Wed, 02/01/2017 - 7:45pm

Bill Packard

Anyone who's read any of my stuff probably realizes that I'm a little off. People who really know me understand that the brain inside this head thinks differently than most others. Even though we've had a pretty mild winter up to this point, it's beginning to drag on folks and many are looking forward to The Toboggan Nationals. It's the big event at the end of a weeklong party in Camden called Winterfest. We Mainers need something like this in February to give our batteries a little boost to help us make it until Spring.

People are getting their costumes and toboggans ready and as I said, my mind is pretty weird, so I got thinking about the beginning of the toboggan chute. How do you suppose that came about? I know the official story about the Outing Club volunteers in the 1930s, but there had to have been some interesting conversations leading up to the actual creation of the chute.

My guess is that someone thought while they were developing the little slope for the ski area, it might be fun to cut a path through the woods so people who didn't ski could ride their toboggans down the hill onto the pond. That was probably fun, but somebody, I don't know who, but somebody said: "I've got an idea."

I have no clue if this is how it happened and have no intention of saying anything negative about the driving force, but I have to believe he's the guy today that would say "Hold my beer and watch this."

They're going down the hill on the snow on a toboggan and this same guy says: "Let's build a wooden chute. When it snows on it, we can ride down to the pond. It's a straight shot. It will be fun. Probably it was. But not fun enough. So that guy or maybe a different guy said, "Let's cover the chute with ice. That should make the toboggans really go fast."

Next month when the teams go down the chute, they know that hundreds if not thousands of people have gone down that chute before so even though they're excited, they feel pretty safe. Sometime, a long time ago, somebody or somebodies went down that baby for the first time with no idea what the end result would be. That takes guts. Or else it was foolish.

So, here's what this operation looks like to me. They've built a 400-foot wooden chute just wide enough for a toboggan. It drops 70 feet to the surface of a frozen lake. The chute is covered with ice created by what Wikipedia calls a "Rude Goldberg device designed by David Dickey.”

You lay down on your toboggan in a mechanism at the top and when everything is ready, Stuart Young sends you flying down toward the lake at 40 miles an hour. What could possibly go wrong?

It's going to be a great weekend. Thousands of people will be in town. Everyone will be having fun, spending money, and just enjoying themselves. In Maine. In February. And it all started with some guy saying "Hold my beer and watch this!"

P.S. Wikipedia mentions Dave Dickey, but says nothing about Stuart Young. That doesn't seem right to me.

Bill Packard lives in Union and is the founder of BPackard.com. He is a speaker, author, small business coach and consultant.