When we last spoke, I was talking about a trip we took to Ottawa. It’s been a while now since we returned, but my story is only slowly coming out.
1. Getting Up Late
On the morning of the third day, my father was waiting for us when we finally rolled out of bed. The eggs were scrambled. The spices were queued up. The onions were diced. He was ready to go while we blissfully slept late. And because he didn’t know our intent that morning and probably doesn’t know our propensity for sleep, he was evidently standing at the ready in the kitchen for hours.
2. The Race
The have this tradition of bed races as part of Winterlude in Ottawa. Teams of five people enter the competition with decorated four-poster metal beds mounted on bicycle tires, and they race the beds up and down Dows Lake. Our plan on Saturday was to watch the races.
When we got there, bundled in layers unknown to the common Texan, they were lining up the beds for a parade past the grandstands. And then they raced the beds in six heats of four beds with four people pushing each bed with one lucky team member riding on top.
Four by four they raced down the frozen lake. There was a bed decorated as a fire truck. There was one as a hearse, complete with flowers. There were teams of doctors in lab coats pushing what perhaps was meant to be a hospital bed. And there were even some folks dressed up as Texas cowboys pushing a bed decorated with red, white and blue balloons.
We stood there on the ice behind the barrier along the stretch where the beds raced and watched the first round of heats until we’d seen them all dash across the red finish line painted on the ice.
3. The Surveyor
There was this tall, official looking guy wandering among the crowd at the races. He was walking up and down, holding a tall pole with a ruler on the side and some kind of mirror on top. As the fair and industrious Trudy took pictures of the beds, he walked up behind us.
I turned around and looked at him. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
So I asked about the pole and the ruler painted down the side and about the mirror on the top. And he explained that he was taking measurements of the ice. He and a colleague on the shore with a laser theodolite were recording the deflection of the ice as people showed up during the day.
“Do you prefer inches or centimeters?” he asked me.
“Either,” I lied.
He explained how the ice was floating on about three meters of water. And he said how thick it was that day. (They take core samples, and you have to watch out for the holes when you’re skating.) And he explained that if the ice deflected more than two inches, they would have to tell the crowd to spread out. And finally he explained that their measurements that day showed a deflection of 28 millimeters.
So we were safe. He smiled and turned to walk back towards the starting line.