While my children were home for their college break, we were rummaging around the garage and came upon a pile of plastic and inflatable sleds that they’d had for well over a decade. As we discussed the possibility of donating the collection to the next generation of young people at “Big Hill,” our local spot for bringing kids to go sledding while parents and guardians watch attentively while sipping from steaming coffee mugs, I mentioned to my kids how impressed I was with how their sleds had held up over the years. In my recollection, sleds rarely made it through one season.
“Well, what were you doing with them?” My son asked.
I hesitated here, as I often do when asked by my kids to share some story or aspect of my childhood because our experiences have been so vastly different. I always fear that my retelling of the dimwitted and dangerous decisions of my youth might influence them to repeat these escapades, which would cause my hair to become an even whiter shade of gray and the majority of my nights to be spent pacing the hallways and staring out windows into the darkness. I don’t think I’m unique in the concerns I have about full disclosure of my formative years to my offspring, especially among the people I grew up with who beat the odds, stayed alive, and now find themselves in the ironic role of the worried parent.
So I answered my son in what I thought was a cautious and measured tone, while also being honest.
“Well, we had a few places we would go, and I guess the hills we used weren’t as groomed or as open as the ones you grew up on. Some were in the woods, you see, and after you hit a tree or two, you know, the sled would crack. And the sled would also crack when you collided or landed on someone else. And it usually got a little melted in the fire. Our sledding was a bit more dangerous, I suppose, like the one time when a kid almost lost his testicle. It was actually the first time I heard the word, and found out what a testicle was…”
From the look on both my kid’s faces, I knew I’d gone too deep in my reminiscence.
“A kid almost lost his testicle?” they both asked, staring at me.
“Well, he didn’t lose it,” I explained. “I mean, once we pulled him out of the woods, the ambulance came and I heard they got everything stitched right up, so he was fine, just fine….”
Both kids were frozen now, silent and wide-eyed.
“We didn’t have cell phones back then, you know, so we loaded him in someone’s sled and had to pull him out of the woods. But we were way out in the woods, so it took a while to get him back to his aunt’s house where he was visiting. For Christmas.”
The wide-eyed stares were beginning to look more like revulsion.
“It wasn’t Christmas, though,” I tried to explain, “it was like a day or two after. And we didn’t just leave him in the driveway of his aunt’s house. We knocked on the door and told her about it. And that she should probably call an ambulance or something. And she did…”
Unlike other memories I’ve told to my dear, naïve children who often choose to believe that much of what I’m telling them is fiction and fantasy (which is probably safer for all of us in the long run), I could see that this was going to require more details and explanation. So I’m writing it all down with the hope that they might pass on some of my childhood adventures as cautionary tales and family lore to future generations.
Sledding was a major winter-time activity when I was a kid. The standard sled for all children in my neighborhood was the red molded-plastic two-person style with a thin yellow nautical-looking braided rope tied to the front at two points so that you could pull the thing by hand if it was empty or put it around your body (mule style) if you needed to pull an injured sledder off the mountain for medical attention (this happened frequently, but most of the time they just needed to put some snow on the laceration and once the bleeding froze up they were back at it. Such was NOT the case with the injured testicle). These sleds also had four cheaply-constructed thin plastic yellow handles, two on each side which were threaded through the top edges of the sled as a safety measure so that the occupants would have something to hold onto during their ride. These handles always ripped off on the first or second ride and were left where they fell. I’m sure if you went back to our favorite spots for sledding today you would find them there, as smooth and yellow as the day they were lost, refusing to decompose in any way.
