Growing Sunflowers: A Photo Essay

Sunflowers are such calm, quiet, peaceful things, unlike boys. But my two boys, Hank and Gabe, are raising sunflowers in our backyard as part of The Daring Quest, and we want you to see the results so far, beginning at the, well, beginning.

Saturday, May 9, the day before Mother’s Day. Here are Jennifer and Gabe preparing the soil and planting the seeds. Each of us has our various jobs: Jennifer and I shovel dirt and mix in chicken manure to improve the soil in the bed, Hank stays inside the house working on his Alaska state project for school, and Gabe occasionally wields the shovel but mainly collects bugs that he finds in the dirt.

Lured by the prospect of seeing something gross, Hank comes outside to see Gabe’s bag of bugs. “Dude,” he says, “that’s awesome.” “Do you want to feel them?” Gabe asks. “No,” says Hank. I confess during the shoveling that in all my life I have never planted anything before-not one fruit, not one vegetable, and certainly not any sunflowers. “That’s amazing,” says Jennifer. “I’m so happy to be part of your first experience.” Hank adds, “I’ve never planted seeds in chicken dung before.”

Thursday, May 14. Gabe and I water the sunflowers. Like the American economy, no green shoots are visible yet. Watering the sunflowers quickly turns into watering Gabe. He starts running around the lawn giggling and exulting as the spray from the hose soaks him like a spring shower.

Sunday, May 17. Success! Here, Hank explores the eight to twelve tiny shoots that are suddenly bursting from the chicken manure soil. This is a testament to the wisdom of The Dangerous Book for Boys, our guide for The Daring Quest, which recommended sunflowers because they grow very fast and children (and their parents) can see immediate results. Afterward Gabe and I go up to my office to download the pictures he has taken, and I teach him how to use the Kodak photo editing  software. He quickly catches on and crops the photos and saves them to the desktop without my help. “I can do it,” Gabe says. “I know you can,” says his father.

In a moment Hank follows us into my office and learns to use the photo editing tools too. The two of them take turns editing photos, and it occurs to me that while the boys are ostensibly growing sunflowers, they are also learning some of the skills I hold dear: writing, editing, photography, design, publishing.

Tuesday, May 19. Before the finals of “American Idol,” I water the sunflowers and the other plants in the beds, something I’m doing much more than I ever have in the past. I feel more connected to the sunflowers because I helped plant them and they’re part of The Daring Quest. This seems a good lesson for teaching children as well: A thing that is done for them will never matter as much to them as when they do it themselves.

Saturday, May 30. I am brushing my teeth when Gabe runs into the bathroom to tell me something. This is not unusual. It is almost impossible to take a shower without Gabe coming in to tell Jennifer or me-whoever is in the shower at the time-his latest breaking news about how he can’t find one of his Warhammer toys or how he had a dream last night about a peanut butter sandwich. But this is truly a dramatic development. “I have good news and bad news about the sunflowers,” he says. “The good news is they’re growing. The bad news is they’re being eaten. By snails, I think.”

Springing into action,  I go down to the garage, find a bag of snail-killing pellets, toss some handfuls in the dirt, and create a snail Maginot Line along the edges of the bed. Take that, you pesky varmints!

Wednesday, June 10. The sunflowers are growing, and growing. According to Gabe’s measurements, the tallest is more than twenty inches high, and there are a bunch of other plants that are nearly as tall.

Thursday, June 18. Gabe measures again and the tallest is now two feet high. Two feet! It’s a miracle!

Boys Will Be Boys: Towel Snapping, Back Slapping

Boys Will Be Boys, our other popular recurring feature here, is our modest attempt to teach the boys of America the inappropriate wisdom of their fathers. Men across the land have responded to my call and are sharing with me all the inappropriate, and often disgusting, activities they did as children. So far we have told about snipe hunting, spitting off a bridge, competitive belching, arm farts, and more, with many more rude and inappropriate activities to come.

