Victims of a Different Sort

In thinking back over the times we had growing up, it is sometimes amazing the things we came up with to keep ourselves occupied at 'Branham's Damsite'. Goodness knows who came up with the original ideas. The fact is, even if the ideas were not our own, we would always modify the rules to fit into our extreme way of doing things. We always loved thrills, chills, and spills.

One such game was called "Ambulance". The premise was that one person was selected to be the ambulance driver (the player no one wanted to be). The other players would go around the property with our bicycles and/or whatever device we creatively used, and get ourselves into a position which displayed some sort of accident we had been involved in. The idea was to be the most creative we could be to get into odd and awkward positions to make it the most difficult for the ambulance driver to retrieve us and take us to the hospital. (Thus, the ambulance driver being the least enviable position to have.)

So, the ambulance driver would usually count to about 100 to allow the other players to get into position. Then he/she would go around the property with the ambulance (the trusty Radio Flyer) and search for the injured parties. They would usually be crying out, "Help, help me!"

Since there were many trees on the property with low branches, it was especially fun to try and hook a bicycle tire on a branch, then the bike rider would be hanging upside down - sometimes tangled in the bicycle itself - and have to be retrieved by the ambulance driver. The object was that the victim could not help the driver in getting loaded into the ambulance. It was always a lot of fun to observe the unlucky person who was the driver try and wrestle the victim down from his or her position and place them in the ambulance, then transport to the designated area for the hospital.

One drawback for being creative, though, was that sometimes it was especially difficult for the driver to retrieve a victim, and it would take quite some time to accomplish. All the other victims had to wait in their postion until the driver reached them for retrieval. Some of my siblings would get bored of waiting and just quit before the game finished. Needless to say we didn't play that game too many times in one day. We would play it often, though, because we always tried not to be the driver. Usually, we would be in a group and someone would yell out something like, "Hey, let's play ambulance! I'm not the driver!" Whomever was the unlucky one to be last to yell out usually ended up being the driver.

Wagons Ho!

Radio Flyers have been around for ages, haven't they? We certainly had our share in my day. These wagons had to be nearly indestructible, because we were so hard on them. I mean, they had to take an impact from rolling down the hill, on the road near our house, at full speed - without any means of stopping other than just plain crashing into the embankment. They had to be able to handle loads of dirt, rocks, wood, animals, or any other thing we could think to haul in them. Our wagons were veritable utility vehicles for us.

We did find time to use these wagons for fun as well. In fact, we loved to put on a wagon train periodically. Now this was no ordinary train. It usually ended up being a circus train where we would literally tie wagons, tricycles, bicyles, and any other object that would roll, together in a train and see how well we could roll the whole thing around our driveway.

Now, up until the late '60's it was more difficult to do since our driveway was made of gravel. However, sometime in the late '60's my father decided he had had enough of the constant puddles and potholes that formed in the gravel (sometimes by our doing), and he had the whole thing covered in blacktop. We thought it was the neatest thing since sliced bread. I mean, such a smooth surface for riding bikes, roller skates, or unicycles. The best was the surface it created for our pogostick marathons.

So, back to our wagon train...we loved to see how elaborate we could make our "cars" of the train. Sometimes a wagon would be a conestoga wagon; sometimes it would be a cage car carrying tigers or lions. The key was to avoid being the engine car, because that person had to pull the whole shabang - usually from a bicycle that had everything tied to it. Needless to say it didn't usually go too far.

I think the most joy from making our wagon train was the actual process of making it. Making it go was always short lived, because what we loved best was the creative part of making it as elaborate as possible (in our own way). Our parents tried to get us to do activities other than to sit around and watch television. My mother would regularly tell us, "Go outside and do that!" Of course, since we loved any opportunity to play outside, we would jump at that one as well.

That type of creativity is lost on youth today. With more television programming all the time, video games, computers, and so much more, it's no wonder our youth are going into adulthood with little to no creative juices flowing.