My Woodpecker Skis
G. GEORGE OSTROM / For the Hungry Horse News
Basked in warm nostalgia while gazing at my very first pair of skis on the 13th of this month. Didn't measure them but they appear to be around eight feet in length and 4 inches wide. They were an awkward load to carry and seemed to weigh as much as I did when "The Preacher" gave them to me at the Flathead Mine in 1938. The original old leather toe straps have been replaced and the skis are now polished and varnished. They hang crossed above the big stone fireplace at Izaak Walton Inn where Sid Goodrich put them many years ago.
Have often wondered what ever happened to the kindly Christian man, Carlton Thornton, who gave me those skis. We met under strained circumstances because I was prowling around in the woods with my brand new BB gun and had shot a small bird, maybe a woodpecker. Carlton was surviving the depression working as a laborer in the mine where my father was a shift boss and he found me examining the dead bird. It was difficult for him to ask me to sit down on a log while he gave me a talk about why birds are important for all of us and how they have difficulty finding food in the winter. The man impressed me with the quiet way he talked and his vocabulary was better than the average working stiff of those days. In an unhurtful non-critical manner, he helped me understand the needless harm in shooting the woodpecker and I remorsefully promised him I wouldn't hunt anymore little birds.
Carlton obviously understood a 10-year-old boy's ignorance and felt badly about having to redirect my outdoor activities. We were not too far from the small cabins where the miners lived and he asked me to come with him because he had something for me. At his cabin he hauled out those big skis and said they were mine. He explained how I could cut a wide rubber band from an old truck innertube and put it around my foot behind the heel, across the strap, and over the toe to hold the ski on.
Surviving that winter now seems a miracle. Found the best width of innertube bands to hold the skis, got high on the mountain side near our log cabin home and turned 'em loose. There was no way to actually guide the descent and the two options for stopping were, hit a tree or crash. I did both of those maneuvers on a regular basis. What probably saved me were two facts, the bands did not really clamp the feet very firmly, and the candle wax I smeared on the base helped a little but didn't produce anything close to blazing speed.
Santa Claus brought my brothers and I some new skis the next Christmas of 1939 and the big old pair was stowed away in our slab garage. Somehow they weren't thrown out when the family moved to town during the war and eventually ended up in my own garage after Iris and I were married. While Sid and Millie Goodrich were remodeling the old Great Northern's Izaak Walton Inn into a recreational hideaway in the late 70s, I think, they had dinner with us and Sid saw the skis. Asked what I wanted for them and I told him he was welcome to take 'em. He did that and the rest is history.
Next time you're visiting the Izaak Walton Inn, look at those ancient skis high up on the fireplace and like Carlton Thornton … try to forgive me for shooting that little woodpecker.
(Correction - In last week's column I made reference to a few of Montana's outstanding U.S. Senators. An accidental typo in the first paragraph changed my adjective "famous' Mike Mansfield to "infamous." It's not a big deal, but you readers know Mike Mansfield was one of the men I most admired and he was certainly the most "FAMOUS" person ever sent to Washington.)
G. George Ostrom is a Kalispell resident and a national award-winning Hungry Horse News columnist.