Not Everyone Is Terribly Upset At School Closures

On my allocated time outside I can’t help noticing that there is at least one group not terribly upset by all the closures – especially school closures. Children who might have been dreading the next day in school complete with their unfinished homework have suddenly been given a reprieve. Their expressions remind one of the young boy in the film Hope and Glory whose eyes lit up when he turned the corner into his school yard and found that the Luftwaffe had turned his school into a huge mound of rubble. He raised his arms in glee and shouted, ‘Thank you Adolf!’

 

Thank you Adolf!

It also reminds me when I was that boy’s age in our small town in Vermont. When I say small, I mean small. There were – and still are – more cows than people. The only paved road was the one connecting us to a state highway. Everything else was – and still is – dirt. Rutted with bone-jarring bumps in the summer and slick with ice and snow in the winter. As kids we loved the winter when our heavy sleds with steel runners would literally fly down those steep ice-covered roads hoping against hope that Harold with his big snow plow was not coming up the hill around the corner.

But most of all we looked forward to this time of year when the temperatures began to climb above freezing and that glorious ice and snow melted, turning the roads into mud. Real, clinging, knee-deep mud that could pull your boots off. Why did we like this so much? Simple. No school bus could make the rounds picking up and dropping off children. We only had about 50 kids in the school anyway, and most them lived back in the valleys and hills far off the paved road. Ergo, no bus no school.

My mother was never one for sitting still and patiently waiting for the situation to improve. She noted that the skiing conditions in our area were deteriorating with the warmer weather and decided we should take advantage of the ‘mud season’ by going to northern Quebec where the temperatures were still frigid and the snow deep. So we all piled into our car and drove 8 – 10 hours to Mont Tremblant about 100 miles north of Montreal. None of us had passports. But in those simpler days nothing like that was needed just to go to neighboring Canada

 Mont Tremblant is now a flourishing year-round resort complete with all the mod cons. Back then only the actual town on the south side of the mountain resembled a resort with hotels and restaurants. ‘Stuff and nonsense’ would snort my mother as we bounced around the base of the mountain on what amounted to a logging road in the pitch darkness to the less developed north side of the mountain. ‘Are you sure we’re on the right road,’ my sister would wail plaintively as the trees grew ever denser and the ice-covered river ever closer. ‘Of course. Just a few minutes more,’ would come the authoritative answer. Two hours later we would arrive at our destination. There actually was a hotel – a small hotel where the adults and girls would stay. We boys, however, were consigned to what was grandly called the ‘Barracks’ which appeared to be designed and appointed by the same contractor who did the German POW camps featured in many films. There were double-deck wooden bunks and a huge cast-iron stove which – at that time – was stone cold. Thank God for warm sleeping bags, long underwear and thick socks. As for hygiene? Well, let’s just say everything was frozen solid.

Mont Tremblant in earlier times

But there were compensations. When we thawed out the next morning, we found deep fresh snow (most of it outside), wonderful trails, and clear skies. And it was cheap. The bunk house was $1/night. While adults and girls got to eat in the hotel we were sent to the Bears’ Den where you could eat all you wanted for 25 cents. The food may have been indifferent, but the Bears’ Den had the great virtue of being warm.

But the real benefit of these trips was not just the superb skiing. Many of my fellow inmates in what we jokingly called Stalag 17 were students taking a short break from some of the finest schools and universities in the United States and Canada. In the absence of traditional aprés ski activities we spent long hours around the by-now working stove – they with their beers and me with my hot chocolate. These discussions introduced me to a world far beyond my small home town and motivated me to perhaps take my school work a bit more seriously. Many years later I was not at all surprised when one of these students won the Nobel Prize in economics.

Every couple of days my mother would call home to check on the roads. After a week we learned sadly that they were drying out and school should resume in a few days.  We repeated this trip for several years until I had left the small local school and found myself in a place where attendance was not dictated by the state of the roads and studies were taken very seriously indeed. But not so seriously that I couldn’t smile at the memory of Stalag 17 and my mother’s determined efforts to fight through blizzards and ice to get us there and back in one piece.