The Do-It-Yourselfer’s Guide to Snowshoes

Our first winter on St. Peter’s Church Road brought with it a doozy of a snowstorm. Everything was quiet, heavy, and bright. The old mower shed looked like it was staggering under the weight of its roof. The pond was a moonscape of ice, snow, and dark melt holes. We kept using the words “winter wonderland” on the phone to describe the transformation of an already beautiful landscape into something truly ethereal.

We took a lot of pictures after the storm. There are a bunch of our daughter in a pink snowsuit dragging a plastic toboggan. She was so happy to be floundering around in all that snow! There are even a couple of me in jeans and a short sleeve shirt down by Shermans Creek.

What can I say? I run hot.

We wanted to be better prepared for the next big storm, so I spent an obsessive week after the holidays making Shana a pair of snowshoes.

Of course, it would have been easy enough to go out to a store and buy a pair, or, better yet, to order them online. Snowshoes aren’t exactly plentiful in Perry County.

I’d seen some modern snowshoes, but didn’t really like the plastic feel of them. I thought they looked like squashed milk crates.

I had something a little more romantic in mind. I poked around on the Web and finally found what I was looking for: snowshoes that looked like, well, snowshoes, the kind you see on the walls of hunting lodges in old movies.

The ones I saw online were beautiful — sculptural, even — with a curving frame of split ash and an intricate web of nylon that looked for all the world like aged rawhide. Their pedigree was impeccable: they were exact replicas of the snowshoes used by the Ojibwa Indians of Lake Superior. Their elegant design had been refined over centuries — perhaps even millennia.

There was only one problem. They cost an absolute fortune.

Of course, for a fraction of the price, you could buy a kit and make the snowshoes yourself. “Snowshoes you make from our kits will be every bit as great,” the website gushed. And then, addressing the silent worry of cheapskates everywhere, it went on to say, “People tend to make snowshoes from kits not so much to save money (which you do, but it’s a fringe benefit)…you choose a kit because something about making it seems right and intriguing and enjoyable to you.”

“Right, intriguing, and enjoyable” did sound a lot better than simply saving money (read, “being a complete cheapskate”).

So I ordered the kit.

I couldn’t wait to unpack my little holiday project when it came. I tore open the box and pulled out a pair of lovely curved ash frames, which I pronounced “extremely well made.” Then I went digging for that intricate webbing I’d admired in the pictures. All I found was a big wad of nylon lacing. I mean, literally, like a fifty-foot-long shoelace.

The leaflet of instructions was suspiciously thin. That’s because it was all so simple. The way to make an authentic Ojibwa webbing was simply to tie about a zillion authentic Ojibwa knots.

True, there were plenty of pictures, but they all looked the same: stringy things wrapped around other things and then looped back through third things.

Basically, like a love manual for spaghetti.

I’m not going to lie to you. Lacing up those snowshoes was a nightmare. Just when I thought things were going well, I’d discover that I’d made a little boo boo about twenty steps before. A mistake that required untying dozens of vicious little knots.

But I was determined. Bit by bit, the snowshoes started to look less like empty tennis rackets and more like…trout nets?

I kept at it hour after hour. Shana wisely gave me a wide berth during this frenzy of knotting and cursing. She got a little worried when I whipped out a cigarette lighter. Maybe she thought I’d finally lost it and was planning to put the project to the torch.

But no, I was merely following the last instruction, which was to melt the tip of the nylon lace once the final knot had been tied.

What a thrilling moment that was! Of course, no sooner had the acrid smoke cleared than I realized there was another whole snowshoe to lace.

A few rope-burned fingers and five coats of lacquer later, the snowshoes were ready for their trial run. Shana tried them out after the very next snowstorm.

I helped her strap them on. They fit perfectly. The bindings were nice and flexible. My wife was ready to tackle the snow with two thousand years of Native American wisdom strapped to her boots.

She stepped off the front walk onto the snow… and fell flat on her face. Then she gamely tried again, using ski poles for better balance.

Boom. Faceplant.

Apparently, those glamorous, handcrafted, labor-of-love snowshoes don’t handle ice very well. Unlike the modern ones, which come with grotesque — but practical — steel teeth.

I know when I’m beat. The solution’s obvious.

Next time I’ll use rawhide.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 11 Feb 2010
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com