A sled, a cow, the future
By Tom Harpole |
Few people may believe that at age 57, I recently T-boned, so to speak, a pregnant, 1,000-pound cow while riding my Flexible Flyer sled down the steepest county road in western Montana. To rural sledders, this is plausible, but perhaps not to adults of my generation. The mean age for the 55,000 sledders injured badly enough last winter to need an ER visit is 9.9, a dismal statistic that reveals a paucity of Baby Boomers still willing to have fun hurtling down mountains with a minimum of control. Sledding down icy back roads is a pure and noble calling that offers countless opportunities for high-speed rides on metal-runners that are only somewhat steerable. Obstacles to doing so abound, from so-called common sense, to cows, like the one I collided with.
Let’s dispense with a possible sidetrack. I was not “cow-tipping,” that is, engaged in the quasi-athletic, nocturnal activity in which alcohol-emboldened ruralites and frat rats — an often-overlapping demographic — putatively try to topple cows who are believed to be asleep on their feet. Cow tipping is probably little more than an urban myth because cows, as stupid as they appear, disturb easily, and it would take at least five drunks, as stupid as they appear, in a coordinated, stealthy effort to accomplish an actual cow-tipping. Cows seem to daydream much of their lives, but they sleep lying down, and warily. They awaken with alacrity and could easily avoid a group of humans deranged enough to aspire to “tip” them.
Drunken ruralites would more likely turn their attentions to sheep, whether they are sleeping or not, but this is an essay meant for families, not those of you prurient enough to hope I am pursuing the more aberrant avenues of animal husbandry. On the topic of sledding into cows I shall lay out the simple truth, for once. That’s what participatory journalists who dabble in gravity sports and incur head injuries vaingloriously attempt to do.
Harpole Road, the county road that accesses my place two miles northeast of Avon, has for 30 years presented me with the best sledding that I will ever know, even though at times I’m forced to share that road with cows. Occasionally, winter conditions conspire to offer optimal sledding; we get around eight inches of snow, then it thaws briefly for an afternoon, which causes some surface snow to turn to water that percolates down through the underlying snow crystals. Then, with sundown, everything refreezes and a layer of ice forms at the base and the surface crusts over. When these conditions occur, each time I drive back and forth over the mile-long hill into my place, I purposefully groom the road for sledding. I make wider sets of tire tracks, packing the snow into “runs.” I’m the only one who uses Harpole Road in the winter, so I call the county road crew and ask them to not plow the road as I prepare it for sledding.
Despite numerous mishaps, I remain an inveterate adrenaline addict and gravity, snow and ice have played into that jones all my life. In December of 2006, the optimal freeze/thaw cycles occurred daily, an unseasonable weather pattern that I took advantage of. After about a week of fastidious grooming, both sides of the mile-long hill on Harpole Road were gorgeous, snow-packed ice all the way, the fastest conditions I’d ever seen. A few dozen of my neighbor’s cows were grazing the edges of the road and pasture on the east side of the hill, resulting in some cow turds on the two tracks I’d been grooming, but I always drive over them and flatten them before they freeze. One should resist the urge to kick the turds that you haven’t been able to flatten or scatter with your tires. When the excreta hits the snow, it is the temperature of the inner cow and melts down to bond with the road surface. The warm fodder lies there and liquefies the snow that cradles it as it seeks its origins, and the cow’s outpourings transmogrify into ice reinforced with chewed grass, a mass that hardens immutably. I have seen heavy steel snowplows mounted on eight-ton trucks bounce off those glacial turds like a Zamboni happening upon a speed bump. As for the cows themselves, I figured I could probably steer around them.