What I am discovering, however, is that boys frequently do many rude and inappropriate things without ever having to be taught. For instance, wet towel snapping. The other day I was in the men’s locker room at the Benicia swimming pool and a group of boys were snapping wet towels at each other. A wet towel, unlike a dry one, can leave a quite a sting upon impact, and this is why, dating back to the beginning of time, boys have been engaging in wet towel fights in locker rooms. The greatest at this I ever saw was my boyhood friend Mark Croghan, who could snap a towel the way Indiana Jones uses a bull whip.

Do girls soak their towels or tee shirts in water, twirl them up like a rope, and then snap them at each other’s butt in their locker room? I do not know the answer to this, but my guess is…not. Nor can I imagine girls doing what I saw a bunch of boys do today at the pool. There were maybe six boys standing around, all in swimsuits, shirts off. One of the boys took his open palm and swung it as hard as he could against another boy’s back, hitting the skin so hard I could hear the pop several feet away. But the boy who was hit, instead of reacting with shock and anger as one might expect, was smiling.

See, he was in on it. It was probably his idea. And he looked proud as all the other boys crowded around him to see what kind of mark it had left on his back. It was bright red and seemed even larger than the hand of the boy who hit. Better still, it remained a conversation piece for quite a while as the boy walked around the pool showing it off to other friends. He could even make the mark get bigger or smaller by moving his shoulders back and forth.

How do boys get ideas to do hare-brained things like this? Got me. But if you ever did any stupid, idiotic pranks when you were a child, or had any done to you, drop us a line. We’re always interested in foolishness of all kinds.

Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grade Chess Player? Take this Picture Test and See

Here is a picture quiz on chess that in all the Milky Way vastness of the Internet, you will find only on Kevin Nelson, Writer.. …So you think you can play chess better than a fifth grader? Well, maybe you can-that is, if you can identify the pieces. This is a problem I ran into playing chess with my sons, and now I want to see how well you can identify the pieces in a specialty chess set based on the characters in Lord of the Rings.

Playing chess is one of the challenges in The Dangerous Book for Boys, and thus in the Dangerous Quest, and it was a snap to do because I’ve played chess with my daughter and sons for years. But what I found when I started playing on this movie-based novelty set is that I couldn’t tell which pieces were which, and so Hank, who just graduated from the fifth grade, beat the pants off me. Is this a queen? Wait, it’s a bishop? Oh geez, well then I’ll move my rook. That’s not a rook but the king? Oh come on!

Now here’s your chance to see if you can do better. Below are pictures of chess pieces from Lord of the Rings. Your job is to identify which ones they are-pawn, rook, queen or whatever. Gabe wielded the camera and I put my hand behind each piece because it cut down on the glare in the photo. In the first set of photos we deliberately did not shoot the insignia at the bottom of each piece because that gives away what it is. In the answers section we’ve shown the piece in full frame so you can see what it is.

Got it? Six dark pieces and four light. See if you’re smarter than a fifth grader chess player and tell what they are.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Answers are here.

Don’t Peek! Chess Answers Here

1. King

2. Rook/Castle

3. Queen

4. Bishop

5. Knight

6. Pawn

7. Knight

8. King

9. Bishop

10. Pawn

Bribing Boys to Learn the Bard?

The latest in my quest to do all the challenges in The Dangerous Book For Boys with my sons in a year…
The Dangerous Book for Boys, the sourcebook and inspiration for The Dangerous Quest, is not merely an activity book; it poses questions about the world, discusses geography and aspects of natural science, contains maps, diagrams and charts, tells the stories of epic world battles, shows pictures and provides information about pirates, the Navajo language, military codes, national flags, and other topics, and recommends poetry and literature for boys to read.

