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.