Sledding

As I sit and watch the snow swirl past my office window I am remembering the mission I always felt I was on when I would go out to play and find a good hill to sled on. I grew up in what I would call the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. We had no lack of verticality when it came to terrain but not all of it was suitable for sled riding. Not that it would stop me of course, not if the run looked like it could be fun enough. Once, when I was around 9 years old, I was at my Grandparents house in Pennsylvania, they lived up this very backroad in a trailer court surrounded by cow pastures. I was out of the house and dragging my sled around looking for the best place to barrel down a hill when I realized the pasture just above the road was the most extreme in it’s slope. So up I went, the cows gave me strange looks but I just nodded and trudged through the snow towards the tree line at the top. Once there I was able to see a huge amount of the valley the road carved thru, I can still remember that crisp air and almost crystalline feel to the snow covered world. So, a few obstacles in this particular sled-venture… First, the cows were at best neutral observers in my shenanigans, at worst they would charge and potentially stop me to death. This was something I was warned about frequently, the many many dangers of the cows, snapping turtles, coyotes, maybe even a colony of red ants that were all just waiting to end my life according to my Grandmother. I was nonchalant about the cows and they for the most part didn’t really care about me. But I still had to avoid them on my down hill escapades. Then there were rocks hidden under the snow. Farmers didn't really do much work on smoothing their pastures to aid in the sled riding, hit one of those rocks on your way down the hill and you would walk funny for the rest of winter. After the murder cows and hidden rocks the unfortunate fact was the hill at the bottom terminated in a barbed wire fence. The fence of course was to contain the apparently serial killer minded cattle. After the fence there was a several foot drop to a gravel ditch and then the road upon which drivers in the back roads of Pennsylvania were very cavalier about speed limits or small children. Had my Grandmother seen what I was up to she would have had a fit. If my Grandfather saw me he would have said “no let him go do it, maybe he will learn something”. They were amazing Grandparents. So I plotted the course, did a few slow runs to test for the rocks and gauge how much the cows wanted to kill me. The only part I didn’t test was the barbed wire and the drop, my plan as a kid was to figure it out when I got there. In my head I thought I would just drag a mitten covered hand and do a cool spin out just shy of the doom border of the pasture. What really happened was I shot down this cow pasture at about Mach 1, had no ability to steer or control so as the barbed wire approached ready to decapitate me I had no choice but to just lay back in my orange toboggin and shoot under it, fully clearing the ditch and ricocheting across the road and into a bush in someone’s front yard back in the trailer court. Luckily no cars were coming and I was safe other than the slight bruise from the jump to the road. In mind as a kid, this was a full success and with the vantage the top of the pasture gave me I could always check for cars to time my future runs to avoid the vehicular mangling. I got several more runs down the hill in that day, it was amazing, top 5 of my sledding adventures as a kid. It ended though the way many of my more danger filled days of play did; my Grandmother stepped outside to check on me. I got yelled at a lot, and lectured, and given hot chocolate and a cookie and then I watched Bob Ross paint a snow covered scene with my Grandmother as she fumed about me trying to get myself killed.