The thinking of authors Conn and Hal Iggulden is that boys should know about such things just as surely as they should know how to make a homemade battery or create invisible ink using urine. In “Sampling Shakespeare” (p. 150, DBFB), the Igguldens seek to introduce boys to Shakespeare, excerpting some of the Bard’s best lines from his plays. (In an unfortunate oversight, however, there are no excerpts from the sonnets.) But in skimming over these lines, I wondered if just having Hank and Gabe read lines from Lear or Romeo and Juliet would actually achieve the desired effect of making the words of the World’s Greatest Writer Ever come alive to them.

At dinner the other night I happened to mention Portia’s “Mercy” speech from “The Merchant of Venice,” fumbling to remember those beautiful and perfect sentiments. Whereupon my wife, a former Shakespearean actor who studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, rose from the table, stepped over to a bookshelf, and took up “The Comedies” from the National Shakespeare, an oversized cloth facsimile edition of the first folio of 1623 that she bought at a Sotheby’s auction when she was a student in London. Turning to the speech, she began to speak it trippingly on her tongue:

“The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath.
It is twice blessed.
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes
It is mightiest in the mightiest…”

Jennifer explained to the boys afterward that Shakespeare’s words were four hundred years old and that even though she had studied him at one time, she had to really concentrate on what he was saying in order to understand it. I added that we had seen a production of “Twelfth Night” last fall and that a lot of what the characters were saying had just gone past me; I didn’t get it.

The boys listened politely (unusual for them at dinner; normally they’re squawking at each other and interrupting constantly), but I think Portia’s words droppeth right past them and they didn’t get a bit of it. When they were gone I asked Jennifer how she thought we could establish a connection with the Bard, complicated as always by the fact that Hank is eleven and Gabe eight and naturally have different reading and comprehension levels. She said that when she was a girl her mother had offered her a bribe to memorize the great speech in “Richard II” about England: “This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” (This passage is also quoted in DBFB).

“I did it,” Jennifer recalled. “I memorized the speech, and I wasn’t any older than Hank is now. It was hard though.”

So what about bribing the boys to memorize a passage from Shakespeare? Bribery is a time-honored parental method to motivate children. I talked to a Mom last night at the pool who confessed that she promised her son a cell phone if he performed well at a county swim meet. He excelled and got his wish.

Jennifer’s mother (see The True Story of the Girl Who Shot a Book to learn more about her) had given her a nickel to memorize Richard, but that hardly seems adequate given inflation and the exalted financial expectations of today’s youth. What about a sawbuck to learn Hamlet’s soliloquy? Or perhaps a five-spot for the Saint Crispin’s Day speech (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers”) in “King Henry V”? Too much or not enough? What, a bribe isn’t the right way to handle this? I’ll keep mulling.

Speaking of Matters Literary…

Conn Iggulden, the co-author of The Dangerous Book for Boys and a successful and widely praised historical novelist, has a new novel out, Genghis: The Bones of the Hills, the third and final installment in his trilogy on Genghis Khan. The first two books in the trilogy are Lords of the Bow and Birth of an Empire, and you can watch an interview with him here.”You can’t find better stories than those in history,” he says, and as a lover of history and a person who writes about it as well, I couldn’t agree more.

To be honest, I haven’t read any of Iggulden’s fiction yet (he has also written a quartet of historical novels on Julius Caesar), but I’ve certainly been inspired by his nonfiction. As the critic Charlotte Allen writes, “The Dangerous Book for Boys became a No. 1 bestseller in 2007 because it offered…a chance for boys to be boys. On its pages they could learn how to do things that boys like to do-grow crystals, build fires, make paper airplanes, design a working bow and arrow, learn about dinosaurs and the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World-things designed to build their competence and self-confidence and help them grow into men.”

This is the goal of The Dangerous Quest as well, seeing if I can give my boys a little boost toward manhood and in the meantime have a little fun and bring other boys and men-and perhaps some girls and women-along for the ride too. Stick around, there’s more to come.

Boys Will Be Boys: Snipe Hunting

Today we are introducing a new feature: Boys Will Be Boys. It is separate from, but not unrelated to, The Dangerous Quest, my attempt to do every challenge in The Dangerous Book for Boys with my sons in a year. It came about after I put out a call a couple of weeks ago for “inappropriate” childhood activities, and I was deluged with emails from men remembering all the hell-raising they did as boys.

