How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself
Page 4
HTDN_67
HTDN_68
Well, each house had an ice-pick too, in case you wanted a smaller piece of ice, for putting in a pitcher of water or lemonade or something. So we always knew where the ice-pick was, right on the side of the ice box, and when we wanted to drill holes in horse chestnuts or belts or whatever, we went looking for the ice-pick.
You see, we didn’t always know where our Scout knife was—if we had one—any more than you do.
HTDN_69
Well, so you bore a hole in your horse chestnuts. Then you get a piece of strong string. An old shoelace is good, if you have an old shoelace. Thread the string through the horse chestnut, tie a couple of good hard knots on the bottom of the string so that the horse chestnut slides to the bottom of the string and stays there.
All you need is the one string, and the reason why I suggested a shoelace is because from time to time you’re going to have to put a new horse chestnut on the string, and the stiff tip on a shoelace makes the threading easy.
HTDN_70
We called the game killers. I am told that they play it in England and call it conkers, and somebody once told me that some places in England they play it with snail shells, too, but I don’t know anything about that.
Let’s say you find another kid, and either show him how to get a horse chestnut and thread it on a string, or let him get his own string and lend him a chestnut to start with.
You choose up for who goes first. The one who loses holds the end of his string with the horse chestnut dangling down. Say you’ve won the choosing up: you take the end of your string in one hand, the chestnut in the other. (All through this book, I’ve been saying right hand and left hand, but since a lot of you are left-handed, I’m just going to say one hand or the other from here on. When I was a kid I was left-handed, and now I’m more or less right-handed, so I know how confusing it can be.) The idea is to swing your killer down so it hits the other kid’s. It may take you a while to get the idea, but it’s not hard to do.
Then you hold up your killer and he gets a shot at yours. The idea is to break his killer. After a certain number of shots, you’ll see a crack in his killer, or in yours, or in both. You keep on until one breaks, so that it can no longer stay on the string. Sometimes it happens that you bust your own killer in hitting his; that still means you lose. The kid who has the killer left on the string, no matter how it happens, is the winner. That’s the game. Now if your killer breaks his, it’s a one-killer. If it breaks another one of his, or one of another kid’s, it’s a two-killer, and so on.
I can’t be sure about this next part, but I think that if a one-killer busted a six-killer, it then became a seven-killer. All I can remember for sure is that once I had a forty-killer.
HTDN_72
If you get tired of this game, and still have some horse chestnuts left, you can make what we called bolas. That’s a Spanish word, and Mitch read somewhere that in Argentina, instead of a lasso, the gauchos, the Argentine cowboys, used bolas. Theirs are made of rawhide and metal balls, but we made ours of horse chestnuts and string. You get three horse chestnuts and fasten each one of them to a string, oh, about two feet long. Put the string through and tie it on around so that the horse chestnuts will stay at the end of the string. Now take the other ends of the string and tie them all together.
Now, if you will take this by one horse chestnut and whirl it around your head and let it go so that it’s aiming at a tree, when you hit the tree with any of the horse chestnuts the string will wrap around and so will the other horse chestnuts. The gauchos used them to wrap around the legs of cattle to hold them, instead of a lasso. What animals you use them on is your affair.
I’m not sure that we called these next things bull-roarers when we made them as kids, but I’ve since found out that’s what they’re called. I’ve also found out that they make them in many parts of the world, and in some primitive tribes, they’re used by the grownups to scare devils away. We just used them to make enough noise to drive grownups away.
These are a cinch to make. You need two pieces of wood and a piece of string. It really doesn’t matter what size you make these either, but a good size to start with is one piece of wood about a foot long and half an inch square, another piece about two and a half inches wide, six inches long and a quarter of an inch thick. The first piece is just to be used as a handle, so make it any size that will fit your hand. The other piece has to be thin, but if it’s a little more or less than a quarter-inch thick, it doesn’t make any difference. All you do is bore a hole in one end of the handle, and in the middle of the end of the flat piece. Thread a piece of string about six inches long through the hole in the handle, and tie a good hard knot so it won’t come through. Do the same thing with the other end of the string, through the hole in the flat piece. That’s the whole thing, all the making you have to do.
HTDN_74
Now, whirl it around, holding it by the end of the handle, and when it gets going fast enough, the flat piece will whirl from the air hitting it, and it will start making a wonderful noise. It will work even better if you make both sides of the thin piece taper to an edge, like a knife blade. Whirl it faster and the noise gets higher, whirl it slower and the noise gets lower. You have now learned, even if you don’t know it yet, something about the science of physics. I won’t tell you what it is, but later on, when you study science, or right now, if you are studying science, you’ll find out. The reason I won’t tell you is because if I don’t, maybe you’ll go to your library again and get out a book about elementary physics, and that’ll be one other nothing you can do with nobody.
