They Can’t Do That…

It was a cold and beautiful day in Minnesota in the winter of ‘73 when I clipped on my cross-country skis to explore the northern woods with some friends.

We set out upon an abandoned logging trail that few creatures regularly saw, except for the plentiful deer and other woodland critters. The leader sliced a clean set of tracks in the freshly fallen powder as we glided behind with little effort. After our initial chatting back and forth about the joy of just being outdoors, we settled into silence disturbed only by the rhythmic swoosh of skis on snow.

After a while, we started to hear a low buzzing sound. Assured that it wasn’t the Minnesota state bird, culex pipiens, we grew disturbed as the sound gradually grew louder and louder until it was an incessant, ear splitting, and grinding roar thousands of times (How loud is loud?) louder than the long absent mosquitoes.

As we approached a fork in the path, coming down one of the trails sped a roaring and hissing machine that glided to a stop before us. The jovial young man got up off his snowmobile, cut the engine and struck up a conversation. “Say, what are you doing out here so far from civilization?” he said. “Trying to find some tranquility away from civilization,” we replied. The conversation went downhill from there.

He was a local boy, of course, but so were many of us. We chatted about some things in common and then the conversation shifted to talking about his snowmobile, its decibel level, and gasoline and, of course, the 1973 Energy Crisis that was affecting us all.

“Aren’t you a little concerned about riding that “gas hog” right now given the fuel shortage and lines at the gas pump? Don’t you think that someday we’ll run out of gas or it will be so expensive that you won’t be able to ride these machines simply for recreation?” Without a moment’s hesitation, the man declared with certitude “Nope. They can’t do that…there’s just too much demand!”

Each of us, not wanting to become entrapped in a long and futile economics debate, quickly ended the conversation and we parted our ways. He went down one path. We took the one less traveled. “I doubt if I should ever come back.”