My hubris and one misbegotten cow resulted in another wreck to rack up in the uncountable, perhaps incomprehensible total of sledding mishaps I’ve weathered during this 50-year avocation. I decided to delude myself that I’d be going past those cows so low and sizzling fast that they’d never process the fact that I was there until I was past them. And besides, they spend very little time on the road itself, since there’s no grass on it. I was on the slippery slope of denial that seduces all adrenaline junkies. But first, a little background:
I’ve had a long, glorious, egregious history with Flexible Flyers, those low sleds with the slatted decks, red metal runners and the steering cross which you grab when prone or push with your feet when sitting. My first sledding wreck put me in the hospital, in 1962, for three months while a doctor named Cedarblade repaired a broken femur and attempted grafts to replace an avulsion of skin and muscle on my right leg where it was nearly torn off. My parents and eight siblings and I had just arrived at a mountain park with a steep slope blanketed alluringly in crusty snow. I pulled a rusted old Flyer from the back of the ’58 Chevy station wagon and, in a move I’d premeditated to avoid sharing a ride with a sibling, I held the sled to my chest and sprinted down the hill and belly-flopped the sled onto the hardpan snow and gained momentum and reached a hell-bent speed faster than I could figure out how to control my trajectory.
The absolute beauty, the transcendent fineness of these unfettered junctures where gravity has its way with you is that they place you ineluctably in the moment. I held no regrets about my eight siblings up there behind me, nor did a speck of apprehension for the future cloud my thoughts. Sledding focuses one completely on what’s right there in front of you, on your immediate future; it delivers you, second by second, into the unknown.
With legs flailing, toes digging at the crust, I was attempting to brake or steer. As I accelerated, I pretty much gave up on gaining control. Then, dead ahead, I saw a patch of rocks sticking out of the snow. A knify granitic intrusive that was pointed uphill intruded through my jeans and into my right leg where it was hanging over the edge of the sled. I felt immediately like I had seriously skinned my knee, but I had literally skinned my entire right thigh. A flap of skin twice the size of my hand hung diagonally across my knee, lying down my shin like an extra-large slice of pizza. Torn grayish muscles and my broken femur were as plain to see as a poorly butchered flank steak sitting in my lap. I didn’t believe that this apparition could be my leg. Then I couldn’t stand up. Finally, I didn’t believe that I would live through this trauma, and I said a Good Act of Contrition.
It took a year and six surgeries to get back to where I could walk. It was another year before I could play basketball.
I have never since headed prone on a Flexible Flyer down an unsurveyed hill, and I usually choose to sled down roads. A smooth sluice of pure ice on a road is way safer than an unknown mountainside. Hence my grooming of Harpole Road when conditions are incrementally adding up to better and better sledding. It is as though the weather leads me astray by degrees, although my aptness for conducting myself beyond the pale is a fact.
During the twelve years that I was an avid skydiver, in several hundred freefalls I experienced terminal velocity, in which the weight of my body falling through the sky equaled the air pressure pushing at me. When you can’t fall any faster, you are at terminal velocity. Sailboats have a hull speed at which they can’t slice through the water any faster. Most objects have a speed that they can’t exceed. Theoretically, sleds don’t have a terminal velocity, except that you eventually run out of hill to slide down because there’s a constant vector of energy adding to your velocity when you are being pushed down a hill by gravity. Extreme skiers, even with the coefficient of friction that occurs between their skis and the mountain, have been clocked at higher speeds than freefalling skydivers because the mountain is always adding to the impetus of gravity. The promise of a mountain pushing you down itself, whatever your conveyance, is nearly as beguiling as what you learn about yourself when stepping out of an airplane: it is the promise that you are gaining self-knowledge and learning how trust works in an extreme situation. Gravity sports heedfully pursued are exercises in character building.
