Snowball fights

One of the things that I enjoyed the most while growing up and going to school in Ekalaka was engaging in snowball fights. New snow did not hold together well enough to make a snowball so you had to wait for awhile. Of course, you couldn't walk on new snow either, but had to wait until it hardened.

Once when I was very young, probably 8 or so, I went over to Mr. Taylor’s house to do his chores. It was April 6th, Easter Sunday, and it had snowed up to my upper chest the night before so I had to make my way through this new soft snow. It hardened up later so I could walk on it and it probably thawed out soon after. Anyway, enough of this tangent.

Throughout grade school we had wonderful snowball fights during recess, lunch and before and after school. There was a kind of creek that flowed alongside the school grounds and on each end was a bridge which the street went over. Those were the forts. We would choose sides, sometimes it was by grades. Actually, sometimes it was boys against girls, the girls more than held their own. The trouble with this was that inevitably some of the boys went over to the girls side and then the rout was on. I never would go over, I was a die hard boy. Sometimes the back door of the school was a fort also.

Every once in a while we would have a truce for the purpose of stockpiling snowballs in the forts. There was always an ebb and flow as one side would almost take over the others fort only to be beaten back again and have to retreat to their own fort. The schoolyards was not the only place to have snowball fights, an impromptu one could start up anywhere. This was almost always done with friends so there were no hard feelings.

There were rules involving snowballs. It was an absolute no, no to make a snowball around a rock or a piece of ice. Of course it was done occasionally. The teachers would sometimes enforce this.

Snowball fights didn’t stop in high school although they probably weren’t as frequent. One time a bunch of us boys, including me, took possession of the front steps of the high school, with a big supply of snowballs and kept everyone else away from coming back from lunch. I might have been the ringleader of this. Of course, it came to a screeching halt when Pop Rowley arrived, boy did our ears hurt, Was it worth it, of course!

This doesn’t have to do with snowball fights, but one of my favorite things to do was to catch a girl in the outhouse and throw rocks or dirt clods at it. Sometimes I threw snowballs also, but it was not nearly as effective. Sometimes I would miscalculate and it would be Mother or another adult; the thing to do then was to get out of there and as far away as possible before they came out.

I probably would hate snow now, but I surely had a lot of fun with snow when I was a kid. Snowballs were just part of it, there was all kinds of games we played in the snow and then there was sledding and tobogganing. I am sure that kids do these same kinds of things there today.