SLIDING
As a child I remember that as soon as the ground got cold enough to hold snow, and the snow began to layer itself into a depth, my friends and I would hit the slopes, not for skiing, which none of us knew how to do since none of our parents knew how to do it, but for sliding. The first thing we'd do is dress for the battle of the hill. Putting on clothes for sliding was like putting on armor. We'd strap on a breastplate of wool or down, slip thick gauntlets over our hands, push our feet into heavy sollerets of leather or rubber, crown our head with a heaume of fur, and thus accoutered, stride forthrightly (if squatly) into the teeth of the downhill, dragging behind us the frail Rocinante of a toboggan or sled or a plastic orange flyer with yellow nylon rope handles or, if there wasn't money for these things, a lunch tray or a slab of cardboard. Anything to grease the skids to the bottom.
Sixth grade probably marked the last and best year of sliding in my life because, as a twelve-year old, I still could access the purity of frolic, undistracted yet by the muddles gathering on the horizon: girls, sex, sullen adolescence, college, pending adulthood. In sixth grade I could still be a kid, with all the callow ease that comes from knowing I had a warm family, three meals a day and snacks, clean clothes, a bedroom full of books, and no obligation to feel ambivalent about anything. And I could be a kid at the top of his form because the sixth grade was the "big guys" in the elementary school, the only ones with a man for a teacher, the ones who took over the playground for their games and who got to use the adult section of the town library. Seventh grade and junior high would bring its own diminishments and humiliations, but that year we rode the peak of an arc, our bodies lithe and well-timed, feeling absolutely "in" and entitled to enjoy our lives.
Every kid in the neighborhood and for a radius of at least half a mile would make for the nearest hill, and from a distance all one would see would be a slash of white covered with dark moving dots in Brownian motion. The particular crew I hung out with had a captain, a tall gawky boy named Albert who was actually a year or two older than us. He went to a parochial school and had to wear a uniform of white shirt and striped tie, but in the evenings and on the weekends Albert would discard all that and organize us into activities.
During baseball season he set us up in teams (we played with five men to a side and no pitcher, each batter tossing his own ball and hitting it). He would keep statistics on each player and referee the games. When football rolled around, he'd do the same thing. We played a particularly aggressive form of flag football, which required tackling as well as plucking the flag, and the people on defense would have to count to five before rushing since no one ever stayed in to block for the quarterback. Albert would actually play in these games, despite the fact that he had no co-ordination at all and no heft: the slightest tap would crumple him to the ground, as if he had no more weight than a milkweed seed.
When it came time for sliding, Albert would gather us together at my house, which sat closest to our favorite hill, and we'd troop off in this pack, hauling one toboggan along with a motley fleet of sleds and plastic disks, snacks stuffed in our pockets, our breaths blooming like cartoon balloons full of chatter in capital letters. My house perched on the edge of the second hole of the municipal golf course; the tee stood some three hundred yards away down a straight fairway, at the foot of a hill capped by the rambling white club house. We took the country club road to the top since walking through the snow down the fairway would have been work harder than we wanted to do, and by the time we got there kids swarmed everywhere, with various sliding engines departing from the crown of the hill with the regularity of the old British rail system.
We did our runs, sharing our one toboggan with admirable ease because Albert remembered who had taken how many trips down and who hadn't gone yet and who had sat up front and all that and so kept the line moving and the friction to a minimum. After a few hours we had become pretty thoroughly frozen, our cheeks achingly red and our noses rimmed with snot. And, to be honest, it had gotten a little dull and annoying, taking the same routes down, wiping out in the same way at the bottom, having to dodge the two-year olds who wandered into the flight paths or get around parents who actually dared to mix it up with the young people and take their own hooting trip to the bottom.
On the other side of the clubhouse a much longer hill sloped downwards, full of small moguls and a few copses of trees. The green for one of the back nine holes deployed at the bottom, and notched above the green twenty feet or so was a sand trap, its lip covered with unspoiled and never-touched-by-toboggan snow. Some people had made their way down because we could see their tracks, and right before the sand trap would could see the snow flung in all directions because someone had wiped out or bailed out just before they hit the take-off. A perfect set-up for the last run of the day.
Several of the gang had gone inside the clubhouse to get the free hot chocolate and use the bathroom, so four of us stood at the top of the hill, the tether of our patient toboggan in Albert's hand. We mapped our route, making a daring sweep near a tree (Albert planning for us how we'd have to lean to our right to catch the curve) and then heading for the trap, with the express purpose of clearing it to the green. Bob got in first, hooking his feet into either side of the curved prow, then Alan and I, and Albert last. Because of his height, he could look over our heads and yell out instructions. With two good lurches we topped the rise and started down.
As soon as we nosed downward we knew why no one had been working this hill: slick, slick, slick. The wind had shaved the snow down to ice, as if a Zamboni had gone over it, and within two breaths we had lost all control of the toboggan. Bob pulled as hard as he could on the rope to lift the nose, and we could barely hear Albert yelling behind us, but the limber slab of wood headed for its own destiny. Peeking out from behind Alan's shoulder, I saw the tree we had plotted coming up, and at the same moment I felt Albert's hands lean me to the right. I did the same to Alan, who did the same to Bob, and we all canted on our right haunch as heavily as our young bodies could, feeling the toboggan catch its edge and pull to the right. The tree dropped behind us, a black smear in our tearing eyes.
