Winter had the Midwest lying in state. Cold and snow prevailed with the quiet authority of funeral directors, and the mood of the populace was as moribund as the spirit of last year`s Christmas.
Across wide stretches of the region, snow was knee-deep to tall deer, and it hobbled the citizenry as effectively as leg irons. It made prisons of the roads; and over the woods and wild areas where the intimate secrets of the cold season are whispered, there was a great lockout.
But there was a key: snowshoes!
So on a night when a full moon rolled up over the Wisconsin pine and the temperature was cold enough to keep tomcats home, a pair of snowshoes threw it all open.
The wooden frames and rawhide webbing were a soft, hissing passport to places made inaccessible by the deep snow. They promised entry to the wild, magical spaces among the evergreen trees, and into the areas of inscrutably suspended life in the lowland along the frozen river. The resulting sense of solitude, the sweep of the night sky, the purity of the cold air, and the magnificent quiet were exquisitely therapeutic.
This, then, is the prescription: Get thee to snowshoes and thence to the winter woods. It will tune you up and make you feel vigorous.
Snowshoes?
Hey, as boring as gray days. As outmoded as sleighs. Nothing more than outrageous: cold-weather miracle shoes enabling the demented to walk on frozen water. Simply curious antiques, as in gadgets remembered from grainy old movies about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Nelson Eddy singing to his husky or to Gary Cooper or to Paulette Goddard.
Well, not exactly, my little Nanook.
Snowshoes are making a modest comeback and the reasons are as obvious as the drip on the end of your nose: low cost, physical fitness, ease of learning, safety and the access they provide to unique outdoor experiences.
So even as we gather here with our backsides to the hot stove, snowshoes are coming off Midwestern fireplace walls and down from garage rafters, and hundreds more are being sold at sporting goods stores. They have waited patiently for the snowmobile and cross-country skiing fads to peak, and now they will assume their rightful place as the implement of common sense, dignity and quality recreation in vast areas of the country where winter is as serious, but not quite as long, as pregnancy.
Snowshoes are, of course, older than chicken soup, by about 2,000 years, their existence having been established in Central Asia in 4000 B.C. This fixes their origin in a period from which emerged the wheel, and it poses the question of what our cars might look like today if Detroit had gone for snowshoes instead of wheels.
A better snowshoe
Before there was anybody home in North America, somebody apparently slogged across the Bering Strait on a pair of snowshoes, thus introducing them to the continent. The descendents and successors of this slogger were the Eskimos and the Indians, and because the Eskimos had to contend mostly with ice and wind-packed snow, they did little to develop snowshoes.
But the Indians who moved down into the trees and plains often found themselves up to their quivers in soft snow, and they became clever at making a great variety of snowshoes, using wood for frames and strips of animal hide for lacing.
The first white invaders quickly got into the spirit of things and strapped on snowshoes even as the Indians were teaching them how to light up their first tobacco.
Snowshoes were important in the exploration and development of the continent, and their use as a means of winter travel for utility and recreational purposes continued into the 1800s. Then came immigrants from Scandinavia, bringing to the New World their cherished skis, which they touted as a faster, more exciting means of traversing snow than the snowshoe.
Such claims notwithstanding, the snowshoe remained the implement of choice for legions of trappers, surveyors, woods workers and others who had to get from here to there in the winter and who needed to go safely and easily-with a solid footing-where skis could not take them.
Amid all the utilitarian activity, owners of snowshoes also had a lot of fun. Across much of Canada and the northeastern U.S., snowshoe clubs were formed, meeting regularly in the winter for organized hikes and socializing and games. Some of the clubs had uniforms with colorful sashes, and one Montreal Club even had a song, which, as recorded by William Osgood and Leslie Hurley, authors of ”The Snowshoe Book” (The Stephen Greene Press, 1983) goes in part:
”Here`s to the slim snowshoe/In glory we renew,/Its fame will live and pleasure give/To manly hearts and true.”
New ways to travel
Snowshoes faded rapidly in the North American recreation field with the rise in popularity of downhill skiing beginning in the 1930s. Then came the snowmobile in the 1950s and cross-country skiing in the 1960s.
