A recent motion passed in the City of Toronto should reassure residents how seriously their Mayor and Council are taking the harsh realities of one in ten Torontonians visiting a food bank, more tents popping up in parks where children should be playing, and hopeful homebuyers watching inflation steal their dream and replace it with the second-highest rent in the country. A thoughtful plan to alleviate suffering and improve the city, you ask? Do not be silly. Of course, I am talking about the ban on tobogganing.
Conflicted feelings may have gripped City employees, tobogganers among them no doubt, who drove to 45 of Toronto’s parks in early January to pound “No Tobogganing” signs into the ground; signs with just enough space to also lecture would-be sledders about the dangers of, “trees, stumps, rocks, rivers, or roads.”
“We used to fly over a concrete wall, land in the school parking lot, and try to bail before we hit the traffic on Kennedy Road,” a friend of mine told me over a Friday night beer. I had just regaled the table with my own tobogganing tale, recounting the time in 1973 when my mother and uncle took us kids to a hill near my Nana’s house in west Toronto.
Our solitary wooden sled held one adult and two children. That meant three, three- and four-year old youngsters waiting at the top in the only way we knew how: whining, crying, and, in my cousin, John’s case, stuffing as much snow into our faces as possible before Uncle Ernie or Aunt Gail told him to cut it out or they would give him something to cry about. Three runs in, watching my uncle sail down the hill with two satiated kids while she policed the impatient ones at the top, my mother contemplated the shin-length leather coat she was wearing. By the time my uncle returned, she had a plan.
“Give my shoulders a push when I say,” she instructed my uncle and then lay on her back like a board, her feet pointed towards the bottom of the hill.
“I think I can take three!” she said to us and patted her chest and stomach. “Hop on!!”
The leather coat was an Olympic bobsled. The other children could only gape in awe as we sailed past their sleds like they were standing still. At the top of the hill, we had something else to argue about.
“I want to ride on Aunt Gail!!”
“NO! I want to ride on Aunt Gail!!!”
Little did we know how lucky we were to be riding on Aunt Gail at a time in Toronto’s history when weekend tobogganing did not lead to fines, arrests, or worse.
During The Great Toboggan Controversy of 1912, so-called by University of Toronto historian, Greg Howard Homel in his 1981 article on the subject, Protestant church groups and one Lord’s Day Association, pressured Toronto’s City Councillors to ban tobogganing on Sunday, not to save sledders’ bodies from physical harm but their souls from eternal damnation. This caused a furor among the thousands of people, many of them labourers, for whom Sunday was the only day to get outside and slide.
“God put slides in Riverdale Park,” was one pro-toboggan cry. “Let us worship outside!”
The debate became so heated that in Toronto’s daily press, news of the City’s Sunday tobogganing deliberations eclipsed death threats against Winston Churchill and hundreds perishing in a sunken ship off the coast of Scotland.
“Look here, City Fathers!” wrote one indignant Torontonian to The Toronto World on January 19, 1912. “The average Toronto man is getting very tired of the attempts of certain busy-bodies to interfere with his personal liberty.”
If the average Toronto man was “very tired” of “busy-bodies” in 1912, he would have gone ballistic today. In a city of three million people living in 294 square miles, those who want to toboggan on any day must now crowd one of 27 approved locations where the City Fathers and Mothers have found no tree, stump, rock, river, or road that might require the average Toronto man, woman, and child to use their own daring, wit, and caution.
“Ridiculous,” proclaimed one east Toronto resident to the CBC, likely echoing the private thoughts of many Toronto City Councillors who also stow a crazy carpet in their garage. “If you’re going to go tobogganing, you know what you’re doing. You’re going down the hill on a piece of plastic.”
Back in 1912, the Sunday ban was passed, and it remained in place until 1961. That means, if the tell-tale signs of tobogganing in the prohibited area behind the CBC interview are any indication, Torontonians could be dodging the authorities along with the trees until the year 2073.
Riding on Aunt Gail lost its novelty before its feasibility as we got bigger. Ten years later, now in high school, two of my cousins and I were together at their woodland acreage north of Toronto. John, who would still stuff snow in your face if you did not keep an eye on him, looked out the window, saw huge flakes, and suggested we go tobogganing.
As we trudged through the soft, deep snow, I wondered where we would launch the wooden sled. We were surrounded by thick groves of tall, skinny leafless trees.
“Where is the toboggan run?” I asked.
John’s sister, Carmen, stopped at a piece of yarn tied around one of the tree’s branches. She pointed at a narrow snake of packed snow that wound its way down a steep hill and through clusters of trees.
“There!” she answered, grinning widely.
That run would today send the City of Toronto into conniptions of worry about bruised elbows, bumped heads, and broken arms. And I admit. I was scared.
However, like any teenager faced with a thrill that was not that likely to end in death, I ignored my fear and hopped on the back. I reasoned that if anyone was going to suffer from an out-of-control veer into one of those trees, it would be John because he had chosen the front.
As John cackled and slowly pushed us off the edge, I wrapped my boots over Carmen’s thighs and gripped her coat for dear life, oblivious to a future where the same City Council that abandons its people to food banks, homeless tents, and soaring inflation would stop a group of kids from sliding down a hill in the snow.
I had only two wishes that day. That John could steer and if he couldn’t, that his face would be stuffed with snow.
Thou Shalt Not Toboggan