As we flew toward the sand trap, I remember having distinct impressions, connected but not connected to the present moments: the peaty smell of Alan's wool coat as I pressed my face against it to get it out of the wind's paring coldness, the knobs of his spine against my cheek; the thin, splintered edge of the toboggan, with our stationed frightened bodies on one side and the blurred maw of the snow on the other, inches from fusion; Albert's spindly grip on my shoulders, as if they were the cross ribs of a steering wheel; the throat-drying imminence of danger that was also a deep and addictive excitement. We sped for the sandtrap, free and abandoned.
We had picked up a good head of steam, and the course correction we had laid in to avoid the tree had pointed us exactly toward the trap. If there had been the chance to bail out before now, that chance had disappeared like the ripped froth of our breaths: physics had committed us. We all hunkered into each other, streamlining ourselves, bracing our bodies against each other, except for poor Bob, who, as we found out later, couldn't see a thing because of the spume curling over the toboggan and icing his face, just like the carved bowsprit of a storm-bucking ship. We waited.
We hit. Bob had pulled up the nose at the last moment, which caused us all to lean back slightly and loosen our tight embrace, which unbalanced the toboggan just ever so slightly, which caused it to hit the ramp slightly tilted to an edge: the butterfly's wing of chaos had found us. Instead of continuing a straight trajectory, Bob's initial moment of leaning back had convinced the toboggan to flip, and it dumped us according to Newton's laws deftly, distinctly, and directly toward the center of the earth. The creators of the course had dug the trap a good four feet deep, with the upper rim curved over like a frozen wave top and the opposite side cupped up to make any chip shots high and arcing. The suddenly riderless, suddenly freed toboggan smashed into the opposite side of the trap, doing an end-over and a one-and-a-half gainer (difficulty 2.0) to continue down the hill for another dozen yards or so. We, on the other hand, decanted as we had been, sprawled at the bottom of the trap.
Because the upper curve of the trap had provided a kind of lee, not much snow had cushioned the bottom of the trap; in fact, the sand hadn't frozen yet. I found myself face down in it, my cheek scraped and part of my lifetime's ration of a peck of dirt in my mouth. Bob had done a complete flip and landed sitting upright, stunned, his coccyx destined to turn a queasy bruised blue and green. Albert lay on his back, a long dark hyphen, staring up at the sky. The momentum had tossed Alan completely out of the trap (he had held onto the toboggan's side ropes, thinking this would save him), and as we all came back to consciousness, Alan crawled into view in classic movie style: first one hand appeared, slapped up over the rim, then the other, and, hauling himself up, his face, stricken and smiling at the same time.
Albert, being Albert, made the rounds making sure we were all right, and as we sat there gathering ourselves, coming slowly back into the present tense, reassembling our normal, testing our limbs for bruises and breaks, we started laughing and laughing, as much thoroughly excited as relieved. We simultaneously launched into our stories, outdoing one another, upping the details, massaging it all for its gloriousness, shaping the tale that would be told to everyone else: The Saga of the Sand Trap. They all hooted as I spit out large gobs of sand; Alan re-created crawling up the side of the pit, popping his head over the top like a turtle out of its shell; Bob howled in protest as we faked smacking his rear-end, teasing him because none of us had ever known anyone with a bruised butt; Albert still blinking, as if to wake himself up, as if to convince himself that we were all, indeed, intact and that his stewardship had not jeopardized our lives.
We trudged down the hill to get the toboggan (Bob walking gingerly), and then trudged back up the hill to gather the rest of the clan, pulling the undaunted machine behind us. We had had enough sliding for the day; we had a long-breathed story we needed to tell.
* * * *
Many years later, as an adult, I had a chance to take some kids sliding - and how different it had become. Now I had twelve-year olds rolling their eyes at me to get out of the way as they careened downward, and mostly I hung around with the adults at the top of the hill, shouting encouragement in cheerleader decibels.
But finally I couldn't resist. I grabbed a plastic saucer, and folding my body inside its diameter as best I could, I topped the lip of the hill and trusted myself to the laws of nature. Spinning like a flung frisbee, unable to provide any steering torque to it, I ended up spilling out at the bottom, my face and laughter full of kicked-up snow. The thrill still bubbled up, that edge of permissible, but not too dangerous, risk. How could I have forgotten? How could I have let it go so much into arrears?
I spent the best part of the day commandeering sliding equipment and flinging myself down the slope. I imagined myself part of a champion bobsled team, or the lone man on a luge, balancing on edges through the perilous sine waves of an ice-hardened decline. Each time down I wanted to experience, re-experience, that point at which control and giving-in-to-gravity balance; I wanted to feel the pin-sharp attention of my senses as the world slashed by because it was that focus at the moment of risk that made a good slide good. Yes, a safe arrival at the bottom had its own charm, relief its own high - but between the ordinariness of standing at the top and the ordinariness of arriving at the bottom, all of life's danger packed itself into a pitched compass made of wood, muscle, scream, ice, consciousness. For a brief moment on that decline sliders were no longer at the mercy, not watching time's sand run through the hourglass but became the sand rushing through the pinch of glass between the weight above and the pile below. Not Sisyphus doomed to endless labor but Sisyhpus' rock as it tumbles downhill in its lithic release.
But as I stood there toward the end of the day, just before leaving to go home, with the sky lowering its colors into black, I also realized that the headlong rush made up only half the truth. As people sped down the hill I imagined blooming behind each of them one of those multi-colored parachutes drag racers use. These enlarged as the velocity increased until the people were gently deposited at the bottom of the hill. These drogue chutes went by many names - affection, love, the friction of good friendship - so many names. These things kept the iced edge just inside the danger. A full run needed both chute and shoosh, the exhilaration experienced in sense and space, the exhilaration cooled into narrative.
In the acceleration we prepare for memory; in the recall we prepare for excitement. This keeps us from abandon, allows us to take another run, and then another.