the Walnut Diary

Thank you, Quora contributor, for this invitation to recount an off-road wheeled experience.

I guess I’ll have to go back to my student days at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. It was 1970. I rode my one-speed bike throughout the winter, and had become quite adept at controlling it on glare ice. One winter day I looked out onto Lake Ontario to see a vast sheet of perfectly clean and smooth ice. The ice boats were making their way out in the light breeze. I dropped down a boat launch ramp onto the lake.

Later on they put in a bubbler for the two-mile ferry route to Scott Island, a large land mass outside Kingston Harbour, but at the time drivers ran the ice and took their chances. I rode across the ice bridge to the island. Cool!

I should mention that regular 1960’s bicycle tires, if you let them dry, gripped glare ice surprisingly well. Steering and balance weren’t a problem on this day’s frosty surface.

I turned right at the island and toured the Kingston shoreline, occasionally passed by ice boaters. Man, would I love to have one of those! But I had picked up a bit of a tail wind which made my progress easier. Eventually I came to a wide bay which gave me a bit of the gulps, but I coasted across Collins Bay with the tailwind and fetched up on the opposing shore.

It was getting dark, the wind was rising, and I had covered over twenty miles, so I hauled my bike up a steep, rocky bank and rode up into the suburb of Amherstview where I knocked on my uncle’s door and asked for a ride back to campus. He was a bit gobsmacked by my caper, but I had had an awesome off-road experience on a huge slab of perfect ice.