Pine Cone Wars

How many can I carry?

Lately I've been feeling a bit nostalgic and have been thinking about my childhood quite a bit.  A lot of you that know me would say that I think about nostalgic stuff all the time.  I won't deny that but it's actually pretty rare for me to let my mind daydream into the past.  Sure I listen to older music and find myself playing 64-bit consoles more frequently than most people, but I can't say that I dig into the neural network in my brain and forcefully find those long lost connections.

My mind uncovered a network though that led me back to first grade.  The most memorable times of first grade would have to be the pine cone wars.  The Pine Cone Wars were something that would never happen in an elementary school nowadays due to zero tolerance and administrations that don't understand that good fun can involve getting roughed up sometimes.

In retrospect, what is probably the most impressive thing about the Pine Cone Wars was how organized that they were.  There were two clear sides (though some people were more like mercenaries and switched sides about every recess).  These two sides were systematically organized in a similar fashion that many professional armies are organized.  Each side had one general (a fifth grader) and then beyond that, your rank was determined by what grade you were.  For instance, I remember being a Private because I was the lowest grade on the playground (Kindergartners had their own playground at my school).  I don't really remember how the middle ranks worked nor did it really matter to me since I was just a Private.  I just know that I would take orders from a second or third grader the whole recess (so a Sergeant or a Lieutenant).  Usually the Sergeants were pretty hands-off since they wanted to chuck pine cones at people too.  So, what would happen is that they would give us either a scouting mission, ammo acquisition mission, guard mission, or a combination of the three depending on what was needed.  Then we would just go out and do this stuff.

We would take a lot of liberties with these missions, especially the scouting missions.  Scouting missions were usually teams of two or three.  Sometimes a Sergeant would lead us on the scouting mission but usually us first graders would just go off on our own.  A lot of times we would never even come back with information.  We would just sit up in a tree and wait for the enemy that we knew was coming.

Ammo acquisition missions sound exactly like what they were.  They were almost always solo which could be kind of scary as you knew that your chances of getting pummeled were pretty high.  I suppose I was fortunate that I could run pretty fast.  But yeah, we would try to carry as many pine cones as we could and return them to an ammo cache.  The location of the ammo cache always changed so that the other side would never know where it was.  I remember one day when it was muddy one of the Sergeants set up an ammo cache on this very large hill by the playground.  He basically dug a hole to store pine cones in.  This backfired though when the location got overrun and all of our pine cones were lost!  That was a bad day...

Guard missions weren't very different from the scouting missions.  Basically we were just told to sit in a tree and throw pine cones at anything that moves.  This could be pretty boring, especially if no one ever traveled down your ambush route.

It was all good fun and, surprisingly, it was very rare that a fistfight or something would breakout.  Everyone was a pretty good sport about it.  About the only time it got out of hand was when someone would decide to throw some rocks or, during the winter, ice balls.  The Pine Cone Wars were responsible for a lot of the injuries during recess.  It didn't seem like anyone was too mad about getting hurt though.  Usually the next day the person with cuts and bruises would be back in the Pine Cone Wars area of the playground, ready for duty.

Now that I'm older, it really is hard to not admire how organized a simple playground game was.  Upon thinking about it further, the Pine Cone Wars were really no different than what people call LARPing (Live Action Role Playing) now.  Think about it.  Everyone has their role/rank in every battle, every recess.  It's just that instead of a Medieval universe it was... I don't know what era you would place the Pine Cone Wars in.  It was just something fun to do.  It was our own little community of organized, non-lethal, warfare.  It was fun and it's a damn shame that the next generation can't participate in anything like it.

After first grade, my school district redrew boundaries and I had to change schools.  Some of us that had done the Pine Cone Wars at my old school tried to start it up at my new school but, to no avail, we would get stopped by the playground chaperons every recess.  So, the line ends there.

As far as my old school, I heard rumors that the school changed principals and the new authority ended the Pine Cone Wars right away.  I don't know if this is true or not but, if it is, I'm glad that I got to participate in the last of the Pine Cone Wars.



Pine Cone Image:  https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm5wxYfvuTPlelStvnfUh5U6VURY0tJBJhPyfzcQewMf-Rsi8uEAc4DsfqhvOzMvbcVntl7uP3TJRA0jjcRDMgfRFSaEyPeRg6nK6lmNqmwWe3-4Mhh6O36dhLQ3gfTbpnssi8Xo4Ykeg/s1600/photo2.jpg