I’m a bit afraid to say this – considering all the Polaris machines I’ve seen in the ditches lately – but I’ve always been an Arctic Cat girl. It’s a family thing. When I was a kid we had two – a 1975 Panther and a 1976 Puma, which we cleverly nicknamed “the big one” and “the little one.” One belonged to Mom and the other to Dad, but they never rode them. By the time my sister and I were 10, we had made them our own. The machines were purple and green with silver reflective strips on their still squarish fronts. We rode those monsters through the ’80s when they were out of style and we didn’t care, until well into the ’90s when we began to suspect that our beauties were fast becoming beasts. And they were, with their pull-string starters that refused to budge to 13-year-old hands – especially in cold weather – and their box-like design. We didn’t mind the roughness of the ride, though you could feel every bump and rut in the trail. (The goal back then was to unseat your unsuspecting passenger by driving fast over the biggest bump you could find.) We even had flags. The kind you sometimes see on the tail-end of soap-box racers. For years we cruised around in complete disregard for fashion with those little pieces of orange plastic rippling in our 30 mph wind. They were the dorkiest things you’ll ever see, but we didn’t know that then. When Dad first brought them home, we thought they were cool. From then on we crested every hill flag first. Approaching sleds knew we were there by the bouncing flame on the snowy horizon that seemed to have no connection to the earth. No hill could disguise our coming, and of course that was just as Dad had intended. As soon as we found out they were there for our safety and not as markers of our reckless, racing spirit, we boycotted them. Back then those snowmobiles were our gateway to a much bigger and more exciting world. At the first substantial snowfall (sometimes that didn’t happen until January or February, like this winter) we’d harass Dad to get those snowmobiles going. And that wasn’t always such an easy task. The track had to be checked, the gas and oil mixed, the spark plugs changed and even then the beasts sometimes wouldn’t start. But more often than not, a few curses and sore toes later (from kicking the “stupid things”) we’d be on our way. Back then my family lived on the Horseshoe Chain of Lakes, which is part of the Sauk River. The ice was an interstate of snow, dotted here and there with wooded islands that challenged our imaginations and our balancing skills. (Those old machines were much tippier than today’s models.) I can’t count the number of times we got stuck or tipped over trying to climb a steep bank. With our hands removed from the throttle the engine invariably died and we’d have to walk home because Dad was the only one who could get the things going again. The level of his anger coincided with how far he had to walk to reach our crash site. But the open ice was still our favorite. That stretch of arctic speedway where nothing stood in the way of continued acceleration. We’d crouch behind the scratched windshield partly to escape the biting wind and partly because we thought we looked really cool. We flew heedlessly over snowdrifts hardened to cement consistency by the wind that tried to throw us off, looking for that one soft one just to see the snow fly up and fall around us as we burst through it. A few years ago Dad sold those two antiques and bought a 4-year-old Lynx. It was black and pink – a real beauty – and we thought, now we can really go somewhere. But sometimes I miss those old sleds and those old times when 30 mph was fast enough and the rivalry between Arctic Cat and Polaris didn’t mean a thing to me.