But you can’t get to those places anymore. I grew up on a dead-end street with forest and trails accessible from both the front and back doors of my house. Even back then, the real-estate buzzards had their talons sharpened to sell off every spare bit of land and fill every inch up with unnatural and non-recyclable items much larger than the sled handles we left out in the woods. It’s all “developed” now. An interesting term for taking places once wonderfully wild and filled with risky natural magic, wrapping them in fences, adding foreign grass seeds to flattened and leveled parcels, and poisoning the groundwater with toxic fertilizers and large septic systems. Oh, brave new world that forces such wonderful and temporary conveniences for the good of an increasingly slothful humankind…
The current roads and cul-de-sacs were a series of logging trails and single-track pathways back then, some wide enough to get a car through, and others so thin that when the pine tree boughs were weighed down with snow they brushed against your shoulders as you passed. On the day of the “incident,” there was a few feet of snow packed firmly on all these paths. We kids knew this snowpack made for good sledding and an easier trek to get to our favorite spots. Light and powdery snow, although beautiful and easy to remove from driveways, has always been elusive in our corner of the Northeast. Much more common is the “heart attack” variety – a mixture of wet snow, sleet, hail, and freezing rain (don’t ask me for a distinction between any of these), that is also pretty to watch as it falls and then impossible to remove from the ground without a sharp-bladed shovel and a fair amount of hacking, chopping, and expletives – not to mention the heart attacks. But as a child, heart attacks were rare. Our main struggle after such a storm was trying to stay on the crusty, slick surface of the snow without breaking through and sinking up to our knees in the mush below.
Kids with Moon Boots ™ had a significant advantage here, and it’s worth noting that the boy who almost lost a testicle that day was wearing one of the first pair I’d ever seen. All I knew about him was that he’d somehow wound up at his aunt’s house and that she had asked her neighbor, Mrs. Thompson, if the boy could join the Thompson girls that day to go sledding. There had been no requirement for him to go with us – no pre-screening or preliminary test he had to pass. At that point in our lives, we weren’t especially interested in anyone’s back story. The kid was here, a parent had said to take him sledding, and we obeyed. I was curious and slightly envious of those boots, though. The Moon Boot ™ came out within the last few years of my sledding career. Like riding a bicycle, going Trick-or-Treating, and watching cartoons, sledding was considered an activity confined to childhood back then. Ski resorts hadn’t tapped into the lucrative snow tubing parks yet. Nowadays, for a “nominal” fee (because why should sledding be free) people of all ages, shapes, and sizes can avoid walking up the hill when sledding (the only exercise associated with the activity), and spend a few hours at the local ski mountain franchise standing in line with other chumps and waiting to be pulled up and ride down two or three groomed runs. If families bring along an extra couple hundred dollars, they can enjoy a lunch of chicken fingers and soggy french fries in the resort’s dining hall. By the time I finished middle school, sledding was no longer cool and I chose to spend my winter weekends at the roller-skating rink or near the pretzel stand in the mall with a few other pimple-faced boys daring each other to approach and speak to the pimple-faced girls that were doing the same thing.
I remember first trying on a pair of Moon Boots ™ and concluding that they were named incorrectly. These boots would never hold you to the moon’s surface. As a matter of fact, they seemed to defy gravity completely! It was truly amazing how light they were. If one was looking for footwear that would hold you firmly grounded on any planet, the snowmobile boots purchased from the annual Sears Catalog was the way to go. Although I’m unsure of the exact materials required to make these boots, I remember that they used the heaviest (and scratchiest) wool available for the boot insert portion. Around this was stitched a synthetic material so thick and unnatural that nothing could penetrate it (water, gasoline, radiation, etc..). This unique fabric worked so well and was so impenetrable that Sears used it to create the entire one-piece snowmobile suit outfit which was also available in their annual catalog. They added the scratchy wool to those suits as well, which was either a major blunder in design or a sick joke on all of us kids because the combination of the impermeable shell and the insulating quality of the wool acted like an organic oven for any warm-blooded creature zipped and buttoned tightly inside. The wool bits also sought out water wherever possible and soaked it in like a sponge. I remember distinctly the smell of sweat and feet and wet wool on winter days at elementary school when we came in from recess (yes – we went out every day despite weather conditions) with actual steam rising from our Sears snowmobile suits and boots as our bodies slowly sautéed inside. The only difference in materials between the Sears boots and suits was that they wrapped what I assume was their thickest rubber – the same type they used to make their “Winter Roadhandler” car tires, tightly around the bottom of each set of boots. The resulting weight of the entire Sears winter outfit was approximately 200 pounds – making it nearly impossible to ever stay on top of the crusty layer of snow that was so prevalent in our winter-time playgrounds.
