Grounds of Play

A playground in Montana. 1968. I'm the little redheaded girl that looks as if she's getting ready to give someone a bit younger a little help headfirst down the slide. We used to polish them with waxed paper to get even more speed out of them. (hehehe.)

I think that' my big brother swinging like a monkey from the monkey bars.

Have you noticed that some the playground equipment has been seriously sissified since you and I were kids?

The slides are now about four feet tall and have bumpers and areas of thick soft mulch to fall in (we had rocks). Monkey bars are getting harder and harder to find. What happened to that merry go round that was the childhood equivalent of a G Force accelerator. If you got going fast enough with a siblings help, hanging on by one hand, you could get up to about 2 g's. Or come flying off and break a tooth as I did and get banned from the playground for a few days. Yes, we had discipline, the 9th and 10th amendment were alive in our parents hearts, but they let us get a few bumps and bruises alone the way, so we'd learn to take care of ourselves.

I'm not uncaring to safety. I have a child. As a teen, I spent 34 hours bringing her into the world at 10 pounds 6 ounces, the old fashioned way, and then handed her over to loving adoptive parents. 30 years later, I'd still give my life to ensure she is never seriously hurt. Those readers who are parents and grandparents know of which I speak. But I think of our entire generation, that grew up with no more than a few skinned knees on the old stuff and the trust of our parents to make mistakes, and sigh a wistful sigh for times lost.

The ground was hard, the high desert polished by clouds the color of glaciers, white drifts torn from the mountains and piled up until they shed hard rain on every surface. The rivulets wore down the earth, already marked with the ruts the wagons made as people settled this area.

I started thinking about it a couple of years ago when they recalled the Easy Bake Oven.. Apparently some kids have had their fingers burned and someone lost a fingertip so they're off the market. Amazing, my generation managed to make it through a gazillion adventures with this thing and none the worse for wear. Kids raised today on video games can't handle the toys we had I guess. They made noise, they got hot. . they REALLY could put an eye out. They were GOOD toys.

When I was little, I begged Mom for an Easy Bake Oven every time a gift-giving holiday rolled around. I'd watch the ads that aired with the Saturday morning. I was not one of those girls, dressed in pink, pulling my own, light-bulb baked cake out of the retro green oven with the special removing tool. No, I wanted an endless source of non parental controlled baked treats we could make for the field when we were playing soldier or cop and robbers.

Then we had the toy that was as good for a good electric shock as anything. The Tudor Electric Football game. Picture the concept: You put eleven players into position. Your brother does the same. Ours came painted like the Kansas City and Minnesota. (Go Minnesota!)

You flip the switch and the whole field begins vibrating and the players start jostling around on the L.A. earthquake-prone gridiron. Time to stop the game so you can place the felt ball on the little base of your favorite player and turn that switch on again. Your player has an opening! He's going for it. . the crowd goes wild.. . . wait! He's turning around! He's running the wrong way! Son of a bitch! . Fortunately since this happened almost every time, the little rule book allowed you to call the play as "dead" rather than have your running back relive Dad's old story about Jim Marshall's 1964 run against San Francisco.

One toy that actually worked, albeit with the risk of second degree burns, was the Creepy Crawlers Thing Maker. I inherited this from an older sibling and what a wonderfully dangerous toy this was, cooking bugs and things in an open hot plate. That wonderful smell of cooking goo, filling the house with the warm ambiance of plastigop and the electrical sizzle as the plate hit the cooling tray.

These toys didn't just get 100 watt light bulb-warm like the Easy Bake Oven. These suckers got HOT. The small scars were worn around the neighborhood like a badge of honor. And frankly, nothing spelled fun like a good aim and whacking your brother right in the forehead with a piping hot stink bug.

But days inside were limited to really bad weather. Unless it was so cold our digits would freeze to the ground we were outside, and usually up in a tree or on some non sanitized playground equipment. The slides were tall, the ground was hard. The purpose of a swing was not to feel the wind in your face, but to get as absolutely high as you could, then FLING yourself out of it towards the ground and hope you landed feet first.

There was just something about playing with the boys, my brother being my best friend in the whole world. Boys, guns, guns, boys. There is an obvious connection there, and being a girl I was never left out of the picture. I had guns. From the time I could walk I knew what they were, and the difference between a real one and a toy one. And guess what, I made it to my 40's without committing a felony or shooting anyone I wasn't supposed to. Our folks had to get us toy guns, otherwise we'd make a gun out of a stick, Legos or even a banana if that's all, as the neighborhood sheriff, we could get our hands on to defend ourselves against outlaws. Some parents say it is toy guns that would make a child warlike. But lacking a gun toy, I more than once grabbed my Donald Duck figurine around the neck like the butt of a pistol, pointed him, beak aimed, and said "BANG!". My folks, thank goodness never bought in to this "nurture, vs nature" and let me choose. I played with the toys I wanted to.

