The Other Lake I Grew Up On

I have been around for a long time now and still have not managed to figure that out definitively.

When I was a kid growing up in the lake effect snow rich town of Fort Erie Ontario, we tended to take the winters in stride. There were snow forts to be constructed, skating rinks to be scraped and watered, the driveways and sidewalks of the older citizens to be shoveled, hills to be sledded down, cars to be hopped on the slick snowy streets and romance to be pursued at the Fort Erie arena on public skating days.

For these and the fact that there was always at least a foot of snow on the ground pretty much all winter long, we never got all maudlin and depressed about the winter. We just jumped in with both guns blazing, quite literally if you were friends with Larry Jackson whose dad’s hobby was making wooden replicas of all different types of machine guns and rifles he saw during his time in the war.

We would all take those guns and head down to a place called the Sugar Bowl, which is also where we would do our sledding. It was, as the name implies, a rather large bowl, surrounded on two sides by woods and a small creek.

Here we would stage little mock wars with each other. These could go on for hours, and because we were constantly bobbing a weaving through the trees trying to stay alive, whatever chill was in the air was mostly lost on us.

Then we would all go back to Larry’s house and his mom would feed us hot chocolate and cookies.

As I grew older and interested in girls, I met a girl named Jean Brown. She was British and lived down near Waverly Beach on Lake Erie. When I would come to visit her we would bundle up and go down to the lake, which was really a whole other side of winter on display as you can see from the pics above.

Fort Erie is right on the corner of Lake Erie and the Niagara River, and even though it wasn’t called Lake Effect at the time, the wind whipping eastward from Colorado and eventually up the Ohio Valley and across the whole length of Lake Erie created as scary a sight as I had ever seen in my young life.

The ice formations looked like they had been zapped by a super villain and fierce wind on the open water blew up waves of 10 to 15 feet, that crashed to the shore and made a sound like bad-ass thunder.

Jean and I would sit inside the shelter of the 5 foot drainage pipe on makeshift log stools that someone unknown to us had put there. And we would just watch the endless contortions of that wind and water, and marvel at the sound and fury of it all.

These days, it takes me a little longer to get used to the idea of hats and earmuffs, layers of clothing, and real shoes that I have to wear to deal with winter. But once I am out in it, my genetic memory kicks in and and I head up to the shore of another lake to see what’s up.

A lot of people will tell you that they hate the winter because it keeps them inside. But I think it’s all in your attitude. I can’t imagine how boring it would be to live somewhere where the seasonal changes weren’t as dramatic as the ones I have experienced all my life.

Maybe when I’m really old, I’ll change my tune, but for now, bring it on. I’m from Fort Erie, so winter can’t really show me anything new.

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