The Toboggan Run

One of my favourite places to visit as a child was my Uncle and Aunt's farm at Lamont, Alberta.  It wasn't a large farm and they did not earn their living by it but they kept a few head of cattle, some pigs, a flock of chickens, and they grew hay.  In the spring, they planted a huge vegetable garden that produced a bumper crop of vegetables especially a sweet, yellow corn of a variety no longer available and buckets of cucumbers for making dill pickles.

The farm was sadly lacking most of the amenities that modern farms now have but there was electricity and running water . . . you ran to the well to get it.  Somehow that fascinated a 'city slicker' and I liked the novelty of pumping water from the well.  Whenever my cousins came to town, the fascination was reversed and one of them, in particular, would spend the entire visit in the bathroom turning on and off the tap in order to watch the water come out.

What was especially nice about the farm was that parts of it were hilly.  That meant that in the winter, my cousins could build a toboggan run that would provide enjoyment for them through the long winter months.  They always chose the same spot high on the brow of a hill above one of the pastures that curved steeply and then more gently downward taking you into the farmyard past the barn and stopping short of a pig pen.  They firmly stamped down the snow thus forming a grooved track wide enough for a toboggan and sprinkling it with water until it turned solid and gleamed like ice.  A snow bank carefully built up along the outer edge of the run kept the toboggan on track so that there was no danger of veering off sideways and ending up in the pasture or in the trees on the other side of the run.

On one visit, three of my cousins, my twin and I were having a great time on that toboggan run.  We had a three person toboggan and a two person sled and we would take turns using them.  I preferred using the sled because you could steer it whereas with the toboggan you hung on for dear life and hoped for the best although it seemed to me that the toboggan always travelled faster than the sled.  After several runs, some of us wanted a break so I decided to take the sled for a run by myself.  Forgetting that only one person on the sled allowed it to go faster, I barrelled down that run at a break-neck speed having the time of my life.  When I got to the bottom and passed the barn, I discovered that I couldn't stop in time to avoid the pig pen and scooted under the fence and got mired in the muck.  The old sow in the pen was as surprised to see me as I was to see her and my cousins had a good laugh.