The Sledding Hill the Town Built

He was gone for twenty. I watched his truck go and come, and when it came back across the lot he parked it in the grass and got out of the cab slowly. He opened the tailgate and took something out.

It was wooden. About three feet long, with two runners and a flat bed and a loop of rope on the front, painted a red so old it had faded to pink. I knew it the second I saw it.

I’ll tell you about that sled. My uncle Merle built it in the winter of 1971, in the machine shed on my grandfather’s farm.

He was thirteen. My father was eleven. Their father, Otto, had a stack of oak scraps from a wagon he was repairing and two curved pieces of iron from an old bed frame, and he told the boys that if they wanted a sled that year they could make one.

Merle did most of the work. Dad held the pieces still and handed him nails.

Dad has told me the story every winter of my life. It took the whole weekend. Merle sanded the runners with a coffee can of sand and a piece of burlap until they shone.

He painted it red with leftover barn paint, and he let my father put the last coat on the underside, where it wouldn’t show.

When it was done they carried it up the hill together, one boy on each end, and Merle said, “You go first, Gerry.”

Dad went first. He says it was the fastest he ever went in his life.

For thirty years that sled hung on a hook in the barn, and then it hung in my father’s garage, where it has hung ever since, beside a coil of garden hose and a bag of softener salt.

He has never once let me touch it. I don’t think he has taken it down more than a handful of times since my grandmother passed.

And now my father was carrying it across a snowy park in front of two hundred people, with his bad hip and his tweed cap, carrying it out in front of him like a man carrying a baby into church.

He walked to the foot of the hill and stopped. “Dad?” I said. “It’s a good sled,” he said. “It ought to be on a good hill.”

“Dad, it’s yours.”

“It was made for a kid,” my father said. “I’m done being one.”

He bent, carefully, and set it down at the bottom of the packed ramp, where the line was forming, and he stepped back. A few of the older men near him had gone very quiet. One of them, Virgil Boettcher, who is eighty-four, went very still, hands at his sides.

I turned toward the top of the hill.

Landon was already there. He had climbed the steps by himself, in his red coat, with the plastic sled he’s had since he was nine.

He stood on the summit with the whole town spread out below him, the loaders parked at the edge of the lot with their buckets down, the tanker hissing, the long line of children, and the fields beyond the park going on white and flat and empty to the sky.