My favorite gun of choice as a youngster which I have written of here in the past was Topper's Johnny Seven O.M.A which was handed down from an older brother, still in working order. Johnny Seven had all of the essentials - gun, helmet and combat phones. The thing that made this line special however, was the gun. This baby was a yard long and chock full of the things that boys/men (and the occasional redheaded girl) love to this day - gizmo's galore! The O.M.A offered seven weapons in one. It launched a grenade, fired an anti-tank rocket, shot an armor-piercing shell, chucked an anti-bunker missileshot, 10 bullets as a rifle made a rat-a-tat-tat sound as a tommy gun AND had a pistol that detached and functioned as a cap gun. The stock was also detachable and the O.M.A. had a built in bipod, which was handy since the thing weighed about 5 pounds. Maybe I should have found another one of these rather than laying out $1500 for an AR15 with accessories.

My favorite weapon though couldn't be found on any shelf at the toy store. It was the Weller soldering gun kept in the neighbor's garage. It was black and sturdily futuristic looking with two lights that would glow when you pulled the trigger and a tip that would make this Outer Limits kind of humming sound and got really hot, hot enough to melt plastic and burn paper. It was a decided step up from the Wham-O Air Blaster. Though it really did a number on G.I. Joe's arm when we tried to give him a tattoo with it.

Like most of the kids of the West, and of that generation, we liked to be outdoors. We learned to fish and later to hunt, a continuation of the early childhood games we played, except this time the strategy involved steelheads, and the only make believe "counting coup" we did was the "one that got away" stories.

The outdoors made us strong, made us self sufficient and capable. It made us search for something up ahead on that horizon, something we would not find in our room on a computer or on a PlayStation.

We didn't have "play dates", we simply rounded up some neighborhood kids and headed out each morning. We pretty well burned, nicked and scrapped most parts of our body, and periodically one of us would have to go in to have someones Mom clean it up with Bactine and a made from scratch cookie, to be sent back out to likely scrape the areas that had been missed.

We didn't sit inside much either, unless it was raining. We'd head out into the boonies, where there were hills and trees to climb, crossing a stream with the aid of a stick to make sure it wasn't too deep, and finding a swatch of "wolf" fur in the bush (OK, maybe it was coyote). It was a different era. We didn't have grown-up worries, about drugs or crime or social standing because we didn't have $300 tennis shoes. We were simply kids, behaving like kids, skipping rocks, marveling in the discover of a nest of robins, or the rub of a pair of antlers against a tree, dragging our tired selves home with a huge sheet of plywood we found we could make a raft out of sometime. And when we'd get home, dog tired, and dirty, sometimes with dried blood on a limb somewhere Mom might let us roast marshmallows in the living room fireplace and eat on our stomachs on her good carpet, so we could continue the adventure until sleep, stomach full of hot globs of sweet security.

Have you noticed how beautiful the day really is, as you sit in front of the television set, a day so glorious you'd gladly pay God if the universe had a cover charge. Take a dog, take a bike, take your child or grandchild and get out into that dimensionless map of green where steams and paths and baseball diamonds, all overlay onto the shifting present, while you go back 30 years. Laugh like you have forgotten how, drink from a garden hose, build up a sweat, and do not, for a moment, care what the neighbor's think.

For I'm going to. Today, the sun is out, peeking from behind the sky. I've been on this computer long enough. I gather my coat and my hat, Barkley rushing to join me as we head out into the big back yard. I'll lob a well chewed tennis ball at him, and he'll chase me, barking in a game of canine tag. The trees watch down on us, like sentient parents, as the wind blows gently, chilling the skin, sparking my soul.

In the distance there are no mountains. But here is a confluence of earth. The cut of my land, the way it folds and lay, the bleached azure sky, the swath of verdant green across the land unfettered, all are beautiful. Oh and the wind. The wind that smells of farmland and freedom, the wind that carries the voices of laughing children across the field. Wind that brushes the trees aside, God's hand, watching over us as we play

And play I still do, with firearms that actually fire, with soldering irons and tools and things that get really hot. When I'm done, I will still lay back down, in the grass and look up to the sky. I will gaze up into the rain murmured fabric of a passing autumn storm, upon which the sun hammers the clouds like my heart beat, growing into something wet, and wild and free. There have been some scrapes on both body and heart, but for those moments, like hard ground that exposed nerve endings to the sunlight, I'd not love as deeply as I can now. For that I am grateful.

Even if I don't have a Johnny Seven OMA any longer.