So, here I was on a Sunday afternoon in the diffuse daylight, where the horizon and opalescent earth made a dreamy ambiance, like playing inside a bucket of milk. The world was monochrome; the horizon was indistinguishable. Bleached gray fence posts and inky barbwire defined the landscapes. Even the cows were Black Angus. The most vivid visuals were my dogs blurring around. My current pack of mutts elicit superlatives — they are, respectively, the dumbest, wildest and homeliest I’ve ever had. Max, the eldest, was supposed to be a miniature Australian shepherd, but his recessive genes went recessive and he ended up the size of a normal Aussie. He’s liver and white with Caribbean blue eyes, but his brain must be smaller than one of his orbs. He sleeps 23 hours per day. Big Fawn looks like a Labrador with tiger stripes; she’s a pit bull/St. Bernard cross who I rescued from a trailerful of meth chefs near Anaconda. I believe she was tweaking inadvertently as she was weaned and she remains about half feral. Ironically, she was named Fawn, and then her namesake animals became her favorite dish. Every dog you get dies and breaks your heart until you end up with the one that outlives you. Wee Ernie, when I drove away from the dog pound with him, struck me as the one that’ll outlive me. He’s a wiener dog/Scotty cross, who is the color of bleached straw and about five times longer than he is tall. He’d been adopted and returned to the Helena dog pound four times in his first year because he is an escape artist. There’s no place to escape to from where I live. My nearest neighbor is three miles away. Ernie has learned to catch pan-sized brook trout from the creek. He goes fishing alone. Sometimes he goes fawning with Fawn.
On the first walk up, the Flexible Flyer offered practically no resistance, sliding along behind me at the end of a macramé of ropes and lanyards that had been added to it by my kids over the years as they attempted to harness various family dogs. As I looked over my shoulder at the sled, my gaze rested upon the valley in the Garnet Range foothills, where I’d built a place from scratch since 1977. Lisa and I had raised our family there. Over the years, I’d built two homes, a studio and a couple guesthouses, so the kids could have plenty of friends come and stay. There are sheds, a greenhouse and my office laid out along a road I built up Warm Springs Creek. Most of the buildings are empty now, and the place so quiet that I often whisper to my dogs. I felt estranged from my own history, out on this hill, a lone graybeard ready to sled.
As I ascended the two-track, I counted seven frozen cow turds spaced down the quarter-mile run on the left of the road, but dozens on the right, fleetingly evoking rural Montana politics. A couple dozen cows in their sixth month of gestating what look like Subarus silently grazed, their black heads pendulously sweeping snow aside to get at the grass. Every year, they spend a few days grazing the “long acres” alongside the edges of the county road before they head down to the riverside meadows where they are fed grass hay through the winter. I like that they graze down the roadside flora, because eating all those grass and clover stems helps keep the snow from drifting later in the winter. The cows along Harpole Road hardly lift their heads when I drive by them. They are treated gently. In their world they ask only for grass, water and sky.
Before setting out on a sledding day, I claw around the soap dishes and put a few of those lenticular remnants in my chest pockets and use them to lubricate the runners. The steam emanating from the unzipped top of my coveralls can fog my glasses but smells slightly of Irish Spring, an oddly comforting aroma on a wintry hillside. I am not, however, blaming the wreck on fogged glasses.
Fawn and Ernie, both in their first winter, watched me prepare for what was to come, tilting their heads. They sensed my friskiness as I lay on my sled and began kind of breast-stroking downhill to get started. But the pups started yipping and dashing in at me, playfully, to be sure, but I was afraid they’d end up with a leg under the runner and my 175 pounds on top of everything, and we’d be headed to the veterinarian.
My dogs must think their first name is “goddammit” at times, because that is a special word I save for occasions when I want them to change their behavior. With one magic word, delivered righteously, prefixing their names, I can stop them in their tracks. Then they were out of my sight because I was racing down that hill faster than they could run, something like 25 miles per hour.
***
Dodging the cow turds down the left track added an engaging slalom for the Flexible Flyer. There was a kind of rhythmic flow to the ride. The wind-chill and speed caused tears to flow back into my ears. Over-steering edged me into the slower, less-packed edge or center and bled off speed. I eschewed sitting because going prone felt about twice as fast with my face inches off the surface, and the lower profile is surely slicker and swifter.