You probably have seen or heard of boomerangs; they were invented by another primitive people, in Australia, and everybody thinks that what a boomerang is is a thing that you throw and it comes back to you. The fact of the matter is that what the Australian natives did mostly was make bent sticks that they could throw to hit game with, and the idea of it coming back to them was found out, like all great discoveries, by accident. Much later on, they started making them deliberately to come back, and the boomerangs that you see now are just for sport, for fun. You can buy them in a store, they make them of wood and, I understand, now, of plastic. I owned a wooden one when I grew up: a friend of mine gave me one for a present, and I took it along with me on a vacation. One day my wife and I walked out into a big open field; I had no belief I could throw it and make it come back to me, and I told my wife we’d better get ready for a long hike across the field to pick it up, and then I rared back and threw it. It went an awful long ways, and I was just saying to my wife, “You see, I never believed they really work,†when all of a sudden I heard a whistling noise, looked up, and ducked out of the way just in time to see the boomerang stick in the ground about three inches from where my foot had just been. I was immediately convinced that I was a natural born boomeranger, or whatever they call them. I rared back and let fly again. It didn’t come back. I had a nice long walk across the field. I rared back again. Same thing. I never did get it to work that well again.
But when we were kids, we never made that kind of boomerang. In the past couple of years, there have been articles in magazines and maybe in some books, about how to make that kind, but I think it’s quite a job, unless you’re really good at woodworking. If you want that kind of boomerang, maybe your shop teacher can help you out.
In the meantime, here are two different kinds that are easy to make. One is an indoor boomerang. Okay, now you’re sure that I have gone completely goofy, but that’s what I mean. An indoor boomerang. Get a piece of very thin cardboard. If your father uses business cards, that’s exactly the right kind of cardboard, and the right size. The top flap of a matchbook will do, too. Now just cut a boomerang shape out of it, just about the same size and sha
pe as in the drawing. Now put it on a book, so that one arm sticks out just a little bit.
HTDN_77
Flick it with your fingernail and it’ll go sailing out just like an Australian boomerang, and after very little practice, you’ll find out how to make it whirl so that it will come back to you. A good way to do it is to hold the book in one hand, tipped up a little, so that the boomerang goes up in the air at an angle, and slides back at just about the same angle, like a ball going almost to the top of a hill, and then rolling down again.
The other kind of boomerang is for use outdoors, and all you need for it is two long strips of thin wood, about the size of a regular twelve-inch ruler. Balsa wood, that you can get at a hobby shop, is good for this, but any light, thin wood is good, like the sides of an orange crate, which you can pick up for free at the grocer’s or the supermarket. All you do is make a cross of the two pieces, and fasten them together with a small rubber band. A good way to do this is to put the rubber band on one piece, a little way from the top.
HTDN_78a
Cross the other piece over, between the rubber band and the end of the first piece, then pull the rubber band up over the second piece and around and under the first piece.
HTDN_78b
As always, if the rubber band is too long, double it.
HTDN_79a
Then slide the second piece down until it’s in the center.
HTDN_79b
Take the cross-boomerang outside and throw it so that it spins, and so that it’s heading up at an angle into the air. It’ll whirl, and come back to you. You can round the corners, or paint it, or nail the two pieces together, if you like.
The next thing on my list is umbrella bows and arrows, but when my own kids saw the list, and I started telling them what it was, I found out something upsetting. An umbrella bow and arrow is something you make out of an old busted umbrella, and I haven’t seen an old busted umbrella for a long time. I got to thinking about it, because when I was a kid, it was a fairly common thing. There was a kind of shopping we used to do when we were kids, which was just walking down our block and seeing what people had thrown away in the trash can, and taking out those things that looked useful. Quite often, in one of the trash cans was a busted umbrella, and whoever saw it first grabbed it. Come to think of it, it must have driven our mothers nuts. Let’s say Mrs. Horn threw away a busted umbrella. Well, if I happened to see it before Charlie Horn, I hooked it, and carried it back to my house, and later on Charlie Horn came by, and I gave him part of the umbrella, and he took it home, and then later my mother put what I left of the umbrella in our trash can and Charlie Horn saw it, and he took what was left home, and then my mother threw away her busted umbrella and then Charlie Horn came along and hooked it, and—well, the way I figure it, nobody ever really got rid of any trash on our block. It just kind of got moved around from house to house.