We’ve already discussed 52-Card Pickup and Arm Farts, Pull My Finger, and Competitive Belching. In the weeks to come we will share more of these tender moments of boyhood, such as lighting farts, shooting rubber bands in class, chasing a babysitter with a dead mouse, setting off firecrackers, catapulting water balloons through open windows, and putting a shotgun shell on a fallen log, shooting it with a BB gun, and watching it explode.

Our initial offering is a childhood classic from Travis Roste of Minnesota: snipe hunting. Travis, the father of two daughters, grew up in a family of five boys and two girls. Above is a picture of three Roste boys: Travis and twin brother Trevor on the outside, and another brother Chad in the middle. When Travis and Trevor were young, their dad Myron took them into the woods to go snipe hunting. Here is how Travis remembers it:

“I grew up on a hobby farm, out in the country. It was a fantastic place to play and explore. I don’t have a lot of pictures when I was a kid, a couple of dozen, but hardly any of them show my dad. He wasn’t the kind of dad to pose for pictures. You had to kind of get him in a candid shot when he wasn’t looking.  He didn’t want his picture taken if he could help it. He was the old-fashioned type of dad. Didn’t wear his emotions on his sleeve. He showed us he loved us by taking us fishing and hunting and things like that. He’s 71 years old now and in great shape; he cuts wood and is active.

“My dad took me and Trevor snipe hunting in the woods not far away from our house. Here’s how you play: Go to a woodsy area when it is getting dark. Tell your boys to hold a burlap sack open to catch the snipe. You turn a flashlight on and put it in the bag, and tell them it will attract the snipe. Then tell them you are going to walk around in a big circle to drive the snipe toward them, but that they have to hold the bag perfectly still. Otherwise the snipe won’t come and they won’t catch any. To make sure they believe you, tell them that you did this as a kid.

“That’s exactly what my dad did told us, and Trevor and I went along with it all the way. We held the sack with the flashlight in it while my dad drove the snipe to us, as he said. We sat there for a long time while it was getting dark. Finally, when we didn’t see our dad anywhere, we went back up to the house, and there he was inside laughing at us. He told us that his dad had taken him snipe hunting too. We didn’t really get the joke too much back then, but of course we do now. It’s a grand tradition in the U.S. and we were glad to be part of it.”

Myron Roste and a friend.

More Boys Will Be Boys: How to Spit

It is a proven fact that men spit more than women. Go to a girls’ or women’s softball game and you will see very little spitting, if any. Watch a major league baseball game on TV, however, and you will see things flying out of men’s mouths at a shocking rate.

Why this is I do not know, but it is. Not long ago I was walking my sons home from school and without thinking, I spit on the street. Hank and Gabe saw me do this and instantly tried to copy me. But anyone who believes that the ability to spit is somehow innate to the human condition would be sorely disappointed because both boys made weak attempts that barely cleared their chins.

Thereupon giving birth to a parenting dilemma: Do I leave my children in this ignorant state where they could be subject to ridicule on the playground by other boys who really know how to expectorate, or do I teach them the basics? Being the involved father I am, I chose the latter option, and the three of us stood on the sidewalk curb seeing how far we could launch saliva projectiles into the street.

A variation on a spitting contest is: Spitting Off a Bridge. On Memorial Day weekend Jennifer, the boys and I drove to Winters, a small Central Valley town where an old railroad bridge built in the early 1900s crosses Putah Creek, a lovely, meandering creek thickly bordered by  trees. The bridge runs maybe 100 feet above the water and when we were walking across, in another of those unthinking moments of which I am apparently very capable, I leaned over the rail and set free some of the excess moisture in my mouth, watching it drop into the creek. The boys of course gleefully did the same. Meantime  Jennifer diplomatically stepped away to let us have this poignant father-son bonding moment all to ourselves.

