88. Memory break

I know that it was 10:00 a.m. on a Wednesday in February, and I think it was in 1988. It was cold and the sky was magnificent—like today’s sky.  

Gerry McNamee walked into the small corner of Ralph Swin hart’s engineering office on Enterprise’s Main Street—where I shared Ralph’s computer and managed my new Pika Press publishing company and started dreaming a new thing called Fishtrap. (Pika Press stumbled on for a few years, publishing a few books that did not become best sellers but pleased some local history buffs and baking enthusiasts; Fishtrap lives on.) Gerry said it was a fine day to go ice skating on Wallowa Lake. 

 

So, we did go ice skating on Wallowa Lake. Out of the car at the foot of the Lake, we toted skates to the frozen shore. It was a beautiful day—the temperature must have been in the single digits; the sun had climbed over the East Moraine, and there was a fine layer—maybe a quarter inch—of hoar frost on the ice-covered lake. We tied on our skates, pulled on our mittens and pulled down our stocking caps—and glided off.

 

I learned to skate young in Minnesota, but we moved to California when I was ten and I’d not made the transition to roller skates (this before the aligned single rollers, when roller skates were clunky, many wheeled things you strapped to shoes).  I’d taken it up again after moving to Wallowa County in 1971, but was only a workmanlike skater. I was not graceful skating backward and making sharp turns skate over skate. 

 

But on that Wednesday on Wallowa Lake Gerry and I were speedskaters. We headed for the broken topped pine a mile or two up the eastern shore. We swung our arms and listened to the swoosh of skates through frost on ice. I don’t think we stopped for breath until we reached that goal. Then we laughed and chortled at our private pleasure. No one else in the County, no one else in the whole world was there that day to earn that pleasure. 

 

Gerry’s gone now; I’d be afraid to get on skates at the Lake—though I might risk it on a small rink with side rails to catch me. But the mind and memory are sometimes wonderful, and on this cold Thursday in 2021 I can still hear the swish of four skates and see a glorious grin on Gerry McNamee’s face the day we skated the Lake alone. 

 

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