The Sledding Hill We Built on Our Pasture

I told Kurt to plan on twenty kids, tops, and I made two thermoses of cocoa and figured we would have plenty left over.

Friday evening my phone started ringing. Could they bring the grandkids who were visiting from Fargo? Was it all right if the youth group came?

Did we want them to bring anything? One woman asked if she could bring her husband’s old snowmobile sled.

Saturday came up bright and clear and blue, the kind of December day that makes you forget the dark ones.

No wind. About eight below at ten in the morning, which up here is a nice day for being outside.

The first pickup pulled in at a quarter to ten. A young couple from town with three kids in the back seat, all of them in snowsuits so bright they looked like a bag of candy. They parked along our barbed wire fence like the note said.

Then another truck. Then two more. By ten thirty there was a line of pickups along the fence all the way from our gate to the corner of the section, and more were parking on the shoulder past that.

A man I knew from church pulled in with a burn barrel in the back of his truck. He did not ask.

He just set it up near the top of the run, filled it with split wood from his own pile, and lit it, and stood there with his hands out, smiling.

Around eleven an old farmer named Nels came up the road on his tractor pulling a hay wagon loaded with small square bales.

He farmed north of us. I had seen him at the elevator for years and never said more than good morning to him.

He did not say much that day either. He just unloaded the bales along the side of the run, about halfway down, and stacked them into a little ramp.

Then he packed snow over the top of them with his shovel and smoothed it with his mitten.

The bigger kids saw that ramp and went crazy for it. The smaller ones kept to the main run.

Nels stood by his bales with his arms folded, and every time a kid went off the ramp and landed it, he nodded once.

Three of the old men who drink coffee at the café every morning showed up around eleven thirty and planted themselves at the bottom of the run.

They had their wristwatches out, and they started timing kids from the top flag to the creek willows.

They took it very seriously. One of them wrote the times on a feed store notepad.

They argued about whether a run counted if the kid fell off at the bottom. They argued about whether the ramp made it faster or slower.

I stood at the top of the run in my red barn coat and my gray knit hat, my braid frozen stiff down my back, waving the kids down one at a time so they would not run into each other. That was my job all day.

Go. Wait. Okay, go. Wait for her to get to the bottom. Okay, now you. I did it for hours. My voice was gone by two o’clock and I did not care one bit.

At noon I counted the kids. Then I counted again, because I did not believe it. Sixty kids.

Sixty, on our pasture, on a rise nobody had ever thought of as a hill until a few days before.