Preyground: Violence in the Name of Good Wholesome Fun

Preyground

When I was in elementary school, we had a massive playground area that was built around an old, cavernous tugboat body, with cement tunnels that allowed you to crawl (or if you were sufficiently short enough, walk) to the wheelhouse. This was an actual out-of-service tugboat body, and not one of those “Middle Tikes/Big Toyy”-type plastic play areas. Occasionally you would find a lost tooth and dried blood in the cement tunnel.

Back in the 1970s, the decisions about child safety were made by people who had grown up in the 1940s and ‘50s, and thus knew that children were indestructible. 

(For heaven’s sake, they learned that you could survive an atomic blast by hiding under your desk! Please keep in mind that these “under the desk” principles were still in use in the 1970s, but we had adapted them to be our earthquake survival methods.  By then, we knew that if there were a nuclear war, we were pretty much toast being so close to Boeing.)

The result was that people decided it would be better for us to play on gigantic, sharp wood chips, climbing ten-foot-high poles with tires nailed to them, swinging from rusty “monkey rings” and bouncing around on a contraption that was essentially fifteen car tires interconnected and then linked by chains to four wooden posts.

Were these safe?  Not likely.  Did we play on them, anyway?  Indeed.  Did we get injured while playing?  Of course.  Did it matter?  Not on your life.

For instance, there was a balance beam setup that went from a low balance beam (about 18 inches off the ground) to a high balance beam (about four feet above the ground) and then back to a lower one.

When I was young and nobody was paying attention, I would walk across the low one, climb up to the high one, walk across it, and then back to the lower one. But whenever other kids were around, it turned into a sort of jousting setup. Kids would line up on either of the lower beams and then meet in the middle, swinging their arms at each other, trying to knock each other off into the waiting shards of wood chips.

Different kids had different techniques. Some would keep their hands tucked into their coat sleeves in the hopes of having less surfaces to grab. Others stood sideways with both feet planted firmly on the beam. Some put their right foot in front, some the left. Some attempted to startle their opponent, some tried to amuse their opponent. One or two did the “windmill.”

I usually could win one or two rounds just because some bigger, stronger kid would see my scrawny, gangly frame and double-over laughing.

The winners of these bouts owned the recess-time glory. The losers had to dig wood chips from his underwear and socks.

Invariably there would be the occasional joust where one kid would knock another off, and then fall off as well. This would be followed by the arguments about whether or not the second to fall had the right to get back up there rather than getting to the back of the line.

“Timmy fell first!”

“But you fell too, Lance!”

“But Timmy fell first!”

“But you fell, too!”

This would usually result in a bitter playground monitor (read: the short-tempered teacher who had a whistle and was stuck watching us because he or she didn’t go back for his or her master’s degree) commanding everyone to stop the game and go throw balls at one another because that was safer.

If I played my cards right, I almost never made it to the jousts because Timmy and Lance would be in front of me ending the process early.

Typically, this form of institutionalized bullying was allowed because said playground monitors were busy administering tetanus shots to the kids who got blisters from the rusty monkey bars. (Hey, what can I say? The school was built in 1919.)

But even in our games of “Soak ‘em” (the local name for Dodgeball) there would always be that argument.

“Timmy’s out! I hit Timmy with the ball!”

“I’m not out, it just hit my shirt!”

“If you get hit by Timmy, it doesn’t count, b’cuz he’s out!”

“I got you earlier, you cheater-head!!!”

This would usually be stopped by the same bitter playground monitor, who then commanded us to return to the jousting.

In the warmer season (June 1-9) we played “kickball,” which was a cross between baseball, soccer and dodgeball/Soak ‘em.

The “pitcher” would “pitch” (roll) the ball to the “batter” (kicker) who would “kick” (kick) the ball  Then the “batter” (target) would run the bases while the fielders (assailants) would try to “tag out” (mercilessly throw the ball at the runner so as to drill the rubber “kickball” (state’s exhibit “a”) into the [insert embarrassing body part]) of the “runner” (victim.)

The reasons to perpetrate this school-sanction violence between classmates were diverse and complex. Somebody might not have liked your haircut, or the color of your parents’ cars, or the way you treated them when you didn’t let them cut in line in front of you. It might have been because you wouldn’t let them copy off of your test, which they subsequently failed, (or worse, you did let them copy off your test, which they subsequently failed.)

Periodically, when we had indoor P.E. (every day except three days in Spring and the aforementioned June 1-9) and we weren’t playing “soak ‘em,” the PE teacher would pull out fifty pairs of roller skates so we could skate around the Gymna-teria-torium. (I think they’re called “multi-purpose rooms” now.)

Roller skating in a gym that doubled as a cafeteria was already challenging (French fries became oil slicks if they sat long enough) without having your classmates trying to play “roller derby” because they still haven’t forgiven you for the time in fourth grade when you carelessly spilled finger paints onto their best pair of green plaid slacks.

Somehow, it seems like this passive-aggressive and aggressive-aggressive mayhem was not so much “overlooked” by the administration as it was endorsed by it.

Maybe the reason we didn’t need gangs as kids in North Seattle was because we got to work out our aggressions and grievances in P.E. and on the playgrounds.

Or perhaps it was just difficult for gangs to take root in a predominantly Scandinavian neighborhood.

“Yah, shurrr, homey!”

 

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