Cold Case

November 23, 2023

"It's not the crime, it's the cover up..."

Most people will be familiar with the old gangster movie ending where the victim is sent for a “swim in da river” wearing a pair of “cement overshoes”. By submerging any evidence of a crime under the water, the criminals are almost impossible to convict and the crime goes unpunished. Sometime, early in the winter of 1966 or thereabouts, my older brother, Bruce, and I employed the same strategy, albeit unintentionally. And before anyone goes about calling the cold case hot line, let it be known that the only victim was a stone, however, a rather unusual one. 

Back in the 1940’s our father, James, like many young farmers, participated in the sport of curling. In those days, before more formal leagues were formed, players provided their own pair of matched curling stones. These would be transported to and from games, in the trunk of the family car, stored in a sturdy wooden box, with a lid to match. At some point, due to the rising demands of a growing family and farm, James gave up the sport and stored the stones in the back of the tractor shed. 

Years later, Bruce and I discovered these stones. As soon as winter came, we loaded them onto a toboggan and took them across the road to the frozen surface of the pond to use them for practice. Well, it turned out that we did not consider that the ice was not yet thick enough and one of the stones broke through! A frantic effort was made to recover it but to no avail. It was buried in the mud at the bottom of the pond.  Panicked, we did what any normal boy would do: put the now single rock back in the crate, shut up and (hopefully) no one would ever find out. I’m not sure what we expected, however, we had good reason to believe that our crime would go undiscovered. James, while a good farmer and provider, was not exactly meticulous regarding his organization of the outbuildings. We were pretty sure that he wouldn’t wake up one morning with the desire to look for his curling stones. 

It turned out that, though it took many years,  the truth was finally revealed. In James' retirement years, as he was puttering in that shed, the crime was discovered.  Mellowed by the passing of years, all he could do was laugh when told the whereabouts of his missing stone! Sadly, Bruce, having passed on many years before, wasn’t around to receive the pardon.

Picture this, if you will, a team of archeologists, thousands of years from now, perhaps excavating the archeological evidence of a place once called Alberta,  coming upon that stone, now sunk deep in the ground in some landscape far beyond imagination. It might give them a bit of surprise and cause a bit of head scratching... good thing the statute of limitations will have run out by then!