A Game of Catch

Blog Post #3

A brief recap of the last Blog Post:

Toward the end of last winter, I went for a walk in Prospect Park and stumbled upon a most peculiar personage lying up against an old tree trunk. The personage was green in color and looked very much like a tree himself. I left it to the reader to guess what he was up to. Here are some of the guesses I got:

 Amy, I’m thinking this guy was playing a “war game’ of sorts and hiding from his enemies. Sort of like a themed hide and seek. Maybe involving paintball too? Tsk, tsk, that wouldn’t be nice in the park now would it?

Amy, the only thing I can guess is this person just wanted to have fun and see how many curious people like you, would find him.

 Could he have been part of one of those live-action role-playing games? You know, one of those Larper people who get all dressed up and fight each other with Nerf swords?

Maybe he was a hired birthday-party entertainer of some kind and he was hiding from the kids?

Amy, he was probably a fugitive Shakespearean actor who ran off from doing the Birnam woods scene in Macbeth.

 Excellent guesses all, but here’s what happened next:

I sat some distance away and waited and kept an eye on the situation. The Green Man lay there, pressed up against his tree trunk, occasionally wiggling a foot or adjusting one of his piney-looking branches or looking up behind himself toward the top of the bread-loaf shaped hill.  It wasn’t long before I heard someone give a sharp whistle. I thought maybe it was somebody calling their dog, but no dog appeared. I glanced at the Green Man and he was now perfectly still.  Then, there was another sharp whistle and, in the next few seconds, one or two at a time, young people began to appear from the other side of the hill. They weren’t exactly children, but they weren’t exactly whatever it is that comes next. There were about a dozen of them. They gathered together with an air of rising excitement, pushing each other and laughing, but not too noisily.

Then a grown-up woman wearing sneakers and jeans and an oversized green hoodie appeared from the back and the crowd stopped messing around and parted silently. The woman was small, but there was something about her calm self-possession that made her look taller than she was. She moved between them lightly, but without haste and when she got to the front, she gazed down the hill and then slowly around at the rolling meadow. In one hand she carried a clip board. Over her shoulder was a cloth bag. When she turned back to the young people and was certain that she had every eye upon herself she pointed first at one tree, then at another.

An afterschool nature class! I thought. I love nature classes. This must be the teacher or the guide, or whatever. I’m not sure if she even spoke, but whatever it was she said or didn’t say, they seemed to watch her with an odd mix of restlessness and expectation. Slowly, she reached into her bag and pulled something out, something closed in her fist. She waited for a moment, making sure they had their eyes on her. They did. It was actually sort of hard to take one’s eyes off of her.

“Catch!” she yelled and pulled her arm back and flung whatever it was, into the air. From where I sat, it looked like a handful of pebbles.

The kids didn’t hesitate. They leaped and scrambled in cutthroat delight, pushing at each other, trying to grab as many as they could and when there were no more to be caught or collected off the ground, they gathered around her again, displaying what they had in their hands, yelling, “Acorns! Acorns!”

Her face remained calm and still unreadable. When they fell quiet, she started pointing at the trees once more.

Now, it seemed to me that if she was asking them which of these trees might have produced acorns, it was not a fair question. Over to my left was the tangle-branched old forest. There were some small pre-bud nubs showing here and there, but everything was still bare of leaves. In front of me rolled the meadow whose great wide trees stood mostly alone, at distances from each other. They, too, were bare.  When they had leaves, you might be able to identify a lot of them fairly easily if you knew about such things. But right now, it seemed a nearly impossible task.

However, to my surprise, it was only a short time before one of the boys threw up a hand with a cry of “Ooohh! Ooooh!” The kind of cry that indicates a kid is about to die on the spot if not called upon to speak.

When the teacher—or whatever she was--pointed to him, he didn’t hesitate, but yelled, “Over there!” and, without waiting for permission, he began to run toward a big, solitary tree which stood not far away. Everyone followed and when he reached the tree and bent down over the scrabbly winter grass, everybody stopped and watched. The boy lifted up an old branch which had probably been knocked to the ground during the winter and he waved it triumphantly in the air. A couple of brown withered leaves still clung to it. He ran his finger around the neatly divided lobes of one leaf and touched the sharp points.

Several hands went up at once and several voices cried out, “I know! I know!” The teacher pointed to one of them.

“Oak!” the kid shouted out in triumph.

“Oak! Oak! Oak!” everybody else chanted in excitement, again, watching the teacher closely. She lifted a hand. In it, she had one last acorn which was pinched between thumb and forefinger. She held it up against the outline of the tree. They grew quiet, but if they were waiting for her to speak, she didn’t. She just stood there for a long moment and let them think whatever thoughts a person was likely to think when gazing at a little dirt-brown nut and a five-story oak tree. Then she dropped the acorn into her hoodie pocket.

Nobody moved. They still waited expectantly. For something in particular, I wondered?

She put her hand into her magic cloth bag again. She pulled out a new object and lifted it up high. It was pointy at the top, round and fat at the bottom.

“Catch!” she commanded.

She had a really good arm. The dark shape flew high into the sunny chill air and then it came tumbling down. One of the girls leaped from the ground and caught it. “Pine cone!” the girl cried out triumphantly.

Makes perfect sense for a tree study, I thought.

However, there was now a problem. The teacher turned slowly, her face serene, pointing first at one tree, then another. The students followed her gestures closely.

But nobody raised a hand or said a word because there wasn’t a single evergreen to be seen.

In the summer, of course, these trees would be green and broad-leafed—oaks, sycamores, maples. And when she pointed to the dense old woods across the way, it was the same. In there, was a late succession forest. You rarely got pines in a forest like that.

Then suddenly, without bothering to raise a hand, somebody let out a cry. “Look! At the bottom of the hill! There it is!” Or maybe the person said, “There he is!” I couldn’t quite catch the words.

Everybody began to run.

For a few seconds I was mystified and then I remembered. How could I have forgotten?

My Green Man. There he was--still lying quietly like a fallen Christmas tree.

The kids stampeded toward him, shouting and cheering, almost as if this was the moment they’d all been waiting for. Did the teacher bring this tree with her wherever she went?

She whistled that sharp ear-splitting whistle again. It could have awakened any dog for half a mile around, but there weren’t any dogs. However, the Green Man sat up and, spotting the young people storming in his direction, he got onto his feet. Because of all the tangled pine branches he was wearing, it was clumsily done, but in the next few moments he was on the path, running awkwardly, but going as fast as he could.

“Catch him! Catch him!” the teacher commanded.

He had a head start, of course, but the kids were moving faster than he was and the distance was closing.

In a moment, when he reached the place where the path forked and one arm curved off toward the woods, he chose the woods. He was soon out of my line of sight.  The young people ran past me, laughing and shouting and soon disappeared, too.

Clearly, once they caught up with him, the tree lesson was going to continue in one form or another.

Clearly, this was a game they all knew. A game that had nothing to do with that old story. Do you know it? The one about the Guardian of the World Tree who must be murdered and torn to pieces at the end of every winter so that Spring may begin again.

The teacher came along at the tail end of the pack. She wasn’t running, but she moved with a surprising quickness of foot. She actually looked like she was enjoying herself. She had the smallest beginning of a smile. It was only an early spring blossom of a smile, but it entirely changed her face.

I didn’t follow them, of course. I would have been embarrassed to be caught spying like that.

So. There’s no help for it. Once more, we’ll have to leave whatever came next to our imaginations.

Snip, Snap, Snout, this tale is told out.