Island Games (by Eric & Wes)

Donnie and Eric poked around for hours at a time in the pram, taking turns rowing, naming landmarks like Hidden Cove, and catching crabs. Afraid to grab at a pinching rock crab, Eric stuck to snails and hermit crabs in their stolen periwinkle shells. Wes, Laurie, and Marlene were climbing in the dense jungle of grape vines that blanketed a sumac grove behind the outhouse and provided hours of near trampoline-like pleasure on the treetops. Curled up in the sun, Fluffy or Snowball or whichever cat was then the family pet watched Dave dig in the sand. Edna watched too.
Toward midday, the gang gathered for lunch, peanut butter and jelly or banana sandwiches, followed by Edna’s eternal admonition, “No swimming for an hour now. You could get a cramp and drown.” The kids could easily entertain themselves until the afternoon sun beat down so intently that clothing fell in little heaps across the bristly lawn, summer-baked to a prickly carpet, and everyone migrated to the small, sandy beach. It was time for a “Happy Fizzies Party.” A big kid must have named it, but everyone took part. All the kids, including the Tobins and other friends, crowded into the big boat and rowed into the channel, a little toward the dike from the dock. Donnie dropped anchor, a half of a cement block tied to the bow rope, and then everyone went stark, raving mad. Crawling over the seats and each other, balancing on the gunwales like tightrope walkers, kids would start shouting silly phrases like, “Washington Crossing the Delaware!” or “Happy Fizzies Party!” At the end of each statement they would strike a ridiculous pose and then plunge, as accidentally-looking as possible, into the river. The water, cold, salty, and bubbly or fizzy as it was, no doubt gave the activity its name.



Using boats and plastic floats or inner tubes for bases and pitcher’s mound, they played water baseball and kickball. The batter stood at the end of the dock. Often a beachball, light and brightly-colored and striped, was hit with a whiffle-ball bat and floated through the air like a balloon toward the dripping infielders. Beachballs broke easily. More often a heavier plastic ball, about a foot in diameter, sold at the Brant Rock Market next to the plastic buckets and shovels, served the purpose. Pitchers dove and shortstops dog-paddled and catchers danced on the pier. Shouts and splashes punctuated the hot afternoon, refreshing everyone, and wild, wet laughter entertained them all.



Headhunter! A game invented by us, a perfect pastime for a jungly island and a tribe of active, anxious, young savages. Here in Eric’s own words is a description of the game and environs:

“The landscape of the island has always been a changing scene. Clearings and paths overgrow in a season. You stop mowing. It never stops growing. Sapling sumac and blackberry vines spring up in weeks and take right over if unchecked. Dad was not as diligent as some of us later became about mowing. About twenty feet out of the porch door, facing southeast, was a grove of sumac. Pretty good size too, up to six or seven inches at the butt. The yard was mowed.






















“The Grove” was also mowed about twenty feet in. To the right, looking south from the door, at the edge where the land dropped off about four feet to the river, and running alongside the grove, was a cleared extension from the yard, about twenty feet wide. The grass in this area was a little pricklier on the feet. On the edge of the lawn where it dropped off to the river bank, there was a brown porcelain stove that Mom and Dad burned the paper trash in. Just a few trees into the grove a hammock hung, tied to two trees. The hammock served as goals in a game of Headhunter. One person would be IT. When gathering around to start a game, someone would yell, “Not IT!” The last one to say, “Not IT!” was IT, although some of us little kids might get out of IT sometimes. Being IT to a young, little fellow like myself was a dreaded and burdensome task.
The game went as follows. Everyone not IT would lie across the hammock face down and count to whatever. I remember Dave and me repeating the numbers counted out by the big kids, somewhere around ten, because we couldn’t count much higher. Whoever was IT had this old wet mop. The difference between Headhunter and Hide and Seek was that the person who was IT would hide. After the count those who weren’t IT would look for the one who was. As those not IT strayed away from the hammock they became more vulnerable to the Headhunter, whose job it was to tag someone with the mop before they reached the hammock. Upon reaching the hammock we always dived across sideways and somersaulted right around it. The younger the child, the closer to goals one stayed, so when the bigger kids dove across the hammock we were usually on it already, holding on tight for the ride. The hammock would flap around like a sheet in the high wind, and Dave, Marlene, and I must have looked like cowboys on a rodeo bull, hanging on so as not to be bounced off and fall easy prey to the wild, approaching Headhunter. I can still see clearly in my mind the view of the trees against the sky, upside-down from looking under the hammock, spinning and tumbling around as each lucky player made it back safely to goals ahead of the Headhunter’s screeching yells. And I can still see Donnie. He was IT. He kept his cool in his hiding spot long enough for the more timid of the players to wander further from goals. I was halfway past the house. Some of the big kids were even further toward the bunkhouse when Donnie stood up from behind the brown porcelain stove, shaking his mop violently in the air and screaming, “Ya! Ya! Ya! Ya! Ya!” I don’t remember whom he chose to tag but he had us all dead to rights, and immortalized himself in my mind as the undisputed Headhunter champion of the island and the world. As the dry and lightweight tassels of the mop hovered against the southern sky at dusk, and the tribal-sounding yell pierced the silence of the quickly approaching twilight, in the view of the low, jungle-looking fauna, even his face was momentarily transformed into that of a savage. And I hardly noticed that he wasn’t robed in grass clothing and adorned with a necklace made from the teeth of his past victims — or that he was wearing glasses.”