Toboggan Rides @Solsticepublish

With the recent snowfall I noticed one of the neighbor children with a sled trying to ride down a small slope in his yard.  He tried and tried but was unsuccessful.  The snow simply wasn’t deep enough for the deep cutting blades of his first class toboggan.  It made me stop and think about my own childhood.  My siblings and I would see a good dusting of powder and head for the big hill in the park.  I swear the thing was a mountain.  We would climb up and try to stay out of the way of other kids sliding down.  We didn’t have the super cool sleds but then again, neither did anyone else.  We used garbage can lids, sheets of plastic, a shovel and sometimes things we invented in the garage.  There was no status to maintain on the hill.  Everyone brought what they had and made do.  If you wanted to slide sitting down, the garbage can lid was the way to go.  Put it upside down on a steep hill and you were flying.  The only problem was that there was simply no way to steer.  You had to sort of slide in a general direction and hope not to hit anyone or anything.  After some words of wisdom from my brother I learned you could alter your direction by placing a hand in the snow behind you as you slid and use it as a rudder.  It worked reasonably well.  There were of course those impacts you saw coming that you could do nothing about.  Often times it was another rider on a collision course with you.  There were two options and you had to act fast.  Run into the other rider and hope you just bounced off one another, or bail out and tumble down the hill.  Neither plan usually worked out well.  With the speeds involved there were very few “bumps” and a whole lot of collisions that would wipe at least one of you out.  That would fill the suit with snow pretty fast.  Bailing out was worse.  You were guaranteed to take a fall and then you became a slow, large moving object half way down the hill in danger of being hit several times.  If you liked to lay down on your way down the hill you went for the plastic sheet.  They were cheap to buy and usually came in neon colors which was always fun.  You laid down face first and held up the front high enough to buffer the snow but low enough to see over.  That sheet went a lot faster than the can lid.  There was practically no resistance.  It had some of the same dangers but at least you could steer by leaning one way or another.  The most crashes happened when you hit a bump and couldn’t see what was ahead of you.  Often your hat would slide over your eyes and if you tried to adjust it, it meant letting go of the sheet with one hand which caused you to go off course and usually crash.  Riding the shovel looks cool in the movies but in practice is a bit too rough on your private parts as you are bouncing down that hill and it is jamming you between the legs.  It hurts to think about.  Invariably at the bottom of the hill some genius always had a busy roadway.  So even if you made it down safely, you usually had to bail out to avoid going into the street.  And do you know what we did after we reached the bottom?  We marched back up the hill to do it again.  There were almost never any adults and the general rule was to stay out until it was almost dark or you had too much snow in your suit to stay outside any longer.  You don’t see things like that these days.  Instead you see a $75 toboggan getting stuck on a 4 foot hill.  Give me back the old days.