The Great Luge Run On Shit Hill

When my older brother, the Genius, came up with the idea, my next-door neighbor and I instinctively went along with him. It wasn't that I always agreed with his hair-brained schemes; that was rarely the case. I immediately recalled the times he set the woods, the lot next door, and the piano on fire as he "experimented with the pyrotechnic properties of flammable liquids." Those instances paled in comparison to the pumpkin catapult that he fired at the passing Tractor-trailer. That unfortunate incident drew the local Bethel Police out of their sleepy stupor and, much to our father's dismay, resulted in an investigation.

There was the falling through the ice up at Gypsy Camp Pond and the rope that broke as we swung out over Redwood cliff. It seemed that the resume of my brother's follies was quite extensive. I did, however, always follow him. Looking back, I now know that the mystery wasn't why we followed him in these dubious exploits, but why we were all still alive.

The winter hit hard that year as we reveled in the eighth snow day. The blanket of snow was deep, or we remember it so. The town was closed down for two days as the road crew did its best with the two-foot pounding. We made forts, had snow wars, sledded, skated, tunneled, and that was on the first day. That left the second day up for grabs. We sat in the family room that night watching the Winter Olympics on my father's RCA eighteen-inch television. The downhill toboggan events played out, and my brother, the Genius, hypnotically stared at the screen fixated, and right then, I should have known that something was amiss. The Genius was rarely quiet. Yes, the cogs were turning in his mad brain, and I swore that I could smell the odor of smoldering dust.

"We're building a luge run." The genius stated, looking up, with a tone of finality, as if it was the best idea he had ever had. "We have to get ready." With that declaration, he jumped up and tore down to the garage. I followed in his wake.

The weather turned cold the next day, and perfect packing snow turned to crust. It sounded like the squeaking of styrofoam as we hiked to our next-door neighbor's house. We were generally all in for a pound in the Genius's nefarious plans.

"Where are we going?" I thought it was a legitimate query. The three of us wrestled with shovels, buckets, and our trusty Flexible Flyer Airline Pursuit sled as we made our way out into the woods that skirted our back yards.

"Shit Hill." I thought about the hundred and fifty-foot high rock outcropping that reared up behind Frankie Kolpa's house and wondered how we would slide down the treacherous face. The neighborhood boys were no strangers to Shit Hill. We had gang wars for possession of the rock; we practiced repelling and used the granite monolith as a point of cosmic boyhood convergence.

We arrived at the face of Shit Hill, and, in the snow, it looked larger than I remembered. It towered over us, in monstrous malevolence.

We stood there, contemplating, and I wondered if this was such a good idea. My next-door neighbor undoubtedly felt the same. Such thoughts did not bother the Genius as he formulated the master plan for the run, eyeballing the slope. We stood there for a while, waiting for the Genius to illuminate us with his brilliance when a voice split the frozen dead air.

"Hey, what are you little turds doing on our property?" It was none other than Frankie Kolpa. Frankie was the local miscreant that would dole out justice in the form of advice as well as a beating as he lorded over the hood. He was sixteen and the king of Redwood Drive. Frankie had no father, and his mother was, in clinical terms, looney tunes. This scenario left Frankie with a lot of time on his hands, which he put to fair use lifting his barbells and kicking the crap out of anyone younger than he. The only player in the hood that didn't pay respect to old Frankie was Nicky Baid, who was twice as big and twice as dumb but not to be toyed with even by Frank.

Frankie would eventually be taken away from the hood when he was caught hiding in Patty Titus's closet naked one evening as she dressed for bed. It was a short trip to Fairfield Hills Sanatorium, and the hood would then breathed easier for a while.

"We're building a luge run," my brother declared proudly. Frankie pulled his head back in the window, and we waited. Nothing was stated, but the three of us all knew without a doubt that Frankie was coming out. We weren't sure if it was to assist us or pound us into a bruise, but he would come.

After maybe five minutes, Frankie emerged from the basement door carrying a snow shovel over his shoulder. He tromped through the knee-high drifts dressed in a red plaid hunting jacket and a wool sweater that looked like he had salvaged it from under the oil pan of his mother's Rambler. The galoshes replete with the open cleats completed the ensemble.

The bathroom window opened again, and his mother leaned out. "Francis, make sure that you bundle up, honey."

"Fuck you, ma," he shot back over his shoulder. You had to give Frankie credit where it was due. He did not give a shit about much. He wasn't smacking us around, which meant we were in with the neighborhood ruling class's hierarchy, and that was good.

"A luge run, huh. Whose dumb ass idea is this?"

"Mine," The Genius puffed.

Well, if we're going to build this, we better get going." Frankie spat and plowed through the snow.

