A Legacy Project

We were also a danger to ourselves.

It was a school day afternoon, a winter day. Dan Leman and I were tubing on Cantwell’s hill. If you took a running start and flung yourself on top of the tube, if the snow was flat and iced over, you could almost reach the river, crossing the flats at the bottom of the hill.  One time Pat Throop went right over the bank into the water. I remember him running home, dripping wet with Tittabawassee River water, thinking, I never want that to happen to me. There were dangers we thought nothing of. Mike Curry slipped on some ice and broke his arm. Up on M47, which in town was called Main Street, Pam Haynes got hit by a car and walked away from it, then a year later Tina Coy got hit and never walked again. 

Mickey Secord came along that afternoon, dressed in her heavy winter coat and snow pants, wearing a long knit scarf. She was what my parents called “a big-boned girl,” taller than both me and Dan, bigger than either of us. She had long brown hair that streamed over her shoulders. We were late elementary school age, still figuring out boy-girl relations. When we played, we played rough. At some point we got the idea of knocking each other off our tubes. We had moved over to the Rice’s hill, which wasn’t quite as steep, with a couple small scraggly trees in the middle. On her third run, when Dan and I, or Dan or I, kicked her tube, she rolled off the tube, skidded down the hill, and then slid into one of those trees. She lay there a minute. Then another minute. She was slow getting up. When she finally did, she said she thought she should go home.  

Next day she didn’t come to school. She had ruptured her spleen, I mean we had ruptured her spleen, Dan or I. A week or so after the surgery she was back in school.  She never mentioned that accident that had happened by accident.

Years later, at a class reunion, I saw her for the first time in more than a decade. Actually I heard her. She had a deep smoker’s voice. We said maybe three words to each other. I would have listened to that voice all night. Not long after, I heard she had died of cancer. She was one of the first of my classmates to go.  Whoever told me, when I mentioned it, they said, Oh yeah, that voice. I never mentioned the hill, the tube, or the tree, not to anyone.