Every runner sled has a point, whether you sit or go prone, where you can feel the right amount of weight on the forward part of the runners that allows for optimal steering while minimizing friction. Truthfully, the phrase “optimal steering” and the word “sled” don’t belong in the same sentence, but as you naturally go for more speed, you must kid yourself into believing that things are under control. On my second run, I reminded myself that, just like turning skis, one also should throw a little weight on the runner opposite the direction you wish to turn. I was hurtling down the ice more efficiently each run, getting smarter and faster. I was thinking “luge,” feeling Olympian, and emitting involuntary “yeehaws.” On the trudge back up in the bracing temperatures, mouthfuls of air tasted like peppermint infusions. One soon learns the rewards of the sledders’ trudge, a pace that allows conversation. Alone, I was singing verses of “Whatya Do With a Drunken Sailor,” for which Ernie improvised a quickly aborted howl. I howled.
The east side of Harpole Road slopes straight down through a pasture, a run that is a quarter-mile long, and for every one hundred feet you travel, you descend six feet, a six-percent grade, where an adept sledder on ice may even exceed 25 mph. There are no fences near the road on the downslope east side. There were a few cows grazing, but far enough away that they paid no attention. My dogs were minding me and the nose-worthy things they find to sniff at in the snow. They weren’t making any cows move against their will. I can’t blame the dogs for the wreck.
After a half dozen runs down the east side, I decided to take a look at the longer, much steeper west side of the hill, where the county road snakes through two easy turns and 17-percent slopes. Consecutive unscathed runs in terrific conditions had trapped me in a deadly web of insouciance and impulse. I had been sledding down the slow side of the hill and believed that I was ready for the west side of Harpole Hill and possibly doubling the speed I’d been enjoying. I stood at the top and looked down the narrow corridor that the fences created — maybe 60 feet wide — with its steeply sloped drop-offs on both sides. According to my GPS, the road drops 165 feet in its half-mile meander down the west side of the hill, the equivalent of sledding off a 16-story building.
When my grandfather pioneered this road into his gold mine in the early 1930s, he simply drove up the narrow spine of the hill, which rises from the riverside pasture like the backbone and neck of a supine horse, establishing a narrow trail up a sinuous ramp over which you could hit a golf ball with a seven iron. I looked down that half-mile-long hill and thought steeper is better, and I knew this would be the fastest sledding I’d ever done. I decided against walking all the way down the hill to survey the road for turds because I felt that I could dodge anything I came across. I couldn’t see the entire length of the road because it drops so steeply in a couple sections. I stood at the top of the slope and felt pleased with myself for being out there getting up a sweat on a 12-degree day, and I was sanguine about how well-prepped the road was, and there was a hint of Irish Spring in the frosty air. Clean fun.
I re-soaped my runners and paused and admired the view of the Little Blackfoot River Valley and the peaks of the Flint Creek Range some 30 miles to the west. Then I placed the Flexible Flyer on the right-side track and pushed it for just a few steps, and I belly-flopped onto it before it outran me. I shouted a gratuitous “goddammit” over my shoulder at each of my dogs, whom I quickly outpaced. In fact, by the time I’d admonished all three dogs, I was ripping down the road too wantonly to even consider arresting my trajectory or rolling off the sled. No yeehaws were forthcoming.
What happened next I can only attempt to recreate. The 17-percent grade kept accelerating me; everything seemed to be happening about three times faster than my runs down the east side of Harpole Road. The wind-chill on my face stung now, and I bounced over a frozen turd before I could even think about steering around it. While I fought to regain control, the expression, “bull goose loony,” occurred to me self-referentially. Grimly and giddily, if that emotional oxymoron is even possible, I figured that this ride would take every bit of concentration I could muster. I’d accelerated down more than half the hill and was still picking up speed. I was focused on the surface just ahead, hoping to avoid frozen cow patties. My eyes teared up, seriously blurring my vision, I blinked hard and squinted, wishing I had thought of ski goggles, and I knew I was moving as fast as I do on skis. I thought that I must be doing about 40 miles per hour.
