WHAT DID I EXPECT? I walked down to the bottom of Regent Street at 45th Street near the top of the best sledding hill in West Philadelphia around one o'clock last night (this morning) to see what the rumpus was all about. By rumpus I mean loud happy noises made by loud happy people enjoying the unexpected and picturesque snowfall that transformed the natural bowl of Clark Park, once again, into a Currier and Ives postcard. The only thing missing were the sleds.
Call me old fashioned (Jesus, did I just say that?) but I believe that a great sledding hill swarming with between 30 to 50 merrymakers in the hour between one and two in the morning on the occasion of the first winter storm with big fat snowball-making snow flakes. . . I believe that the rumpus made by everyone hurtling headfirst, butt first or sideways down that sledding hill his should include at least one sled.
I saw everything but an American Flyer and Rosebud last night while watching a vigorous attempt by people half my age to navigate uncollapsed the snow-slicked western slope of the former pond watered by Mill Creek that now runs underground in concrete to the Schuylkill on its way to the ocean. Not once the entire time did I see anything resembling the device I grew up calling a sled.
You know, two metal runners or blades running beneath a slatted wooden body with a flexible cross beam enabling a kid to steer downhill with either hands or feet. A sled.
I didn't see a single sled. What I did see was an Our Gang/Litttle Rascals parody of Depression era ingenuity by college students and the dreaded thirtyish hipster element I found congregated at the top of the best sledding hill east of Cobbs Creek. You would have thought these kids grew up in Bangladesh the way they confronted the options of snow-assisted gravity-powered travel technology. They went to the local dump and pilfered plastic. They surfed on "Far Sale" signs. I saw a cheap kitchen table used as a toboggan. I saw a young man repeatedly try to urge snowboard-type tricks out of a restaurant-sized Amoroso'a rolls cardboard box.
And not a single sled amid the cell phones. I saw half-pipe highway barrier barrels, blue plastic cafeteria trays, mom's webbed shiny-plastic laundry basket, clear plastic, curved plastic, huge sheets of drop cloth quality plastic that could accommodate seven people at once, assorted trashcan lids, a four foot trampoline, 24-inch cymbals from a drum set -- Drump-CHISH! -- and a toilet seat which someone hung from a snow-covered tree.
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