We were walking up Tower Road, looking for friends with sleds.
I am 58 years old and my companion is 62.
I’ve been down south lately, I said to my friend, and I don’t think many 60-year-olds in my hometown are still out sledding.
“Ah Haines,” he replied, “Where you can relive your childhood every day.”
Indeed you can, and that’s some of the charm of the place.
Sophisticated recreation is scarce in a small town, winters are long, and sledding Tower Road is dangerous and illicit enough to provide a thrill. At its iciest best, only runner sleds work on it. Plastic toboggans difficult to steer careen into roadside ditches or berms.
Sledding Tower requires real steering and nerve. You can post spotters at the intersections at FAA Road and Theater Drive to ensure you’re not run over by a car, or you can live more dangerously.
But you’ll want a plan for crossing Beach Road, because by then you’ll be terrified by your own speed and anything that might be heading at you.
I think I made it to Beach once without dragging my feet to slow down. Someone was spotting, so I barreled across the street just to see where I might land. Hitting a berm on the road’s opposite side, I shot airborne before crashing down on hard-packed asphalt.
My borrowed sled broke into three or four pieces and I was knocked out of breath.
Curiosity killed the cat and probably has claimed a few middle-aged sledders, but the truth is that sledding isn’t that safe even for those with young, elastic bones. A tree at the bottom of Wiggins Hill, the grassy slope we’d sled as kids, claimed a leg bone and at least one shoulder blade that I can remember.
“Sure it’s dangerous. If it wasn’t a little bit dangerous, it wouldn’t be fun,” Erwin Hertz once said of the Mad Raft Race down the Chilkoot River, though he could have been talking about just about anything people do outdoors.
I don’t know what the people who brought us bike helmets and knee pads recommend for sledding. A brake, perhaps? Certainly a headlamp for going out at night.
While fueling my truck at the Second Avenue gas station a few weeks back I met a young dad sledding with his kids down the small slope there. He said they’d been running the Young Road hill but the cops found them and told them to at least wear headlamps.
Haines designated its first sanctioned sledding hill a few years back. It’s a steep run, a hillside that parallels a road so parents in cars can ferry their children back to the top, which not only makes sledding safer, it eliminates most of the actual exercise a kid would get back in the day.
Back in the thick of the Baby Boom, when children weren’t that rare and parents weren’t that worried, we’d grab our sleds on a snowy day and not return until lunch or dinner or after dark. We’d hook together sleds to make trains, then snake down slopes to “whip” the kids at the end off the back.
We’d make jumps or jump curbs. We’d do what needed to be done to do what hadn’t been done before. Invariably some kid would lose control and smash into a tree or a parked car. Some adult would yell and we’d scamper.
When we’d get back home, mom and dad wouldn’t ask for details and we wouldn’t offer any. We were just kids out having fun, and as long as no one got seriously hurt, it was all good.
It’s snowing here today, as hard as it has in a few years. Down at her hardware store, Glenda is selling new Flexible Flyers for $70. That’s not cheap, but it’s still less than the cost of missing a mad night out.