This toboggan run was really long, and perfectly graded, and a years-and-years-delight. Here's how it worked. If you were in it for the speed, or looking to crash, you'd take that steep start and lean into it. If you made it that far, and the pitch started to flatten a bit on its way down to Whitemud Creek at the very bottom, you'd roll off and run back and repeat the entire exercise.
How far was it? A mile? In joyful memory it was, but more realistically this track was probably about 300 metres long. 400 we could even say, if we were being reckless.
Sometimes you'd go for speed, but other times you'd go for distance. The grade flattened after a while, but depending on the amount and condition of the snow, you might only be halfway done, halfway down. The pounding and the whistling in your ears would give way to the sound of wood or plastic on snow, and the busy silence of the winter wilderness. It certainly was winter, and it was also quite wild, after a fashion.
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| The creek, at the bottom |
This is the end. If you got this far, it was purely by pulling with your arms. Cheating? No! It got you to the bottom, which was an accomplishment.
Is the scene, above, aggrandized in memory, diminished in fact? Maybe. But maybe not. The water used to move more. There was often, there was usually a beaver dam, which made for a much more dynamic eco-system. But this was quite a thing, there in the more or less middle of the city. Still is.
The pregnant silence that prevailed down here, with the odd burst or bustle of creatures, signalled a second motivation, or kind of occupation. Sometimes we were sledding. Other times, often, we explored.
Scott, as usual!
Here's a turning, from further up the hill, trailing off to the south. Sometimes, winter and summer too, we'd walk instead of running down here. We'd peel off. We'd explore, or imagine or often, just be.
The illustrious Scott was a bona fide outdoorsman, always immersed in some book or other about plants and animals and woodcraft and the like. And he was generous about it to. "Come on," he'd say. So down we went, to this little shelter that (he) we (he) had fashioned, to this outlook, or that.
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| Our doughty provincial flower, being doughty |
Credit where it's due! The cub scout and the boy scout programs were implicated here. I have no memory at all about their dire ideological impositions, or obliviousnesses. Which is the whole of our experience in this part of the US. At that time scouting connected us to the world outside, and some of its bounty and possibility. That was Ernest Thompson Seton's influence, wasn't it?
And it was my brother's too. Scott would point out the traces and characteristics of this species or that. Here was a nest, or footprints, or a lair. Here's how it worked, or what they did, or where they went. Sometimes, often, the species itself would be on hand. Minutes and half-hours would pass lightly, easily, in the modest pursuit of or the hushed, glancing co-habitation with all of this bounty.
We weren't trailblazers, we weren't hunters or trappers, we weren't fugitives from the RCMP. Beyond the incalculable value of the time and the place and the duration and the company, these frequent interludes would not lead to any lasting occupation, or even avocation. For me it didn't really lead to any useful or retained knowledge. The echoes of past plenitudes, now extinct!
And yet, there was something true and real in all of this. Something kind of I Corinthians 12: 8-9. Scott's was the knowledge, and mine was the faith therein. I can't quite say how or what, but it definitely panned out into something, or other ...
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| Going back up that hill ... |
