I think that, at one time or another, we all take a look back at some of the things we did as children and adolescents and are completely shocked that we were that stupid, and equally surprised that we actually survived our own stupidity. There seems to be a direct inverse correlation between one’s intelligence and one’s ability to survive accidents. This explains how idiots routinely walk unscathed from spectacular train wrecks and people of renowned talent and promise die slipping in the shower. (To whit—Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets, died at fifty after a cold became pneumonia became heart failure; Lindsey Lohan snorted an entire Colombian drug cartel and didn’t even hiccup.)
I remember clearly discovering parachutes when I was about eight or so, and immediately taking this to mean that I could float serenely to earth from any height simply by holding any reasonably good-sized piece of fabric over my head by the corners—a theory I tested by (I swear this is true) jumping off the roof of the garage with a sheet. This is not something I did just once and got hurt or in trouble over it and then never tried again—I did it on a number of occasions, and continued to do so for a remarkably long time. (I also did it with umbrellas of various sizes to see it they worked, too.) It goes without saying that this doesn’t work at all, in any way—it doesn’t even come close to working—but repeated failures did very little to deter me from continuing with my experiments.
Amazingly, my parents knew what I was doing but did absolutely nothing to try and discourage me. To this day I don’t know why, but they knew I was extremely stubborn and not predisposed to following unsolicited advice no matter how sound it is, so I suspect they figured I’d stop on my own once I suffered a severe enough injury, like a broken leg or death. Either that or there was some kind of entertainment value in watching their daughter climb onto the roof and jump off again and again, each time sincerely expecting a result other than impacting the ground like a retarded little meteorite. No, actually, that’s not really fair—meteorites don’t climb back up into the atmosphere and jump again.
Eventually I did stop doing it, but it took an embarrassingly long time for me to figure out that it wasn’t working. Not that I’m taking my good fortune for granted here, but I really think I should have been killed doing that. Fortunately—in case you were wondering—I didn’t die. I didn’t even suffer anything worse than a few scratches; I was hurt much worse than that the time my dad and my uncles threw me out of my grandpa’s pool onto the bocce-ball court. (This is also true.)
The point is that, as children, we do things that make our adult selves cringe in horror at the risks we took. ‘What was I thinking?!’ seems to be a common mantra among people recalling childhood stupidity. The answer is pretty straightforward: you weren’t. None of us were. Scientists have deduced that nobody has the ability to think anything through until well into their twenties. Really. I swear I’m not lying.
I mention all of this so I can segue into my next anecdote. Since winter is on its way and the air is starting to get just a touch frosty, I naturally began to think about snow and all the memories I have associated with it. Most of these memories involve miserably digging my car out and losing boots in big snowdrifts, but some of them are about the fun things I used to do in the snow—back when getting cold and wet and courting certain death counted as ‘fun’.
When I was little I didn’t live in New York—unlike Long Island which is completely flat, this place was extremely hilly. The area where my parents live is really uneven, to the point where the property developers had to accommodate the wildly variant lay of the land by building a lot of the houses with basements that are subterranean on one side of the house but come out at ground level on the other—sometimes the slope is so big that they also had to build stairs going down to the ground because the basement door is still several feet above it.
There are still some places where it was just flat-out impossible to build a house. One of these areas is about a quarter of a mile from my old home, between two houses. It’s a stretch of empty land some 200 yards wide and the whole thing is one enormous hill far too steep to build anything on. Level ground extends only a little past the edge of the sidewalk, whereupon the ground takes a massive plunge straight down at an almost completely vertical angle before it levels out again about sixty feet below and fifteen horizontal feet from where it started.
This sounds like hyperbole, but it really isn’t. I’m not exaggerating in the slightest. It actually is that steep.
And that was the neighbourhood sledding hill.
Looking back on it, I’m really astounded that our parents let us all play on that hill because absolutely nothing about it even remotely suggests it might be a safe place for children to play. On such a dramatic slope, small children on plastic sleds pick up an enormous amount of speed very quickly—I think a few kids might have broken the sound barrier—and braking was almost impossible. You just had to wait until you ran out of momentum, but even that didn’t really work out well because just a few yards beyond the bottom of the hill is an ancient and rusted barbed wire fence leftover from when the builders marked off the edge of the development during construction. It was presumed among us children that any contact with the fence was a guaranteed trip to the doctor for a tetanus shot, so there was always a certain sense of urgency and a lot of frantic scrambling to slow down followed by a dramatic emergency escape from the sled by leaping off of it at several times the federal speed limit.
The neighbourhood had all been built up in the 70s, when the area was mostly former farmland and quite empty, but in the twenty-odd years between that and my sledding days, a huge sprawling forest had grown up on all sides. The effect was rather like living in ‘Hansel and Gretel’. You sort of expected to see a gingerbread cottage. A lot of this forest was located right at the foot of the sledding hill, producing yet another energetically hazardous situation, because if for some reason the barbed wire didn’t stop you (there were gaps in it), then you would end up rocketing through the woods where you would quickly get helplessly lost and have to live the rest of your life eating tree bark and sleeping with the pack of wolves who adopted you.
At least, that’s what we thought would happen.
Right after the trees thinned out, there was yet another big hill. Depending on the angle at which you went down, you could end up in one of two places: a large reservoir or the highway. Even though both outcomes were potentially lethal, it was commonly agreed that the highway was the lesser of two evils. Yes there was every chance we could have been flattened by a truck, but there was a vague sort of hope that at least drivers would make some kind of attempt to swerve to avoid running us over—whereas piranhas weren’t known for being quite so forgiving. We had no reason to believe this other than simply by virtue of the fact that we were all children and therefore mind-bendingly stupid, but somehow we all came to the belief that the reservoir had piranhas in it. And piranhas are one of those real-world animals that take on mythic proportions to children—like sharks and lions and dinosaurs—and we believed them capable of total annihilation. Getting a toe in the water with piranhas meant certain doom and they would devour you completely and there would be nothing left for your parents to bury. The fact that residential drainage ditches are not typically known for being infested with Amazonian fish didn’t seem to occur to us.
(Ironically, years later there really did end up being a legitimate bodily threat in the water all over the state through the sudden population explosion of an invasive species of horror-movie caliber fish called snakeheads. Up to three feet long and sometimes even longer, extremely aggressive, and full of sharp teeth, snakeheads will eat anything they can rip chunks out of and are capable of leaving the water to hunt on land. Reports abounded of innocent fishermen and happy vacationers taking an innocent romp along the water only to end up minus one limb, beloved family pets reduced to just a bit of disassociated fur. It was not a particularly fortuitous time to be renting lakeside property. No one knew where they’d come from or how they got there but eventually the National Park Service hypothesized that the fish were bought illegally from international grocers—the snakehead is a popular food in Asia and Africa—and then for some reason were dumped alive into various bodies of water, where they had no competition and began having lots of snakehead sex and making evil snakehead babies.)
Sometimes when I go to visit my parents, I’ll walk by the old sledding hill and take a look at it. During the summer it doesn’t look quite so bad, but covered in snow it becomes clear how dangerous it was. In childhood it seemed so benign, but as an adult I just see the whole thing as a lot of potential bloodshed and broken bones just waiting anxiously to happen. Of all the stupid things I did as a child, it seems like the worst ones were things my parents not only allowed but actually encouraged me to do. (Remind me to tell you about my dad teaching me how to catch snakes bare-handed when I was eight.) It wasn’t even just my parents, either—everyone’s parents let them do this. After all, close encounters with mortality are well known to build character, aren’t they?
Actually, even decades later, I am not entirely convinced that this wasn’t some attempt on their part at culling the herd.
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