There is a terrific tobogganing hill a
couple hundred metres from where I live.
There are several grades from a
leisurely slide down the hill to a rocket-like decent for the brave
and foolhardy.
The best part is, the run off area is a
football field.
My children spent many an hour sliding
down that hill, as did numerous other kids from the neighbourhood.
There were even a few of us older kids
out there once in a while, reliving our youth by taking a blast of
frozen ice particles to the face.
I never had an actual toboggan when I
was a young lad, but I have ridden on one and quickly learned the
snow pours over the top of the wooden contraption and sandblasts, or
rather snowblasts, you in the face, tearing off the first layer of
skin and rendering you temporarily blind.
Good times.
But, the more the hill is used the less
powder there is, until eventually, the snow packs down and the slope
ices up until it is basically a downhill skating rink, allowing
participants to break the sound barrier before they reach the bottom
of the hill.
As a young lad, we would all gather at
'Suicide Hill' to do our sledding.
What else would a group of youngsters
name a tobogganing hill? Gentle Slope of Fun? Slide of Silliness?
No, it had to be something dangerous,
something that evoked the death-defying acts we were performing.
We were, after all, daring dare devils
doing daring acts. Or something like that anyway.
Actually, it really was quite a
dangerous place to go sledding and now that I am all grown up I
wonder why we were even allowed to go down such a hazardous hillside.
Where were the adults when I was growing up? Probably just happy to
have us out of the house.
There were two runs: a short fast one,
and a long slower one.
The short fast one went down a fairly
steep slope before it leveled out. Doesn't sound too bad, does it?
And except for the barbed wire fence at the end of the run, it
wasn't. If you had too much speed, you actually had to jump off your
mount to slow down or you would hit the fence – as had been done by
many people on many occasions.
Torn jackets, scratches and even a few
stitches were just par for the course.
The other run was much slower and if
you did it right you would slide across a driveway, over a cross road
and down another road that was even longer than the actual hill you
started out on.
The full length of this run could only
done when there was a fresh, unplowed snowfall blanketing the
blacktop because sliding on bare asphalt is a bad idea any time of
the year.
Aside from the risk of being run over
by a 2,000-pound automobile, it was a lot of fun. Kids rarely factor
danger into their activities, so we hardly ever thought about being
clobbered by a car.
Our focus was on racing down the
mountain and seeing who could slide the farthest, the fastest.
No one was ever seriously hurt, but one
intrepid slider did crash into the side of a car, much the
displeasure of the car owner who was more worried about a dent in his
automobile than the head of the child that caused it.
That hill is now a housing development,
so never again will a child be able to dodge a Dodge or find a way to
stop before sailing through a barbed wire fence.
And perhaps that is a good thing.
Copyright 2017, Darren Handschuh
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