The Wonderful Magic of Kidness

Our snowy weather has gotten me to thinking lately about being a kid. Not that it has been that snowy, but I have been telling my children stories of when I was their age.

One favorite winter activity was to drive up to Soco, the mountain pass between Maggie Valley and Cherokee, to the entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway there. With a foot of snow on the ground the big iron gate to the parkway was always closed and locked with a federal government sized padlock, but you could park the car on the side road and walk past the gate. (Why does it seem like the best spots are always just on the other side of the gate?)

Just past the gate there is a very steep section of the hill that somehow has an alley with no trees. Its not very wide. There would be no steering of your sled on a hill like this, it's way too steep. At the bottom of this hill, the engineers sloped the ground down and away from the road to drain water. So at the bottom of this straight, incredibly steep hill is a short incline back up to the paved road. During most of the year, there is nothing about this spot to attract any attention. But with a foot and a half of snow on the ground, this spot is revealed as the best naturally occurring Ski Jump on earth.

We never took sleds to Soco, somehow they were too civilized for that wild place. Or maybe it was the fact that they probably would not have survived the ordeal. We would take inner tubes, walk up the hill as high as we dared, then try not to think about the bottom. You just have to jump on your inner tube and hang on for dear life. Sliding down is a blur, you can almost feel your stomach in your throat. At the bottom of the hill, you go airborn. If you're lucky, you land on your inner tube. As often as not, you land in the snow. I can still picture my friend Mark about 6 feet in the air on one particularly fast run. It took us a little while to revive him, but he was famous after that.

Mark and I still reminisce about that day when we get together. We talk about his famous slide down the Ski Jump, and we talk about the magic of being a kid. I'm going to hold on to this magic as tightly as my innertube, this wonderful magic of kidness.