My Daddy’s Mountain Stories – Part Two

Another excerpt from my book about growing up in the mountains. In remembrance of my wild and crazy mountain man Dad!

…….The snow brought fun times as well, while my daddy was still alive.  He would invite our friends from town to come up and hang out with us.   Mysteriously, it was considered fun to come to our home in the mountains no mater how rough the living conditions were, and many kids would arrive ready for a snowy adventure.  My dad would tie inner tubes together in a long string usually four long and then fasten them to the back of his Jeep.  Kids covered in colorful snow suits, scarves, hats and coats would jump hap hazardly onto the tubes and off we’d go.  My dad never seemed concerned with the mortality of other people’s children, or for us now that I think about it.  We would race up and down the streets of Marble looking no doubt like the biggest parade that tiny town had ever seen!  There were kids screaming and flailing and laughing until my dad would inevitably take a turn too sharp and the last one or two tubes would slam into the ice walls that lined the streets.  These ice walls were made from the snow plows pressing the snow over and over into the corners of the street until it was nothing but a frozen barricade.  Small human bodies would be strewn all about the road, limp and moaning, holding their heads and swearing they were done riding.  Some would climb up in the Jeep for awhile and take a break as my dad would laugh and continue on, always unimpressed with other people’s suffering in his fantastic adventure.  Usually any kid that got in the Jeep and swore off the tubes would eventually come crawling back to the party ready to give it another try come hell or high water, life or death!  It was just too fun.  You knew if you died by destroying your head on a wall of ice, you would die happy so we all just kept at it until the sun would go down and the cold drove us inside.

My daddy liked fun and he liked to see us have fun and since my dad was crazy, fun sometimes happened in weird ways. We learned that in the Winter months in Marble you do not go out without your snow suit.  Even if you were going to get the newspaper, a snow suit was the best bet for surviving any trek, even just out to the driveway.  So my brother and I wore snow suits whenever we decided to leave the safety of our house.  Therefore in the Winter it was not uncommon, no matter the temperature, to see the Hamby kids riding in the back of my dad’s pickup truck, laughing at how miserably cold we were.  Somewhere along the line, one of us came up with the idea that since our snow suits were slippery we should be able to slide on snow with nothing more than our suits.  We created great snow slides at the edge of the house where snow had slid off the roof and built up.  This led to another brilliant idea. If we could reasonably slide down snow we should also be able to be drug on snow like a human toboggan.  Thus what we called “being drug behind” was invented.  We would ask dad, “Dad! Can we get drug behind?” and my dad would say “Sure!”  So Zeb and I would find some grasp under the bottom edge of the bumper of my dad’s truck and lie flat on the road on our stomachs and wait.  My dad would fire up the truck and put it into gear and we would get giddy with expectation.  I can only imagine what it must have looked like to the residents of that tiny town to see my father’s truck going down the street with two children being drug behind on the icy roads, holding onto nothing but the bumper.  I should think that it could have been easily taken for some sort of cruel punishment to see two brightly clad bodies bumping along behind a pickup, but of course the laughter told otherwise.

However it should be noted that’ being drug behind’ also had some unpleasant aspects, like the random chunk of ice or rock that might be lying in the road.  Large bumps could also be painful and the trucks exhaust was pretty annoying but overall a fun experience.  And it must have been safe, after all, my daddy let us do it.

G.R.

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