Fun in the Snow

You only "get" sledding when you're too young to know better. Once you get old and jaded, the last thing you think about doing when you see snow outside is to go slide down it on a tacky hollow, plastic object made in China. It has to be the point where the occasional inverse relationship between fun-for-kids and torture-for-adults reaches its apex.

When I was a lad, back in Boston, things were much better for the kids and much worse for the kids, because we had this place called "The Arnold Arboretum", the name of which reflects a rich guy with a dorky name who gave his estate to the City of Boston and Harvard University to maintain (what was he thinking?!!), full of trees from all over the world with metallic plates telling their place or origin and their name and their Latin name... But we didn't care about the trees. For us, the arboretum was a delivery system for these gigantic hills which were great for sledding - or awful for sledding, depending on which generation you belonged to. My father was a very indulgent man, as far as fun was concerned, so we never knew just how bad it was. For us, it was pure bliss.

Where we live now, the hills are not so bad - or good. But it's still awful beyond description. You look out on all that pretty snow, and know you don't want to touch it, and then, once you have kids, your wife says, effectively, "Why don't you get Daddy to roll around in that stuff with you for a long time, and climb hills, and risk all kinds of injuries?" And so you do.


So all day, we were looking forward to this outing - in this case, to our rather hilly back yard - and we gave it a try.


Of course, just as important as sledding was the imperative of bringing plastic action figures along for the adventure. Ian brought Wall-E. Daniel brought Wall-E's robot-girlfriend, Eve. I explained that plastic toys don't generally fare very well on sledding adventures - what with gravity and rolling and so much snow to lose things in. But Ian explained that the purpose of the trip, in part, was for Wall-E's enjoyment, so Wall-E joined us, in my zippable jacket pocket. So did Eve, on Daniel's behalf. So we climbed the hill.

This snow - enough snow to cancel church, which is rare - was several powdery inchces on top of a sheet of ice, over several more inches. So we sat down on the plastic sled -the three of us - and things sunk, went crunch, and sanks some more. The entire effort to gain gravity was a fiasco.

Daniel is smart. He bailed out, and stood beside to watch us. Finally I found a mini-precipice from which we could launch. Ian, who is five, told me, who am olde, that perhaps it would make more sense for me to sit in front, so that my weight could cause gravity to kick in. His phrasing wasn't far from that.


The five year old turned out, unsurprisingly, to be a better physicist.

But Daniel still didn't join us. Every time I invited him to get on the sled, he would scream "No!", as if I had said, Shall we torture you some more?"

Even with Ian's superior engineering, we only made it half way down the steep bottom-half of the hill, at which point I would pull Ian the rest of the way, singing the verses of "Jingle Bells" (me, not him), all of which he certainly enjoyed. Each time, I would invite Daniel to joy on the supplemental pull-ride, which seemed less daunting than the gravity-driven ride before it, and each time Daniel would yell the "No!" football-cheer, almost playfully.

For the record, it its fun in its own ways for two reasons"

1. It is fun to see the kids have so much fun, no matter what my toes think...

2. It is a rare excuse to take in the beauty of the winter landscape in the background - especially in New England - and I would never excercise this opportunity otherwise.

In any case, I still think maybe Ian takes things a bit far. When we were pretty-much done with the actual sledding, he suggested something like "Maybe we can just run down the hill now." Even good physicists sometimes propose wacky things... "The universe is curved," sounds pretty weird, but it doesn't compare to "Let's run down a snowy hill."

(January 11, 2009)