(Continuing my look back on my college days at Prairie Bible Institute. In order to make good sense out of this you should have read the posts starting with May 12 leading up to this one.)
On a less important note, I really enjoyed the western prairies of Canada. I would have appreciated more trees, but it was still beautiful. My first year it stayed below zero for the entire month of February. A warm day might get to -5. Lows were in the -20 to -30 range. One unforgettable night I stood outside and watched the thermometer record a temperature of -50. We’re talking the Fahrenheit scale here.
My best buddy, Dave Wright, got me into horseback riding. Out of the many rides we took, two are unforgettable. The one was a three day ride way up north by Edmonton. The wheat had been harvested. The farms were huge and way, way far apart. I don’t remember encountering a single fence. We rode around like Cossacks on the prairies for three days. I was the least experienced rider and I had the horse with the roughest gait. I can still remember how proud I was to be the least sore person in the days following the ride. It turns out that the muscles used to ride a bike come in very handy when you are going on long horseback rides, and I had spent a lot of time on my bike that summer.
The second memorable ride was in answer to a cry for help. A couple girls from the neighborhood had gone riding, and as the sun set, it got too cold for them to make it back home. So they called my buddy Dave. (For reasons that still aren’t clear to me, Dave was much more likely to have contacts with surrounding females than I was.) “We’re freezing. Could you boys come out and ride our horses back to town, letting us drive the car back in?” Of course we could.
About twenty below. Dead calm. Not a cloud in the sky. No moon. Have you ever seen the stars in a place where it can get really, really dark? No street lights near by. A population density of less than one person per square mile. The heavens were declaring the glory of God. Radiant night sky. The Milky Way was dazzling. We had just received a new dusting of snow. I can still hear the crunching sound of the horses hooves in the dry snow on the road as we rode at a walk beneath that amazing sky. The girls had been riding bareback, so I was nice and warm in the parts of my body in direct contact of the horse. We would get off to walk every once and awhile to keep the circulation in our extremities going, but we didn’t want to stay off the horses too long because the horse sweat on the inside legs of our blue jeans had a tendency to freeze up. The town of Three Hills, where the school was, was somewhat above us, almost as if it was on a ridge from where we were at. It was all lit up with street lights and it looked like the New Jerusalem just descended from heaven. (To be continued . . .)
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