The other day while Jean was driving us to lunch with my childhood pal Willy, I saw three boys on a front lawn fingertipping a volleyball to each other in the afternoon sunshine. It made me momentarily happy, and I remarked to Jean that it was a welcome change—more commonly these days one would see three young heads bent over small screens. I don’t care that this happened while the Olympic games were being contested. Those boys, as far as I could tell while our car drove past them, were not contesting—they were just playing, and relying on one another for fun.
We sure did that when I was an elementary school boy. In Oliver our school had a girls’ playground to its south and a boys’ playground to its north. Either playground was made up of about ten acres of semi-arid land, mostly composed of sand and rocks, with sagebrush and antelope brush and greasewood growing slowly and sparsely. There were rattlesnakes and cactus to watch out for, but that was true in just about every vacant lot in Oliver. Occasionally we had rattlesnakes in our back yard, down the hill from the school
In those days the boys in Oliver usually played “swords.” We had wooden swords that would be held to us by our belts, hardly ever any shields, once in a while cardboard box armour. Sometimes we made bows and arrows, but we seldom used them against each other, because really, you could put an eye out, just as our parents said. We snaffled laths from the lumberyard and employed them as javelins, but only if the other guys had cardboard shields.
Swordfights went on all over town, and sure enough, boys did come home with skinned knuckles and a bit of blood in the crew cut. But the parents usually knew as well as we did that we boys made up the rules around here and agreed to them.
We saw in the comic books that kids back east made snow forts in the winter. We usually didn’t get enough snow for any such thing, but we made another kind of fort in that big boys’ playground north of the school. It took a lot of teamwork and time to make these forts. To begin with, they were pits, not surface structures. We dug our holes in the sifting dirt, then acquired planks or shiplap from somewhere for a roof, then did the best we could to lay the crumbling sod on top of the boards, complete with cactuses. The idea was to make it seem as if there were not pits there. Usually we had two crawly holes for entrance and exit. I think that nowadays no such surprise would be allowed because of safety “issues.”
I don’t remember whether we raided each other’s pits, or tried to destroy them. Probably not, because the teamwork involved was more enjoyable than any hostilities. That we would come home with our hair, skin and clothing covered in dirt didn’t mean all that much. We were boys. I never knew a boy without knee-scabs and dirty fingernails. When someone told me that that brush lying on the edge of your bathtub was a fingernail brush, I didn’t know whether to believe it.
But one winter we had a hell of a snowfall. It was just like the snowfalls we saw in magazine pictures from back east. It got cold, too. Someone with a back porch Fahrenheit thermometer said it went to ten below. In later years I took a picture every Christmas, of my two little brothers standing on the front lawn with their Christmas presents—skates dangling from their necks, toboggans held vertical beside them, their shoes on the bare grass of December 25th. But this winter when I was ten we finally got our chance to build snow forts. Instead, we got together and built a giant snowball.
Remember, we had acres and acres of snow in the boys’ playground. Someone started a regular throwable snowball rolling, and it picked up snow until it was big enough to make the bottom ball of a snowman, but he kept going, and friends joined them, and by lunch hour the ball was a little higher than a regular ten-year-old boy. We left it outside the grade five window for the afternoon, and when the end of school came, we raced out into the fading Okanagan sun and pushed our snowball.
Soon it took five or six boys to push the snowball, and it was so high that you needed to climb on top of another kid to get up there. We took turns getting to the top while that was still possible, each boy seeing whether he could remain riding while the others pushed the snowball. There were old dead cactuses and elm leaves in the snow, a frozen sock and an arithmetic assignment. We pushed back and forth across the boys’ playground until we could hear referees’ whistles being blown—time to go home. We did not think of leaving someone to guard the nine-foot snowball. That was a Friday.
Saturday morning, just before the sun struggled up over the brown hills of the Indian reserve, there were four boys pushing the snowball. There were some slight slopes in the boys’ playground, but four boys could, with a lot of loud straining and some ten-year-olds’ profanity, move that ball up them. When it came to a downward slope the ball would get away a little, but the snow was so deep that eventually we could run around the other side and slow it down and get it to stop. It was early morning and it was below zero in the south Okanagan, but we were sweating inside our heavy jackets. When one of us became lieutenant for a moment and declared a rest period, we willingly complied.
Let me give a sketch of the landform involved. To the immediate west of the then village of Oliver lie some brown hills that ascend to some blue mountains. At the foot of the former is a sizeable flat bench, upon which the school rests. Then there is a sudden drop to the village (now town) itself. Along the edge of this precipice runs “the ditch,” a concrete irrigation canal. Near the school is a street that runs from the bench down to the town. It was near that street that we stopped pushing the giant snowball late that Saturday morning.
I should mention that boys loved pushing fair-sized boulders down hillsides in those days, and I don’t remember anyone getting killed down below, though I do remember parents becoming stern-faced when the discussion turned to boulder-rolling. This giant snowball perched on the edge of the drop into a snowy little town could have picked up real speed and done some real damage, especially if it followed the road right to downtown, where Highway 97 was main street. Cars would have been smashed. A house could have been demolished. A pedestrian would have been killed for sure. But there the giant snowball perched. No one boy, no one man, could have started it rolling. It would take teamwork by a group of snowball boys, the kind that puts stones in hand-sized snowballs. And it never happened. The snowball stood there on the lip of mayhem while the rest of the snow in the valley melted, while all the front yard snowmen disappeared. Finally some of us made snowballs from the handy armory and enjoyed a once-in-a-life springtime snowball fight.
It was while the giant snowball stood sentinel on the edge of the hill just west of the house I lived in that I got a glimmer that I wanted to be someone who noticed such things and got them into something. I don’t know, a poem, maybe.
Originally published in White Wall Review 37 (2013)