Hey, it could have been worse. We could have been standing on a balcony above a sidewalk with people walking by. But I’d never show my sons something like that. There is a proper time and place for expectoration and that is not it. And if they ever do something like that, they’re totally on their own.

The True Story of a Girl Who Shot a Book (1 of 3)

Among the many fascinating things about Lillian Kaiser (pictured here on the year of her graduation from Bryn Mawr), she is the only person I know who has ever shot a book. She did this when she was eleven, in 1942, in the basement of her family home on Summerland Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. The book was The Past Lives Again, by Edna McGuire, and why she chose this book to shoot I do not know. But shoot it she did, one summer day when her brothers were away and her father was sleeping upstairs in the house.

This last fact-her brothers Chuckie and Alfie being gone-is perhaps the most pertinent because they would have never let their younger sister shoot their .22-caliber rifle had they known about it. It was their gun, and many a time Lillian Smith (her maiden name) had sat at the top of the basement stairs watching Chuckie, Alfie and Bruce, her oldest brother, fire away at a metal target. “I would sit at the top of the stairs desperately wanting to take part,” remembers Lillian, but her brothers never let her, although later on Alfie did relent and show her how to break down the gun, clean it and reassemble it. These skills came in handy when her older brothers went off to fight in the second world war and Lillian, shouldering her rifle, walked around the neighborhood with her mother making sure that all the homes had drawn their black-out shades down during air raid warnings. This was serious business for her, her way of helping in the national emergency, and although she did not really need to carry the gun her mother understood and let her do it.

The basement was perfect for target practice because its concrete walls were “like a fortress,” says Lillian. With her father sleeping upstairs, and her mother off visiting Aunt Suzy, and her brothers off somewhere, Lillian stole into the basement, uncovered the gun, and experienced the thrill not only of using a firearm for the first time, but of doing something that was forbidden to her. “The use of the book,” she explains, “was so that the noise of the impact would not wake up my father.” Her father worked nights at Allied Chemical and Dye and slept days, and he would not have liked it, not one bit, if she had woken him up. Nor would her brothers have liked it if they had found out what she was doing with their gun—”surely would have beat the hell out of me,” as she puts it—but she cleaned it afterward and picked all up the casings and none of them was ever the wiser.

The bullet passed through the cover between the words “Lives” and “Again,” and it’s fascinating to flip through the book and mark its progress: small and circular in the front but gradually widening out as if a person took his thumb and pushed down on the paper and indented it and made a hole in the exact same spot throughout the pages. The bullet eventually slowed and made less and less of an impression as it went along until on page 397, there is no more trace of it. What happened to the bullet fragment? Lillian may have thrown it away when she was hiding the evidence so her brothers would not discover her and punish her for her rebellion.

As interesting as it is to shoot a book, it is not the best part of the story, however. The best part was revealed when we saw Lillian, now in her seventies, at a Mother’s Day celebration when, as part of The Dangerous Quest, she showed her grandsons Hank and Gabe how to wrap a package in brown paper. The package she chose to wrap was none other than The Past Lives Again, and to learn how she did it, please read on.

How to Wrap a Book: An Expert’s Guide (2 of 3)

While The Dangerous Book for Boys, the bestselling manual for boys that serves as the inspiration and guide for this quest, concedes that “wrapping a package in brown paper and string” (p. 180) is hardly a dangerous activity, it argues that boys will nevertheless derive a hands-on satisfaction from knowing how to do it. Thus I recruited Lillian Kaiser to help me on this challenge, for she used to own a bookshop, Chimney Sweep Books in Santa Cruz, California, still sells books online, and has wrapped many thousands of books for mailing over the years. But after reading the DBFB’s package-wrapping instructions that called for the use of string, she objected strongly, saying string would jam the powerful and fast-moving Postal Service machines that sort and distribute packages. “It would destroy the machines and the Post Office would come and sue you,” she joked.