I can think of a number of reasons why you don’t see busted umbrellas any more. In the first place, in our town, we don’t put trash cans on the street, so a busted umbrella might be harder to locate. But I don’t think that’s the main reason. In those days, the olden days, umbrellas were made of cotton, or, if you were rich, silk. And people used to walk a lot more then, because there weren’t so many cars, and the umbrellas got used more, and cotton and silk, after a while, rot. Nowadays, umbrellas aren’t used so much, and I imagine they’re made out of nylon, and that doesn’t rot.
But if, after all this, you do happen to run across a busted umbrella, the first thing to do is to get all that remains of the cloth off the ribs, and then pry the ribs loose from the center part. You can use brute strength, pliers, or intelligence. The thing is to get them loose. Now, right there you have made something: what you have left is a very useful cane.
If you tie a piece of thin strong cord, like fishline, to one end of one rib, pull the cord tight and tie it to the other end, you’ve got a bow. And if by this time, you’re strong enough to bend down and pick up one of the other ribs, you’ve got an arrow. The arrows are pretty sharp, so one more time I’ll say anybody who shoots a gun, bow and arrow, dart, slingshot, anything, at another kid is a dope, and I’d just as lief he didn’t read this book.
I just now mentioned a slingshot, and I don’t suppose I have to tell you how to make one out of a forked branch, but just in case you don’t know, all there is to it is to look around (in the fall is a good time, because you can see the branches clearly with the leaves gone) for a good strong forked twig. Cut the two ends even, and the handle to your hand size, so it looks like a capital Y.
HTDN_82a
Get a good strong rubber band, cut it so it’s one long piece. Get a soft piece of leather, and cut it to this shape.
HTDN_82b
Thread the rubber band through the holes in the leather. Wrap each end of the rubber band once around each end of the Y and tie it with good strong cord.
HTDN_82c
Pebbles or nuts or beans are your ammunition.
If you live in the city and have trouble finding a forked twig, you can saw out a wood fork; we found out that this shape was maybe even better than the forked twig.
HTDN_83a
And if you don’t have the wood and the saw, if your mother or father ever bring home a package with one of those wood-and-wire carrying handles, like this, get a pliers, straighten out the wire and pull it right through the hollow handle. Then twist it into a fork shape and push it back into the handle and make your slingshot. This kind, you can just tie the ends onto the wire.
HTDN_83b
HTDN_84
For some reason, when I was a kid, I used to like to make things very small—perhaps you do, too—and I used to make a little tiny slingshot out of a hairpin. If your mother uses hairpins, you know what they’re shaped like. Well, all you have to do is bend it like a slingshot, and using just a plain, everyday, little rubber band and a piece of cloth instead of the leather, and thread instead of the string, you’ve got a miniature slingshot. I made a lot of them, and took them to school with me, and I guess my teacher liked to shoot miniature slingshots, too, because she made a collection of mine.4
HTDN_85
There’s still another kind of slingshot, sort of a cross between a slingshot and a bow and arrow, that you can make out of a spool. All you do is cut a wide rubber band at one end, and tie the two ends onto a spool. If the hole in the spool is big enough, you can use pencils for arrows, if it isn’t, use lollipop sticks, or any straight stick that will fit with a little room to spare into the hole in the spool. Grab the pencil or the stick between the sides of the rubber band, pull back and let go.
There’s a kind of gun you can make, too, with rubber bands. The simplest way to make one is just to cut a piece of wood, somewhere between a quarter of an inch and half an inch thick, into a pistol shape. On the top, just jam the point of your knife in so that it makes a flat hole. Then cut a piece of cardboard into little half-inch squares. Put a rubber band on the gun, a rubber band big enough so that when you pull it back over the top of the handle, it’s good and stretched. You can put a thumbtack through the rubber band where it comes over the front end of the pistol. Now jam one of the little cardboard squares into the flat hole, like this.
HTDN_86
Now if you’ll hold the gun, you’ll find that by rubbing your thumb up, you’ll push the rubber band up over the end of the handle and it will spring forward and flick the card.
I just now thought that maybe if you’ve made the cardboard boomerang, you could probably fit one of those into the crack, hold the gun sideways, and it would probably flick the boomerang better than a finger.
If you’ve got a lot of rubber bands, you can make the card gun into an automatic rubber-band gun. Just loop the rubber bands over and release them one at a time with your thumb.