The second steep drop on the road is invisible until you get to its edge. Just over the lip, in the middle of the road, a big mama cow faced me, her head low. She looked to have each of her legs fleeing in a different direction, sprawled on the ice and not going anywhere.
The only sensation from the collision was an explosion, complete with blast pressures that seemed to fill my head and reverberate into my chest. Getting knocked unconscious is kind of prosaic. An unexpected sense of weight bears down somewhere on your head as you hear a loud crack and that’s about it. It always happens so fast that I obviously didn’t have a chance to avoid it. Then, with the passage of an indeterminate amount of time, you awaken. If you don’t wake up, that is not getting knocked out, it’s getting killed.
Between my many years of horse logging and timber falling, some amateur boxing, and my aforementioned predisposition for gravity sports, I’ve been knocked unconscious a couple dozen times. It almost always happens when I am around other people and, of course, I awaken to voices and hands on me. This time, I awoke to silence. Max was sitting practically on top of my chest eyeing me quizzically. There are no animals that more closely observe humans than dogs. Wee Ernie was keeping his nose in the breeze, while staring at me from a few feet away, and Fawn, right next to Ernie, was watching me stir. Max has dog halitosis, and I wanted to tell him, “You stink,” but I couldn’t speak. I could not figure out how I ended up rag-dolled on a snowy hillside with my dogs eyeballing at me. I never take them skiing with me. My head, left shoulder and neck felt stretched and hot. I wear a helmet when I ski; twice, when tree-skiing too fast, it has saved me from certain concussions. I wondered where my helmet was, not realizing yet that I hadn’t been skiing. Although both times I’ve been knocked out on the slopes, I didn’t know what I’d been doing or where I was for a while either.
I assumed I’d been unconscious for some time because palpating my skull I found a well-developed lump growing above my left ear. I felt my head and looked at my hand and there was nothing. I felt my ear and saw blood on my glove, but I couldn’t tell if it was from inside or superficial. I could taste something primitive in my icy moustache and realized that sour grass-smelling cow slobber had had time to freeze in my hair and beard. Then I heard a cow mooing, as they do towards the end of the day when they’ve had enough to eat for a while. I began to get the picture.
I believe that blows to the head alternately knock sense into or out of you. Sadly, where I stood that cycle was no longer apparent. I looked up at my dog Max’s blue eye and I sort of dreamed about snorkeling. But the intimate smell of fresh cow shit insinuated itself, and I noticed a smear across my shins. I had been out long enough for cow pies to quit steaming. I was sort of draped over some basketball-sized rocks and regaining myself and clinically curious about what price I’d pay in broken bones, torn connective tissue and memory loss. If you can wiggle your toes and then lift your legs, you have a lot to work with. I could do both. I hadn’t looked beyond Max’s eye. I’d lost my glasses. I could make out the amorphous track I left in the crusty roadside snow where I had bounced and skidded about 30 feet off into the ditch. I crawled back up onto the road. That I couldn’t imagine standing up saddened me, as though I had been beaten into submission. Thankfully, my glasses were up on the road glazed in frozen bovine saliva and crusted over with snow, but intact, if icky. I breathed on the lenses and wiped at them with a clean hankie and, looking through them, I felt less disembodied.
I thought about being knocked out, lying there invisible to the world in a ditch on a late-December afternoon with the temperature headed south of zero. I felt somehow in arrears with the world, like I’d never make up the lost time. My sled was about 40 feet down the road and bent beyond any notion of pulling it home. I crawled to it. Kneeling, I picked it up; the birdlike lightness of it seemed improbable. Crawling downhill had magnified the pain in my head, then my neck and shoulder aches coalesced and I gave out and collapsed on top of the Flyer and vomited. I took solace identifying some blueberries from lunch, as though I was reassembling fragments of my day rather well. Back down in the snow, I cupped my hands around my face and paid attention to my breathing. I was hyperventilating, curled up on the county road in my Carhartt coveralls, no more noteworthy than a cow turd.
