Story Time--The Ice House Cat

[Brian Rupnow]

The Ice House Cat
Long years ago, back about 1955, I went to public school in L’amable, Ontario. This was a charming little village, about 50 miles south of Algonquin Park, near Bancroft. The village boasted a school, a general store, two sawmills and a church.
I lived down a side-road about a mile past the general store, which was built at the corner of Tait Lake.
The man who owned the general store, Morris Adams, had an ice house. Now for all of you too young to know just what the heck an ice house was-----This was pre hydroelectricity in that part of Ontario, so food was kept cold in ice-boxes during the summer, not refrigerators. Every winter, Morris and his sons would carve huge blocks of ice 18” square from the frozen lake, and store them in the ice house. About 3” was left between the edges of all the ice blocks, and this space was filed with sawdust from one of the local mills. Then after spreading 6” of sawdust on top, another layer of ice blocks was added, and so on until it was filled to the very top. I believe a block of this ice cost some ridiculously low price like 35 cents or so, and would keep your ice box cool for about 10 days in the summer before you had to replace it. The sawdust insulated the ice from the heat of summer, and it would last right through to early fall in the ice house.
For some reason which I never knew, there was a space left under the floor of the ice house ---perhaps for ventilation to keep the floor from rotting from the constant moisture.----A space which was inhabited by about 5 semi feral cats.
Morris also kept row boats for rent in the little cove on Tait Lake, just down from the ice house. Yes, he was the village’s entrepreneur!!
One evening in late spring, as I was walking home from school I spied one of Morris’s cats setting in the back of one of the rowboats which was pulled up on the shore. I thought this would be a splendid opportunity to take the cat swimming!!!
Stealthily I snuck up on the boat, and with one quick lunge pushed the boat out into the water and leapt on board, with a now very alarmed cat standing and hissing in the far end of the boat. Fortunately there was a broken paddle in the boat, so I paddled out about 50 foot from shore and promptly flipped the cat out into the lake. What a laugh!!!
But wait!!! Something’s very wrong!!! The cat was a long haired variety, something like a Persian, and after about 3 or 4 minutes of squalling and thrashing around, the damned thing started to sink. Now it was never my intention to drown the cat.---I just wanted it to swim.-----For fun.
So, thinking quickly, I offered the broken paddle to the cat to save it. The cat promptly swarmed up the paddle, up my outstretched arm, and onto the top of my head, where it sunk in all 16 claws and clung for dear life.
And wouldn’t you know it---that’s when Morris decided to come out back of his store to get a block of ice for a customer!!!
So here I am, paddling frantically for shore, bleeding like a stuck pig, with a firmly anchored cat on top of my head that has its claws dug in so deeply I can’t dislodge it.
I think Morris knew what was going on the moment he seen this sorry spectacle, for he began to laugh uproariously. As soon as I got near shore the cat made about 5 giant leaps and disappeared under the ice house.
Much abashed, bawling like a new babe, and shedding blood from numerous claw marks and scratches, I beat feet for home.---and declared therewith, that I would never again attempt to take a cat swimming!!!

Brian Rupnow---October, 2011

 

[dalem9]

Well Brian it was bee's for me .I was about ten and was at higgen's lake State park .Well I had to pee and the out house was way-way back in the woods .So I deicded to stop behind a tree ,yep the bee's didn't like me peeing on their nest .I run back into the lake and went under and every time I came up for air they would get me again .So it was off to the Doc.'s for me I think of that every time I pee behind a tree.Dale

 

[Harold Lee]

Brian - What a hoot!!! Thanks for sharing your story. I think that is the best cat story I've heard... Karma to you for saving him.

Harold

 

[///]

Haha, thanks for the laugh.
Same as Harold, Karma.

 

[te_gui]

That story reminds me of one I happened to witness when I was around 12 or so. I worked for a dairy farmer who decided it was time to fix a few of the barn tomcats. There was an old guy who I think had gone to veterinary school at some time in the distant past, but wasn't practicing. He did a fair amount of animal doctoring and was somewhat of a local legend amongst the farmers. His preferred method of surgery was to stick the cat head down in a work boot, leaving only the tail and work area exposed. This took a little bit of a rodeo, but once the sharp bits were all tucked away and the laces pulled tight, the operation commenced. Of course like most farm surgeries, this was done with any sort of anesthesia, so the sounds coming from down in the boot were not friendly by any means. Once it was done, and a splash of "Blu-kote" disinfectant applied, the bot holder (not me) was instructed to dump the cat out to the side. He missed that part and tipped it out directly in front of him. The cat promptly proceeded to make for high ground and maximum velocity with all claws engaged. The path it chose was straight up the holder, and then from the top of his head, about a 5' jump to the hay loft, leaving about a 2 " laceration in the guy scalp. This was stitched up by the "surgeon" and the other 3 operation completed in a less spectacular fashion. They seemed to be none the worse for the wear afterwards, didn't see much of them for a few days, but they eventually rejoined the rest of the pack around the milk dish. This story still gets recounted at the local cafe, generally to much laughter at the injured party.

