Our high school ski team dragged an old truck engine to the top of
a hill.
The idea came from our coach, George Woodard, who did not ski but
knew how to farm and tinker. We hauled
the engine up the hill to build a rope tow. The rope tow was George’s idea to improve access to the top
of our ski jump. This was back
when Vermont high schools allowed teenagers to jump, and maybe George couldn’t
ski but he knew less walking meant more practice.
Harwood Union has a small hill behind the school. At the time, it’d been converted into a
jump; a short, steep pitch with a huge dirt headwall carved into the middle of
the slope. The headwall had a
kicker. We’d sail off it.
Walking up that hill to practice was hard work. The long wood skis, built like barrel
staves, wide as floorboards, were mounted with old steel telemark cable
bindings. Industrial. The skis weighed a ton. The ancient leather boots weighed, oh,
one hundred pounds dry, one-fifty wet. Throwing skis as long as small trees onto teenaged shoulders
and walking up a hill wearing wet moon boots. As I say, hard work.
So we all thought George was onto something. Moving a rusted, ancient, gigantic, iron Ford Model A engine
to the top of the hill seemed a small price to pay to avoid the hike.
George mounted the engine on a wooden timber frame. The frame probably weighed more than
the motor. Angled at the front
with two big ropes attached, the frame was really a massive, heavy sled. The plan was to haul the motor on the
sled to the top of the jump.
The sled and engine sat on the grass behind the school while we
waited for winter. When it did finally
snow, big wet flakes laying down a foot of base, we were excited for the
job. Like Egyptian slaves we
grabbed the harnesses. We dragged
the sled to the base of the hill.
Dragging across flat ground itself was near impossible. Exhausted from this small effort, and we
hadn’t really done anything yet.
The hill was incredibly steep.
What we were doing was insane.
Which was perfect. It
was perfect because letting us jump with little instruction and old gear was
insane. And not only the jumping was
crazy. Landing was crazy. The outrun to one jump we competed on
took us across a small road. A teacher
was stationed at the road both to pile some snow on the dirt track and to shout
when cars came, although there was no stopping so I don’t know what the teacher
would have done if a car roared up when a kid came screaming down. The base of another jump crossed a
stream by way of a narrow wooden bridge. Thread the needle over the bridge or end up in the water.
Getting to the top of some jumps was also crazy. The depression-era trellises, stacked
high on hills, were coming to the end of their lives. The trellis jump in Lyndonville leaned like Pisa and moved measurably
in the wind. There was no stair,
just a steep incline with small, worn wooden slats for toeholds. Dead of winter, wearing moon boots,
carrying the weight of a cross and climbing in a wind with the whole thing swaying
under foot, getting to the summit of the Lyndonville jump was a sport of its
own.
And then there was the jumping. None of us were very good. We were unschooled.
Our gear was from the Great War.
If success was overcoming sheer terror we were Olympians.
But sometimes it went just right. Point the skis, hurtle like an arrow toward the headwall; leap
forward when you hit the lip; skis come up, body leans forward into the sky,
and for one or two beats of the heart the skis lift, you lift. You fly. The rope tow was a chance to fly.
Hard work, dragging a truck engine to the top of a hill. We tugged and slipped and fell. We were soon soaked and covered in mud,
exhausted.
Near the top someone noticed frozen rotting apples hanging from
gnarled trees. Between the wet snow and the apples we abandoned the sled and
launched an epic snowball and apple fight. As it always is, one team member almost lost an eye, taking
an apple right in the glasses. Another
I think broke his nose. There was
blood in the snow.
After the apple fight we finished the job, putting the sled in
position. We stood there, soaked,
cold, battered, maybe a bit proud. We stood in the gloam of a late-fall afternoon. George pulled a key out of his overall pocket,
wrapped cold fingers around the key, put it in the ignition, turned it.
I was brought back to all this a few days ago. I was reading an article by Adam Gopnik
in the New Yorker about Albert
Camus. Camus - philosopher, writer,
resistance hero - wrote about Sisyphus, a man who defied the Gods and was condemned
for eternity to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it perpetually fall back
down.
Camus argues Sisyphus was condemned to nothing worse than life; we
all spend a lifetime rolling rocks up hills only to have them tumble back
down. Gopnik sums it up this way:
“learning to roll the boulder while keeping at least a half smile on your face
is the only way to act decently while accepting that acts are always
essentially absurd.”
As Jonah Hill’s character says in Moneyball, ‘it’s a metaphor.’
We probably should have tested the engine before we dragged it up
the hill. It would not run. The block was cracked. Back down the hill we walked. I bet the
engine sits there still.
What a day, the day we sledged a truck engine to the top of a
hill. It is the trying, I guess, which
makes us smile.
David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2012 David Rocchio
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