The cows grazed phlegmatically, none of them apparently injured by the Flexible Flyer or me. I rested my head on the sled and looked up; the milkiness of the day was just cold now, the sky curdling towards darkness. I thought it looked like the inside of an oyster shell, then a dirty dishrag up there, then the dull side of a piece of tin foil, then I realized I was cycling through winter-sky clichés and that vaguely alarmed me. That I just wanted to rest up, maybe take a little nap on the road, suddenly felt like an undertow pulling at me. I mustered myself from the lethargy of trauma and stood up, using the sled for support. I stood still until I could pick the sled up. The walk back over the hill, trying not to jar my head, favoring a shoulder and stiff neck, carrying the sled skeleton like a broken bird under my right arm, was the loneliest I’d felt since I can’t remember. I released the dogs with a whisper and they loped home well ahead of me.
I topped the hill and my place came into view, the 10 buildings like a ghost town under snow, the gardens and lawns and basketball court and trampoline blanketed, unnaturally level and clear. The pond and golf course and swing set and tree house and no one to play with. I sat on my bent sled and thought about all the days I spend alone up this valley where I’ve lived more than half my life and made a place for my family. For three years, it has just been me up here, all the good noise we raised has been sifted down to me whispering and this day I’d come close to being a ghost and that fact had me sobbing. Had I not come-to, there would have been no one to find me before I died of exposure while unconscious. The isolation of my place had never made me feel so vulnerable. Had I frozen to death in the ditch, melting down into the snow, no one might have found my body for days.
Then I came to a decision that made me think later that I’d just had some sense knocked into me. I decided I should sell the whole shitaree and move closer to other humans, where someone might find me if I was about to expire in a ditch. I whispered that epiphany to myself like a prayer.
A couple days later, I met my kids in Helena, where they were hanging out with other college folks just home for Christmas break. I apprised them of my decision. We had all planned on me hanging onto the place where they were born and raised and Flannery and Derry would someday inherit it. Their faces went through shock, disbelief, confusion, and Flan burst into to tears while Derry sat introspectively, not giving up much emotion yet. I cried a little. Then Flannery, with some effort, composed herself, wiped her tears away, and in a leap of learning she carried herself from understanding loss to accepting change. She said, “Good, Dad, you’ve spent 30 years out there, building anything anyone wanted and making a living for us. It’s time you do something for yourself.”
“You’re amazing,” Derry told his sister, and he hugged her for at least a minute. Then he turned to me, shrugged and smiled and said, “You did a good job on us,” and he hugged me for quite a while. “It is time to do something for yourself.”
We’re not done crying about turning our backs on the place yet, but that meeting made me prouder than I’ve ever felt about my kids, and sure that it’d be okay to move closer to town. I told them I didn’t know what to do about moving my dogs because they’re about half wild. Derry said, “You’re about half wild. This is going to be interesting.” Then we talked about my history of injuries that I seem to add to every year and they agreed that living alone and isolated might catch up with me terminally.
I asked them if they’d have time over the Christmas break to go skiing for a few days. We all bemoaned climate change and the way it has decimated the number of days we get to ski.
The daytime thaws and evening refreezing in December that made sledding so good is portentous, an unearthly weather pattern for a Montana winter. But I know that if the weather presents good sledding, I’ll be back at it, albeit helmeted, focused on another interlude with gravity as my Flexible Flyer delivers me into the future.
Harpole writes for the likes of Smithsonian Air & Space about skydiving and paragliding, teaches writing workshops in Alaskan Bush Schools and really is selling his place. Sled is included.
