Go through, or go around?

Adams Park was, and probably still is, a pretty good place to spend an evening in the suburbs when you’re too young to get into bars and there’s nothing better to do. Not that Scarborough has any good bars, of course, as we’d all find out in due time. But at that point, anything would have beaten another winter night watching rented movies in someone’s basement.

A dozen of us – it’s tough to say who, exactly, after so many years – had piled into a couple of cars and driven from house to house, raiding garages and picking up sleds and toboggans. We raced each other through icy streets to Adams Park; it had the nearest decent hill, and it was bound to be deserted that late on a cold Thursday night.

The hill and the empty parking lot where we now stood were only separated by a rushing river, twelve feet across and a foot deep. The nearest bridge across – and the quickest dry route to the other side of the river, so close we could almost touch it – was over a kilometre away.

“What do we think?” someone asked. “Go through, or go around?”

Snow started falling and the wind picked up as we broke into factions. We argued bitterly and restlessly, with the kind of commitment that only bored kids with nothing more pressing to worry about can make.

“Walk that far in the cold, carrying all this stuff? Forget it!”

“Look, there’s no way to get through that river without getting soaked!”

“It’s windy! Sleds are fast! We’ll dry off in no time!”

“No, we’ll freeze in no time!”

“Just shut up, you guys! I can totally jump that far if I take a run at it!”

Eventually Rob, who owned one of the cars and was therefore a de facto leader among our group, pointed out that if we’d just walked around instead of arguing, we’d probably have made it to the other side already. True to form, we argued for a little while longer over whether or not he was right.

In the end, and in a pointless attempt to make everyone happy, we tried to build a crude toboggan bridge across the river. It was flimsy and wobbly, and it didn’t get built with any shortage of punching and bickering. When all was said and done, we ended up wetter than we would have if we’d simply walked across, and more exhausted than we would have if we’d just walked around.

Still, it did beat another winter night in somebody’s basement. And we still laugh about it today, for what it’s worth. But we’ve never managed to agree on the best way across, and nobody’s ever accepted the blame for the awful toboggan bridge idea.

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