my sometimes-skeptical social commentary

Archive for the ‘snow’ Category

I’m hoping for a longer winter, because I’ve only had one chance to go skiing so far this season.

The boys and I went sledding at Chestnut Ridge Park yesterday, where we saw a sign that says the toboggan chutes are opening soon. I read in today’s paper (well, I read it on the newspaper’s web site) that the toboggan chutes will be open next week. I can’t wait to take the boys on that ride!

I was surprised to learn that the toboggan chutes have been closed for four years. It has been that long since we were there last? I am pretty sure my oldest son went down the chute with me, but that would have been five winters ago, and I am pretty sure he was too young back then.

Sledding with the boys is a lot of fun. I’m still young enough to go with them, and they’re not old to want to go without me, so it works out great. We crashed a few times (that’s part of the fun), and I managed to avoid landing on my bad shoulder. You know you’re old when you are thinking, as you fall from your sled, ‘I need to make sure I don’t land on my bad shoulder.’

We were dressed for cold and wind. My face mask stayed put, but the boys were wearing a different style of face mask, with a larger opening for the face, instead of the eye- and mouth-holes my hat has. They didn’t look scary at all.

Sledding at Chestnut Ridge Park reminds me of the sledding hill where we went when I was a kid. We used to walk through several fields and hedgerows to get to the back fairway of the golf course, then walk through half the golf course to the hill. It seemed like miles. But the hill was so huge it was worth it. The boys asked me if the hill at the golf course was bigger than the hill at Chestnut Ridge, but I wasn’t sure. I haven’t been past that hill in many years, and I know that our memories of things from our childhood always make things seem larger than they are.

To shoot the video below, I held my camera phone in my right hand, leaving only my left hand to hold on to the sled. The problem I had with only one hand on the sled was NOT that I almost fell out of the sled, but that I couldn’t steer. As I went down the hill, I had to steer by dragging my feet in the snow to avoid running over other sledders.

At least I didn’t drop the phone in the snow.

When I went to the ski shop on Saturday to return the boys’ season rentals, I discovered that ski country still had plenty of snow, and I whined to the ski shop owners that it would have been great to have one more day of skiing. Naturally their response was “come back tomorrow, you don’t have to turn in the skis today.” I called my wife to make sure nothing was planned for the next day, then packed the skis back into the car and gleefully drove home.

I also called a friend of mine who recently told me he was interested in skiing with us next season, and he agreed to meet us at our house at 8:30 a.m. the next morning.

The weather was perfect, and at first the snow was perfect, too. But then the temperature went up, and the snow started getting mushy. I think the reason my friend had a bad fall is that he hit some slow snow on a turn and couldn’t get his balance back. He did something to his knee and will be on crutches for a few weeks.

But my friend is still enthusiastic about skiing and insisted that me and boys keep skiing while he rested in the lodge–he hoped to rest a bit and join us after a while, but his knee was in bad shape.

The boys and I kept skiing and occasionally stopped into the lodge to check on my friend throughout the afternoon. It got warmer and warmer, and we started getting uncomfortably warm, so while we rode up the chairlift, we unzipped our coats a little and took our gloves off. Once, I was holding my youngest’s gloves for him, and when we got off the chairlift, I thought I had given him both gloves, but I had lost one of them.

We skied down the slope, trying to follow the chairlift so that we could find the glove on the ground, but part of that slope was closed due to poor conditions, so we didn’t find the glove on the ground.

When we got in line to get back on the chairlift, I was looking around to see if someone had turned it in for us, and there were a couple gloves, but not the one I lost. After we got on the chair, however, we discovered his glove ON THE CHAIR. So it turns out, that of the 119 chairs on that lift, we happened to ski down the hill and wait in line with just the right timing to get on the same chair. What are the chances? Is it 1 out of 119? Or do you have to decrease the odds because of the number of people in line ahead of us?

Those are our two stories of luck; one of us had good luck, one bad luck.

This might be our last day of skiing for the season, but we’re hoping to get one more day in over Easter weekend. In this picture, you see the boys riding up a chairlift without me–I was in the chair behind them with their cousin. This photo was taken with their mother in mind–she doesn’t worry about them when they’re with me at all!