It’s Spring. SPRINGGG. It’s not actually Spring, of course; we have entered the period of time identified in Facebook memes as “The Season of Deception” since the weather can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants – but I tell you what, it’s 45 degrees and the sun is golden and lovely and the “Get your ice house off the lake or prepare for the lake to claim it as its own” emails are in the ether, and that makes it Spring enough for me. We’ve had a long period of C-O-L-D as of late, and the notion that warmer weather was on the horizon kept us going. “Only three more days,” we’d say to one another. “Only three days.” And on the third day we ripped off our parkas and fell to our knees in the slush in a North Dakota retelling of The Shawshank Redemption, crying out to not-yet-budding trees, “We did it, everyone! We made it!”
The other evening, I was sitting on the front porch watching Nine throw a pine cone (originally sourced and abandoned in the yard by Nine, now uncovered by the melting snow) as far as he could and something about the way that pine cone bounced and Nine celebrated dug out a memory from deep beneath the snow piles of my mind.
Here goes.
From kindergarten through sixth grade (1985-1992), I attended Belmont Elementary School. I’m not sure if Belmont was the original schoolhouse in Grand Forks, but it certainly was the oldest still in circulation, having been built in 1904. It was the type of school that a brand-new community would erect when they wanted to show the world the town was legit: a giant three-story red brick building with pitched roofs and archways and multiple chimneys. Somewhere in the late 1970s or early 1980s (I don’t know that period for a fact, but I’ve worked in architecture long enough to know what “Man, this cheap-o 1970s/80s business is terrible; we should replace it” looks like), the community, having grown out of the original building, decided the best way to handle the influx of additional students would be to tack a single-story yellow-bricked extension off the side like a weird Frankenstein arm. That addition housed the kindergarten, first, and second grades, as well as the lunchroom and library. The upper classes stayed in the old building.
By the time I got there, the old building was…let’s say…filled with character. None of the floors were level and many of the floorboards were loose. Everything, from the beautiful tall ceilings to the “not 100% for sure but, like, FOR SURE” asbestos-y, lead-y paint – a deep, moody red – was in some kind of state of peeling. Of course, there were ghosts. As a child who wished herself daily into a Victorian drama, the old building was magic.
I’m not sure why I’m telling you all of this because here is what you actually need to know as it relates to my aforementioned memory: It was an elementary school; one part of the school was very tall and very old, and one part of the school was very short and very new; the end.
Once a year, in the spring, Belmont Elementary would hold an Egg Drop Contest. Here were the rules: Design and build a container which would protect a raw egg from breaking when dropped from the top of the old building. Containers were judged both on functionality and creativity.
We had lots of “Form and Function” competitions at Belmont Elementary, and you’ll be unsurprised to hear I lazied out on every one. Build a contraption which would extinguish a candle without touching it? Boom: string tied to a mousetrap with a bucket of water in front of the candle. Build a Popsicle stick bridge which can hold ten pounds? Boom: three square bricks of Popsicle sticks. Egg Drop Contest? Boom: shoebox filled with bubble wrap. As a grownup, I now know the purpose of those competitions was to stretch those developing brains as far as they could go; it wasn’t about protecting the egg or extinguishing the candle, it was the process we took to make it happen. As a child, I assumed the whole thing was rigged because I never, ever won.
On Egg Drop Contest Day, the school’s janitor would collect the inventions and head on up to the roof of the old building. Our janitor got every crappy job in the place: powdering up puke from the carpets, jerry-rigging the rusty heating system, and toting dozens of paper mached, coat hangered, bubble wrapped, parachute-clad eggs onto a three-story roof which had probably seen better days somewhere in the 1940s.
One by one, he’d drop the eggs onto the playground. Only the upper grades built containers, but the entire school watched. With every drop, the crowd would shout, “OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” And when it landed, they would cheer. After each drop, the container’s owner would present their egg to the masses. The best were a toss-up between the containers that exploded the eggs into a billion pieces and those with crazy designs which worked exactly as planned, like the kid who duct taped three hula hoops together into a three-dimensional star shape and suspended the egg in the center. The hoops bounced, and the egg survived.
By the time my sister got into the upper classes I’m pretty sure they changed it so the janitor dropped the eggs from the roof of the addition, which was pretty well pointless because you could have probably dropped an egg from that height unencumbered and it would turn out fine.
Belmont Elementary was lost in the Flood of 1997. Grand Forks built a brand-new beautiful multi-story red brick building in its place and named it Phoenix Elementary. I haven’t been inside Phoenix, but I can guarantee the walls are white and cheery and there isn’t a single ghost anywhere. My own children go to a different elementary school and I haven’t heard nary a whisper about egg drops or egg babies (where you pretend an egg is a baby and take care of it for a week, which was a 6th grade competition at Belmont) or even eggs being served in the cafeteria – so I guess Egg Drop Contests, like Belmont Elementary, are a thing of the past.
The photo above is of me in the 6th grade. I thought that barrette (the thing on the left) was the coolest accessory in the world and only wore it sparingly as a result.
This week on North Dakota Today we talked “the Pregnant Arby’s Lady,” my Nice Person of the Week, as a new transitional house in Grand Forks for women in recovery. (Valley News Live)
This is a cute and kind story about eggs. (KFYR TV)
Sixty-nine North Dakota health care centers are getting $27.4M in life-saving ultrasound equipment thanks to a New York-based trust. (Grand Forks Herald)
Already excited for next year’s ice fishing season? Bring your family out to this new (and free) family-friendly ice house in memory of a boy named Adam. (DL Online)
Williston is gearing up to relaunch its air medical transportation services. (Facebook)
UND is opening up its spatial disorientation trainer to anyone who wants to cure their motion sicknness. (Grand Forks Herald)
My dad (Steve Silverman) was a guest on this week’s North Dakota After Dark Podcast to talk about ye olde days of Central High School Hockey. I keep getting compliments on the episode – probably because he told some “unique” stories, like the one about Fido Purpur putting Icy Hot up his tush in order to skate faster. (North Dakota After Dark)
North Dakota Nice 
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