South Carolina sledding

January 16, 2025

By Jeff Becraft

 

Years ago, one Sunday morning, there were some snow flurries.  A member of our church called us up and said, “We’re not going to be meeting this morning… you all just hunker down.”  My wife and I kind of chuckled… as we looked out the window and saw 5 or 6 flakes floating through the air.

Back in 1987, when we had just moved to South Carolina and I was in graduate school, there was a real snowstorm.  They called off classes early that day because eventually 4” of snow was dumped on the ground.  Getting home was quite an adventure… but that is a story for another email.  The snow froze over and stayed around for a week and shut everything down.

One year, there was a dusting of snow.  Our kids were still young and at home.  The snow barely covered the ground.  Still… this is South Carolina… and if there is snow on the ground, that is something to get excited about.

There was not enough snow to sled but that didn’t stop us.  It was time to put the Little Tikes wagon into action.  I have to say, I had the utmost respect for this wagon.  It had been through it all.  From its original purpose of putting little kids in it to pull them along, to Josiah putting his younger sister, Corrie, in it and tying it to the back of his bike and wheeling her around (the turns didn’t work out too well), or Josiah building a roller coaster ramp coming down out of the fort and using the wagon as the roller coaster car.  (We did have to intervene in some of these situations and make it known that OSHA would not approve of such endeavors.)  I am happy to share that Corrie survived all of this and is now happily married and has two children and living in Texas.

But the wagon also did heavier work.  There was more than one occasion where I used it to move furniture.  (It’s not like we have furniture dollies sitting around the house.  There are a lot of things in our garage, but that is not one of them.)  Once I built a doghouse for the hound dog.  Now, this was a real doghouse… shingled roof and everything.  But it weighed a ton.  To get it into position to where I wanted it, I used the… you guessed it… the Little Tikes wagon.  And this was four-wheeling across the backyard.

This day, though, was none of that.  This was the luge at the Olympics in Lake Placid… except it was in northeast Columbia.  None of us could fit in the wagon.  So we had a pillow from one of the beds on top of it.  You would sit or lie back (like a luge) and someone else would push you down the hill on our road.  Snow barely covered the road but that was what the four plastic wheels were for.

Trying to steer a little plastic wagon with a pillow on top (larger than the wagon) going down the luge course of our road was not the easiest thing in the world.  And on some runs, it led to some interesting results.  If any of the neighbors were looking out their windows, I am sure they were thinking, “What is going on out there?”

What is going on out here is what you would call South Carolina sledding.

And we were having a grand ol’ time.

Sometimes in life, we wait until everything is just right or all the pieces are in place or all the “i’s” are dotted or the mood is just right or whatever… before we jump into something.  The conditions were hardly perfect that day.  The first sled would not have made it down that road.  But there was snow on the ground and there was an adventure to be had.

And we went for it.

 

Jeff Becraft is the Director of Our Place of Hope and the Director Emeritus for Youth Corps and has dedicated much of his life to helping shift the vision of people’s lives. Our Place of Hope is a paradigm shift for people living with mental illness that encourages them to regain meaning, purpose, and hope for their lives. You can connect with Jeff at  [email protected].