At 10 o’clock at night the whistle would blow.
My Mom had a police whistle that she had picked up somewhere, and when it was
time for my brother Tim and me to come in the house on summer nights, she would
walk out the back door and blow the whistle two or three times. You could hear
that thing all over the neighborhood, and beyond. There were probably
submarines in the middle of the Pacific where the sailors, when Mom blew her
whistle, would look up and ask each other, “What the heck was that?!!!”
In Knoxville, where I grew up, summertime twilight stretched to 9 o’clock or after, and all the guys in my neighborhood played hide-and-seek in the
evening. But let’s face it: “hide-and-seek” sounds so kid-like, so when our ages reached double digits, we came up with
another name for it. We called it chase. Or, the way I think of it, with an
initial capital and exclamation point: Chase!
So beginning after supper and until the 10 o’clock whistle, it was chase time.
This started out as a pretty informal thing. Barry Suffridge, who lived two
doors down, the Llewellen brothers Jimmy and Steve from next door, Alex
Coleman, who lived one block over, and often a few other kids from further
afield, would somehow or another show up, and we would divide into teams.
Then one team would have five minutes to go anywhere in the neighborhood,
defined as the yards of houses on the south side of Maple Drive where kids
lived. We stayed out of the yards of people without kids primarily because old
man Everheart was extremely picky about having kids running through his garden,
so his place was off limits. Mrs. King and Mrs. Martin were older ladies who went to bed early, so their yards were off limits, too—they didn’t need full throttle chases occurring around their houses.
That still left a fair amount of real estate, though, with a lot of trees and
shrubs and shed rooftops to hide in or on. And when somebody was spotted, the
hide-and-seek part turned into a game of tag in which the chaser was supposed
to actually touch the chasee. So the game was a lot of fun and pretty simple:
hide, seek, tag.
If you think about it, somewhere back there, baseball was a pretty simple game:
hit, run, catch. And then people started keeping records and figuring batting
averages and earned run averages, and sooner or later the infield fly rule came
along.
Same thing with chase.
We started making things more complicated. I think the first thing that happened
was that somebody realized that a white T-shirt stood out like a beer sign in
the moonlight, porch lights, and street lights of the chase territory. So part
of the after-supper ritual was that we would all change into dark shirts, the
better to be less visible in the dark. So we sort-of had “uniforms.”
Then the flashlights showed up. Whoever decided to do this first is lost in the
mists of time; all I know is that pretty soon whichever team was doing the
hunting was charging about in the gloaming and dark brandishing ever-larger and
more powerful flashlights. We started out with standard-sized two-D-battery
type flashlights, but pretty soon somebody got a bigger one, and things took
off from there, like a flashlight arms race. I imagine if one of us had access
to one of those sky-sweeping spotlights like theaters use to announce movie
premieres, we would have hauled it into somebody’s back yard to sweep the underbrush for people hiding out wearing their dark
T-shirts.
Then came the record keeping. One Christmas I had gotten a stopwatch, which, for
some reason, we all thought was cool and lots of fun. We would use it to time
who could hold their breath the longest. We had our own 100-yard dash contests,
precisely timed within a margin of error of several seconds. I think one time
we used it to time who could hang upside down from the swing set bar the
longest, until one endurance champ turned extremely red and threw up. Sure, we
could have timed any of this stuff with a regular old watch with a second hand,
but this was a STOPWATCH, so it was LOTS cooler.
Anyway, we began to time who could stay hidden the longest. We would turn on the
stopwatch and then turn it off when the last team member was captured and write
down the results. I am sad to say that I was the record keeper. I am proud to
say, however, that I am also the record holder, having once spent two hours and
18 minutes squished behind a line of bushes on the edge of Everheart’s garden while the flashlights holders swarmed and then eventually got bored and
stopped looking. (The garden was off limits, but the bushes weren’t. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)
The record still stands after all these years, mainly because we all grew up and
stopped spending several hours a night running through the neighborhood in dark
clothes carrying enormous flashlights and shouting “Get him!” at the tops of our lungs.
The fact that I still remember that winning time—to the minute—is either a nostalgic detailed remembrance of a time gone by or an indicator of
derangement. This is a question upon which I don’t choose to dwell.
