The screen lit up. It was almost completely filled by a low-angle video shot of an impossibly shiny cherry-red four-man bobsled just about to rocket down the mountain. My first thought was, “Wow! It looks like a space ship. Sleds have hanged a bit since I first met them.” Entranced, I couldn’t look away. I felt just the way a retired fire horse must feel when he hears the alarm bell.

The winter of 1958-59 had not started out kindly. My old Plymouth threw a rod on Thanksgiving weekend, and I had to give it to the tow truck owner in exchange for what I owed him. I got laid off my brush-cutting job on Christmas Eve. I tended bar in the village in exchange for supper, and mopped up in the morning to get my breakfast. Then someone said he’d heard the boss at the Olympic bobsled run over near Lake Placid complain that the unemployment office in Saranac Lake was sending him the dregs of their client base, and he was looking for good help. I called and was hired sight unseen; it was a small town. After enduring a frustrating and fruitless political vetting, I wrote Governor Rockefeller himself. Next day the boss called me as I was mopping the bar. “Willy!” he shouted (he always shouted), “you still wanta work?” I inquired about a bear’s habits in the woods and was told to show up as soon as possible.

Ever watched an infant in arms at a church supper or a sporting event? Those wide and utterly innocent eyes are taking in hundreds of inchoate impressions. That’s just the way I was most of that winter. There were probably thirty of us on the crew that built and maintained that one-mile chute of ice: Adirondackers to a man, clad in wool hunting shirts, a wild congeries of warm hats, leather mitts, and rubber boots. We cut ice blocks from a nearby pond and laid them end to end like Jersey barriers to line the straightaways. We set up high staging – this was way before OSHA; any inspector watching us would have gotten writer’s cramp – mixed snow and water into slush, and threw it up onto the staging for the “plasterers” to slap onto the dry-laid stone walls of the curves and polish into a smooth surface. Each of us had his own long-handled, square-pointed shovel, and you could judge a man’s status on the crew by the size and offset of his shovel. At quitting time, if the run was smooth ice, we slid down to the bottom sitting on our shovels, with the handle sticking out before like a bowsprit. To stop, we pulled up on the handle.

There’s no room here for all the new experiences, all the stories, all the characters. Once the run was open for sliding, my job was in a glassed-in booth at the bottom, where I announced to the whole mountain what was going on. I got my information from earphones on a conference call line – old Spencer Branch up at the mile start, Eddie Prue at the half-mile, George Umber at Zig-Zag, and Art Yando at the finish booth – and improvised scenarios from what they told me. Now and then, when a sled coming down was moving especially fast, they tried to foul me up by feeding me expletives, but the dirty rats never got me.

A lot of the old-timers were alumni of the extinct logging camps. Listening to them talk during tea break and lunch was purest music in my ears; there was bardic Irish in their stories. In the evening, as we were leaving after scraping the run clean, we met the night crew coming in: old guys in uniformly dark wool; they looked like the Seven Dwarves. They’d spend all the sub-zero night hauling rubber hoses and drums of water up and down that icy mile, constantly spraying. By morning they were hung with icicles.

Most of the domestic racers were local guys, who seemed to do their training at the Dew Drop Inn in Saranac Lake. Dewdrop himself raced, as did his brother Jerry, who one day unaccountably began signaling for brakes when his sled was only halfway down. Compression fracture of the spine in the big U-curve at Shady. I kept track of every run in my log book in the booth, including how many paying passengers we brought down after the racing ended for the day. If the records have survived (I was once asked to erase one when a bunch of the crew, skylarking in a racing sled, broke the world record for the run), I suppose I could determine how many hundreds or thousands of sleds I watched explode out of Curve 15 and hurtle down the finish straightaway toward my window. I even got to drive a sled a couple of times, but would never let my new bride (1959, though it started badly, was a pretty exciting year) ride down. I’d seen behind the curtain, if you will, and didn’t want her to chance it.

That old run is as gone now as the square-rigged navy, and of the guys I worked with, I doubt more than one or two are still alive. But I see them still as brightly as if in an animated film, treading slush, shoveling snow, pulling the hateful straightaway planer, setting blocks of ice with tongs. And that sound! – the rumble of a four-man sled rocketing down the chute of ice like an avalanche – will be with me forever.