It’s a quiet weekend at home for me for the holidays. One of my dogs announced in October that what she wanted most for Christmas was puppies – and so I am thus obliged to tend these ungrateful wee dogs in the manger, forfeiting the usual trip home to the farm to visit family.
Something is amiss, and it’s not the aroma of roasted turkey, new John Deere dress gloves or the delighted squeals of last year, when my young nephews ripped apart gladly coloured paper to reveal the soft glint of hatchet blades – a gift from their grandfather. “You’ll have to take those to school…”. It’s not the look in the eyes of their overwhelmed mother.
It’s not the endless family debates, nor the table decorated with festive spirits and their various mixes, or losing at crib, or the clatter of croquinole combat in the living room.
No, what I miss tonight is the intoxicating scent of two-stroke exhaust, the blue-tinged combustion of premix. It’s been unseasonably warm, the snow has melted and with it the unapologetic roar of Arctic Cats and Polaris’ and Yamahas from the streets (and sidewalks) of our small town.
The quiet delivers me back to a time when we spent a cold Christmas eve layered in underwear and sweaters and snowmobile suits. With visiting cousins on board, we pulled loud engines to life to surf across unfenced farmland and up frozen creeks. Stopping in the shelter of a poplar bluff, the Skidoo and Snow-Jet would wait like patient sleek horses while we snapped branches from sleeping trees for a fire. With boots drying in the heat, we warmed our toes, taking turns from a thermos of Kahlua-spiked cocoa while weiners sizzled on coathanger twigs.
We rode at speed and without destination, shattering the dark night air on the strength of a single headlight and the confidence gifted to teenagers. We rode without helmets, without compass and without fear, protected by daylight recall of fence lines and drainage ditches and farm equipment lurking in the snow.
The snow in Saskatchewan falls horizontally. Where the fields are bare and open to the wind, it forms in concrete-hard waves which, when taken at speed, lift roaring machines into air and launch disgruntled jackrabbits from their nervous safety in the leeward hollows of the drifts.
As the evening deepened and we tired of fruitless lupine harassment, we’d take a final turn to the south and away from the hard drifts and the anchoring lights of the distant farmyard to a field that rises to a gentle plateau from where one can see all the way to the northern horizon. With a turn of the key, the big machines would coast darkly to rest on a crisp bed of powder captured from the wind by stalks of wheat stubble.
There, with the warmth of calmed engines wasting into the night, we’d lay back upon the seats under the sudden silence of a hundred million stars and imagine we were lost.
Merry Christmas, one and all.
