Like a shooting star but gripping the earth, I hurtle into the darkness. The roaring, crunching, screaming of plastic on ice beneath me melds into the experience of sheer speed. With my face only inches from the snow-coated pavement, in this moment there is nothing in the cosmos but my child-sized sled, the wind tearing at my face, and the next few inches of country road, which changes by the nanosecond. But I am not alone.

Mere minutes before I was comfortably ensconced by a wood stove, my whole world the book in front of me. Then my two sons-in-law burst through the front door, showering upon us snow, ice, and the excitement of boys on holiday. “C’mon, Poppy,” called John, “you gotta try this!” His brother-in-law Philip nodded earnestly over John’s shoulder. Before this onslaught of enthusiasm, the thousand reasons I had to stay exactly where I was—the warmth of the fire, the pleasure of the book, the head cold I’d been fighting for a week—all melted as quickly as the snow dripping off the young men’s boots. I didn’t really want to go out in the cold, but even more I didn’t want them to go back out in it without me.

After putting on the requisite number of clothing layers for the night after Christmas in northern Maine, I was out the door behind the two little boys who in another life are grown up enough to be the best husbands I could have wished for my two daughters. A heavy cloud cover gathering for the reinforcement of snow to come the next day ensured almost total darkness beyond the glow of the house’s windows. I could only see the small, white world under Philip’s head lamp, our only illumination. I headed for the fifty-yard slope they had built in the front yard earlier that day, but John beckoned me down the driveway. It wasn’t until we reached the end of the drive that I realized their true objective. They were taking the plunge down toward Wilson Pond on North Shore Road. In near total darkness. Our way shown by one LED head lamp, barely out of its Christmas gift wrapping.

We climbed aboard our undersized Walmart plastic sleds. They may as well have been the latest experimental NASA space ships, for we faced darkness and void as foreboding as anything Spaceman Spiff ever took on in his third grade daydreams. I was given a rudimentary preflight briefing: drag your gloved hands to steer, and don’t worry, there are snow banks to keep you on the road, except where there aren’t. Then with a sudden bark of “Go!” from Philip, we are off.

The house my youngest, Hannah, and her Philip share with two of our grandchildren (and the one on the way!) sits on a hillside high above Wilson Pond. Nestled perfectly among the mountains that build up toward mighty Katadin, Wilson Pond has become one of my favorite spots on earth. On a clear day from the Walden’s rear deck Wilson and its peaks form a scene a Maine postcard photographer would trade his best Nikon for. But on this deep winter night, Wilson Pond is nothing but a presence ahead, somewhere at the bottom of this sloping road. In this moment, all of Maine is reduced to the few square feet of brilliant white ahead of one small head lamp.

Quickly I realize that physics is no respecter of camaraderie. Gravity finds the solidity of Philip’s journeyman carpenter frame, and within seconds he and his light are a pinpoint somewhere ahead of me. And then they are gone. In the blackness now there is only the roar and crunch of the ever-accelerating sled on the hardened ice cover of the roadway to remind me that I am rushing at breakneck (oh, why that adjective?!) speed towards…what? A different pitch of scraping and crunching somewhere to my right and slightly behind me alerts me that John is still with me. I glance back just in time to see the dark outline of John’s sled weaving into an unrecoverable fishtail spin. Suddenly his sled plunges into one of the high piles of snow left by the plow that are the only definition of the boundaries of North Shore Road. My moment of concern is dissipated by the comforting peals of laughter from John, now quickly fading behind me. But before I can relish the satisfaction that I’m still in motion, a massive wall of white appears before me as if it dropped out of the sky. I’ve arrived with no warning at the big curve in the road, and my gloved rudder is no match for it. With a thud the sled goes instantly from sixty to zero, but not so my middle-aged body. The aforementioned impersonal physics decide that though my sled has found the end of its journey, I have not. I execute what I’d like to think is the graceful arc of a gymnast over the snow bank and nail my landing into the (thankfully) deep snow of the field beyond. And like John before me, I come up laughing. A few moments later, climbing over the snow bank and shaking the cold whiteness out of my gloves, coat, and boots, I meet Philip already on his way back up from the bottom and John coming down to see what became of us. As soon as we are all three within hailing distance, we begin to talk all at once, our individual stories of our maniacal blind descent becoming one shared story.

As we make the long trudge back up the hill, I realized that something significant would have been missing without that moment of communication. Without John and Philip the run would have been just as fast, just as exhilarating, just close enough to reckless danger to make a great memory. But it would not have been what it was. Somehow its pleasure, its thrill, and its meaning was what it was because we did it together. From the moment Adam received Eve there has been something very human about the need for community to make our experiences completely, well, human.

The elevation of the solo experience—climbing a mountain, crossing an ocean, or traveling abroad on one’s own—seems to be a largely Western and modern phenomenon. The ancient stories of great journeys almost entirely involve group experiences, whether it is Abraham with his household, Gilgamesh with Enkidu, or Ulysses with his loyal crew. But even the modern lone adventurer seems to do what he does, at least in part, for the sake of the tale to be shared. A few years ago I read a series of first-person accounts by Jonathan Raban about his solo sailing trips down great waterways of the world, such as Alaska’s Inside Passage or the Mississippi River. Even though Raban relished the thought of solitude in the planning of each of his voyages, once underway he found himself anticipating each port and the human contact it would be bring. Each of these encounters was an opportunity to share his experience with those along the waterway, those who could understand and add to it.

If we think about it, don’t the deepest friendships of our lives tend to come out of shared experience? That’s why so many of us maintain contact with high school or college buddies years after we’ve left school. Now that Karyn and I are back in school, we find that our deepest relationships are occurring among our fellow classmates. I don’t think it’s just proximity or the amount of time we spend with them. Because we go through the same classes in the same school culture, we have a vocabulary and encyclopedia of occurrences that would be meaningless to outsiders. And in those experiences we find bonds that would probably not have occurred had we just met at a coffee shop or church lobby.

I’m impressed all over again with how Jesus went about inaugurating his kingdom. He didn’t write a book or even just set out a list of teachings or commandments for future followers to memorize. Rather he drew together twelve men and created a shared experience among them. His teachings and parables were set in the midst of the miracles and dusty roads and sinners’ feasts that they all shared. As you read through the accounts they left behind you can sense the value of the community in which they were birthed.

All of that to say that it just might be worth it to plunge headlong where gravity takes you in the darkness of this world if there are brothers and sisters around you. Laugh with them as you both hit the snow drifts, and bind up each other’s bumps and bruises from the hard landings. Be thankful for those among you with the headlamps of wisdom. And know that even when you can’t see, the Lord knows where the road goes and remembers where your home is.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 28th, 2005 at 9:28 pm and is filed under It`s All About Me, Tell Me a Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.