Having rejected string as being unnecessary and perhaps a tad nostalgic—a trait, it is true, the authors Conn and Hal Iggulden sometimes fall prey to—Lillian set about to show the boys how to wrap a book using only ordinary paper, a brown paper grocery bag, a plastic bag, cardboard, scissors, and two-inch wide mailing tape that can be purchased at any office supply or mailing store. Here are the steps:

1) Fold a regular piece of 81/2×11 computer paper over the cover of the book to protect it. Books are hardy and resilient things but they are also fragile in their way and no one likes to receive a book in the mail that has been damaged.

2) Place the book with the paper around it inside a plastic bag. Push the book down to the bottom of the bag so there is no extra space, and wrap the plastic around the book tightly.

3) Place a piece of scrap cardboard on each side of the book, front and back-again, for protection. The cardboard should be about the size of the book.

4) Rip the handles off an ordinary brown paper grocery bag. Stick the plastic- and cardboard-wrapped book inside the bag horizontally. As before, all the way down to the bottom of the bag to remove any extra space.

5) Fold the paper bag over according to the size of the book. Then tape it lengthways and sideways with the mailing tape, making sure the package is tight. “Now it can be thrown against a machine at 70 miles per hour and it will not break,” Lillian told the boys. “And no machine can eat it up.” “What about a chain saw?” asked Gabe. “Well,” replied his grandmother, “a chain saw would eat it for sure. But I don’t think the Post Office has any chain saws.”

In Lillian’s practiced hands, the procedure took only a few minutes and her factory worker of a father, if he had been able to see her, would have marveled at her assembly line efficiency. The boys fumbled around a little at first but they picked up the techniques quickly and each wrapped a book. And as I was writing this up a week later, I was puzzling over my notes and unsure about some of Lillian’s instructions. So I called Hank up from downstairs, and he went through the steps and wrapped a book while I watched. He also quickly created a cool bookmark that Lillian showed us how to make, and I will share that in the next post.

Give Your Book a Little Hat (3 of 3)

Lillian Kaiser, who studied Spanish literature at Bryn Mawr-she much admired Don Quixote, also one of my heroes and another inspiration for this odd, tilting-at-windmills quest the boys and I are now embarked on-likes to read weighty philosophical and religious works with footnotes, indexes and bibliographies. But even if your tastes run to lighter fare, you may find this easy-to-make bookmark useful. Few materials are needed: sheet of paper (white is fine but red, green or another color is a livelier choice), scissors, glue and a round object. This round object can be a roll of masking tape or a drinking glass, needed only for drawing a circle.

First, place the masking tape on its side and draw a circle on the paper. Cut the circle out. Fold the circle in half and fold it in half again, forming a quarter of a circle. Open the paper up and cut out a quarter of the circle. Fold the top right corner over. Put a little glue on the bottom piece and fold it up. In Lillian’s words, “it makes a little hat” that rests on the top right corner of a book page. This little hat marks where you left off reading the book or, as in Lillian’s case, shows the index or footnotes page for easy reference while she’s reading.

After shooting The Past Lives Again and graduating from college in 1953, Lillian Smith married, became Lillian Kaiser and had three daughters. But she never told her daughters the story of how she had shot the book with a .22. She waited more than sixty years until she brought it out on Mother’s Day to show her grandsons how to wrap a package in brown paper. Now Hank and Gabe own the book, and they are talking about taking it to school to share in class.

Want to join the ongoing celebration that is The Dangerous Quest? Subscribe to Kevin Nelson, Writer and you won’t miss a thing! Here, see all our adventures to date, archived for your reading pleasure, right here.

