Schoolyard games

In Grade 7 us boys wore hunting knives to school in a sheath hanging from our belts. You never know when you’d need to stop on the way to hang and skin a moose, or perhaps to thwart a robbery. One of our favorite schoolyard games was chicken. Two guys would stand close together with feet the same width apart. Each guy would throw their knife and stick it between the other guy’s feet. After each pair of throws the feet were moved closer together. Whichever guy jumped away first lost. The bravest guys usually had new runners more often than the losers. The other game was throwing the knife at a tree trunk and seeing how many successive times you could stick the blade in the tree. Mr. Reichert was better than most of us. Tony Wolfgang Reichert. He was a good teacher and continued life lessons right into the schoolyard. Instead of wasting breath on health and safety drivel he actually taught us how to throw properly. The trick is placing yourself an appropriate distance from the tree and being consistent with the arc of the throw.

But I digress.

More often than chicken or tree sticking we played marbles. I don’t know what grade seveners do at lunch and recess these days, probably video games. We took marbles to a professional level. You could play ‘closies’, which was flicking a marble towards a wall of the school. Whoever was closest to the wall without hitting the wall first won the round. You get all the marbles from that round. Or – you could play true regulation marbles. That was poking a hole into the dirt with a stick or a hunting knife and flicking marbles towards it till someone managed to flick one into the hole. Again, that guy got all the marbles. Everyone had little cloth bags with drawstrings kind of like a Crown Royal bag to hold their marbles. Except Geoffrey Ashcroft. He kept his in a pencil box. It made his parents think he was taking pencils to school and by extension that he was participating in educational activities. He was not. He sucked at marbles too. Those of us who played marbles and participated in the hunting knife activities would hang the marble bag around the handle of the knife on our belts. Anyway, sometimes we would use the pitcher’s mound in the school diamond for a big game because it was more challenging to place a marble accurately. The mound was oddly shaped on account of being maintained mostly by grade sixers and seveners, and since we stood farther away to increase the level of difficulty, every once in a while a marble would break. Didn’t matter – wherever the biggest piece landed that was still a marble in play. It was this particular vision that came to mind when we pulled up to the Remarkable Rocks near Cape du Couedic on the southwest corner of Kangaroo Island. It looked like the finish of a round of marbles on the baseball diamond at Mountview School in 1967. Random marbles and broken marbles scattered roughly near the top of a roughly convex mound. I’m sure you can see the similarities and the connections in the thought thread laid out here. For clarification, these are pictures of the “Remarkable Rocks” on Kangaroo Island, Australia, not pictures of the grade 7 marble game.

Remarkable Rocks.

A little abstract but plausible?

Looks a bit like the middle finger of CRA ready to claw back all the marbles.