Our crew met that day in the Thompson girl’s driveway and then began walking into the woods on the wide logging path directly across the street. We were happy to see that somebody had left a snowmobile track recently for us to trudge down. This helped to pack down the snow while also breaking through the surface ice. The only disadvantages to following one of these tracks were that:
1. You might get run over by the overzealous and grossly untrained operators of these machines.
2. If a snowmobile had traveled the same trail you were on within the last twenty-four hours, you would be walking in a low-hanging smog cloud created by leaded gasoline and the thickest, blackest oil known to humankind.
Within the Sears Catalog, these gas hogs were sold on the same pages as the snowmobile suits – which caused great resentment from us sledding kids against our peers who owned the suit and the machine it was named after. These were the same kids who always had a motorcycle or four-wheeler to speed along the logging trails in the summer while the rest of us huffed and puffed on our Schwinns and Huffys. When they weren’t motoring around in the woods, their parents were taking them out on boats in nearby lakes in the nice weather or on gondola rides to ski down some beautiful mountain in the winter. At the time, their families seemed to be the rich ones. It wouldn’t be until several years later, around senior year of high school, that we “poor” kids realized the money their parents spent on these recreational toys and experiences was the same cash our parents had been busy saving for college. Although I wasn’t in their kitchens or living rooms at the time these conversations took place, I have a story in my head where a mother or father gently informed the naïve kid that they wouldn’t be going for any higher education on the family’s dime, but they could take a lap around the lake on the pontoon boat or go for a spin on the quad if they would like.
So, we trudged into the woods following this snowmobile track and pulling a wide assortment of sleds and gear for the day. The kid who almost lost a testicle had an aluminum round saucer – which we all knew would be useless but nobody bothered to tell him. The majority of us were pulling the plastic red variety I mentioned earlier, but we also had a few old-school wooden toboggans in the mix. These were six or eight feet long and bent up and around at the front. They also had a cushion along the bottom for riders to sit on. The toboggans were a great alternative when sledding down an open field or in the steep sand pits we frequented. If you were going on a trail where turning was required, as we were today, the primary uses for the toboggans were to hold other gear upon, to use as a sitting place at the top or bottom of the hill, and as a temporary bed or stretcher for the injured (which would come in handy later that day). When conditions were icy, we broke out the runner sleds. Nowadays I often see these classic and elegant beauties used for decorations during the winter holidays. They remind me of the well-built and stylish cars I grew up around – the ones that weighed more than they should and moved like boats through the streets. These cars (and sleds) took a while to get moving, but once they planed off, it was a great ride. Unlike the toboggan, the runner sled was built to steer and turn which was useful in the single-track trails threaded through pines and oak and birch trees like the one we were headed to on that day.
There were actually two trails which intersected and then descended through a series of twists and turns into a ravine at the bottom of which was a swift-flowing stream. The stream, being a stream and not a lake, would never completely freeze to the point where a conscientious parent would have advised standing or sledding onto it. But parents and guardians back then weren’t required to hover so closely around their offspring’s activities, and they rarely asked questions about our expeditions into the woods beyond “So, did you kids have fun?” And we kids all knew that the answer was “yes,” even if we’d barely made it back alive. The unwritten rules of these required exchanges were simple and had somehow been handed down through generations of kids and parents. I can’t help but wonder who the snitch was that ruined all of it, condemning the current generation and those yet to come to a state of perpetual adult supervision, safety-compliant recreation, and snow tube parks.