 

[Brian Rupnow]

Te_gui---I like that story a lot. I don't want to start another thread and get shot for too many off topic posts, however here is another "cat" story that everyone who was a boy at some time in their lives will be able to relate to.---Brian

The Flying $h*t Houses
In the days of my miss-spent youth, during the 1950’s, there is one tale I tell that never ceases to bring tears of laughter to one of my friends who grew up in the same era, but in the city of Ottawa, far removed from the L’amable of my youth.
The big old water powered sawmill at the end of L’Amable Lake was in a deep valley, and had absolutely enormous hills on each side running down to the mill bridge. This happened to also be the main street of “Old L’Amable.
My very best friend in the entire world lived with his mom, dad, and numerous assorted brothers and one sister about 200 feet up from the mill on the old L’Amable road. His father like mine was a logger who worked in the surrounding camps and also did a bit of trucking to help feed the family.
Now David and I had a “Need for Speed”!!! That is to say, the faster we could travel, the better we liked it. Of course, being 11 years old at the time severely limited our means of going fast, as automobiles were out of the question. We did have some old fourth or fifth hand me down bicycles, but David had a paper route, and he had a parcel carrier on the front of his bike just slightly smaller than the Queen Mary. We had learned that to go fast on that bicycle was to court death from scores and abrasions ---the damn thing was a pig to steer at anything more than a fast walk.
Wintertime was okay, because we both had Bob-Sleds, and during January and February, many world speed records were set as we raced them “Hell come leather” down the icy road past David’s house. I’m absolutely certain that we occasioned at least one or two heart attacks amongst the older folks in the village who were unfortunate enough to be driving their cars up or down the road at the same time as these feats of “Daring Do” took place.
David and I were veteran dump scroungers, and the summer we were 11 or 12 it seemed that just about every woman in the village decided to send their old baby carriage to the local dump. Perhaps this was their way of declaring an end to the Baby boom which had been going on ever since all of our fathers come home from WW2.
David and I quickly realized that we had an almost endless supply of wheels and axles to create “soap box racers”. Neither of us had ever seen a soap box, but Hey---we did read comics when we could sneak them at the local general store, before old Mrs. Turriff would catch us and say “Now you boys put them back in the rack RIGHT NOW if you’re not going to buy them!!! Buy them???—Huh---whats that??
We built wooden frames and bodies from left over and “scavenged” lumber, attached the baby carriage wheels and tires, and instantly were transformed from 11 year old backwoods kids to Stirling Moss clones. (And for those of you who don't know who he was, he happened to be the fastest race car driver in England at that time.)---For some reason, us Canadian boys seemed to know a lot more about what was going on in England at that time than what was going on in USA.
And Oh My God---Would they ever go!!! Once you had lugged them to the top of the hill, which seemed to us a bit like that mythological fellow who was doomed to roll a rock uphill forever, the race was on. I’m not sure how fast we would go, but by the time we flew across the sawmill bridge at the very bottom of the hill, The Green Helmet had nothing on David and I.
Now remember---We were kids. We were damned bright kids, but kids, all the same. We hadn’t reached the stage of technology where brakes were a part of the picture. The current thinking was “If something or somebody jumps out in front of you in mid flight—Yell as loud as you can, steer around them, or hit the ditch and pray to the baby Jesus for a soft landing!!!
We discovered that a certain amount of braking could be achieved by pressing the sole of you running shoe against the front tire. This sort of worked, but if you were going too fast when this brake was applied, the sole of your running shoe would reach ten million degrees in two seconds and put a big ugly blister on the sole of your foot.
I was an only child, so had the privilege of a new pair of running shoes each summer. David on the other hand, had a whole house full of siblings, so often went barefoot all summer until school started. The bottoms of his feet would take on the consistency of bull hide by the end of summer.
It was David’s father who christened our racers “Flying $h*t Houses” and the name stuck. It had a certain “Pizzazz” to it, and David and I readily adopted it.
Phil and Mary Green were an old couple who lived half way down the hill, and Mary had a whole HERD of housecats. David and I had been threatened with mayhem different times for throwing stones at Mary’s cats when walking home from school, so we gave the cats a wide birth. Mary we could contend with, but Old Phil had a carved wooden walking stick, and had no qualms about applying it righteously to the shoulders of young miscreants who messed with any cat of Mary’s.
The Saturday afternoon of the ACCIDENT was a beautiful August day. David and I had been swimming up at Tait Lake in the morning, but got a bit bored with cannonballing the tourist ladies to hear them squeal, so we decided a good drag race would be a great way to start the afternoon off.
We dragged our valiant four wheel steeds up to the top of the hill, checked for any oncoming traffic, and away we went!!! David got the jump on me, and was leading by about one car length when we went rocketing past Phil and Mary’s driveway. Just as we were passing the driveway in a cloud of dust and thunder, one of the damn cats decided this would be an opportune time to cross the road. David nailed the front tires with both bare feet, realized immediately that flames were about to burst from the soles of said feet, then ran full bore into the cat. His cart went into a spin, and I nailed him broadside, and then we both went slithering around in circles at three thousand miles an hour, until we ended up in the hedge at the side of the road.
Neither David nor I sustained any lasting damage, but the cat---Oh my God---the poor cat!!! Somehow its spine came out through the top of its head, and to say it was messy would be a grave understatement. One of us quickly shed a tee shirt to wrap the victim in before anybody could see what happened, and as soon as we extricated our carts from the hedge we very quickly escaped down to the mill bridge and found a boulder as big as our head to wrap up in the tee shirt with the cat and drop the whole gory mess into the mill stream where it quickly sank out of sight.
A few days later we happened to cross paths with Mary, and she did ask us if we had seen one of her cats, apparently it had gone missing. We both perjured our souls to everlasting fire and swore to Mary that we hadn’t seen her cat, but we’ be sure to keep a look out for it.
Ah, but to be a boy again, and race Flying $h*t houses down L’Amable hill!!!

Brian Rupnow----October-2011