An Apology to Kids in South Dakota

 

I am still haunted to this day by the hysterical crying from my neighbor as I woke up a few days after Christmas, and I realized that I was to blame.

Now that I am parent, I can see the hurt I caused to a seven-year-old girl.

You see, teenagers in South Dakota get bored very easily on Friday or Saturday nights because there is nothing to do and nowhere to go.

At least that was the case back in the 1980’s when I was a teenager.

A fun tradition (for some)

So some teenagers created a fun tradition to deal with the tedium, and it brings misery to the kids building scarfed snowmen with twig arms, black charcoal eyes, and cute carrot noses and that was the case with my neighbor.

You’ve never heard of the snowman tackling tradition? Let me explain.

It all starts when a sea of glistening snow blankets the winter ground. Some friends pile into a dad’s station wagon and off you go to tackle snowmen.

There are some simple rules:

  1. You earn one point for a solo tackle
  2. You earn half a point for a joint tackle
  3. The winner is crowned at the end of the night.

 

A visual portrait

Basically, imagine four teenagers cruising around in a car and looking for snowmen. Someone yells, “Stop the car now!” and four teenagers jump out and run towards a snowman to bring heartache to another girl or boy.

I think you can see the lure to a teenager. It was a huge endorphin buzz. And I never felt a twinge of guilty until I heard my neighbor crying that morning.

It really got the heart pumping and blood flowing on winter nights, and if my memory serves me correctly, we had a season-long contest the winter of ‘82.

I was the T.J. Watt of Snowman Football in Vermillion, South Dakota, leading the league (consisting of my four friends) with 39 tackles in my first season of playing. My friend Jeff Johnson was a distant second with a mere 23 tackles.

Rusty Jenson, at the disadvantage of being the driver, had eight tackles.

Snowman karma

I can still remember the night I got injured in our Snowman Tackling game. My friends told me about a ten-foot Coco-Cola bottle some kids had made, and they knew something about the massive coke bottle that I didn’t know.

They didn’t tell me it was frozen solid. Thick ice. I bolted as usual towards the snowman (I mean, Coke bottle) and lowered my shoulder into its midpoint.

And I began to see stars and feel pain radiating down my right shoulder.

To make matters worse, a heard a man yell and dog barking. Everyone ran to the car. I slipped and fell in my dazed condition and my friends drove off.

And I had an angry Doberman chasing me across front and backyards, bent on taking out the fury of its owner who was also chasing me down the street.

My face was blue when I finally caught up with my friends at W.C. Franks, a pentagon-shaped half hot dog and nacho joint and half arcade hangout.

“Your face is blue from where your face hit the snowman,” a friend told me.

A lame lie

I had to explain the blue coloration of my face to my dad. “My friends and I were playing football and my face hit the ground when I got tackled.”

He fell for my whopper. Not even questioning that it was nighttime.

Parents fall for the lamest lies. I know because I now fall for lame lies as the parent of a thirteen-year-old son who has told me a few whoppers.

Fond memories

I have fond memories of my inaugural season of Snowman Tackling. It was a way to bond with my friends like nothing else as a fourteen-year-old … and South Dakota makes it easy letting teens get a driving license at fourteen.

It just puts you at a disadvantage if you’re the driver in a certain tradition.

My only regret was waking up to my crying neighbor that winter morning.

I knew I had to do something.

I’m not that heartless like Ted Bundy or the Unabomber. I felt an instant sense of remorse when I heard her wailing outside my bedroom window.

My Redemption

I threw some on some sweatpants, my winter jacket, gloves and ski cap.

“What’s wrong, Cindy?” I asked my sobbing neighbor.

Of course, I’d demolished Frosty with my 22nd tackle of the season, earning the nickname Jack Lambert, my favorite NFL player on Pittsburg Steelers.

“My snowman, he’s dead. Someone smashed him,” she said.

I knew instantly what I had to do redemption, scooping some snow off the ground and trying to remember how to construct a snowman.

“Let’s see if we can bring Frosty back to life,” I said.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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