I always got off on gravity! As a kid, I enjoyed the ways it provided for some of life’s more endearing moments with some of my closest friends: water balloons, snowballs and inner-tubes. This page is dedicated to that last one.

Although the first two, used judiciously from well hidden perches, were quite entertaining in their own rights, inner tubes resulted in less pain overall than the others; laughter being SO hard to conceal from prosecution even from a well hidden perch.
During my childhood, or B.M.C. (Before Micro Chips - and the games that employ them) for short, whenever there was a snowy incline, either natural or man-made and large enough to generate a little adrenalin, an array of sleds, saucers and tubes with their jockeys would congregate around it, discuss pecking orders, then proceed to play up a sweat.

Late February was the best time for this, as it also was for doing back-flops from tall buildings. You can probably understand why.

I preferred old truck tire inner tubes to rigid sleds, for the bounce factor if nothing else. With a little practice, short yet exciting periods of weightlessness (sometimes mixed with panic) were achievable. This can only be truly appreciated because of gravity, hence my fondness for it.

I can still remember my first ‘ride’, a battered old 11.75 x 17.5 Firestone truck tube so badly distorted by the haphazard application of over a dozen different patches that its shape resembled a crescent dinner roll no matter how much air I forced into it. But it was all mine! Probably because no one else wanted it. This might explain why it never got commandeered by a higher authority.

It also had a long steel valve stem, which could act as a handle while climbing up or, as my proctologist on the way down through the moguls of descent. It was also large enough for me to stretch out on yet surprisingly soft in a pinch. Like the kind that happened in the middle of those intersections where drivers were sometimes not very observant.

Our little winter paradise of West Yellowstone sits on a billiardesque plateau, three miles from the nearest decent slope, which also served as the town dump, target range and bear smorgasbord. The best we could do on a whim, therefore, were either the mountainous white formations built up at major intersections by state plows and snow blowers or some of the chalet style A-frames that were difficult for a little kid to differentiate from the Grand Tetons and obviously promised excellent tubing if the owners weren’t around to rub the smiles off our cherubic little pink faces.

In a tactic that would take a couple of decades for me to understand completely, my parents would often (almost always) use this and a few other pastimes as a means of getting more important (a subject of debate) things in life accomplished, “If you do all of your chores (correctly), you may go out and play in traffic with the other kids.” Debate over.

As I look back, inner tubing may have been the start of my back problems but it didn’t slow me down any. In fact, after dabbling in this sport in southern Oregon for a number of years where I worked on perfecting the cartwheel landing on the rugged slopes of Mt. McLaughlin, I moved the family up here to North Ideeho to get serious about it. Going pro was my intention, but apparently only mine.

Not long after setting up camp on our eight acres of south sloping wonderland, I asked a friend with a skidder to come over and carve a luge run up our hill, just outside our front door. Nice and handy.

This has served quite well over the years. A no-maintenance (except for mowing) venue of winter bliss, provided you limit your alcohol absorption, get past the goldfish ponds, the house and two trees. Other than those, one could, given the right conditions, let gravity take you from where the view uphill starts to get interesting, all the way down to our well head, 400 feet away. Along that way, you will lose any sense of adulthood you are left with and possibly a few articles of clothing. Your brain will immediately become ten years old. Especially when you come off the jump, where the drain field is, doing forty+. If you ‘stick’ the landing, and not with your nose, you can enjoy another 200’ of powder-in-your-mug recollection of childhood glee the way we used to get it before electronics took over.

However, one’s back does not spontaneously renew its youth like the brain does at times like this (mine has become a realist after all these years and screams like a baby if it catches me even looking at an inner tube when there’s snow on the ground). And that is a big problem to anyone with a luge run in their own front yard, and a brain wishing it was ten again. It taunts me without mercy whenever there’s fresh powder gracing the slope. It beckons me like Lucy Van Pelt and her football does Charlie Brown. “Come on, Chuck, you know you want it.”

The last time I fell for that ruse several years ago, I performed my very last cartwheel. Ever!
“Nevermore,” quoth the raven as he cruised the treetops over
my sprawled carcass and scattered clothing.
“Nevermore,” I promised.
“Nevermore.”

Scott Clawson spent his “formative” years in West Yellowstone, surrounded by the usual suspects: bears, tourists, gamblers, drinkers, strippers, musicians, assorted bartenders and great friends. His mind has been reeling ever since.