The stream wasn’t deep enough to drown in (at least none of us ever drowned in it), but breaking through the ice did cause a bit of a hassle because the level of water was higher than the snowmobile boots and once you had completely submerged a foot or two into the stream, the wool socks and inner lining of our boots became an immediate hazard for frostbite. Which is why we started making the fires. The woods were full of dead and dried timber so it made sense to have a place where we could all warm up and, if necessary, dry ourselves and our boots out. Disposable lighters weren’t all that common back then, and few of us were bold enough to steal our father’s Zippos, so we made do with the packets of matches which were given away freely and generously from virtually every business. Birch bark was plentiful near our sled trails and worked well to get the fires started. Dead sticks were also abundant, but the best timber to keep the fires going were the large, dead trees we worked together to push over. Two or three kids would rock the tree back and forth as it creaked louder and louder and eventually toppled to the ground. A fourth person was ideal in these situations to act as a spotter and yell “RUN” when the top of the tree snapped off first and tumbled downward towards the would-be loggers (now victims of their task) in a powerful example of physics, environmental science, and Darwinian selection theory.
At first, we started these fires at the top of the ravine or at the bottom near the creek (sometimes we did both). But a better alternative was devised after a few of us watched a particular intriguing episode of C.H.I.P.s. Ponch and John were speeding after a criminal along the winding roads of the California Coast (the person was probably a jewel thief – apparently that was common on the West Coast in those days), and the person’s Camaro came upon a fiery blaze blocking Highway 1. Fortunately for the thief, there was a large industrial ramp nearby which allowed the Camaro to jump over the flaming wreckage and outrun the boys from the California Highway Patrol – at least for that day.
Because the trail we were using had an intersection point, it made perfect sense to build a large jump from the snow and to start a fire behind it so that we could jump through the flames and back onto the trail just at the point in the “Y” intersection where the two separate routes became one. The other trail, the one without the jump and fire, attempted to time their start just right so that the jumping sled barely missed crashing down on top of them as it cleared the firepit. Everyone who was not sledding at the time gathered near the fire at the intersection and scored these near-misses. It always made for an exciting game of Cops and Robbers. And then the boy almost lost a testicle.
It’s difficult now to know where the blame really should be placed in the series of events which lead up to the injury. The kid’s aunt certainly seems liable. She and her husband were both young, without children of their own, and newer to the neighborhood. I imagine she wanted to appear cool and hip to her nephew, as most aunts and uncles without children strive to be, and therefore pushed the kid upon an unsuspecting Mrs. Thompson and the girls next door. If the aunt had any idea about the group of children she was sending the kid out with, or the basic idiocy and lack of sound reasoning among most children at that age, I trust she would have kept him inside, or maybe joined him in building a snowman (snowperson these days), or an ice fort in the front yard. I don’t wish to judge children (anyone under the age of 24, actually) harshly here, but neuroscience has proven that the human brain is the last organ in the body to fully develop, and it doesn’t happen until around that sweet spot between our second and third decade on the planet. And that shows. My point here is that I know kids have small, impulsive little brains – but apparently the aunt was not aware or experienced with this fact. Nobody who was present that day became a lawyer, but if they had I might ask them their thoughts. We had played the Cops and Robbers game many times before that day, and aside from a few mild contusions, a little blood, and one or two first-degree burns (barely first-degree, really), it had gone as smoothly as if we’d been stunt people on the set for C.H.I.P.s.
The main problem was the sled the kid chose. He realized fairly quickly that the aluminum saucer he arrived with would only work for packing down snow to make the jump higher or fanning the flames of the fire to stoke it up. You simply can’t steer those things, and on a trail that serpentines through trees steering is essential. The Thompson girls, perhaps under the assumption that he was somehow their responsibility because they had brought him along, alternated at allowing him to ride in the back of their sleds. And that should have been enough for him. But the sled with two people never went over the jump and through the fire. That would have been unsafe. And he – of his own volition, your Honor – stated that he wanted to jump over the fire. So, he asked to use one of the extra runner sleds.
