Memories of the Inn
Our artist son and I have talked occasionally about doing a children's book about my growing up in a small country inn. To inspire him to do some drawings, I jotted down some memories. So far, it's been in vain - he has yet to do some pictures. But anyway, I figured I'd post the stories here.
Christmas Trees for the Inn
One of our Christmas rituals was for my Dad and me to go get our Christmas trees. Notice that I said trees in the plural - that’s because we had to get four of them. The biggest and best one was for the front living room of the Inn, where it would stand just inside the front door and be the first thing guests would see when they came in. Another tree was our private family Christmas tree that went up out back in “the ell”, our family quarters tacked onto the rear of the Inn. My Father’s parents lived in the “chalet” up on the hill behind the Inn and they needed a tree for their living room. I still remember how they decorated their tree with just silver and blue lights and ornaments. And finally a fourth tree was needed from which Dad could cut greenery to adorn the lamp posts, fence and front porch.
So on the appointed day, Dad and I would get into the big old 1954 Pontiac station wagon, light green with fake wood on the sides and “Holiday Inn - Intervale NH” painted on each side. We had plenty of forest and woodland to search; we usually would drive up the East Branch Road a few miles and then up onto an old farm road. The farm was long-abandoned and the fields were well on their way to turning back into woodlands. The depth of snow would determine how far up the road we could go. Leaving the car, we’d take the saw and plod off through the snow in search of four perfect trees. The afternoon light would be fading as we tried to make our choices. Dad would crawl in under each tree, snow falling down his collar, to cut it. When we had our four, we’d then drag them back to the car and tie them on top.
Dad would usually have to back down the old farm road for there was no place to turn around in the snow. We’d head back down the East Branch Road, passing ice-covered Flat Rocks - not so inviting in December! Back at the Inn Mom would get the hot water boiling and make us some hot chocolate, which tasted mighty good and warmed us up nicely.
Putting the trees up would take us several days, and actually by the time we had all three of them decorated, some of the fun and excitement had faded a bit. The tree for the front living room was always the first to go up, followed by “ours” in the ell. The main thing I recall about that tree were the strings of bubble lights that we had for it. They had to be clipped to the branches just right so they’d remain upright. As they warmed up, little bubbles would rise through the liquid. Pretty neat!
At least while doing the decorating of the trees we were warm. That was rarely the case when it came to the outside greenery. Invariably the day that Dad tackled that would be cold and windy. As I got older, I would help tack up the greenery and the colored lights. The lights ran all along the edge of the porch roof and we used U-shaped staples to fasten the lights and greenery. It was next to impossible to handle the staples with gloves on, so we’d have to take a break every so often in order to warm up our hands. We also decorated the lamp posts and fence with springs of greenery in a big red bow. We probably put up about a dozen of them.
And I almost forgot the lighted Santa in a sleigh and the reindeer that Dad put up on the side of the Inn. It was a pretty old decoration that Mom and Dad had gotten some years before ever buying the Inn.
Gotta admit - the place looked awfully nice when everything was up.
The Skating Rink
My Dad decided that we could provide some wholesome winter family fun for guests by building a skating rink out behind the stone cottage motel. Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into. The first issue: how big should it be? There was plenty of space in the back yard, so Dad decided it ought to be about the size of a badminton court. The next problem was getting the ground reasonably flat. Most of the area was flat, but we did have to dig out some earth in one corner that was a little higher. We put in a low retaining wall of stones from the brook in that corner.
Since the rink would be used mostly in the evening after dark, Dad installed some floodlights on a telephone pole that was right beside the rink. And to add the proper mood, he put up an outdoor speaker connected to his hi-fi set in our family living room.
Now all we needed was some ice. Oooh boy, what a project this turned into! The first thing to be done each fall was put up some wooden side boards all the way around the rink. These were about a foot high. Then in mid-December or thereabouts, as soon as it started staying pretty cold, we’d begin the process of building up the ice. The first year we learned how NOT to do it. We just put a running hose out, letting the ice build up a bit and then moving it every so often. This did not result in a smooth surface at all. We tried different lawn sprinklers, but that didn’t work either.
