#24 - Sticks and Ropes

I drove into the yard quite late the other night, anxious to get in the house to what I hoped was a supper kept warm on the stove. It was good to be home after such a long day. Heading across the yard, the next thing I knew I was sprawled flat on my face, caught in a man-trap only a few feet from the front door. It was very dark, and as I rolled around on the frosty ground in my efforts to free myself from the contraption, I must have made some raucous noises. My young son, Elijah, and his cousin, Beecher, who both should have been in bed at that hour, suddenly burst open the door expecting to see who knows what, when Elijah said, "Oh rats! It's only Dad." 

Rats indeed! I was thoroughly wound up in a virtual rat's nest of old clothesline that had been carefully suspended only a few inches above the ground by a number of strategically placed, forked sticks. The marvel of this predicament was that not only did this Neanderthalish contraption actually work, but it managed to catch a man with the survival wits of a Neanderthal.

It was not the first time such a thing has happened around our place. These kids, because they don't know any better, appear to be born doers of the near impossible. The capture of wild and dangerous prey for example, a tricky and complicated feat, is learned almost as easily as chewing bubble gum, and I think it is partly because they are so well equipped for their game. Many are the times while reading peacefully in a chair, I have been assaulted by a throng of screaming heathens, had my magazine popped out of my hands and been generally immobilize by rosy-cheeked youths on all quarters. From repeated experience, I find my goose is cooked when they produce irregular coils of assorted ropes to tie me to my chair for good; they always have that damned rope, and usually a stick or two is poking up out of the melee.

Sticks and ropes, ropes and sticks, nothing has more value than those two things. They could be taken as a measure of a boy’s wealth, for, with them in hand anything becomes possible. Put another way, without sticks and ropes nothing much is possible, at least nothing very exciting. That must be why these boys I know hoard them in such quantity. Sticks are propped in corners all over the house. Ropes hang from the door knobs and dangle from tree branches in the yard. And when we go on the road, these things end up in the back of the car.

Ropes and sticks are the means by which kids can reach the unreachable or tame the backyard wilderness. They are the binders in the construction of forts and the basic material for defensive barriers. A rope provides aerial conveyance from tree to tree, and it links owner to beast, no matter who is leading whom. Sticks are for brandishing, prying and probing, and when tied to a rope, there’s no end to the contrivances to be fashioned. I dare say, the crest for the Clan of Boys should be a shield displaying a stick and a coil of rope on a field of blue.