Today I see in the Calgary weather forecast that we are supposed to get our first few flakes of snow of Winter tonight .
As a kid growing up in a Vancouver suburb in the 70’s I had a pretty laid back lifestyle. I stayed out after school as musch as I wanted, played tennis and swam in the pool and played in the park. This morning though I have been thinking about bumper riding.
When I was 9 or 10 I discovered the joys of bumber riding. The snow in Vancouvber is very wet and slippery and happens only a coule of times in the Winter. When the snow falls in Vancouver it really comes down and it slows traffic and the roads turn into a skating rink.
So with a slippery road and slow cars what is a kid to do? Bumper Riding!
Here is the scoop, the best way to bumper ride. You ahve to find a good long road in a residential neighborhood. The road has to be long so that a car can get a bit of speed up down the street. You wait until the snow is coming down really hard so you can’t be seen and you hide behind a bush….wait….wait as soon as a car comes around the corner you crouch out behind it, put your mittened fingers underneath the back bumper and pull your body in while still crouching down and hang on for the ride. When the ride was over you just let go and let yourself slide on the icy snow until you stopped.
The freedom of bumber riding is great there is an element of fear, there is the dull sounds in the area from the sound relfecting off of the snow and the darkness means that you go from light to shade from streetlights really quickly. A rush that it takes years to forget.
There are really important strategies to remember when you are bumper riding though. You need perfect road conditions that are slippery and before and gravel trucks come by. You need to have a bit of traffic because it gets cold waiting for cars. And of course the more people that tried to hop on made the car heavier and a chance that the driver would figure out that you were on. I always found 7-9 PM was a good time, especially once VCRs first started to get popular and people would go out to get a video.
There was always and element of danger in Bumper Riding. one alternative was to hold the back tire wheelwell, this way you could get a better hold then the bumper but risked falling under a wheel. No one cared about the danger and this is part of the great memory, kids are not afraid.
There was a certain camaraderie between the bumper riders, waiting for the next car, deciding if there were too many people who would get the next car, the stories of long rides and wipouts.
I don’t know if bumper riding still exists, I hope it does. If I get a chance this weekend or this winter I hope I can sneak out and by 9 years old again, rediscover joys of bumper riding and see if I can share the excitement with others.
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