A Memory from My Youth

Odd that this should come to me now. For the record, it is 1:08am, April 24, 2017, and I am fighting jet lag from my trip back from Kansas, USA to Camp Arifjan, Kuwait.  It isn’t the time or place that is odd – it is the memory itself.

I remember tobogganing at the Monroe Country Club when I was a kid along with my brother, Andy, and friends, Pat and Mike. Growing up in Monroe, NY, I lived at 4 Barnett Road East, off of Still Road. Across the street was Monroe Country Club, an eighteen-hole golf course set in a little valley between Still Road and Stage Road.  The valley was steep in places and in the winter time the snow made for conditions that could not be passed up.  It seemed to snow more and deeper back then and I recall many trips in calf-to-knee deep snow to get to the top of the hill. 

The best hill on the course started off on a tee and sloped immediately down to another tee on another part of the course and then that tee dropped off.  This let the riders get up enough speed to jump – or get airborne – off the second tee. 

It was all about speed.  If you came off the first slope fast enough you would fly off the second tee and ride all the way to the bottom of the hill several hundred feet away. 

We owned a four-seat toboggan that my Uncle Ed Mooney made for us.  The contraption was solid wood, heavy as the dickens, had some padding, and yellow nylon rope to hold on to, but – and here is the important part – NO way to steer.  Maneuvering this beast required the rider to lean or drag a foot off of the left or right. In other words, you were at the mercy of gravity and the snow.  AND you did not want to be in its path.

We would pack two to six people on the toboggan.  Sometimes we would sit front to back with legs wrapped around the person in front creating a locked chain of humanity. Sometimes we would stack ourselves like cordwood three deep. If there were other people there that we knew we would make a train, ten kids on four sleds, careening down the hill.

Because one jump was never enough, kids would put their resources into build ramps further down the hill for a second attempt at flight.  It was a goal to get to the bottom but even more fun if you got thrown off on a jump.  How we never broke a bone or compressed a spinal column amazes me to this day. 

We were kids. Not even, or just barely teenagers. 

I can remember the long walks up and down the slope and the eventual longer walk back to the house, near frozen and red faced.  It. Was. Glorious. Looking back, nothing about those days was bad at all.

Fast forward to 2009.  I still owned that toboggan. I even used it a couple of times at the park in Cortland, NY. It was one of those family heirlooms that I had no desire to get rid of until we moved to North Carolina. I willed it, so to speak, to the Lime Hollow Nature Center in Cortland, NY, that is run by Glenn Reisweber, a friend of mine. It is still there, 2017, propped up outside along with a pair of snowshoes, still ready to go. 

It's going to be over 100 degrees today without a hill in sight for hundreds of miles. Yet I can close my eyes and feel that cold rush racing down the hill.  That is a good memory.