A few nights after our day of feasting on junk food, my wife and I decided to walk over to the skating rink and get some exercise on our ice skates. It was a very windy night, with strong gusts and after a half an hour of normal skating I decided to get creative.
One of the popular winter toys for my students, at the time, was a “Crazy Carpet.” It was sort of a flexible sled, which just consisted of a heavy plastic sheet with hand grips on the front. Like the name suggests, the kids would sit on top of it and pull up the grips so the Crazy Carpet curved up in front of their legs like a toboggan, then fly down the hill.
I noticed that there was a Crazy Carpet laying on the side of the rink so I grabbed it and tried to use it like a sail, letting the wind propel me across the ice. At some point in my ice-sailing, I slipped and fell slamming my cheek against the ice. I don’t know what happened next.
I assume my wife took me home to the teacherage, because I have no memory of the event, but I woke up on our couch, and and kept asking her what had happened, and my wife would repeatedly tell me that I fell on the ice and hit my head. I then would doze off, wake up again, and ask her the same question. I kept doing that over and over.
Needless to say, she was getting pretty concerned. There were no doctors in the camp, or within 120 miles of the camp, and no roads out to drive to a doctor. The only way out of camp would was to fly.
The next morning I taught school for a half a day, and then was able to get a seat and fly out on the company’s DC-3 which traveled the 370 miles back and forth to Williams Lake, twice a week. Once in Williams Lake, I went to the hospital and got an X-ray. The doctor told me just to take it easy for a few days. We spent the weekend in Williams Lake then flew back to camp in -30°F temperatures on Monday morning.
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