Andrew Wyeth would often paint pictures of the winter wood. He created a number of works of cold slow rural days. Invariably Wyeth’s skies are foreboding and grey tinged with brown. His chosen brown is the color you find in late dry summer roadside dust. His painting’s fir trees are full, solid; their color more black than green. Sparse windowless buildings are all weathered worn brown verging on the grey of old Europe’s aged ancient town sites. Out the window today is a winter landscape, but it is not like Wyeth’s, although Wyeth’s paintings really do capture the essence of winter more accurately than today’s scene.
‘Tis the 13 day November this year and an early winter snow has fallen. Like all first season snows it is beautiful. Where does this beauty come from? Most likely it comes from the glowing white of new snow’s ability to hide the decaying remnants of summer. Gone are the leaf piles waiting to be collected up for composting. Gone are the branches that have fallen from fall wind storms. Gone is the detritus of our warm weather life (chip bags, plastic lids from our coffee cups) that we have failed to pick up because the air has been too chill to go out and do yard work. Yes, this snow is like all other first real snows, has covered all our world’s imperfections. For a moment we have a still, calm and beautiful world. This moment of wonder will not last. The time from “It is so pretty,” to “F&#king snow” is measured in nano units.
A long time ago, on a day as cold as today, but with a biting wind and a sky as brooding as any ever painted by Wyeth, a 10-year-old boy stood at the top of a hill. Let us call him Sam. Four and a half foot tall with maybe eighty pounds on his rangy frame he stood equal in size to his Flexible Flyer sled. Sam was determined to get a couple of rides down on the packed snow, racing between the trees, before the winter storm kicked up again in earnest. If he were to use terms we use today the boy was thinking, “I am going to own this hill.”
Hill was really a misnomer. Really the sledding spot was a nothing more than a hollowed out space in the flat dirt. On three sides were empty fields filled with nothing but winter stubble now. On the fourth was the snow covered road that came from the center of town.
The hill was not quite a quarry. Someone for some purpose at some time had stripped off an acre of topsoil leaving a broad two story pit at the edge of town. For some it was a dumping ground. Broken cinder blocks and rotting rough sawn pieces of two by four had been scattered. If you looked you would see some stray empty 55 gallon drums.
In winter all this trash was off to the east side of the pit. At the end of the summer just past, and many prior summers, the blue jean and flannel shirt wearing kids of this town had pulled the trash off to the edge of a thicket to clear the way for two sled runs. Perhaps in their collective consciousness they just sensed winter would come. A leaf turned orange, and in unison they thought, ‘well guys we gotta move the trash off the hill.’ There was no place in 50 miles in any direction that was more than 15 feet above sea level. So as far as hills to sled go, this pit was it.
Of course you had other options to make use of your sled. You could grab a rope behind a car and skid down the road. But too many variables in that equation could lead to a life with a game arm or a permanent limp. For example, if you hit a drive spot of pavement the sparks would fly and the black top’s drag on the sled’s metal runners would induce a roll. Over and over you would go on ice packed asphalt. Bruised, contusions and broken bones, oh my. God forbid if the car stopped quickly for then there would be no open casket viewing for you. Nope, the hill was it.
As Sam stood at the top of the longer run, the more gentle slopped run maybe a hundred feet in length, he could hear the voices of the other kids already at the bottom of the hill. Just a few moments before, several of them had formed a sled train. Each of them was on a sled but they were holding the feet of the person in front of them. Down they went in a group slide ending with a pile of bodies, with scattered sleds and with bruises for sure. Those old rubber boots they wore, you know the kinds with hard thick soles and metal buckles, they hurt and left marks when you hit them with your face as the person in front of you stopped short at the bottom of the hill.
Sam waited at the top of the hill as the pile of laughing and cursing bodies untangled. He waited for sleds to be collected. He waited for them to trek off to the side of the hill to come back to where he was standing and demand a new turn. Sam decided he would push off holding tight onto the wooden piece that controlled the runners of the sled when the noisy group was about fifty paces from him.
Standing there on that moody winter day, scarf wrapped around his neck, thick almost unbendable gloves on his hands, he thought of freedom. When Sam dropped onto his sled he was dreaming of the joy of victory and not even thinking of the agony of defeat. The ride from the top of the hill to the bottom was fast. It took maybe five, maybe ten and at most maybe fifteen seconds. He would have to steer because there were trees on either side of both runs. While the grooves of the prior sled runs were well worn, and iced sometimes, he still had to control his ride. Drop the sled, belly flop forward on it to give moment and then become the bullet headed down to the flat center of the pit.
Sam tensed and he threw himself on the sled. Bellyflopping forward face first into the pit he gained speed. It was always in the second or third second of the ride that the feeling came. Feeling the air rush past his fast and looking forward Sam was exhilarated. As he rushed into the pit he was not just a kid hurtling toward a quick stop under a cloudy sky on a cold day in bulky clothing. No, at about the second or third moment of that ride Sam’s brain was as free as his ten year old mind would ever be. No worries about bills and work had touched his soul yet. No existential angst had crept in yet. So when he heard that internal voice screaming “Wheeeeee….”, Sam was above the world. For a second or two he was a floating in heaven. On that day there was no better place to be.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be ten years old and back on that hill again?
1 comment:
Yes it would. I was on a similar hill, one lot away from mine, that we never touched, or ran down, or waddled in on a summer's day...one that was just waiting for the First Snow to arrive. It was then...and only then...that that hill became a mega monster. And down we would travel...into Mohawk Lane.
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