What did work was long, cold time spent standing there with a spray nozzle on the hose and gently, slowly moving across the surface. Dad and I would take turns, relieving each other so we could warm up our hands - that water through the hose was cold, even with the thickest mittens we had. It would take a week or two of nightly spraying to build up the ice thick enough to cover the grass. After that it was a matter of trying to keep the icy surface smooth.
When not building up the ice, we’d have to haul the hoses in to the basement of the Inn to keep them from freezing.
One of my main chores became keeping the ice free of snow. The first few years I had to shovel the rink by hand. I talked Dad into getting one of those big wooden push scoops. Off one end of the rink I’d build up a large ramp of snow, up which I’d have push the loaded scoop and dump it off the end. After a few years we joined the age of machinery and Dad bought a snow blower. This first one wasn’t too large and after a few storms it couldn’t throw the snow high enough to clear the snow banks. A few years later he bought a larger one, which did a great job. Naturally he got that one just a year or so before I went off to college so I didn’t get to enjoy it that long.
It was all worth it, though - guests really had a great time out there after dinner, especially the kids. It was quite a sight to go out on a snowy evening and watch the skaters gliding around the rink to the sounds of Ray Conniff or Lester Lanin.
The Mighty Toboggan Run
The Inn sat at the foot of a good hill, a nice steep hill. It was covered with lots of huge old white pine trees and most years we kept the undergrowth cleared. My grandparents’ summer house, “The Chalet”, was up at the top of the hill and there was a gravel road from the Inn up to their house. When I was younger, I confined my sledding to the road after it had snowed. One could really fly down the hill belly-whopper style. Sometimes the road would get very icy; it was then a challenge to make it around the corners, especially the one sharp turn about halfway down. I’d pile up some extra snow on the outside of the curve so that the sled could swing up the snow bank. We had to be careful down at the bottom, for the road began right in the parking lot of the Inn and there might be cars on the move.
About the time I was 12 or so, I felt that the road was getting a little too tame for my taste and I needed a new challenge. As I stood at the top of the hill and looked down toward the Inn, in my mind’s eye I could see a fantastic toboggan chute winding down through the pine trees into the back yard. I could also see a lot of work ahead. But hey, the outcome would be well worth it.
First I had to lay out the course, trying to take advantage of the lay of the land to help with the turns. Then came Phase 1, the manual labor involving a snow shovel. I spent a couple of weeks (every afternoon after school and on weekends) piling up snow for the banked turns. It took a lot of shoveling and then I had to pack it down as I piled it up. Every so often I’d take a test run….and would go shooting off the course where the banking wasn’t high enough. That was a tad scary because of all the pine trees I could smash into, but I was always able to use my feet and hands to steer and slow down. And then I’d go back up and add some more snow to the spot where I went off course.
Eventually I made it all the way down without leaving the chute. Yeay! At last.
But you can imagine what came next - it wasn’t fast enough for me. Any decent toboggan run worth its salt is coated with ice. This led to Phase 2. We had hundreds of feet of garden hose, some of which we used for flooding the skating rink. I hauled that hose all the way up the hill and began spraying down the chute. At first the water sank into the snow, but eventually it began to build up a crust and that got thicker and harder over several days.
Time for a test run. Oops - the ice has made it a lot faster, so I had to build up the banks more so as to stay in the chute. Eventually I had a complete run without going off.
Now my fun became getting the city-slicker kids that were guests at the Inn to ride down the hill with me. One night several of us went out after supper, in a snowstorm, to take a few runs. The snow on top of the ice made the chute even faster and about halfway down we went shooting over the bank on a turn. Now we’re out in pine tree country, in the dark, snow blowing in our eyes, praying we’ll miss the trees. Somehow we made it. When the toboggan came to a stop, I looked to my right and there RIGHT beside us was the barn. We had come down toward the back of it and fortunately were over just enough that we went along parallel to the side of the barn, just 2-3 feet away from it. Had we been that far to the right, we would have smashed right into the back of it.
Well, of course, these wimpy kids had to run inside and tell them parents what had happened. And of course then their parents tell my parents. The dreaded edict came down: destroy the toboggan chute.