Nobody had done that before. Because it wouldn’t work. The sled was too heavy and too slow to ever clear the fire. And even if it did, landing on the Cop or Robber from the other trail in the intersection with what amounted to two jagged, slicing, shards of metal also seemed unwise.
“Sure,” someone who brought one of the extra sleds told him, “you can use mine!”
“Have you ever ridden one of those?” the younger of the Thompson girls asked.
“No,” the kid replied, “but it looks easy.”
Perhaps if he had been a relative, even a distant cousin, or someone with whom we had any type of relationship prior to that day, one of us would have made more of an effort to dissuade him. Although I’m a bit ashamed to admit it, I was actually looking forward to the jump. It seems important to inform you that this was a time in which Evil Knievel was jumping EVERYTHING. Cars, buildings, canyons – nothing was off limits. Recently, Arthur Fonzarelli jumped a shark on Happy Days while also wearing his leather jacket – A SHARK! I already mentioned the amount of jumping going on out in California with Ponch and Jon, but our other favorite show around the neighborhood, The Dukes of Hazard, spent far more time jumping cars than creating plotlines. So yes, when this kid decided he was going to jump the fire on the runner sled, I pulled a toboggan close to the fire for a front-row seat. For the record, I had every intention of pulling him off the fire as soon as this young Icarus burned his wings off and dropped into the flames.
But I didn’t pull him out of the fire. Because he never made it that far.
In my recollection of what came next, the boy who owned the runner sled did try to offer some instructions about riding the thing. He advised the kid who was now minutes away from a life permanently testicle-altered to sit with his butt on the back of the sled, holding the rope tightly in both hands and placing his Moon-Boot ™ covered feet on the thin pine board at the front which ran horizontal to all other boards and was used for steering. To turn left, you pushed hard with your right foot and vice-versa to turn right. The trail was straight from the top down to the jump, and since nobody expected the kid to get past that point to the twisty sections and the stream below, these instructions seemed more than adequate.
But here again, the kid displayed an outrageous act of hubris, which back then we called “acting like a Big Shot,” and said:
“Thanks. But I’ll just ride down on my stomach.”
Why he chose to ride this way I’ll never know. It seems beyond common sense and more in the realm of basic human survival instinct that if you are going to jump over fire, you would choose to have your face as far away and protected from the flames as possible. I would bet that every stunt person on the set of C.H.I.P.s and The Dukes of Hazard was taught this! They probably also had a large sign at the Hollywood studio, maybe even in several places, that read “Don’t Act Like a Big Shot!” It’s sound advice that was reinforced that day and has kept both of my testicles in fairly decent shape for all these years.
So we all gathered near the fire by the trail’s intersection and watched as the kid pulled the sled to the top of the ravine. One of the Thompson girls volunteered to be the Robber and to ride down on the intersecting trail, but I’m sure she was just being kind and had no honest expectation of being chased beyond the intersection and into the stream below.
When the kid got to the trail’s launch point, he placed the runner sled facing down the hill and then surprised us again by walking back and away from the sled. He was going to get a running start before jumping belly down on the thing! None of us had ever employed the running start on that trail because it clearly would have been too much speed to control our red flyers after landing. We also always rode with butts down and faces up, which didn’t lend itself to the running start.
I began to think that the kid might just get that tortoise of a sled over the fire with this extra bit of power and speed. Perhaps there was a method to his seeming madness. Maybe he, like Fonzie, had a right to play the Big Shot and after jumping his personal shark he would turn smoothly to all of us, sticking up his thumb and saying “Ayy!”
We heard a shuffling sound from the top of the trail, followed by a loud “flump,” as the kid threw himself upon the wooden planks and began to shoot down the trail. We could hear the metal runners clicking and singing off the hard-packed snow and ice as the kid picked up speed and hurtled toward the flames. He appeared to be too far back on the sled, with his arms spread out wide in front and clutching the steering pole. It looked like he was inching himself closer and closer to the back of the sled, perhaps trying to get more weight back there so he wouldn’t go face-first into the firepit, or maybe to slide off the sled completely and allow it to hit the jump unmanned.
