Tuesday, December 25, 2007

All I ever knew, I learned while Ski-dooing.




Hello Everyone,
Well, the big day brought Mommy and Daddy a Ski-doo. Actually it arrived last night and I was eager to start to get to know the new machine. Now, I'll always be the first to tell anyone who'll listen the dangers of being outside up here and the precautions outsiders must take to protect themselves, All of it profoundly important and should be adhered to, apparently by everyone else but I'm allowed to ignore it, to my own detriment. You see, I went out for about a hour to get the battery recharged and figure things out, always being careful to remain in town and on others tracks. I gave myself a timeline and told others what I was doing and when I'd be back, and I came back on time and checked myself for frostbite, and all was good. At this point I started to think on my own... Unfortunately.
See, Christopher and Melissa were in bed and I was bored so I decided to go out and do it again. Since no one was around, I didn't tell anyone, Since I was overconfident, I didn't follow my rules, but as long as I stayed by my other rules I should be OK... but I didn't. The first thing I did was head out of town on the ice road towards MacPherson, now when I got halfway up the hill I decided that this was as far as I was willing to go, So I thought I'd found a wide enough spot to turn around. However, where I turned around wasn't wide enough (missed it by that much, chief), so I found myself on the wrong side of a 6 foot snowbank separating myself from the road. Simple enough, I'll follow the snowbank till I see a point where someone crossed it already or its lower and I'll get back on the road there. Now, here is where I made some poor assumptions, everyone else was smart enough not to be in the place where I was so no crossings appeared and the tree's started growing closer and closer to the snowbank leaving me riding on the verge of the snowbank at a very difficult angle. Now, something I didn't know was that driving a ski-doo in this position for prolonged periods of time will cause the engine to die for lack of gas. Next lesson I learned was that a Ski-doo sinks a lot further than you'd assume when it stops moving. I also learned that a ski-doo that has sunk under about three feet of snow is very, very, very hard to extricate. I also learned that when your buried in 4 feet of snow alone in the dark triing like a son of a gun to pull a ski-doo out of a snowbank, do not get frustrated, and never get angry. I'm normally not a man who has much of a temper, but being upset with my own stupidity and the futility of the situation I did get angry, Followed by another very stupid mistake, I ripped off my face mask and gloves and threw them. Very stupid, face masks get soaked in vapor from your breathing in a very short time while triing to pull a 600 lb machine from under 3 feet of snow, removing it from your face assures it will freeze almost instantly and when you have to put it back on your going to greatly regret ever taking it off. The other act of stupidity, for this particular moment was the throwing of the gloves, which when retrieved had kindly filled themselves with snow in a attempt to cool my temper. Leaving to another very uncomfortable and possibly very dangerous situation (I normally carry a thin pair of gloves in my pocket in case such a event happens, which I found out I had removed from my pocket( enough about stupidity already)). Anyways, I fought with this situation for about a hour until some kind young man travelling from MacPherson to Inuvik for the evening stopped and with his assistance we had the ski-doo out in about 30 seconds and I drove, very carefully home.
The moral of the story, its a quote that I am unable to place at this moment, "respect Mother Nature, cause your guaranteed she has no repect for you".
Take Care and enjoy your Holidays.
Humbly yours,
CG

4 comments:

Rob, Tina and the boys said...

Good to hear you made it back safely. Boys and their toys! Merry Christmas guys!

Anonymous said...

Congratulations on the new family member. I have to say that I am more than a little Jealous as I have 4 snow machines in my front yead that I am unable to use as they are the store's to sell. I am glad to see that you made it home ok, I have been there with a 4 wheeler before and it is NOT fun. You chose your words right. It is a VERY humbling experience. Well, good luck on your future treks!
Rob

Matt, Kara, Hunter and Cavan said...

Love the duct tape seat- very northern!

Glad you made it out of the snow bank!

jen said...

Why do those things always seem to snowball...(lol no pun intended). It can get scary out there alone. My husband drove us into one of those deep snow situations, we had to dig ourselves out. I wasn't too pleased. Glad to hear your story had a happy ending!