Cardboard and Foxtails

Every time I walk past a store, my eyes instinctively scan the dumpster area. I know what I’m looking for, even if I no longer have any use for it. I am looking for a large discarded cardboard box, preferably one that has recently held a major appliance.

I have cycled from Paris to Geneva, skied down Squaw Valley’s KT-22 at fifty miles an hour, and gone white-water rafting on the Clackamas and American Rivers. But none of these, I repeat, none of these can compare to the youthful thrill of cardboard sliding on the grassy hillside behind our and the Montgomery’s houses.

Back before the Internet, before Pong, before VCRs, even before we had color television, summers in our neighborhood were spent outdoors. We built rickety forts, pretended to be spies or cowboys, and held circuses and fairs with made-up carnival games at each other’s houses. But those were all just killing time. The real action was to be had sliding on a cardboard box down an empty hillside.

By June, the oat grass had reached two or three feet in height and had turned golden. It was ready. First, we would scour the neighborhood to find suitably large pieces of cardboard. Occasionally one could be found in someone’s basement, left over from Christmas. Then, the dried grass had to be carefully flattened to make a bobsled-like run. That first pressing required weight and patience, sitting on the cardboard and inching downhill, ironing the grass as you went. Then the fun began as we made the first tentative test runs, sitting on the cardboard and pulling the leading edge up with your hands to resemble the front of a toboggan. Hidden rocks were painfully discovered and tossed down the hill into the blackberry patch. With each pass, the run would get faster and faster. We would dare each other to go headfirst. Then two at a time. Then three. Then standing up. Then actually inside the box. The run was seldom long, no more than sixty to eighty feet, but that didn’t matter. We kept at it from early afternoon (you couldn’t slide in the morning because dew would make the grass wet) until we could no longer see. There was no competition to speak of. We didn’t time ourselves or declare winners. Each run was an adrenaline rush unto itself. We laughed and screamed and hiked back up the slippery slope towing our cardboard sleds.

The ne plus ultra of sliding was the refrigerator box. We seldom came across those, but when we did it meant all-hands-on-deck. Four, five, six, or even more could clamber on, grabbing shirts and wrapping arms around each other as we tipped over the edge of the level section onto the pitch. The speed you could attain was startling, which often led to “chickens” bailing out early. To do so might save you a trip into the blackberries, but it also assured you a mouthful of foxtails.

With time, each run would wear out, developing patches of bare dirt that stopped a slider cold, sending him or her catapulting off the front into the weeds. We worked our way across the hillside, developing new runs as we needed them. Even though we had skateboards and bikes, the lure of the cardboard was supreme, only to fade as Labor Day approached. As soon as school started, the hillside would become abandoned until the next year, with the cardboard left right where it had been last ridden. I suppose somebody picked it up over the winter, but I don’t know.

Here it is the middle of summer (and the middle of my life, as well) and my eyes scan the golden hillsides of Marin as I travel through the county. But I never see anyone cardboard sliding. Oh, I do occasionally see an abandoned piece of cardboard here and there on a grassy knoll, but either the sliding is done out of sight, or it has simply gone out of fashion. It is hard to imagine any modern kid being as dedicated to the thrill of the hill as much as we were. The names of the cardboard sliding legends are still on my tongue: Gary and Lynny Montgomery, Michael Baroni, John and Kathy Clark, Barry Roberts. I hesitate to add my name to such a pantheon, but I was there, too. Now, you may regard my story as being told by some fossil who used to play with a hoop and stick in the old school yard, but those summers of cardboard and foxtails were as rich in joy and excitement as any I have experienced since.