Speedster

My friend Olive gave me a sled. Not one of those molded plastic gizmos made in China out of old soda bottles, but a real made-in-the-USA classic. Steel runners. Hardwood deck. Sturdy maple steering bar. Real rope, just the right length to tuck under the tailboards.

“It’s out in the breezeway,” she directed. I found it easily, standing against the wall beside a cabinet devoted to cans of paint.

Olive’s sled had been her companion growing up in Thomaston, Maine. Now that she was in her eighties, it was looking for a new owner. Naturally it picked a guy in his sixties with a fondness for nonmotorized outdoor fun.

“Would you take it and love it, as I have?” As if that appeal was not enough tug on the heart, I could just read the name in faded original paint: “Speedster.” A sled with that name has got to be cherished.

So I have this beautiful thing at home on my outdoor worktable, with its ghostly worn name and decorative filigree and several nail heads protruding just a bit. Every child’s sled needs at least one pants-ripper, just to make returning home to mother more interesting.

I pass a wad of steel wool over the snow-grabbing patina of old rust, recalling that at the start of each sledding season in my childhood, rusty runners left the yard hash-marked with red-brown lines. I want Speedster to have a good clean start. My first scrubbing pass yields a dry scraping, like old barbed wire being pulled through fencing staples. Then, as the shiny-smooth steel emerges through a reddish cloud, a new sound emerges. It is a high, thin voice. Reminds me of those old Edison cylinders played on my grandmother’s wind-up phonograph. Makes me think of the song a wet finger can draw from the rim of a crystal wineglass. Definitely a call. This sled yearns toward a hill, and I happen to live just under a good one:  Mellow Hill, in Sidney, Maine. A thing wants to be used according to its purpose.

I waste no time getting to the trail. The snow is perfect for sledding—hard packed by recent rain and turned to slick marble by a below-zero night. I plunk the sled down atop a stretch of gently sloping woods road. The trail wends below me, passing between arching birches, spreading maples, and tall oaks.

Speedster responds to my weight with a tentative creak. Time to go. It’s been a long time. She starts eagerly, and as her speed picks up, cold air curls into my ears, but I can still hear the runners hum as tree trunks flash past. Then they sing; just as I pass beneath the first white-birch arch, I hear the laughter. As if I share this ride with several small passengers. Peals of terror and of delight. With an echo from storefronts as a long-ago sled rockets a little girl down a night-lonely street through glowing pools from streetlamps, lazy snowflakes drifting inside the yellow cones of light. Laughter of crossing a small bridge downtown. Held breath. No cars coming. Then more laughter, the squeals and shouts of sliding right through a forbidden intersection, runners clattering on icy ridges made by cars earlier in the day. Then I am trudging back up Mellow Hill for a second run.

Speedster is much more than a friend’s old sled; it is a special instrument of joyful memories, hers and mine.

Projectile Recreation
The cannonball, its trajectory impossibly flat, tore along my field of vision between the base of a wooded slope and the flat marshland. It was black and glinting in the sun, and whatever it hit would explode, be destroyed. It traveled from left to right with such speed that I could barely keep it is sight.

That is, my first thought was “cannonball,” probably from my memory of a scene in the Civil War movie Gettysburg, in which the ball from a field piece skipped viciously along a ridge, seeking its next victim. What I actually saw on that crisp morning in February, along the west branch of Bog Brook, which flows from The Great Sidney Bog to the Kennebec River, may as well have been a cannonball. It was the shiny helmet on the head of a snowmobiler who had steered down the twisty trail from the Quaker Hill Road. Upon reaching the pounded-flat stretch of wetland, which offered a frozen, racetrack-like level of about two hundred yards to the next rise, he had accelerated immediately, turning his machine, and himself, into a projectile. There was almost no sound, just a light buzz on the frosty air of a clear morning.

I stayed put on my skis beside a beaver lodge for the space of several thoughts after that. Partly to see whether any other ordnance would follow this one, but mostly to allow the hole torn in my attention to heal. I had been listening to a pair of beaver kits squeaking from inside the lodge, probably competing for nursing rights while Mom held her breath at the sound of my skis creaking on the snow outside. That innocent animal sound helped. I reminded myself that mine was not the only peace broken that morning. The little brown-water song, emerging from a nearby beaver dam across the tiny stream, helped. Watching the early stir of air pushed by the climbing sun, nudging fronds of dry grass to make delicate arcs in the snow, helped. But a hole had been punched in my morning, and I turned my skis for home.

My experiences with snowmobiles and their operators have been ever thus, since my first encounter with them years ago. Not all of these meetings have been the near misses of my cannonball moment, but they have always felt like a rude intrusion. I was in my twenties, not long out of college, teaching, raising two children, and working hard to pay for a house. In those days, there would have been no money for such toys as snowmobiles or even for the newly popular cross-country skis. But I did possess an old pair of snowshoes, rawhide and ash, with indifferent but functional bindings. With these I could join my father in pursuit of his recent discovery: ice fishing. This was a new thing; Dad had never allowed himself time for recreation. When I was growing up, he was always working on somebody’s baler or chain saw, or repairing the presses for the local newspaper.

