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The sport still holds in one form or another, but it has changed. Coasting in the streets is rightly forbidden now in many communities. The chances of meeting dangerous obstructions in these days of multitudinous automobiles and omnipresent trolley cars are too great: In the old Ponkapoag days such things were unknown, and the rarely occasional sleigh or wood-sled was little to be feared.
The steersman on the mammoth Ponkapoag bob-sled steered by a rope bridle and the use of his feet on a stout wooden cross-bar, and his position was no sinecure. He had at least a ton of people on board and he had no brake. After the leviathan slid over the brow of the hill and began its downward course there could be no slowing up, no backward sled tracks, till the end of the course was reached.
It is probable that the coasting on Ponkapoag Hill began with the coming of white settlers to the region, "the Dorchester Back Woods." The Indian invented the toboggan, but he seems to have used it for a sled of burden and not as a pleasure chariot. Coasting is essentially a white man's joy.
The days of the stage coaches had passed and the place was more thrown upon its own resources, especially for excitement, than it had been since they had made it a stopping point on a main thoroughfare. The railroad brought bustle to many hamlets, but it took it away from Ponkapoag and left it a sleepy hollow.
It is two clipper sleds fastened together so that the rear one runs in the tracks of the front one. Then came a board placed lengthwise across the two and the double-runner was fairly begun. Later this board came to be a long plank that would hold a dozen. With that the capacity of the common clipper sled was reached. But they did not stop at that at Ponkapoag.
Modern easy methods of transportation and communication have put the typical New England village, with its manly, self-reliant, self-centered life, out of existence, and with it have passed or become decadent many of its community sports. I doubt if Ponkapoag will ever again see such coasting as it has seen, and I fancy the same may be truly said of hundreds of big hills in other towns.
On days and nights in the old-fashioned winters, when the sledding of big logs to the sawmill on Ponkapoag brook had made the course down the hill one glare of adamantine snow between deep rifts, the population of the village used to turn out; not the big and little boys and girls only, but the grown-ups even to the venerable gaffers of those days who could remember how they used to coast there before the Civil War was thought of, when the Cherry Tavern still fed scores of pleasure-seeking Bostonians on big, luscious black-heart cherries each June, and in winter the Ponkapoag Inn had its patrons from the big city not only for coasting but for pickerel fishing on the pond.
It may be that he invented the strangest form of double-runner that I have heard of, and which was used on Ponkapoag Hill, but I fancy not. That I guess was an inspiration worked out on the spat by some hardy Yankee. It consisted of a great wood-sled on which half the village could be accommodated.
A great if not famous inventor once lived in Ponkapoag. James Basin came from one of the Channel Islands, a French Huguenot, with his family, and settled in the little village; it would be hard to tell why. He invented the "Basin trumpet," a curious kind of cornet with which one gets change of pitch by turning a crank with one hand while holding the instrument to the mouth with the other.
The golden crowned kinglet and the winter wren, the white-throated sparrow and the brown creeper, all may be looked for between the 20th of September and the passing of the month, though as for the brown creeper those two ardent bird students, Frederic H. Kennard and Fred McKechnie have demonstrated that it is not a winter visitant only but an occasional all-the-year resident, they having found nests and eggs in the Ponkapoag swamp.
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