Ahh, June. What do you think about when June rolls around? Weddings? The longest day of the year? The first day of summer? The annual Jam in June, which is a free fundraiser on that same day, June 21st, at the Elks Club, where some old rock, folk and country bands get together and throw a party to raise money for M.S., to which you are all invited? I know I do.
But I as I was driving around doing very important errands including getting a drive-through coffee and then getting gas so I could drive around some more, I drove by an old school of mine.
And when I drove by my old school, I couldn’t help noticing that during classroom hours, instead of seeing a big building surrounded by an empty, sad-looking expanse of abandoned real estate, the entire school yard was packed with a mass of young humanity. And the young humanity appeared to be fully engaged in all kinds of physical activity all over the place, running and jumping and throwing and also laughing joyfully and shouting uproariously and generally revelling in the fact that they weren’t stuck inside in a desk trying to stay awake during math class.
‘Ahhh, June’, I said to myself in much the same voice as this column did when it started out. And then my self sighed and said, ‘Track Meet’!
If School Track Meet Day in Alberta doesn’t say “June”, I don’t know what does. I still remember the joyous, fresh air, freedom feeling of Track Meet time, even way back to South School, when the teachers had to shoo the dinosaurs off the school yard so we could spend the day running around outside in our gym shorts.
I thought I was particularly good at high jump. Every year in my imagination, I was always “High Jump Champion” even though I was perpetually the shortest kid in class and therefore had the highest height to jump, comparatively speaking. Until, of course, it was my turn. I never did get over that stupid bar – even at its lowest starting point. Mind you, this was back in the day when the school track meet high jump event consisted of two wobbly posts holding a stiff horizontal bar made out of fairly deadly non-flexible titanium or possibly kryptonite standing there in front of a “landing pit”.
Unlike today, where the high jump pit features a soft air bag or, worst case – a pile of padded gym mats to land in, our pit was the pits. A small rectangle the size of a bath towel with about 2 inches (.005 centimeters) of completely useless sand cover. Not soft, fluffy beach of golf course sand trap sand, it was ‘sand’ in the sense of ‘rock hard dirt material’.
Thank goodness the diving ‘flop’ technique hadn’t been invented yet, where the high jumper throws him or herself headfirst over the bar, backwards, laying out, flipping over and kicking butt. I mean kicking their butt and legs and feet up and over and landing, basically, on their head. Thereby successfully kicking butt in High Jump.
This flop would have been lethal at the South School Track Meet. We all used the ”scissors method” – throwing your one leg then the other over horizontally and thereby (theoretically) clearing the bar almost it a sitting position. Resulting in successfully crash-landing in the “sand”, often resulting in a fairly serious injury.
Remembering all this as I drove on past the gleeful chaos of the Track Meet, I had one thought. Thank goodness our school never had Pole Vault. I would never have survived.
Harley Hay is a Red Deer author and filmmaker. Reach out to Harley with any thoughts or ideas at harleyhay99@gmail.com.