That’s Inappropriate! 52-Card Pickup, Arm Farts, and More

Man, talk about an unexpected turn of events. Last week I stumbled onto the most surprising and astonishing discoveries to date in The Dangerous Quest:

Competitive belching. Pull My Finger. Indian rope burn. Ringing the doorbell of someone’s house and running away, aka Ring and Run or Knockout Junior. Rubberband fights. Spitballs. Prank calls. Secretly placing Saran wrap across a toilet bowl so that when someone goes to the bathroom … aw, you get the picture. Dog poop in a flaming bag (on someone’s doorstep). Lighting a match with your teeth or pants zipper. Riding strips of cardboard not just down a grassy hill, but also down the stairs of your house. Tossing firecrackers into the sewer to wake up the neighbors. Egging houses. Toilet papering a house (a common suggestion). Filling someone’s bathtub with instant mashed potatoes. Letting frogs loose in the community pool. Wet towel snapping in a locker room on someone’s bare bum. And on and on and on.

I plan to talk about all these activities, in all their glorious and inappropriate detail, but first let me explain how I came to hear about such things, and how innocently it started. The other night after dinner Gabe, Hank and Jennifer were playing Fish, and I sat down for a hand. After a few minutes Jennifer asked if we were going to teach her how to play Texas Hold ‘Em because she had missed out on our games a few weeks ago when I had shown the boys how to play poker. (See Playing Poker—And Dress-Up.) I brought out a jar of pennies for gambling, and each boy dealt and shuffled a couple of hands. I drew a terrific hand—a two-to-six straight—and raked in the last pot.

After we were done, just as a lark, I asked Gabe and Hank, “Wanna play 52-Card Pickup?” Both eagerly nodded their young, angelic faces. I had them cold. Two easy marks, aged eight and ten respectively, and they had no idea what I was about to do.

I held the deck in my right hand, bending it slightly, thumb on the bottom, middle finger on top, index finger pressing gently against the back with the top card facing out. Then I let ‘er rip, spraying the cards across the kitchen floor. The joke is, of course, that whoever agrees to play has to pick up the cards. The boys were absolutely delighted, laughing hysterically while Gabe ran around picking up the cards so he could do it too.

I was equally delighted-but also slightly aghast. “Haven’t you ever played 52 Card Pickup before?” I asked. Both boys shook their heads. “Don’t you have any bad influences down on the street corner teaching you these things?” I continued. “No,” they repeated. “Oh well,” I said with a laugh. “I guess that’s my job.”

If I wanted to go all sociological on you, I could talk about the deterioration of our neighborhood social structure and how young boys and girls today don’t play outside as much anymore because of the lure of electronic games and computers and because their parents are afraid to let them out of their sight because they might get snatched by a kidnapper. The idea of “free play”—kids just going outside to play with other kids in the neighborhood—has been largely replaced by “play dates” scheduled and organized in advance and usually being held inside the safety of the home or in the fenced-in backyard. But even if kids did want to play outside, where are they supposed to go? Here in suburban northern California where I live, there are precious few empty lots or open spaces left anymore, because real estate is so expensive and everything has been or is being developed. Even the parks, lovely and welcome as they are, represent another form of land development.

So kids in the neighborhood don’t play with other kids on the streets as much as they used to, and maybe that’s a good thing in some ways because cars and giant SUVs are whizzing by all the time and there truly are poisonous people out there, pushing drugs and destroying innocent hearts. But, on the other hand, when boys in the neighborhood aren’t playing outside with other boys, especially the older ones who teach some bad things but also many good things, how are the younger boys ever going to learn such inappropriate activities as arm farting?

I actually showed Gabe how to arm fart a few months ago, not as part of The Dangerous Quest but as part of the normal teaching that fathers do with their sons to prepare them for adulthood. I guess the experience was touching for me on some level because I wrote about it in a notebook. This is what I said:

