The roads on Signal Mountain are one thing to an adult, but a totally other thing for boys. We raised our six kids on wonderful Signal Mountain, and, Oh, the crazy things they did…always going downhill with no brakes.
We added a large addition to our house years ago to keep pace with a growing family in a 100-year-old home. The contractor apparently had never worked with four boys watching their every move or thought that their materials were just large building blocks!
The contractor used 24-foot wooden I-beams and casually put them aside till needed. This was an inventive boy’s delight. Add three step- ladders and you may figure this out. Starting at about 12 feet high, the young boys stood on a ladder and placed one end of an I-beam on the next to top step. Then 20 or so feet they put up a shorter 10-foot ladder and rested the other end of the I-beam. Next came an eight-foot ladder and finally a six-foot ladder. Between each was another I-beam. The end had another I-beam that ended on a flat place in the front yard.
At least they wore their helmets. But as boys will, they climbed the highest ladder with their skateboards and went on a merry ride down the rickety affair. (These boys were between 10 and 5 years.) At first, a Dad thinks, “What the heck, this is not going to end well.” Perhaps I was too tolerant, but they had been doing it for hours before I saw the rickety, roller coaster-like affair. And no one had been hurt! (Perhaps moderns would it have it another way, but I am not a modern, and in my defense, it did have built-in rails.)
This went on for days till the I-beams were nailed down for a subfloor in the new great room.
Signal Mountain gets snow before the valley. Many hours were spent at the Signal Mountain golf course going down hills in every type of convenience: sleds, toboggans, homemade contraptions, disks, water skis with the fins removed, old garbage lids, and of course, bottoms…and noses.
But this was not enough for me and my boys. We wanted to be daring and get away from the crowded slopes. More than once, we went to the top of Green Gorge road, closed to traffic by the police, and icy like the rump of a frozen penguin. We would pile on an old-fashioned wooden sled with metal runners, making sure we had coated the runners with soap, and take off down the road, steering around corners, skidding near the edges, and arriving at the bottom with a radical sideways slide. What fun! Let’s do it again!
We had a great dog, Hunter, a Springer Spaniel. He would go everywhere the boys went and when sledding he would run barking beside us down the hill. What a sight! Well, someone, I think it was me or Douglas, had the idea of tying a lead rope to Hunter’s collar and having him pull the sled even faster! Hunter never had such a romping good time. Off he went, and off we went, three on a sled. He ran and the sled, already fast, would go faster. “Go, Hunter!” was the cry. What a hoot! No one ever caught us. (I have heard this event will be added to the next Olympics.)
Hills do have bottoms. Little kids don’t know that. John-John, child number three of three of six kids, had a new Big Wheel. One fall morning, he got going down the steep driveway all by himself. “No, Johnathon,” I cried, “There’s a road down there. Stop! Stop!” But he couldn’t hear, and he couldn’t stop. Boys must have angels, five-year-olds even more so. He flew down the driveway, turned on the main road, and then turned again down another side road. When I caught up to him, he had crashed into a pile of leaves, covered from head to toe with wet oak leaves, and was laughing! What’s a Dad to do?
Beats me. I put him on the skateboard at the top of the wooden roller coaster. (All the kids grew up with no real injuries. They do, though, have a healthy respect for hills.)
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Doug Daugherty can be reached at dedsr1952@gmail