Through all of this, annual sales of snowshoes remained around the half-million mark, according to Ed Kiniry, president and general manager of Stowe Canoe and Snowshoe Co. in Stowe, Vt. Part of this was due to sales of snowshoes as supplements to snowmobiling. Since then, the U.S. snowshoe market has fallen to about 100,000 pairs a year, Kiniry estimated. Of those, he said, 60 percent is claimed by Canadian manufacturers, particularly the Huron Indians near Quebec.
”They have the advantage over us of lower labor and material costs,” he said. ”And they make the same snowshoe today that they made 100 years ago.” One feature of snowshoe manufacturing in Canada and the U.S. is that most of the lacing work is done in people`s homes under cottage-industry arrangements.
Kiniry`s company, which manufacturers Tubbs snowshoes, shares the remaining 40 percent of the U.S. market with Iverson Snowshoe Co. of Shingleton, Mich., which also makes traditional ash-framed shoes; and Sherpa Designs Inc., which produces innovative metal-framed Sherpa snowshoes in an old brick factory on Chicago`s West Dickens Street.
While Stowe, Vt., and Shingleton in Michigan`s Upper Peninsula are logical places for snowshoe factories, Chicago is not, experiencing snowshoe- depth snow only often enough to skew mayoral elections and exhaust dusty snow-blower inventories. Sherpa is located there because its owner, Jeff Liautaud of Park Ridge, bought the company in 1977 and moved it to Chicago from Tacoma, Wash.
”I spent 15 months looking for a way to get into business,” Liautaud said, ”and then I saw a picture of a Sherpa snowshoe and I said to myself that is what a snowshoe should look like, so I bought the company.”
`The sport of the `90s
Snowshoes haven`t changed much over the centuries, Kiniry said. Recent innovations by Sherpa and by his company, he said, were ”finally bringing the snowshoe into the 20th Century.”
”The future of snowshoes is in improving their technology and making them accessible through recreational outlets such as winter resorts,” Kiniry said. ”I don`t think that someone who works an 8-to-5 job in Chicago is going to go out and buy a pair of snowshoes and then take off through hip-deep snow in the deep woods. But they might like to try snowshoeing under less stringent circumstances, where a trail has been broken and where they can put on a pair of snowshoes and see what they are all about.”
Others promote snowshoe racing as a competitive winter sport. Roland and Denise Tanquay, a father-daughter team in Lewiston, Maine, have coordinated such efforts through the American Snowshoe Union, a 20-club organization affiliated with the International Snowshoe Union, which has 30 clubs in Canada. The union helps conduct competitive events throughout the winter, and Denise, 25, has lost only one of the nearly 200 races in which she has participated.
”It`s the sport of the `90s,” she said. ”And we`re hoping to see it as an exhibition sport at the Winter Olympics in 1994 in Norway.”
Efforts to get snowshoe competition into the Olympics have been going on for decades, according to Jim Tucker, a counselor at Paul Smith College in Paul Smith, N.Y., and chairman of the North American Snowshoe Classic. That race is sponsored by Paul Smith College, and, like most snowshoe competition, it includes events for serious competitors and for those who simply want to experience snowshoes. Typical winning times, Tucker said, have been 15.2 seconds for 100 meters, and 10 minutes 5 seconds for 1,500 meters.
Competitive snowshoe events in the Midwest start in early January and continue through mid-March. (For a schedule, send a business-size, self-addressed, stamped envelope to Cassie McLain, 8720 28th Ave., Merrill, Wis., 54452.)
Picking a pair
Snowshoes come in a half dozen styles and sizes and are made from a variety of natural and synthetic material. Generally, you select snowshoes according to your weight and size, the snow conditions under which they will be used, and the condition of your pocketbook. Prices range from $50 to $200. Snowshoes can be fastened to any good winter foot gear, but it`s wise to choose a binding that holds well and is easy to attach, even with cold fingers.
The dilemma of cold fingers and stiff bindings gave me a momentary start one morning a long time ago when I snowshoed in to spend the night in a winter deer yard and did not bargain for a temperature of 30 below. The next morning, it seemed rather important to get the snowshoes on to navigate the 4 feet of snow for a return to the warmth of civilization. There were some awkward-and very cold-moments before I was able to beat some feeling back into my hands and fasten the leather straps.
Then the walk out on the snowshoes, through pristine wilderness, produced one of my most treasured memories. It came complete with the haunting strains of a pack of seranading coyotes.
Such can be the wondrous world of the snowshoer.
