The lost art of playing outside
“Games for children should be found out of doors as much as possible when the weather is fit for them to be exposed to it. Running and playing comes more natural to them than walking like their elders. And in these days of high pressure education, it is most essential that when released from the school room they should find healthy, active exercise and games which try the muscles instead of the brains.”
— From a book of household management dated 1888
We certainly practised that at one time. But now, Participaction is asking, whatever happened to just playing outside?
It’s asking that for good reason. Kids have become sedentary. And atrophied is a closely related word.
Few of them — very few — would be able to get together with their friends and organize the kind of play which would have kept their grandfathers and grandmothers, when children, occupied all day, ignoring mealtimes and being unimpressed by the change from light to dark.
That’s not half of it. Even daily bodily functions would be ignored to the squirming point with a good game in progress. The parents of that day would call repeatedly for their children to come in and do their homework, or come in, “it’s supper time.” They would never think of calling 911.
In her small 1983 book “Journey to Yesterday in the Out-harbours of Newfoundland,” Jessie Mifflin wrote about the “ring,” which was played vigorously to a nonsense rhyme beginning “King William was King Jarge’s son, and all the royal trace he won, and on his breast the star he wore, come point me to the Governor’s door,” and so on. Mifflin wrote: “Although this popular game was played at practically all social functions which children and young adults attended, it was at the Sunday School picnic that we enjoyed the ring to the fullest extent. It was a lively game in which some twenty or more of us joined hands and pranced around and around the field with great gusto.”
The thing you may have noticed about this game, apart from the great and good exercise which it demanded, was that nothing had to be purchased in order for the game to proceed. You needed only a flat surface — perhaps rocky, dry, scrubby land, perhaps even full of the worst weeds; fertile ground in which to grow strong legs and arms, good lungs and clear minds.
From an essay on outport life referring to what is now nearly a century in the past, we can see that boys and girls learned to skate on frozen marshes; that sliding and bobsledding were the favoured snow sports, with slides often fashioned from the curved staves of barrels.
Indoors it was blind man’s buff, puss in the corner and ring games like London Bridge. Then, if there was reason to be quiet in the house, play still went on with quieter games like hide the button, Ludo, Lotto, Fox and Geese, and charades.
Board games notwithstanding, you can readily see that youngsters were almost constantly on the move. And this is to say nothing about idle inquisitiveness — if there is such a thing — like seeing how far you could climb in an apple tree without breaking a leg, seeing if you could enter a stage by climbing up its structural logs, perhaps balancing yourself on a moored dory.
Writing in 1950 of his early life in a Newfoundland outport, Ron Pollett recalled that “the kind of outdoors play most children only imagine from story books was what we outport boys took for granted.”
He described the coves, cliffs and headlands that he and his friends considered their playground.
Today’s clinging parents will read with amazement that children were free to roam so far and in such dangerous environments.
Think of this: “One woman had perfected such a trill to summon her roving brood her voice carried over the headlands and out to sea. On calm, soft, limpid days of summer it even ranged to the fishing boats a mile offshore in the bay.”
While Pollett embellishes his account with humour, kids certainly ranged far out of sight on a daily basis.
I happened to catch a bit of “Cajun Pawn Stars” on television earlier this month. A boy of about 14 came into the shop to sell his collector horse bridle pieces and spurs.
The first thing a viewer would notice was that the boy was very much overweight. He was accompanied by his mother who watched him constantly but for the couple of split seconds when she allowed her eyes to flick to the shop owner. Admiration for her boy was “writ large” upon her face.
The boy was cool, with the eye of a mature man who had grown up with people ready to cheat him at every turn. He debated the price and he got (if I recall correctly) close to what he expected.
He took the cash and marched out of the store, his voiceover saying something to the effect that he was gonna treat his buddies ta’dinner. His mother followed close behind, slapping him on the back.
To end this column I contacted a retired teacher and he recalled as a boy playing tiddly (piddly) which, while it wasn’t over-strenuous, took place outdoors and required skill and mobility. And the only equipment necessary was rocks to position the sticks, a short stick for flicking and a long one for measuring. He also recalled running with a bicycle wheel spurred on with a stick.
Simple things, but they required hands, eyes, motor skills, muscles — far more demanding than a cellphone in the hands of a creature designed to move.
A note on horse troughs
Thanks to the many readers who emailed me after the Feb. 6 column to point out that there is an old trough in Bowring Park. I knew that, but neglected to say I did.
What I wanted to learn was where an old, discarded trough might still be found, perhaps in good shape and ready to be brought back as a touristy thing downtown somewhere.
As to my oversight about the one in Bowring Park, I, of course, blame those very good people who edit my column. Are they not supposed to save me from oversights? “No?” you say? “Still my fault?”