Pioneer Pride: Part 2-Hackey Sack

From my senior year journal:

5-25-82

Hackey sack is the range among the jocks and intellectuals lately. I find the game stimulating. I am not skilled at it but it is a learning experience. What the hell am I talking about?

Hackey sack, the Patron Sport of Stoners, was invented in Oregon City in the early 1970s. I was there to witness its genesis, and later, its unlikely dissemination across the world. There we were in Gardiner Junior High, 1976, 1977 or 1978, in PE, sitting in rows on the hardwood floor of the gym, tube socks to the knees, in our dank PE uniforms with reversible colors, when our teacher introduced two men, both bearded and wearing shorts if I recall correctly, and one of them produced a little, tightly-stitched, brown leather bag, “footbag,” I think he called it, and the two men faced off about five feet apart, and then the man holding the footbag gave it a little upward toss to other man, who did not catch it as Americans are prone to do, because we are a catching people, but, rather, he raised his right leg perpendicular to his left leg, and kicked the footbag up into the air with his right ankle and then raised his left leg in a similar motion and kicked the footbag into the air and then he used his left ankle to pass the footbag to his partner and then they kept the footbag in flight between them with a series of of acrobatic kicks that often resembled slow-motion karate moves. They never once touched the footbag with their hands or arms, which was against the rules as we later discovered. The chest, however, was okay. We sat their utterly dumbstruck, watching these two men twirl and kick and smile and chant, and then they asked for a couple of volunteers for some quick basic instruction and I volunteered, of course, and after that, the men broke out a dozen footbags and it was on, around the gym, around Oregon City, around Oregon, around the Pacific Northwest, around the country, and, approximately 15 years later, I stood near the Great Pyramids of Egypt and watched two Egyptian youth playing hackey sack and I joined right in. They weren’t even stoned.

I recall one game of hackey sack in particular. There was about five or six of us, with a couple of girls in the circle. It took place during my senior year in the the court yard of the high school, the concrete space between the old and new campuses. In the courtyard was a memorial plaque of the Oregon City grads killed in Vietnam. We played a few feet away from the plaque and debated the Falklands War. In all my high school social studies classes, I never had a teacher present a lesson about the Vietnam War. There were no offhand discussions about it. All American history instruction stopped at the end of WW II, or if we were lucky, a movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The names of the war dead were etched in bronze only paces from the classrooms, yet we never paid a visit. Interestingly enough, I wrote my senior term paper for College Prep English on the subject of Vietnam veterans and their PTSD, homelessness and addiction issues that were just then coming to light. I still have it somewhere.