Column: Pothole Prairie

Sliding on a 100-foot chute of ice down the bank of North Twin Lake in Calhoun County, Iowa, and several hundred across the ice is a thrill — and a skill — not duplicated anywhere.

Not in a video game.

Not by a roller coaster.

Not from sledding at your neighborhood hill.

This excitement comes only from a toboggan slide. And I was quite fortunate to grow up only a block from one. I became quite good at steering the toboggan so it would go way out onto the ice.

Too bad there is not one around here still. Ed Shannon is going to write about former toboggan slides in Albert Lea for the Lifestyles section of March 13.

The one I grew up near is at Twin Lakes Bible Camp, now called Twin Lakes Christian Center. The camp was and still is managed by the same denomination of church that I attended as a child — the Evangelical Covenant Church. I attended the one north of Pomeroy, Iowa.

The closest Covenant Church around here is Vista Evangelical Covenant Church north of New Richland. You can usually find them where Swedes settled. It’s a great denomination.

But I digress.

Toboggan slides are pastime holdovers from the 19th century and early 20th century. I don’t know when the one at Twin Lakes was built, but I enjoyed it in the 1980s, before it received its neat renovation in 2003 or so to look like a silo.

The chute is made of wood and is covered with carpet. The carpet holds the moisture well when the camp staff wets it in the winter. Layers of ice build up until the surface is smooth. Camp Director Scott Larsen told me in an e-mail message that they throw in a little snow, too, to create a low-friction surface.

“The bottom of the wooden toboggans have three nylon rails which create tracks that guide the sled straight,” he wrote.

The camp staff also hose down the lake ice, so even if other parts of the lake had snow, the toboggan slide area has ice.

I used to go to the camp in different ways. I sometimes would go as a legitimate camper or camp counselor. I sometimes would go as part of a one-day activity with our church or youth group. I sometimes would go when it was open to the public. I sometimes would go as a friend of the son of the camp director at the time, whose family lived across the street from me.

And I sometimes would sneak into the camp and act like I was a camper; nobody seemed to know I wasn’t with them. I would just blend in with whatever youth group from who knows where was using the slide. They were usually several churches anyway who didn’t quite know each other completely.

At the top, two or three people ran the fun. A board (which you can see at the top of the chute in the pictures) holds the toboggan in place while four people pile on. While waiting in line, they had decided who would ride in what position. To some people, the front spot was the scariest. To others, it was the most fun. I liked riding in the back because the person in back steers — my specialty.

The operators lifted the board and gave the toboggan a little push.

Zoom! Down the chute and onto the ice we flew. Put a right hand on the ice, the toboggan would go right. Put a left hand down, it would go left. To go farther than other toboggans, I would keep us on the icy area as long as possible, then — if there was snow on the ice — I attempted to align our toboggan with existing tracks in the snow beyond the end of the icy area.

That, and I had long arms yet weighed a little more than a feather, so I had a low-friction-good-steering factor.

Once we hit untouched snow, our speed slowed. But if we had a lot of momentum when we got there, we could make a record that was hard for other tobogganers to break.

To this day, campers enjoy the toboggan slide day or night. Some even prefer the nighttime, as it adds to the thrill. Imagine shooting out onto the darkness of a lake at night.

Larsen told me that one youth group named the chute the Tower of Doom, and they enjoy night tobogganing, too.

I must wonder why more places don’t have toboggan slides anymore. It seems like TV came along, and we all stopped getting together for these kind of fun activities. Bible camps are a great place to get away from TV and the other screens we stare at all too often and actually do some activities together, whether it is singing as a group, zooming down a cable ride, paddling kayaks on a lake or playing carpetball.

Or getting a kick out of a toboggan slide.

Tribune Managing Editor Tim Engstrom’s column appears every other Tuesday.