But he was now too close to ditch the sled and doing so wouldn’t keep him from rolling over the jump and into the flames. Then, at the last minute – at the very last minute when he was nearly at the foot of the jump we saw his arms move wildly, the metal runners bending under him, and the entirety of his person and sled veer instantly to the right and head-on into a large pine tree that abutted the jump with an impressive “THUD!”
The fire crackled loudly and popped an ember into the snow where it sizzled and sunk out of sight in the few seconds of silence that followed. I thought he was dead. He must be. From my angle, he had driven his head directly into a tree at an impressive speed. The idea of wearing a helmet back then when sledding, biking, skiing, or doing anything where head injuries were a viable possibility was as ridiculous as wearing seat belts in a car or believing that second-hand cigarette smoke was dangerous (how could it be, if first-hand smoking wasn’t dangerous)? But I thought a helmet would have helped in this situation – maybe one with stars and stripes like Evil Knievel had.
My pondering ended when the silence broke with an ear-shattering shrill that rose up from the kid. This seemed like a good sign to me, because dead people tend not to make any noises. Everyone scrambled over to the tree, expecting to see him holding his face or head while blood ran out and onto the snow. But there was no blood, and his face and head looked fine. He must have been riding back far enough on the sled so that his head didn’t take the impact. How wonderful! But, something was obviously wrong, because he continued shrieking like an injured animal. He had also rolled off the sled into a fetal position in the snow where he was now rocking slightly and cupping both hands into a place we collectively referred to as “his privates”.
Just as no legal culpability was ever determined for the accident, there was also never a reconstruction of the crash itself, although we kids spent a good deal of time trying to understand the mechanics of the injury (these discussions only happened when I was with other boys – I imagine the girls discussed it when they were together as well, but can’t confirm this). It’s important to know that the runner sled had three main pine boards upon which his stomach lay. The middle board was longer than the other two and formed an “A” like the tip of an arrow exactly where his “privates” would have been riding, especially because he had pushed himself so far back on the sled before impact. In our estimation, it was this tip that absorbed the brunt of the impact and which somehow tore what we collectively referred to as his “sack,” but which we soon learned from the EMT Responders is clinically called a scrotum. And that’s how his testicle got out.
But none of this was clear immediately after the crash. What we did know was that the kid was in a tremendous amount of pain and that a few minutes next to the fire or laying on the toboggan wasn’t going to help. We needed to do the thing that we tried most to avoid – we needed to get grown-ups involved. The decision was made to send two children, the fastest runners among us, to the aunt’s house to report the accident. In the meantime, we loaded the kid gingerly onto a toboggan and began to pull him down the trail and out of the woods. This seemed a long and laborious process, with each of us taking a turn pulling the toboggan when someone else tired out. The kid remained doubled-over on the sled, moaning and crying the entire way.
By the time we got to the road, the aunt was in her driveway along with the two runners we’d sent ahead. We could hear ambulance sirens in the distance as we threw ourselves into nearby snowbanks, exhausted from our effort and confident that things would now be “handled” by the adults.
Mrs. Thompson, having seen us all emerge from the woods, read the situation wrong and walked out of her front door with a tray carrying a carafe of hot chocolate, Styrofoam cups, and a bag of mini marshmallows. This service was an obligatory but unwritten rule for whichever house we descended upon after our sledding adventures. Quickly sensing something was very wrong, Mrs. Thompson rushed over to us, set the tray on the ground and went down on her knees next to the toboggan where the aunt was comforting the boy as he writhed and moaned. We could hear the ambulance getting closer, and we knew this would cause other mothers to come – as mothers do – and start to ask questions about what happened – as mothers also do when it becomes clear that our arrangement of simply reporting that “we had fun,” wouldn’t suffice.
