Worlds in a Sandbox and a Street

I want to remember a time in life when I was an integral part of the world: when a child at play--indeed in the proverbial sandbox in our backyard in Sacramento. My young friends, brother Jonn, and I built elegantly planned roads of curves and turnouts, underground car ports, sad dwellings of found materials for our Matchbox vehicles and imaginary citizens. At play was not a diversion but the creative point of living a long afternoon. Bridges spanned hand-dug rivers into which poured water from sticky green garden hose. Intricate care was taken to smooth the roads and distance the dwellings. None of us in the south Sacramento neighborhood possessed miniature railroad gear to pilfer from--trees, depots, people--to make our town more colorful and "realistic" -- What did we bother with realism? There was no interest in "recreating" what a miniature town should resemble. We recreated nothing. We carved and patted and smoothed sanded roads, dug and fortified dwellings for small toy vehicles; the narrow roads were real as were the tiny gasless cars and pickups our imagination fired and wheeled not to develop imaginary worlds but to create and build in the real one: our town had no center, no economy, no police force, no rest home, no library, no adults, no animals, no arrogant, no lonely. We had narrow winding roads engineered for toy cars to smoothly glide from their stick-covered shelters to nowhere. But the roads were smooth! They curved elegantly. As night came on we worried over the coming storm we overheard the weather man on TV news warn about when we drifted by the living room to the bathroom to pee. Night falling, wind rising, we tucked our vehicles inside their dwellings and sheltered with makeshift garage doors. We didn't want to leave our sand and water world, return to warmth of lights and family and television and our place-mats at the dinner table. We relished darkening and threateningly cooler winds, iron in the air, desired not the ordered stage but to watch over our sand and water dominion out back by the puffy white Viburnum opulus (Snowball bush)... -- The internet kills play. Play is unprogrammed, unrehearsed, open-ended, relatively untimed, and so timeless, bounded only by the borders of the twin tyrannies of sleep and school. It is a testament of the purity of play that I remember few details of how we passed the time of childhood. Ditch Em, the game, would have recurred. This activity consisted of breaking into two or three "teams" of around three boys each--whomever we could scour from the neighborhood that particular afternoon after the game popped into somebody's head while lounging on the porch. Our teams had no uniforms, no names, no hierarchy. Brothers were never allies. Ditch Em--did we create this name or inherit it from ancestors?--began when someone unpicked and random yelled "Ditch Em!" and we bolted with our tribe in opposing directions. Could be running down a long block, catapulting over the chain-link fence of our elementary school, hoisting up onto the wooden-planked backyard fence (didn't matter whose backyard), heaving into the silver maple, dropping onto the back lawn and crossing quickly, then up and over a neighboring fence (didn't matter whose fence). All backyards had hideouts: honeysuckle and pussywillow, hemmed-in weedy empty dog pens, burrowing under citrus metallic-tanged shade of sturdy thronging juniper bushes, the dusty oil dark cool of garages. The motive and mission of the game: to see and remain unseen, to scout and monitor enemy positions, their stealth movements. The endgame was to gain the controlling eye, to adjust your movements, retreats, advances, and escapes according to your enemies'. To know and be unknown was the point and only power. Usually a few blocks radius whirling out from the corners of Vernace Way and 48th avenue encompassed the boundaries. With bikes, it could be miles and miles, and then knowledge of enemy movements shone like diamonds in your mind. You traveled and hid, spied and ducked, burrowed and waited and listened. If your team was spotted, you made fast and furious escape; for although there was an initial and formative spurt of chase by the enemy when they surprised, no capture ensued. There was only the advantage of knowing. Pursuers and pursued would slink and sneak again into hiding, create and maintain strategies of concealment and witness. Summer rolled on.