip off the board after about ten feet of being pulled along. 

Our modification put the front strip at roughly a thirty-degree angle to the board.  This worked much better as far as being able to stick to the board. 

Now, as we encountered longer runs, say forty feet or so, we discovered another modification was necessary.  What concerned us was what happened when we tried to steer the thing using foot signals and pressure.  When we directed our tow board to go into a right turn, it would abscond into the opposite direction.  For a while we compensated by simply reversing our turn signals, but no great amount of speed could be built in such trial runs. 

Envision the torso concentrating on a right turn and the lower body diametrically opposed in direction.

While this attitude of position can be maintained with great talent and dexterity, which each of us possessed, it was less than relaxing, and when attention to detail waned, the falls taken were spectacular. 

Because of the oppositional forces at work, one left the tow board in much the same stance as he had been, only now because there was no board to claim friction to, the hands clawed madly at the air on one side, the body proper had assumed a horizontal attitude, and the feet kicked violently on the other side, trying for a purchase on something substantial. 

The kicker here, was that we had enough gyrations to set a top-notch gyroscope in motion but said gyrations can be described quite accurately as lopsided ellipticals while the falling one made his way back to the blessed earth, thus canceling out any gyroscope effect. 

One last difficulty remained, and this was when contact was made with earth.  Whichever side of this mass in motion hit the earth first had the advantage, as it soon calmed itself into subservient repose.  The other side still had to wind down, and this didn’t always bode well, as the fellow on the four-wheeler was now in danger of falling off and spraining his eye teeth because of uproarious laughter.

So, we pulled our experimental project off the field and headed back to the lab for modifications.

This time, we took more flashing and fabricated ½ inch deep by approximately 1/8 thick fins to the outside edge of the board.  These fins extended from the rear of the board ¾ of the length toward the front.  It was a simple fix and we raced back to the field to try it out.  Our problem was remedied.  Except we had over remedied it.  Now the board held true in direction.  No more of this diversified turning.  We thought we had this one in the bag, until the four-wheeler man started his turn.

The board kept on straight and true, while the rider was towed off it and to one side.  The fall was far less spectacular.  In that we failed.  He just more or less hit the ground at an angle, on his side, and remained in that position for some feet, skidding along to his final stop. There didn’t seem to be any need to prolong this phase of R & D.  

We were homing in on our final product and this time our adjustments in the lab proved to be the right ones.  We trimmed back the fins to only a quarter of the length of the board.  It worked brilliantly.  In today’s slang, ‘We were cooking with gas.’

By rocking back just a tick on the board and using the back leg to apply downward pressure and using the front leg to push sideways in the direction you wished to turn, we could make this work. 

Except now we had another issue that I wish to discourse upon.  The snow had melted a fair bit, and there were large brown, muddy spots barren of any snow.  Let me share with you, based on our time of R & D, that there are two ways to respond to these hazards.  One way, once the muddy spot has been encountered at a high rate of speed, is that you continue your purchase on the tow rope and immediately morph into very lengthy steps. 

These steps will need to span 20-30 feet in order to maintain speed and also keep your hands on the rope.  The snow board, as it can now be properly called, stops in its tracks upon arrival into the mud.  The problem with working it this way, is when the four-wheeler driver listens to that little imp whispering to him, and continues driving, acting oblivious to the need to slacken his pace, maybe even speeding up a bit, and meanwhile peeking back at the ever-widening steps taking place behind him and the facial gestures that seem to match the math of the steps.

The second way is to let go of the rope immediately when the mud is encountered.  This is the quickest way to end the ordeal.  But there is an extra hazard with this approach.  You will face plant every time.  That may be survivable, but western Kansas mud is the next thing you will need to deal with.  It’s one thing to deal with it on your clothes and shoes, but it’s quite another to work the stuff out of your nose.  If you could attach a crank to the side of the nose somehow, you would have just invented the worlds smallest sausage, uh, mud stuffer, provided you could find casings that small.