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Up until about the time I was ten years old, we had two kinds of snow sleds. The first was the old fashioned wood type with narrow metal runners that you could supposedly steer by pushing on the bar at the front. This was a blatant effort by orthopedic surgeons to increase business by leading one to assume that you could veer around that haystack at the bottom of the hill. Their scheme was foiled on most occasions by the steel runners, however, which sank into anything softer than glacial ice and left you pinned to the hillside.
Our other option was the four person toboggan. This was an improvement for everyone except the person at the front, whose legs were wedged under the front curve between the chains, making it impossible to bail out when it became obvious you were heading straight for the creek. And if the others, due to lack of visibility or poor judgment, failed to bail out, the front person always ended up at the bottom of the pile.
Then along came the saucer.
Our first saucer sled was steel, painted orange, about three feet in diameter. It spun willy-nilly as it flew down the hills, giving the rider the distinct advantage of not seeing that they’d pointed it at a drop off, and therefore not dying of fright at the launching point. But the saucer didn’t become a true implement of doom until the day we tied it to the snowmobile.
At first we were satisfied to pull it along behind, bouncing over the dips and ripples in the snow left by the wind. Then someone had to go and boast that they could hang on longer than you could, and the game was on. We went out looking for the biggest bumps we could possibly drag each other over.
Considering the snowmobile had to traverse the same terrain as the sled, you would assume the danger factor would be self-limiting. You would be wrong thanks to Isaac Newton, whose Second Law states that a saucer sled on a long enough rope can be made to go places that no snowmobile need venture.
Our favorite trick was to cut a circle at the side of the hayfield, swinging the saucer across the big drifts along the barbed wire fence. Oddly enough, I don’t recall any decapitations, though there may have been a stitch or two. If that failed—and it often did with my brother, who was stubborn enough to hang on up to and including the point of unconsciousness—you could always aim the snowmobile straight at the side of the coulee, then veer at the last second and send saucer and occupant sailing over the lip of a twenty foot drop off. If they didn’t chicken out and let go, you almost always shook them when they smacked into a wall of snow on the backswing.
By the end of the first winter, our saucer was so scratched and dented it looked like it had been used as a shield during hand to hand sledgehammer combat. Our snowpants and coats were shredded. We had been forbidden to use the snowmobile without adult supervision. Spoilsports.
A couple of weeks ago, we acquired a second hand snowmobile, the first I’ve owned since high school. My brother in law used it for racing. It will go eighty five miles an hour. And my son just got a brand new saucer sled.
Thank the Lord he has no siblings.
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