Boys and Toys

As a teacher, I often hear my colleagues lament that imagination is dead. I now have evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately, the creative play I witnessed was among twenty-something year old men and not the children in our classrooms.

The day after the blizzard that shut down Centerville Road, I called in sick from work, still unable to leave our driveway. At some point later in the day, Dan's friend Jamie showed up to "work" with Dan in the shop. Within minutes of his arrival, snowmobiles burst forth from the shop and started doing loops around the yard and pasture. From the kitchen window, I could see both "men" grinning ear to ear as they chased one another around our property.

At various times, I saw each snowmobile get stuck in a drift somewhere on our property. The driver of the second snowmobile would approach dismount, and let the driver of the first use his sled to pull the first from the drift. This continued for quite some time. Eventually, the snowmobiles were put back in the shed.

Playtime over, I imagined the boys were starting whatever task had called Jamie out to the farm in the first place. I was corrected by the roar of four wheelers coming to life. The guys had traded one vehicle for another and were repeating the scene that had played out on snowmobiles with four wheelers. With the four wheelers, they attempted to climb the large drift that I had abandoned my four wheeler in the day before. (Mine was now free and part of the mayhem.). Stuck. Duh! Hadn't I proved the day before that this couldn't be done?

Watching from the kitchen window, a very maternal instinct came over me. I felt as though I were watching my own little boys (which I don't have) playing in the yard. The movie reel in my mind fast forwarded to some point in the unknown future when I could watch the sons of these men playing in our farm yard. Then the projector got stuck. Damn it! Dan hadn't completed a thing on his honey do list. Like any modern mom, I text him to come in and finish a few tasks for me. Like Beaver and Eddie Haskell, the boys tromped into the house, completed the most important of the tasks I had assigned and then ran off back into the snowy fields.

I had to leave shortly thereafter, and as I pulled out of the driveway, I saw two four wheelers tethered together by a webbing lead attempting to pull the larger free from another snow drift. I shook my head and started off for town.

A few days later, I mentioned the events of that afternoon to Dan. Casually, I stated that it seemed they were actually TRYING to get things stuck. "We were," was his reply. It turns out that the scene I had witnessed was actually and elaborate game with rules to be followed. And like with any game, the boys were finding loopholes in their own rules.

The object of the game was to get your vehicle of choice stuck in a snow drift. To free it, the rider had to use the same type of vehicle and his own man power.  So, if they got a snowmobile stuck, they had to use a snowmobile to get it unstuck. Freeing a four wheeler had to be done with another four wheeler. Tying a four wheeler to the bumper of a truck and using the winch on the four wheeler to pull itself out did not constitute cheating because all the power provided came from the four wheeler.

Creative play is not dead. It is alive and well in the young men surrounding me. I obviously did not play this game. Being stuck in a snowdrift had been the bane of my existence the day before and yet Dan and Jamie found a way to enjoy it. Boys!