But now he was going ice fishing on weekends, and we in the family cheered him on. That he wanted me to join him was even better. In his typical craftsman’s way, he had made much of his own equipment. He fashioned various kinds of ice chisels, until he found the best width, length, and angle for the blade. This and his traps, five for him and the same for me, plus extra line, sinkers and tools, fit snugly into a long, narrow pine chest he had built. This box, along with a bait bucket and our lunch pails, fit perfectly on his old toboggan, its bottom waxed slick for the trail.

Thus we struck out on many a winter morning for a day together. We chose ponds for their solitude, not necessarily for their game fish. A pickerel or two from Moody Pond in Windsor was quite as satisfying as salmon or togue from more distant Moosehead Lake. After parking Dad’s Ford Falcon wagon beside the snow bank near a tall pine that marked the tote road, we snowshoed in, towing our gear quite happily. I liked the neat way the toboggan would crest a rise in the snow, then flex to meet the trail again. The pond welcomed us with a companionable silence and shortening shadows as the sun rose behind us.

One of us would gather dry wood while the other cut the first holes, and soon we would be ready to sip coffee from the Thermos and watch for “flags.”  The closed chest was our bench, and the small fire contributed to our contentment in ways we could not have described. I think now that the combination of leisurely fire tending and watchful waiting for a red flag to tip up was just right for two men who had never learned how to share feelings but who otherwise communicated pretty well.

Dad smoked in those days, before the combination of brain tumor and lung cancer sickened and eventually killed him. To this day, the distinctive combined aromas of wood fire and cigarette smoke can make me wistful.

On one of those sojourns to Moody Pond, we received a sign that would signify a change. Obscuring our earlier trail, and packing the fresher snow to a corrugated trench, was a snowmobile track. This was a Ski Doo, the first of many to come, and a harbinger of the infernal racket, the cloying smoke, and the arrogant attitude that we came to associate with people who would rather grind their way through the woods than be here under their own power.

Later, many other ice-fishers would appear noisily on “our” lakes and ponds, towing sledges filled with gear, perforating the ice with their sputtering power augers, and careening around in lieu of waiting for flags. Sometimes it would seem that they made a special project of packing the snow wherever it lay fresh and inviting. Gasoline was cheap, and apparently ambition and imagination were in short supply.

That first snowmobiler had piloted his contraption right through the center of our previous week’s fishing holes, stopping over one of them for a good look. We sometimes joked about saving the “good” holes for the next winter’s fishing, but now this one showed an oily, sooty residue where the driver had opened the throttle to take off. We scarcely suspected it then, but this was the beginning of an end to our solitude. Slowly at first, then with increasing frequency, we saw greater numbers of mechanized ice-fishers. They tended to gather in noisy flocks, and to leave litter behind on the ice: beverage bottles, oil containers, wrappers. The oil from their two-cycle engines lay on the snow, ready to make a scummy sheen on the water during ice-out. Once along a tote road we found a broken plastic snowmobile windshield, discarded after some mishap.

Some of these “sleds” (have you noticed that nowadays, many think a sled is a snowmobile, just as a bike is a motorcycle?) were driven by very young operators, and it was one of those who finally succeeded in driving me from the ice. After Dad’s death, I attempted to carry on his tradition of quiet ice fishing by including my family on the outing. The wife, two children, myself and our playful golden retriever were enjoying a sunny Sunday, ice fishing around the homemade shack that several friends had helped me haul onto the ice of China Lake. I had cleared a little skating rink, and the children were having fun with hockey sticks and a puck. While we were sharing lunch beside the shack, one of the pack of growling snowmobiles veered our way, plunged through the little bank of snow, and proceeded to run over the hockey sticks lying on the ice. I accosted the driver on his second pass, noting that he was very young, maybe with a chronological age of as much as thirteen.

“You have this whole lake. Do you suppose you could keep clear of the children’s skating rink?”  I asked. He shot me a venomous look and sped off, spinning his track and enveloping me in oily smoke. When we returned to the spot next week, someone had used chunks of firewood to smash in every piece of sheet aluminum siding, so that our ice-fishing shack looked like a derelict skeleton. I quit ice fishing after that.

Since then, registration requirements, established trails, and the work of snowmobile clubs have done much to improve the behavior of most snowmobilers. But I feel keenly the loss of the sort of outdoor adventure my dad and I cherished. Such an experience today could probably be arranged, given enough advance planning and expense, but the very simplicity that we enjoyed so much would be missing. I do not expect to find it again, any more than I think I will enjoy a lake or waterway absent engine-driven craft, or trails in the woods free of ATVs.

Access to outdoor machinery does unpretty things to some people, and we all lose some important, peaceful qualities from our lives at their hands.

Sledspeak
I will continue to insist that only a real sled, not a snowmobile, can provide me with true joy on one of the best playgrounds winter can offer: a crunchy downhill run. There, the child emerges, chortling with excitement, rousing the hills once again with peals of playful laughter. When the profiteers among us have exploited to the limit our gullible capacity to buy ever more exotic toys, if there is a limit, we will be left with ourselves, our imaginations, and a natural world that so far has been remarkably forgiving of our abusive ways.

When that happens, look me up. We’ll go sledding.

Don Robbins ddlanod7@aol.com, born and educated mostly in Maine, is a retired high school English teacher living in Sidney, Maine. He writes regularly for local publications and shares his love of nature with children and adults through volunteer storytelling in schools, libraries, and small local gatherings.