Play Day
This week we had a postcard perfect snow day in Boston. It was the ideal amount: just enough for decent outdoor fun, but not enough to put some poor meteorologist in danger of being swept out to sea remarking how “it’s really coming down now.” The snow was a fluffy, tacky consistency that made it cling to trees like buttercream frosting. Everything turned a shade of lovely. Even the garbage cans were having a moment.
I went into the city to enjoy the day and take photos. I headed into Boston Common–our much smaller version of Central Park. In the middle of the park there is a small hill with a monument dedicated to the soldiers and sailors from Massachusetts who died in the Civil War. The back of the hill fans out in a gentle slope onto a few hundred yards of open green space. In the summer this area is a patchwork sea of blankets and people hanging out. In the winter it becomes the go-to sledding spot.
There were a couple of families at the top of the hill when I rolled up. Two moms stood off to the side, clutching cups of coffee, chatting. One dad plopped his kid onto a long inflatable sled. The kid was cocooned in a snowsuit that looked like he was outfitted to defuse a bomb on Mars. Dad gave the sled a light shove. It started to coast down the incline, which, and I really can’t stress this enough, is graded more like the ramp at your public library than a roller coaster drop into oblivion. There are streets in San Francisco steeper and more terrifying than this part of the park.
“Watch him! Watch him!” yelled Mom in a distress squawk that most long-term couples know. In the span of any lengthy relationship this tone gets deployed for various reasons that range from the mundane, “The pasta water is boiling OVER!” to the Defcon-5, “A BEAR! A BEAR IN THE HOUSE, JON!!!” Unfortunately what ends up happening over time is the steady erosion of urgency. Because it actually wasn’t a bear, was it, Amy? It was your idiot brother Jeff who showed up unannounced because he needed a place to crash. The distress squawk sounds more like a muffled trombone from a Peanuts’ cartoon: “wah-wah-wah. Wah-wah-WAH, JON!”
In this case something broke through and activated the dad’s DO SOMETHING! response gland (located behind the adenoids).
Dad took off at a shuffle, loping alongside his inflatable child accelerating down the hill at the same speed as rolling an orange across a kitchen floor.
“His head! His head! Watch his head!” the mom yelled. The kid was lying on his stomach. He was on a slow-slow-motion collision course with an inch of snow that had been shoveled off the pathway running along the bottom of the slope. Fortunately Dad was there to put himself between his precious offspring and the deadliest of threats: frozen condensation. The child was completely unaware of any dangers, giggling with glee, seduced by physics. A real Dear Diary kind of day you could tell.
This was a much different kind of sledding experience than I had when I was a kid. My older brother and I were lucky to have a side lawn pitched at an angle. Our property line disappeared behind a thicket of scrubby, overgrown acreage that belonged to a power company. Skinny pines and small trees filled in alongside wild shrubs, brambles, and probably a whole army of invasive plants. We just called it all woods, and where it started and our sledding trail stopped was debatable. And that was the whole point.
Jammed into our snow pants and boots, outfitted in puffy coats and gloves that barely stayed on our hands, my brother and I shoveled down breakfast on those snowy mornings and hustled to get outside. We retrieved our sleds from the garage on the way out. These were thick pieces of plastic that resembled cartoon magic carpets. I have no idea where they came from, but they definitely looked like discarded material from a plastics manufacturing plant. It’s quite possible that all those years we were sledding on the scraps of Porta Potty doors.
The sleds rolled up for easy storage, which also required a whole pre-snow storm ritual of laying them out tacked down with heavy books, preferably overnight. Otherwise you’d spend 20 precious minutes of snow play time wrestling with your coiled rectangle of plastic. They had two holes punched in the top of one end ostensibly for hands, but we found our feet fit better. If you were not partially immobilized careening down the hill then, honestly, what are we even here for?
These were all we had and we didn’t know any better so my brother and I were fine with it. It wasn’t until we both got a little older and went to a public sledding place that we saw kids on plastic toboggins (that you could steer !) and inflatable tubes (!!!). Those were the Ferraris of sled gear. The kids that owned them probably skied and drank real Swiss Miss hot cocoa and not Charlie’s Cocoa Drink-for kids!
My brother and I labored over making the track down the side of the hill as close to luge-quality as possible. We AIMED for the trees. We’d go down one behind the other, but this was mostly to try to engineer a crash. If you could derail the person halfway down that was particularly satisfying because it meant they were probably going to roll the rest of the way without their sled—a human snowball.
Sometimes our dad would come out to “shovel,” but I think he really just wanted to drink a beer in the garage and watch us horse around. At some point we’d beg him to do something we called Belly Whoppers. My dad was not tall, but he was stocky and had a fair amount of mass on him. He’d lie on his stomach, barely making it onto the plastic. My brother and I would climb on his back (very safe) and we’d scream at him to go as fast as he could go. All the while my brother and I would be trying to bump each other off or somehow get my dad to spin out of control and send us all tumbling into the snowbanks that had been building up at the bottom of our lawn (zero chance of injury).
I can assure you that our mother was nowhere to be found. She certainly was not hovering shouting “Watch them! Watch their heads!” She was drinking a cup of tea, leafing through a magazine, savoring the silence and relishing that for fifteen minutes no one was bothering her to play a game or make them a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or reattach a limb.
Were our parents negligent? I don’t think so. We were GenXers growing up with a kind of fearlessness based on ignorance, not bravery. We simply played harder, not smarter. This was also the era of some pretty no-holds barred kind of outdoor toys like Pogo Ball–a bouncy ball stuck into a ring of plastic that you were supposed to balance on (sure, Jan) and BOUNCE (what?). No pads, no helmets, just a great time with you and your pal sustaining traumatic head injuries brought to you by Hasbro!
No one sat us through a power point presentation of all the ways we could kill ourselves or each other just playing outside. And if they had, I don’t think it would have changed much. Because to a kid, adults know plenty, but they don’t know anything about being a kid, right? Did your parents even HAVE snow when they were little? The guardrails are for them, not you. At least that’s what you guess all the squawking is about as you remember racing like a comet down a snowy hill twice the size of Everest in your precious kid winter memories.
This made me think of sledding with my daughter when she was little. I’d lay on my belly and then she’d lay on my back and we’d go down together.
I’m not crying you’re crying.
It's never too late! Last year, my hubbie and I found a hill close by for sledding. He lay on his belly and I lay on top of him. He got facefuls of snow and I screamed wildly. Oh, and did I mention we're in our sixties?