Today I threw a frisbee and it exploded into hundreds of pieces. I was at the park by my house. There were those who were impressed. The frisbee wasn’t impressed. It was exploded. I picked up the five pieces (Did I say hundreds? Well, I had to impress you back there in the opening sentence. But now that we’re old friends, it was just five, OK? Possibly four. What am I, Cam Jansen over here with the photographic memory?). I looked at the pieces. They were blue.
A blue frissbee is good for playing frisbee golf in nature. That’s what I was doing. It’s one of my favorite games. (Don’t know how to play? All you do is pick a target and say, “See that tree? The one by the trashcan? Par 4.” That means everyone has 4 shots to get to the tree. After each “hole” or target you adjust your scored based on how you did. If you did it in 3 shots you are now at -1, which is good. If it took you 5 shots you are 1 over, which is a little bad. Oh, you got it? Good.)
Last week I got to play frisbee golf while camping. That’s pretty much the best. It doesn’t hurt to have a cold drink in hand and a small posse of friends, strolling through the woods, picking out challlenges: “Through those two skinny trees and then it’s got to slide over that picnic table and land in that bear locker.” Wasn’t there an ad like this a while back? Michael Jordan and someone calling shots? Obviously written by a frisbee golfer. Most great works of art trace back to this possibly ancient sportsform.
In the old days they didn’t use frisbees, of course. No plastic ’til that guy in the Graduate whispered the word. However, there have always been projectiles (that’s the prequel to There Will Be Blood). I guess it probably started with rocks, especially back when there was a whole lot less stuff to break and fewer people to maim. Or, I suppose, when maiming was no big deal. “See that big guy with the lumpy head?” “Grog?” “Yeah, par 4.”
Last week in the mountains my posse and I happened to “play through,” as they say, someone else’s camp site. It wasn’t on purpose. We were just working our way back to our site, carefully trampling a relatively pristine meadow, and a couple of the boys didn’t make the turn so well (we were aiming for one of our tents). A couple of womenfolk from another camp site exclaimed, “Hey, why don’t ya play out in that big meadow? No one to hit out there?” We hadn’t actually hit anyone, but of course we apologized and moved on.
Later in the game, we found ourselves looping back to camp from another angle of apporach, this time through someone else’s site. However, we were just shooting straight down the edge of the driveway, nowhere near any of the humans as far as we could tell. Several of our frisbees didn’t really make it past the driveway, however, landing loudly near a rather large truck (you can see where this is going maybe). Suddenly a large man with no hair (and not because he was old ’cause he was young enough to maim) leapt out of his truck and said, “What the f#@%!” Then he repeated it. “What the f#@%!” Then he made us to quickly understand that his people were also the people at the next site over, the ones we had already lighlty disturbed earier. “That’s two times!” he growled. We apologized and slunk back to camp (we’re frisbee golfers, man, not kung fu fighters…we just want to play disc in the peaceful woods).
Afterwards we exchanged thoughtful analysis: “That dude was special forces!” “He said two times because one more time and we were dead.” And…”It’s a good thing there were so many of us or we would have gotten our a@#%s kicked.” Good manly stuff like that.
I should say that when not in the wild you can actually find frisbee golf courses. They’re ‘aight, but I’ll take a cross-country game any day. Who wants to follow someone else’s course when you can make your own? The trick is just to not play through people’s space. You can do it if you’re alert.
Today I was at my own park, which is a perfectly great place for frisbee golf. It has beautiful redwood trees, oaks, magnolias, buckeyes, trashcans, tables, benches, play structures, no end of good targets. I was lining up for a deep throw out towards a redwood tree in the middle of the park but I hooked it straight into the brick bathroom building. POW! My little blue frisbee blew into a thousand pieces. I picked them up and dropped them in the cardboard trashcan. It didn’t seem right. After all, printed on the frisbee in clear black letters it had read: Reduce – Reuse – Recycle. And yet, it had also read “Alameda Waste Management.” I called it my 3 R’s frisbee. Still, the truth is it wasn’t recyclable.
Those four blue pieces probably still sit midway down in that trashbox at the park. A skunk strolls by. A deer has hopped down following the creek. There’s a possum. A cat, thinking, ‘I don’t think I should have cut through the park at night.’ Four blue pieces. It was a kind of magic carpet that took me through the forest until it hit that brick wall. Now a raccoon knocks over the trashcan. “What have we here?” He digs down, pushes aside the four blue pieces, grabs a half-eaten burrito, tears it open and eats it. Strolls off, cackling. Back on the ground we find shards of tinfoil, a few black beans and four little blue pieces, quietly reflecting the quarter moon, just cresting the tallest redwood.
