I've got snow up my butt

Sledding is horrendous. You spend hours in temperatures cold enough to make liquid freeze, jockeying with hundreds of complete strangers to spend three seconds speeding down an icy hill on a crappy piece of plastic. Despite putting so many layers on that your child can't even recognize you, snow finds its way into every crevice in your body. When you're done you're cold and soaked and in danger of hypothermia and if you're lucky you haven't impaled yourself on your sled, a tree, another child or a nearby fence.

I love it. Sledding is my favorite part of winter.

Sure, I'm sadomasochistic, but there is no better way to spend a winter day than by hurtling oneself at top-speed on something that provides no protection whatsoever. It's better still when you do have some protection in the form of a three-year-old child riding shotgun.

This is what we did today, because it snowed yesterday, and sledding after a big snowfall is a rule around these parts. And I'm not one to break any rules.

Until The Boy arrived, I hadn't gone sledding in years because respectable adults don't do such things without a child in tow -- they go skiing, but I'm deathly afraid of downhill skiing. No, I'm not afraid of skiing. I'm afraid of trees that get in my way when I am skiing. (There's no truth to the rumor, by the way, that I had a child simply so I had an excuse to go sledding; I had a child so I had an excuse to buy large remote control cars. The sledding is just a bonus.)

The great thing about sledding is that you don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on equipment. You barely need to spend anything -- a big piece of cardboard is enough, though you probably need money to buy something large so you have a big enough piece of cardboard. You'd also have to endure endless ridicule from your fellow sledders by sledding on cardboard, but the point is that it's possible.

Back in The Day I went sledding with my best friend Jim. My younger sister tagged along, which drove me nuts, especially because over time Jim enjoyed my sister's company more and they began dating once puberty ran its course.

We went to a hill next to school. It was a wide hill, with plenty of space. One end was only for daredevils. It was next to a fence and it was known as "Death Valley." Jim told me that one kid had his heart impaled on that fence after one particularly ugly mishap. Jim had a tendency to tell a few stories -- he'd also told me that he had spend years running around in gangs. He was 11 when he told me this.

An area in the middle of the hill had been dug to seem like large stairs. You could walk up them, which made the return trip to the top of the hill much easier, or you could sled down them, which I tried once. And only once. By the time I made it to the bottom my butt was broken and all of my internal organs felt like they had gone through a blender.

We tried everything -- head first, for the maximum amount of face-hitting snow; backwards; the normal, sitting, front-facing way; we'd even try standing once or twice, but that never got us far. Regardless of how I tried to make it down the hill, my goal was always -- always -- to wipe out at the end. I was never satisfied unless I found myself head down in a pile of dirty snow at the bottom of the hill, my sled far ahead of me. I gave myself points for the distance between myself and my sled at the end of the hill. I got bonus points if I ended up in the hospital. The points were double if I hit a bully on the way down.

This, unfortunately, is also my style of skiing. I never got the hang of stopping at the end of a run, so I'd just fall, then roll until I no longer rolled or I hit the chalet, whichever came first.

So Thank God that winter is here. I was wondering whether our local emergency room missed me.






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