Excitement Began With A Hammer And Nails

Sitting at a stop light the other day and staring at a sales yard full of very elaborately constructed, and I am sure very expensive, play yard equipment, caused me to reminisce about simpler days. In the days of my youth, we never had the type of outdoor apparatus that you see in many of the backyards and schoolyards today. In fact, most of the schoolyard swings, slides, monkey bars, etc., of my childhood would have long been condemned and deemed unsafe today.

Funny thing about it is we never missed having these factory built monstrosities, because we had imaginations and tools. Thinking about it now, I am amazed what we accomplished with a hammer, handsaw, and some old bent and rusted nails. Astonishingly, we never thought about asking our dads to go to the local hardware and buy some new nails, no, we were content with pulling nails out of old boards, straightening them and using them again and again.

Most of the nails came from the boards we would gather around some old abandoned house, I do not think I knew what it was to use new lumber until I was much older. One of my uncles was a plant manager at a yarn mill, and occasionally when they would install a new piece of equipment, he would bring us some of the old shipping crates. No matter where the wood came from it seemed there were always nails in them, so we had everything we needed to create whatever our mind could dream.

In what would seem like no time, a few boards nailed up a big tall pine tree in the woods as steps, would eventually become a tree house that was the envy of the neighborhood, or at least I thought so. One such creation in the woods even had a long gangplank that stretched out over the tops of some smaller trees. While we never made anybody walk off it, there were many a dare to see who would walk to the end of it, turn around and walk back.

While the tree houses were great, nothing could top the actual cabin in the woods some of my cousins constructed using old wood and tin roofing gathered from around the farm. They even managed to find an old wood stove and put inside of it, so that you could camp even when it was cold. Unfortunately, that one would eventually burn down one night, not sure, if anybody ever figured out for sure what happened. Not far from the cabin there was what probably for lack of a better term, I will call a hillbilly alpine slide.

On my grandfathers’ farm, two large hills were separated by an old road, which ran through the holler. On one side of the road, my cousins laid 1 x 6 boards with a 1 x 2 strip in the center, end to end from the top of the ridge to the bottom. Then they built a seat out of wood and two wooden strips that would fit the channel created on the track. Then with a little grease on the track, we took the most amazing ride ever down that hill. No amusement ride could ever rival the thrill of sliding down the hill on that creation made out of old scrap lumber.

As children, we learned to grab anything we could for our designs, a little lumber and some old lawn mower tires would make the most amazing downhill go-cart you could ever have imagined. Three straight boards, a small piece of plywood for a seat, four tires and a piece of rope and you were in business. My memory can never recall just how many trips down that big long downhill drive behind my grandparents I have made. Even now I could probably still build one, the only problem is like most adults I would probably over analyze the construction, trying to build it with newer and better materials. Funny thing that as kids it was never about anything but building it quickly and having as much fun as possible before something broke.

Maybe we should all think about fewer trips to the big old toy store and instead sit down with our children, and find a few old boards and some nails, take that hammer, and then let the imagination rule the day. One thing I know for certain, that when the store bought toys are broken and thrown away, the memories of your children creating their own toys will last a lifetime.