A Norway Story - Ice Shacks and Police
A funny thing happened to me back around 2000. I was a sophomore in high school at the time, less than a year into having a driver’s license and half a decade away from ever caring to even think about owning a cell phone.
The story I’m about to tell you is one that I used to occasionally share with my students when I was in the Navy and teaching at the Nuclear Power School in Goose Creek, South Carolina, from 2010 - 2015. Much like the “Half a Head of Lettuce” story I shared a while back, this tale is mostly true with shades of literary embellishment sprinkled in. There were days at the Power School when my students looked tortured and beaten down by the constant pace, pressure, and aggressiveness of the Navy’s nuclear training pipeline. Sometimes we just needed to take a few minutes to take a deep breath and share a laugh. I would always preface the telling of this story by warning my students that there is an f-word involved. Issuing this warning often left me standing on the podium with 30 students looking at me like, “You know we voluntarily joined the Navy, right? We assumed we might hear an f-word now and then.”
So, with that being said, here we go.
*Names have been changed to protect the innocent.
I grew up in the real small town of Norway, Michigan. This is way up north in the Upper Peninsula. Like, you’ve seen people describe Michigan by doing the hand/mitten thing? Well, there’s a whole other part of the state of Michigan. It’s a totally different world up in the U.P.
Norway. You can imagine what the population looks like. Lots of Scandinavian people.
When I say small, I mean about 2500 people, one stoplight, an entire kindergarten through high school in one big building. I graduated with about a hundred kids, and that was a big class for our school.
Norway is also far enough north to get some real bad winters. I’m talking snow on the ground from mid-November through April or May. Lots of cold and snow and early sunsets during those winter months. The only way to survive winters that long is to embrace quintessential winter activities. Skiing, snowboarding, sledding, ice fishing, snowmobiling, snowball fights, that kind of stuff.
When I was in high school, one of the major cold month pastimes was ice fishing. And the fishing part was totally besides the point. Maybe I should say, people would set up ice shacks on a frozen over lake so they could stand around, hang out, drink beer, and look at the clear and starry winter night sky.
Back then, Vulcan Lake was a prime spot for setting up ice shacks. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, you can look this up on Google Maps. Find Vulcan, Michigan, right next door to Norway, and zoom in on Hanbury Lake, just a little ways south of U.S.-2. I guess Hanbury Lake is the official name, but we always called it Vulcan Lake. All summer long, we would go fishing and swimming down at Vulcan Lake. On the shore across from the boat launch was this really big rock. We were super creative so we called it Big Rock. Yeah, I know. Clearly we were gifted children. We would either hike a beaten path through the woods or just swim right across the lake to get to Big Rock. Once we were out there, we would jump, flip, and dive into the water below. It was also common for us to perform pro wrestling moves on each other as we sailed through the air. You know someone is a true friend when you can exchange diamond cutters and power bombs and everyone still goes home happy.
Regular access to Vulcan Lake was down this roughly three-quarter mile narrow dirt road with a boat launch and a little parking lot at the end. When people were hanging out at the shacks, there would be a bunch of vehicles parked haphazardly in the parking lot and you could see people standing around out near the middle of the lake. Obviously, the local police knew what kind of stuff was going on out there, so they always kept a close eye on the parking lot and who was coming and going. The Norway police would have been all too happy to bust some kids with a dreaded Minor in Possession of Alcohol (better known simply as an MiP) ticket. The shitty thing about getting an MiP was that the recipient would have to miss a quarter of whatever sports season was going on at the time. In a small school with a limited number of athletes, missing five games of a winter basketball or wrestling season was extremely costly and all the coaches would be pissed.
One typical freezing cold Saturday night, a bunch of us were down at the shacks, standing around on the ice and making each other laugh. I wasn’t drinking anything because I was afraid of getting an MiP and knew I had to drive myself home. The hour grew late and I had had enough, so I headed back to the parking lot and my sweet ride, a maroon 1988 Chevy Corsica. On this particular night, one of Norway’s finest was sitting in the parking lot eyeballing me as I got into my car. As soon as I started driving down the road, the police officer started following me with his brights and an extra spotlight lighting up my car and nearly blinding me in my rearview mirrors. I grew nervous as heck and could barely see, so I put my right blinker on and pulled over to the side of the road in the hopes that the officer would just drive on by. No such luck. He pulled in right behind me, keeping all his lights on and just sitting there making me wonder what was going on. Not having any previous interactions with the police, I was basically crapping my pants when the officer finally got out of his car and slowly walked up to my driver’s side window.
“License, registration, and proof of insurance,” he said flatly.
“Sure thing, Officer,” I replied.
As I started going through my glove box and wallet to find the requested documents, I saw some lights from a vehicle coming up the road from the Vulcan Lake parking lot. Just by the shape of the lights, I could tell it was my buddy Gary in his huge 1989 Chevy Blazer. Now, you need to know that Gary would regularly make his vehicle backfire just for the fun of it. One time he did it up by the school. I could hear it from my parents’ house several blocks away and it was so loud I thought a plane had crashed up at the school or something. If Gary was driving his Blazer and you all of a sudden heard him turn it off, plug your ears because a huge backfire was coming as soon as he started it up again.
I handed the officer my documents and he stood there next to my Corsica looking at them with his flashlight. The Vulcan Lake road was pretty narrow so the cop was practically standing in the middle of it. Remember, Gary is still approaching, and when he gets about ten yards from where the officer is standing, I hear him turn the Blazer off.
“You have to be kidding me,” I think to myself. Was Gary really going to backfire the Blazer right now?
Gary and the Blazer continue rolling up on the cop, and my other buddy Ben is absolutely hanging out the open front passenger window. The bottom window sill is pretty much at his waist since he’s kneeling on the seat and sticking his whole upper body outside of the vehicle. The cop turns around to look at Gary and Ben just in time to see Ben scream at the top of his lungs, “FFFFFFFFFFUCK THE POLICE!!!”
And as soon as Ben finishes his declaration, Gary turns the Blazer back on and the thing backfires like we’re at ground zero in Hiroshima when the first nuclear bomb went off. Gary then floors it, kicking up dirt and gravel and fishtailing up the dirt road away from the cop and me.
I’m sitting there half deaf and stunned over what I just witnessed while the officer throws my documents at me through my open window and races back to his car. He chased down Gary and Ben and gave Gary a disturbing the peace citation, and I think Ben got a ticket for not wearing a seatbelt. It was funnier than hell, and I bought them lunch at Dairy Queen for rescuing me from the cop and giving me a story to tell for the rest of my life.
Holy cow. What a time to be alive.