How Sledding Can Be Fun, or "Why Spraying Down a Sledding Hill With A Garden Hose Before Considering the Consequences Can Give More Problems Than Pleasure"

How Sledding Can Be Fun

or

“Why Spraying Down a Sledding Hill With A Garden Hose
Before Considering the Consequences
Can Give More Problems Than Pleasure”

As my previous readers already know, I lived in Alaska when I was between 10 and 12 years of age. If you take a moment to recall your own childhoods, you would realize that this period of time is the most memorable, most enjoyable, and most delirious of times…that way-lay twilight time between the freedom and permission to be childish and the time of compounding responsibilities leading into adulthood. In other words, this is the time when you could enjoy your GI-Joes or your Barbies as toys rather than collectors’ items, spending hours building forts or castles out of cardboard boxes without being told to “act your age.”

And, for residents of this country that may enjoy a typically cold winter season, the ages of 10-12 are prime years for snow-capades.

Where I lived, there were two military housing complexes, separated by a small stream that fed into a lake—Lake Louise—and a wide field that was only home to grass during the summer and six foot tall balls of snow that the snow plow rolled onto the field as a way of keeping it off the roads during the winter. There were many of them, and from the rose-colored view of my memory, they numbered into the hundreds, although I’m willing to concede that there were likely less than 30 of the mounds on a typical year.

The stream was lined by trees on both sides, so unless you cut through the foliage you couldn’t actually see the stream from the field. Further, as this stream led into Lake Louise, it circled around a land feature than the residents of both military housing complexes referred to as Green Hill. This hill was rumored to be so named because during the summer, if you flew a plane overhead, you would not be able to distinguish the differences in the topography as the trees that engulfed the hill blended in so well with the rest of the scenery. Whatever its origins, this hill has for over 50 years been the preferred sledding spot for the almost every child (and some adults) willing to fly fast and fly low.

Between this and the backyards of some of the Nimitz Park housing complex (wherein I lived) lay a small stretch of flat land and an opposing hill which, as far as I know, has never been named. This other hill had neither a sharp incline nor foliage, but was large, gradually sloping, and had a great distance from the top to the bottom of the hill. For most people, this was the preferred sledding section for having a good, safe time. Little children could sled without parents worrying that their children would be knocked down, interfere with other bigger children’s paths, and risk collision injuries. The incline was soft, as I mentioned, and so the speed was regulated by a quiet supply of gravity.

I, being a young boy, was a highly competitive person, always wanting to race my sled’s prowess against any other boys in terms of speed and distance before stopping. While Green Hill was excellent for a high-speed sledding experience, because the hill had been used by children for over a half of a century, there formed a distinct groove on which a sledder could take without being knocked off course into trees, bushes, or—God forbid—the lake to the left of the Green Hill sledders. This groove forced the sledders to go one at a time rather than numerous people at once. So instead races took place on the unnamed hill, which were excellent thanks to the main aspect of racing multiple people at the same time.

And yes, I did consistently come out the winner…and that’s not a rose-colored memory.

From time to time my friends and I would want something more risky, more dangerous, and would navigate the taller Green Hill in attempts to see who could slide the furthest before gravity stopped us. We would march up the well-worn path along the side of the hill, joining the line of people each awaiting their turn. On one of my first attempts at this sledding spot, I took my trusty blue sled—it had two pairs of yellow handles, but I maintained an occupancy of one…and I had the sled waxed prior to my sledding trips!—and when I became the next person in line, I placed my sled on the ground above the pathway and sat in it, waiting until the path below was clear enough for me to go.

My sled had other plans.

The blue plastic, primed for high speed thanks to the waxing, shifted ever so slightly to the left, and I, who had positioned myself inside the sled completely, was now at gravity’s whim. I began speeding down the hill in the wrong direction, hands digging deeply into the permafrost, as I saw that I was headed closer and closer to the semi-frozen lake below.

I leaned back, grasping the snow with both worn gloves, tearing holes in the finger tips, and as the distance passed beneath me more quickly than I could comprehend, my 10 years of life passed before my eyes, heart raced, eyes dilated…

And I rolled off the sled a mere 15 feet from the waters’ edge.

My sled grabbed a gust and took flight, flipping and twisting in the air, and then landed closer to the water than I was, though thankfully not into the water, as I feared I was destined to be seconds before.

I didn’t sled down Green Hill for some months after that experience.

When I was 12, with two years of sledding practice behind me—and my confidence at sledding down Green Hill recovered—I continued to challenge my friends in races, although the new sledding equipment that was catching on then were inner tubes. These tubes resembled the kinds you would use for water skiing, making for a soft, flexible trip down the hill, though the speed tended to suffer as a result.

My father, who has his moments of brilliance—I’ll grant him that—thought it would be incredible for the speed of the sledders to have, rather than snow, a layer of ice covering the hill. He had an impressive collection of garden hoses, and though my family did not live near the hills, he inquired with some of the residents that lived directly above the large, unnamed hill as to whether he could string his hoses from their back yards to spray the hill down. Apparently—or disappointingly—one of these homes agreed to let him do this. He strung four or five hoses together and, with your typical pistol-grip nozzle, proceeded to layer the hill late one night after all the sledders had gone home.

By the next day the hill was bright and crystalline, solid and as slick as snot, though more solid than brick. My father, bless him, didn’t think to spray down only a section of the hill, instead deciding to cover the entire surface with this damning solidity. Sledders of any age were now flying down the hill with no control whatsoever, dangerously avoiding—or not avoiding—collisions with anyone in their paths. The ice was so slick that once a sledder traveled down the hill, it was nothing short of a miracle to return to the top again. Those with sleds like my blue one—which I still used frequently—could feel every burr, every bump, every uneven surface of the ground beneath as we slid in circles wherever gravity wished to take us, giving everyone an brand-new, very unusual cause for rawness of our backsides.

Interest in sledding declined considerably from that point.

That wasn’t the only highlight of this unusual sledding year, however. My father, seeing how brilliant it was to use water to turn the sledding hill into a frozen warzone, thought it would be amazing to use water to build a ramp.

There was already a small collection of snow that had been gathered by my father, my friends, and myself, packed in tightly to create a bump that, when aimed properly on the non-iced hillside, gave the sledder an airtime of roughly a second…maybe two, if you’re lucky. Seeing how a little bit of snow allowed sledders to soar for a short time a short ways into the air, which brought a short bit of pleasure to those enjoying the feature, my father thought, Hey, we could make it bigger, which would make it more fun!

For those of you who want to know, it really doesn’t work that way.

We did as he asked though, gathering and packing more and more snow onto the pile, altering the angle to increase the trajectory, and tested its performance. The first few tries flattened the snow drift, and while we piled additional amounts of snow onto the ramp, the testers found that their backsides were becoming more and more injured with each landing. Still, we carried on.

The coup-de-grás for this experiment was the addition of water. After liberal amounts of water, the mound was now solid, able to bear our weight with ease, but the sledders’ asses were landing on the solid, inch thick ice with enough weight and speed to cause bruises to form halfway up our spines.

So, final word to the wise: do not be convinced that sledding will be improved by soaking your favorite hill with ice overnight. Your asses will thank you.