Sledding at 55

    It snowed last night so I carried my red racer - my chariot of death - the plastic sled I crashed into a tree few years earlier breaking my leg and I headed back to the hills of KU. 

    The air was right at the freezing mark. The sky, gray. The world, hushed. 

    I walked to Campanile hill. It was completely deserted except for a small tractor plowing snow down at base near the stadium.

    I laid my torso down into my sled, lifting my legs at the knees, and then I pushed off with my mittened hands, holding my arms to my side. It was a long, easy run, the snow rushing past my face. When you sled head first down a hill, the part of you that is aware of where you are is barely inches above the snow-covered ground. 

    When I reached the bottom, I looked across the way to the steep hills on the other side. KU has since put in a parking lot across the path I took that fateful day, but there were plenty of good, steep slopes remaining.

    I headed on over. When I got to the top of the steepest hill, there were two KU students with snowboards trying out the slopes. One of them expressed some appreciation that I was the first sledder they had seen today. They made no mention of my age although I suspect it was implied.

    I thought for a while about not hitting the smaller trees and a light pole near where my downward path would take me. And then I looked over at the larger trees well off to the side, trees not unlike the one I ran my right leg into not so very many years ago.

    And then I dismissed the risks. I put my body onto my sled - my face, forward into the unknowable - and I flew down the hill.

    The sensations are much the same as they were a few years ago - or forty odd years ago. You feel the speed - it feels fast - the rush of adrenaline, an explosion of neurons firing, snow flying into your face, the guttural, involuntary grunt as your chest bounces over a bump and you then feel as if you are about to lift off even though it is only fractions of an inch that you are actually airborne. Mostly you feel the speed.

    And then, as you near the bottom of the hill, you dig your toes down into the snow, extending your arms to gradually catch the snow to help bring your body to a stop before you grate into the parking lot.

    And that's the moment when you pause as you wait for your spirit to catch up to your body. 

    Then you trudge back up the hill, look out across the snow, the bare trees, the gray horizon. You catch your breath. And then you fly down the hill again.

    I think the sensations are much the same. It is the context that is different. All the peripheral excitement I felt when I was a kid with my friends, the chatter about who went farther or faster, or which run we should try next, and just the giddiness of being out in the snow instead of in school - all that is not part of my experience now.

    And then there’s this: when I was young I had no inkling that those sensations I was experiencing and the various accompanying pleasures of life would one day come to an end.

    The context is different.

    I flew several times today. I will accept a little risk to feel that feeling of flying over the snow again. To fly just one more time before the earth finally spins into the sun and there are no hills for me to sled ever again.