A shoe in

The first year crawls in my soul. Entering grade nine I was totally unprepared for that sort of environment. It was closed and florescent.

The student council had decided on a Winter Carnival. The month was right but the weather wasn't. January had been nothing but very cold averaging forty below for a month straight, day and night. So up went all these ice sculptures.

Almost the instant the Winter Carnival was proclaimed to be open, the temperature soared to be very warm. It was over the freezing point. And down went the melting ice sculptures. The sphinx looked horrid in the noon day fog.

A nascent student newspaper began. My first assignment was covering the snow shoeing races. The year before Santa delivered some super duper Faber Athapaskan style racing snow shoes. The snowshoe route was from Penn Lake to the High School which has since been changed to a shopping plaza and Canadian Tire parking lot. Distance was about 2 miles.

Using my high tech, Brownie box camera, I snapped off the first shot as the race began. I snowshoed to the middle of the race and snapped another picture. I hopped to it passing the entire field to get to the finish line five minutes ahead of the pack.

Quietly I stooped down to get that finishing shot which would make it to the news rag. The field finally came into sight. And you know that little lightbulb that sort of click, that third person guy... going... "Hey idiot, you would've won the race."