| X-treme Sledding |
| Every winter, when it snowed, Spaz, Jaws, and I would go sledding. The hill of choice was a street right across from my house. The location in itself was a stupid one considering cars came up the hill all the time, and if we were sledding at the time, we would have no idea if a car was comming until it hit us. Eventually we developed a system where we took turns standing at the bottom of the hill and screamed "Okay it's safe!" To which we at the top of the hill would reply "What?!" "I said it's okay to go now!" "What?!" "I said it's...no wait. Don't go yet! A car's comming!" "Okay! Come on, he said it was safe." Faults in vision aside, it was still a fun experience. However, it got boring after awhile. The thrill of speeding downhill wasn't enough to satisfy us anymore, and we started to look for ways to make it more interesting. We tried going down backwards. We tried constructing crude ramps. We tried standing on the sled, but success was not with us. One day Jaws got an idea. X-treme sledding. The object of X-treme sledding was to get to the bottom first through any means possible. This meant ramming your sled into another persons. Throwing snowballs at them to break their consentration. Or the ultimate: hurling yourself off your own sled and on to someone elses, then proceed to knock the other person off and commandeer the sled for your own purposes. This was a highly difficult move to put off, mainly because we never gave up our sleds without a fight, but it was fun to do nontheless. One day we were playing it and Jaws through himself onto my sled. Now Jaws was older and quite a bit heavier (muscle, not fat) than me. The impact freaked me out, and in an attempt to slow myself as well as keep us from crashing I put my hands on the ground right in front of the sled. Now simple physics will tell you that pressing your hands down will generally not create enough friction to slow you down. In fact, your hands will generally stay where they are, while the rest of you moves. That's exactly what happened. No sooner had my hands touched the ground when one of them was sucked underneath the sled. This was not one of those new plastic sleds. This was one of the old wooden ones with the two thin metal strips at the bottom. Now add the fact that both my and Jaws weight were on the sled. That was a good 300 lbs. put on my had which was being cut into by a thin metal strip. I rode like this for a few feet, trying to get the message to Jaws that I was injured. I heaved all my weight to one side and managed to overturn the both of us. I looked at my hand and found that the glove was completely severed at the wrist. Luckily the rest of my hand was virtually unharmed. Only some minor cuts. We retired X-treme sledding that day. |