We worked all through the morning shoveling and banking snow, and the run began to look like something. Jimmy Wilks and the Claperoff brothers were soon beside us, knee-deep in the snow as the down-hill luge run emerged. My brother, the genius scampered up and down the hill as he shouted orders and gave directives; this was his show. I now understood how the slaves built pyramids. No one was sure who came up with the brilliant idea to pour water on the packed banks to solidify them and make the run slicker. It would definitely do that. In retrospect, we all understood that it would have been inadvisable to admit this.

Around three in the afternoon, as the sun cooled, most of the kids from Redwood Drive and half of the rabble-rousers from Hawleyville Road stood admiring our handy-work. The seventy-five-foot-long Luge Run snaked almost straight down in a double S curve at almost sixty-degrees and then whipped around in a highly banked hairpin turn to a straightaway where we could put out our feet to break the speed. My brother, the Genius, thought of everything.

"We'll have to bank the sides high. The centripetal force will make the sled ride up the sidewall." My brother the Genius touted his engineering expertise based on the Olympic run he studied on NBC the night before. I had no idea what the word centripetal meant, but it sounded like the Genius knew what he was talking about.

We looked at the creation, and none of us were too keen on doing the maiden run. I looked at my brother the Genius, the neighborhood resident architect of mayhem, as he peered up at the run. There were close to twenty of the neighborhood's bravest and most dedicated, but none of us was stupid. The run didn't just look dangerous; it was.

That is when Frankie jerked the flyer sled that had frozen upright in the snow and, with a, "You fucking pussies," hiked up around the backside of Shit Hill. The Genius looked sideways at our next-door neighbor and me, his eyes wide. Maybe this would not be his finest plan. The rest of the crew of boys stood in the snow, dreading their turn.

"Maybe it's too steep." The genius whispered to himself in a moment of doubt. We were no strangers to steep hills, but this was different.

"Look." I pointed to the summit. Frankie defiantly stood at the run's apex and scanned the crowd of children that assembled as if he was an Olympic god. I could see Frankie's face, and he had the look of a man that was about to jump to his death. The bravado and recklessness had disappeared from his mug; some things you can't hide. 

He placed the sled on the flat area at the "jumping-off point," as my brother the Genius referred to it, and sat down on top the flyer.

"Whoa, he's going to sit on it." My brother's tone carried a degree of reverence. I had a bad feeling as Frankie gripped the rails and gave the sled a slight lurch forward.

"Do you think it'll work?" I stared at the run as the sled began to move.

"We'll find out soon enough."

It was odd the way the Flyer began to move. It was almost comically slow for about three feet as it teetered off the edge into the first steep drop, which we referred to as "the speed leg." That's when the sled runners hit the ice. The Flexible Flyer Airline Pursuit seemed to immediately accelerate to a weird warp speed as the sled reached the sheer vertical drop. The first ice bank held up as he careened around it. I think about that ride, and in my best estimation, Frankie Kolpa was on a sled to hell at close to forty miles an hour when he hit the hairpin turn. We could hear Frankie screaming in a wail that froze our guts. He blasted into the turn, and it was too much for our engineering to withstand. The sled smashed clean through the ice wall as if it wasn't there and launched into the air.

"Holy shit!" My brother's mind was blown. I was sure that he was glad that he didn't insist on being first, and yet another part of him wished that he could have taken this trip into local immortality and fame.

Frankie soared a full thirty feet in the air as the sled dropped away like the stages of a rocket launch; and yet, on he flew. It was a stroke of good luck that the sled-rider only broke his two shins as he cracked into the sleeping oak that wintered at the bottom of the hill. If he had been going down head first, who knows? When the police, ambulance, and the Stony Hill Volunteer Fire Department arrived, things were entirely out of hand. Frankie's mother was wailing, "Frankie, oh, Frankie, My Frankie!"

"Shut the fuck up, ma," Frankie screamed as he lay there, wailing at the base of the tree. I can remember the blood looked extra vivid as it smeared the pristine snow. My mother had somehow arrived and was administering first aid as only a Registered Nurse could. The entire neighborhood was showing up, and the Kolpa's back yard was packed with people.

The firemen attacked our Luge run with Pulaski axes. It was almost dark as Bill Carlson stood the three of us instigators up and delivered what would become the best lecture of his life.

Bill Carlson shook his Pulaski ax and pointed the adze end at us as he ranted. "What were you boys thinking? Are you trying to get someone killed? Next time you pull a stunt like this, you better talk to your parents first." He was on a roll now, and the rant continued. "Better yet, talk to me. It's a good thing that he didn't go down head first, Christ on a crutch, can you imagine?" he glanced at Carlos Vaghi, the attending officer, who nodded, his face in a mask of hysterical seriousness, as if he couldn’t make up his mind how to feel.

We lay in bed that night recounting the events of the day. There would be school tomorrow, but it was Friday, and the weekend was coming. I suspected where all this was going.

"Next time, we'll have to make the turns wider and not so steep." The Genius had it all figured out.