Kill Hill

Our neighborhood was very agreeable to kids on bikes and skateboards, broadly speaking. Cars passing by would inevitably slow way down and move to the other side of the road when kids were playing, and there were lots of us kids out there playing.

I wasn’t much of a daredevil before I hit puberty, but there were certainly occasional moments of potential euphoria that were just too good to pass up. Sometimes, we’d jump over things with our bikes, using a little ramp to set us up for some airtime.

Mainly, the thing to do was to go down one of the steeper hills in the neighborhood. Gravity would do the hard work of accelerating you to speeds fast enough for your feet to tingle just a little bit. I liked this feeling, but it had its limits.

One hill in particular was far steeper than all the rest in the neighborhood, and it ran for a while. Kids inevitably started calling it Kill Hill, and that’s how it was introduced to me the first time I went down it on my bike.

Kill Hill was no ordinary little molehill, but more like a mountain to us kids. Every single trip down was a white-knuckle ride through my own fear, and to the pride of overcoming the feelings that told me not to do it. I’m sure there was plenty of peer pressure there too, although I can only remember the feeling of actually doing it.

Going down on a bike was one thing, but some of the kids had gone to the bottom of Kill Hill on skateboards. Skateboards! This seemed so much more dangerous than a bike to me, and that’s because it almost certainly was.

Now, I have to say up front that I’m no skater. Many Generation Xers ended up punk thanks to the not-so-subtle gateway drug that is skate culture, with lots of the same elements as punk, and punk rock was the music of choice for most skaters back then. No, I was a bike kid, not a skateboard kid.

Nevertheless, I ultimately decided to take my banana board to the bottom of Kill Hill. These skateboards had some element of control and steering, but not much. If you stood on them, you already felt a little off-balance, and trying to change course in the middle of a turn was all but impossible.

I don’t remember the trip down or any of the specifics, but I know for sure that I went down Kill Hill that day on a skateboard. I didn’t die, and I didn’t even get into a wreck, which is a good thing, since none of us ever wore helmets or pads.

Why did I make this dangerous trip to the bottom, like some Evel Knievel or Homer Simpson on a skateboard?

I’m sure part of it was that peer pressure I mentioned. I liked to imagine that I thought for myself, but I really didn’t even understand the forces that caused me to make decisions. I’m certain that there was some of this involved.

Still, I knew there would be a payoff where nausea and euphoria met. I understood that this was a moment to test myself, just to see if I was capable of overcoming that fear. It felt really good to do this, and I later used that same concept to motivate me to wrestle, something I still do today by way of jiu jitsu.

There was also something to the idea of experiencing what this felt like for the first time. I had been down some hills before, but nothing like Kill Hill. This would be a bit of a scientific experiment, with me as the guinea pig. This was just like dropping things from my crib to observe how gravity worked, only this time, I was the thing being dropped.

One huge benefit to this experience has been making everything after easier by comparison. If you’ve gone down Kill Hill, the SATs don’t seem quite so intimidating. Nor does competing in high level jiu jitsu tournaments, for that matter.

Looking back on my own life, there have been a few of these Kill Hill moments, where I just had to overcome the fear to find out how things would go. Using myself as the guinea pig is never my first choice, but sometimes, it’s the only way to learn how something is going to turn out or feel.

Have you had any Kill Hills in your life? Were you a bike kid or a skateboard kid, or neither?