Grand Forks North Dakota

I wish I could say that I took the picture above but I didn’t. It was sent to me from my good friend Ignatius O’Hara a few days back. Truth is I’ve never seen the Aurora Borealis anywhere near Tacoma. Once, years ago when I was seven and living in Grand Forks, North Dakota, I remember my dad gathering me up out of bed and carrying me outside to look at it. It looked like green dancing smoke.

Out in the snow of our front yard, wrapped up in my blanket and my dad’s arms, I kept thinking that I was missing something. That there was something I wasn’t seeing. At seven most of the world is still a wide-open mystery, so green smoke dancing in the sky didn’t impress me much I guess. I think at the time I was more interested in my dad’s reaction to the whole thing. The fact that he dragged me out of bed, carried me down the stairs and out into the night. I kept looking at the sky, at the shifting smoke and thought it looked as if the Milky Way was being blown by the wind. I know for a fact I never saw a red color like the one above. That would’ve impressed me.

Across the street from the duplex where we lived, was a vacant lot where the snowplows and trucks left mountains of cleared snow. Being that Grand Forks is as flat as a table it became a gathering place for all the kids in the neighborhood. We’d kick footholds into the side of the hill and drag whatever we were using for a sled up to the top. My family had a four-person toboggan we bought at the Salvation Army thrift store but it was made out of wood and far too heavy for a seven year old to haul up to the top of our block’s Mount Everest. The Piggly Wiggly at the end of our street would sell these sheets of plastic with a rope on one end. For right around your weekly allowance, you could wrap them up into a tube and carry them all the way to the top under your arm. Some kids had the hard molded plastic seats with brake handles on either side; others had those circular metal disks. The really poor kids just used cardboard boxes, or waited at the bottom to ask if they could take a turn on yours. The major problem with the thin plastic sheets was you could feel every bump on the way down. By the end of the day your ass was so bruised and sore you could hardly sit down. The other problem is they didn’t last much more than one solid day of sledding. The first thing to go would be the rope. By the end of the day you’d be hanging on to whatever piece of plastic that would cover your butt.

The sleds would quickly carve runs into the hill. Like a miniature ski resort, you would have both bunny slopes for the little kids gently winding their way to the bottom and black-run-slopes-of-death for those of us trying to impress the twelve-year-olds. We would take our little plastic sheets over the dangerous cliffs of snow in the hope that in our bravery they might say we were crazy and by that gain their respect.

That night, from the vantage point of my father’s arms I could see that some of the older kids were still on the hill. Our street had one lone streetlight down at the end of the block by the cornfield and in its dim yellow light the boys looked like laughing shadow puppets. We stood there, heads up towards the sky, watching our breath in the night. Me wrapped up in my blankets with my bear under my arm and he, shivering in his pajamas and rubber boots, explaining to a seven-year-old the wonders of the universe.