When you’re a little dragon living in the shadows of the human world, there’s one thing you learn how to do well.

Listen.

I like to listen to people talk about their favorite activities because I can imagine myself having fun doing things like skiing or “tube-ing”!

I’ve never done either, but I hear a ton of stories about people going out on the lake in the summer or driving up into the snow in the winter just for the thrill of a fast ride over choppy water or bumpy snow drifts.

It’s been cold and stormy here the last week and some of my favorite mountains are already piling on their winter snow coats.

My friend Jen doesn’t really like living in places that get a lot of snow (she did it once, and said she won’t do it on purpose ever again) but seeing the snow, she says, is always fun. It always reminds her of the best winter run of all time.

The Great Snow Race

When Jen was a kid, she and some family friends went up in the mountains in Southern Oregon. There’s a steep hill there that’s turned into a long water slide ending with a splash into a giant pond during the summer. When it gets cold and snowy, the pond turns into a giant sheet of ice.

The creek flowing out of the pond, however, did not freeze solid that year. To be safe, everyone was only going halfway up the hill and they created a snow drift to bounce off and turn them away from the pond and into a field so they’d come to a stop long before they ran into the creek.

As long as they weren’t going too fast.

Everyone (grownups included) spent the day laughing, drinking hot chocolate, and whooshing down the hill in different ways, hamming it up for the camera. They even turned Jen’s little brother into a snowman. I’ve seen the pictures. He had a carrot nose and everything!

Just before sunset, Jen says says she, her sister, and her dad decided to climb the tree-lined steep hill all the way to the top for one final, scream-inducing ride.

So they hiked, sinking knee deep in places, until they reached the peak, huffing and puffing.

Jen says she remembers looking out through the trees, across the ice, and into the field beyond. For a minute she considered chickening out, but since they were already there and everyone was cheering them on, she shoo’d the butterflies out of her stomach.

Besides, she’d been on roller coasters with a bigger drop than this one, and Jen loves her roller coasters!

So dad put down the giant inner tube and held it steady while Jen plopped down on her tummy, head first on the right side of the tube, her sister to her left. She remembers crossing her left arm over her sister’s back and trying to hold onto the side of the inner tube with her thick gloves.

That’s when she realized the hill went almost straight down before angling out. It’s also when dad gave a war-whoop, dog piled them, and pushed them off the cliff.

To this day none of them knows how fast they were going down the hill. They will tell you that it was fast enough for the wind to whistle in their ears and freeze the liquid in their eyeballs. They do know it was too fast for the camera to take a picture. And they can tell you that they roared past everyone faster than they could make out who was who.

What they did see was that every face was wide-eyed and terror filled—and they were approaching the snow bank, but they weren’t slowing down.

The inner tube hit the snow drift and almost jumped over the edge. At the last second, dad juked the tube to the right and went rolling off. But Jen and Steph shot across the field straight into the danger zone. They managed to bail and tumble to a halt just before the inner tube tumbled end over end into the rocky, ice-crusted creek.

Somewhere along the way Jen lost her hat and her sister lost a glove. The inner tube survived its encounter with the stream, but only just.

Jen says it’s not the last time her family went inner tubing in the snow. But it was the last time anyone attempted to ride down “a cliff.”

The best stories don’t always come from books

Tonight the wind is throwing a tantrum outside my family’s cave. We’re enjoying spicy hot chocolate and reading by the fire. But the way the wind is crying keeps reminding me of Jen’s story.

That’s what I love so much about listening (and reading)! Good stories stick with you and it only takes a little thing (like the wind) to bring them back to you.

Do you have any crazy stories like that? If you do, you and your family should use them to create your own story book. You never know! Some day, somewhere, another little dragon could be waiting to hear them.

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