I didn’t want to be the first one to pour my hot chocolate. That seemed rude. But it would be a waste to leave it there, cooling down and eventually ruined. The boy who loaned his runner sled to the injured kid didn’t seem to consider the social faux-pas being first to the carafe created, and he also added what seemed like an excessive number of mini marshmallows to his cup. Once he poured his cocoa, the rest of us quickly shuffled in our 200 -pound gear from the snowbanks and filled our cups as well.
The ambulance arrived and backed into the driveway, being careful not to run over the kid, who hadn’t been moved from the toboggan yet. My feelings of security and relief that we could sip hot chocolate and trust the adults to handle things changed suddenly as Mark “Skippy” Baxter slowly moved his enormous weight down from the driver’s seat of the vehicle. “Skippy” was a well-known custodian in our school, which certainly wasn’t enough to negate him from receiving the proper medical training to join the local volunteer ambulance department. My concern was more related to the fact that he was so big and fat (morbidly obese in today’s terms). It was the kind of extra weight that not only severely limited his movement, but also appeared to effect his breathing. My other concern was that we should have known him as Mr. Baxter. In my experience, any adult that was known by a nickname, especially one ending in a “y,” didn’t warrant the same amount of respect and trust we kids would have in someone we were required to address more formally. It also didn’t help that all of us were used to seeing Skippy smiling idly while telling a joke based on someone’s ethnic heritage to the lunch ladies. He would lean against the large, flat-bottomed brooms used to sweep the school’s floors and laugh himself into fits of wheezing as we shuffled past with our trays in the cafeteria. He didn’t seem creepy or weird to me, I just lacked confidence that he would be as useful in this role as he might be at a retirement dinner for another custodian or a lunch lady. There, he could deliver one-liners, entertaining the crowd while roasting the honoree just like Rodney Dangerfield would.
Luckily, Mr. Dingman emerged from the passenger side of the ambulance. Mr. Dingman and his wife had three kids, one of whom had graduated recently and was going to a prestigious college somewhere in “The City.” In our town, this could have been anywhere south of Albany. Mr. Dingman had also been a member of the school board and worked in the administrative offices of the local paper mill. He was President of the Rotary Club and attended every parade, fireworks show, and little league game that his younger kids played in. Mr. Dingman had a C.B. radio attached to his belt, and his day-glow volunteer ambulance jacket looked clean and well-fitted (Skippy’s looked more like a small baby blanket wrapped around an elephant). He went immediately to the kid on the toboggan, asking a few hushed questions to the aunt and Mrs. Thompson before going to the back of the ambulance to retrieve the gurney.
Skippy’s first stop had been at the hot cocoa carafe. When he realized it was empty, he joined Mr. Dingman in pulling the wheeled gurney to the kid and then carefully placing him upon it. They lifted and pushed the gurney inside the ambulance, leaving the back doors open while they secured the wheels and, for the first time, unzipped the kid’s snowsuit to examine the injury.
As the lights of the ambulance pulsated and glistened off the icy surface of the aunt’s yard, we gathered near the open doors, drinking our hot chocolate and staring on like young med students in the show Quincy, M.E. Mothers were arriving now, each of them looking worried at first, then somewhat relieved when they realized they wouldn’t be taking the hour-long ride with Skippy and Mr. Dingman to the nearest hospital. Because of the angle we were at, we couldn’t see what Mr. Dingman saw as he put a pair of examination gloves on and gingerly examined the wound. There was blood – I saw it on the tips of his glove when he removed it from the snowsuit and summoned Skippy to fire up the rig and let the hospital know they were en route.
Skippy seemed to go through the motions of some type of learned protocol in the ambulance: securing the kid in the gurney, handing Mr. Dingman his gloves, retrieving bandages, ointments, and tubing from their sterile packaging. When Mr. Dingman told him they would be leaving, he made the mistake of first going over to the kid and looking down at the injury. Immediately, I saw his face blanch as he covered his mouth and stumbled towards us and out the open doors onto the driveway. After allowing his stomach to settle and catching his breath, he assisted the aunt into the back of the ambulance and closed both doors. He turned then, seeing the crowd of children and mothers who had instinctively sought out and gripped the shoulders or free hands of their young to convince themselves all was well.
I don’t think that informing the gathered crowd about the status of the injured person was part of Skippy’s training. Today, I know there are a variety of state and federal laws protecting this information from the general public, but as I’ve mentioned numerous times, this was back then, and I do believe Skippy did his best to deliver the information in a way that was subtle yet effective.
“Okay folks,” he began, “thanks for your help. The kid is going to be okay, so don’t worry. It looks like, um, you know, one of his coconuts fell out of the tree.”
Skippy must have seen the confusion on our faces, so he changed the message slightly. “His scrotum got torn, and that’s how the coconut got out. But these doctors, they’re real good, you know, and I’m sure they’ll be able to put it right back in there and stitch him back together. Hey, even if they don’t, that’s why the good Lord gives us two of them coconuts, you know…”
With that, Skippy lumbered back into the ambulance, turned on the siren, and headed out of the driveway and up the street.
The only alteration we made to the Cops and Robbers game after that was no runner sleds were allowed, although the rule was only loosely enforced. I quit riding them completely, although I prop the wooden beauty our family has had for many decades up outside my house each December next to a few other holiday heirlooms.
I did get a pair of Moon Boots ™ before leaving the sledding trails for the pretzel stand in the mall. After their first or second trip to the ravine, I noticed a small burn hole from the firepit in the cheap, lightweight fabric of the boot that morphed into a much larger tear within days and ruined them entirely. If any of our parents ever checked on the status of the kid or his testicle, I don’t remember hearing about it. He was just visiting, after all, and neighborhood news and gossip continued to flow, like the stream winding through our beloved ravine out in the wild woods behind my house. A notable piece of gossip was that the kid’s aunt moved out of that house next to the Thompson girls a year or two after the incident. If I remember right, she either got a divorce or moved with her husband to “The City” for a better job.
Mr. Dingman remained an active member of the volunteer ambulance company and the Rotary Club for many years before retiring and moving with his wife to somewhere in Florida, where they continued to send Christmas cards of their growing family to friends and old neighbors in the North Country. Skippy went back to leaning on his broom and cracking wise with the lunch ladies until a sudden heart attack sent him home to meet his maker. Everyone who discussed his demise said he “went before his time,” and many agreed in quieter tones that it was a blessing his final moments were in the broom closet at school, because the financial implications of it being “work-related,” would ensure his survivors could upgrade their snowmobiles and four-wheelers.
But this financial windfall, like the fates of the boy with the injured testicle, his aunt, and Mr. Dingman’s wonderful life in Florida might not have been true at all. Old injuries and childhood adventures and twice-told tales are all similar in that way – they tend to expand and flex and grow with the retelling. Sometimes the details become less important than the overall message or lesson or feelings of fondness and warmth for a time in the past that will always be a part of us and our unique stories. Now that this tale is told, I hope that it lives on, in some form or another, so that future generations, with sleds in hand, know why they feel that primal urge to zip past the trees, jump through the flames, slide over the unfrozen creek beds, and arrive back at home, wet, smoldering and exhausted, saying simply “we had fun” when asked by any adult about what they did out there in the wild…
It certainly was a kid friendly neighborhood. You are absolutely right in the feeling back then of, “the kids are out playing”. Good they are getting some fresh air.
“If you boys think that you’re going
to stay inside today, you’ve got another thing coming!!” Snowsuits on
and the Flexible Flyers in tow, we went out to collide with a Pine tree,
or the granite hitching post at the
bottom of the hill. Thanks for the
memories!!!
No, This one is 100% absolutely true.
It certainly was a kid friendly neighborhood. You are absolutely right in the feeling back then of, “the kids are out playing”. Good they are getting some fresh air.
“If you boys think that you’re going
to stay inside today, you’ve got another thing coming!!” Snowsuits on
and the Flexible Flyers in tow, we went out to collide with a Pine tree,
or the granite hitching post at the
bottom of the hill. Thanks for the
memories!!!