“11/14. I showed Gabe how to do an arm fart this morning. Maybe there’s a more delicate way to say that: simulate a gaseous explosion by the use of the arms. Nah, that’s not right. An arm fart. Gabe started it by saying that Hank knows how to make farting sounds with his arm. Always the adult, I said, ‘So do I,’ and proceeded to do it. He wanted to know how, and this is what I told him: You stick your left hand under your right arm and make a sort of cup with your left hand to form an air pocket. Then you flap like a bird with your right arm and this blows air out of both sides of the cup that you’ve formed, producing the simulated gaseous eruption. Actually, there’s nothing gaseous about what you do; it just sounds like a fart. But Gabe couldn’t quite get it. He started out by placing his left hand flat on his armpit, which of course didn’t work. Then I took my shirt off to show him exactly how I did it. Then he took his shirt off too. I showed him how to cup his hand over the armpit, which actually is a natural indentation and thus the site of a perfect air pocket. Gabe did it once or twice but mostly struggled with the concept. He’s young. He’s got a bright future ahead of him. We’ll keep trying. I’m sure he’ll get it.”

Reading this now, I realize that I have not practiced arm farts with Gabe for months and have no idea what degree of competency he has achieved since our first lesson. We may need to work on that. Nevertheless, it did occur to me that there might be other inappropriate things that boys do that I might not know about, and so I decided to ask some of my friends for their suggestions. And, at that moment, things got wild.

Pull My Finger, or Why You Can’t Take the Boy out of the Man

So, as I was saying, in the truly genuine desire to find out more about the secret lives of boys, I sent out this blast email to a bunch of men I know:

Okay fellas, I need your help. As part of The Dangerous Quest (what, you’re not hip to that? See it and subscribe at: kevinnelson.wordpress.com), Gabe, Hank and I were playing cards and I taught them 52-Card Pickup, which they had never seen before and loved. So it occurred to me that younger boys today are not hanging out at street corners enough and learning enough inappropriate games and activities from older bad influences. They need to know, in essence, all the activities such as 52-Card Pickup that we played when we were boys and that mostly you tend to learn from other boys. So I need you to come up with “inappropriate” games/activities that you played (no sex or drugs and alcohol, age 12 and under) or know about. These I came up with myself: Arm farts. Ring and Run. Spitballs in class. But I’m looking for more. Help!

I sent this only to men at first (the ladies would get their chance later and their response was much different), and in all my years of writing emails to people, I have never gotten a response to match this one. It was instantaneous and overwhelming, like a damn breaking. In less than a half hour I had gotten twenty-four inappropriate boy activities—and they were all different. There were very few repetitions, and this has held true even as I continue to send the email out to other people not on the original list and hear from them.

I’m not saying to people, “Oh, I’ve got that one. Gimme something else.” People are sending me original, unique activities all their own. There’s a lot of inappropriate creativity being shown out there.

One of the most commonly mentioned pranks is toilet papering somebody’s house-and this is something it seems every young person has done, boy or girl. “TP-ing” appeared on the inappropriate lists of both the guys and the gals-that is, when the gals chose to get back to me. Whereas one man (Gary Grillo) ripped off eight inappropriate things in a single email (tipping outhouses over, pulling out chair when a person is about to sit down, etc.), and another (Bob Newlon) sent a two-page, single-spaced treatise on how to hook junk metal pieces to the bumper of a moving car so that it drags the metal down the street, the women tended to be more muted in their replies. While there were some glorious exceptions to this rule (thank you, Katie Lynn!), they were hesitant about the whole thing.

There are many reasons for this I suppose, but one thing I see already is why so many stupid, crude and inappropriate Hollywood comedies are made by, for and about guys. Generally speaking, we like to do stupid, crude and inappropriate things because we think they’re funny, and often they are. And this doesn’t change much even as we get older and become (it is hoped) responsible adults and fathers. You can’t take the boy out of the boy—and you can’t take the boy out of the man either.

For instance, Pull My Finger was one of the inappropriate activities suggested by Scott Lynn, a Silicon Valley software engineer, father of two, and the husband of Katie Lynn. When I asked him what that was, he said, “I thought for sure you’d know “Pull my finger.” When you know you need to fart, you ask someone to “Pull my finger” and then let it rip. I had a friend ask me this recently.  When I didn’t he said, “Come on.  Give me an assist.” He’s fifty-one!” Although he thought it was a little “weird,” Scott grudgingly agreed to his friend’s request, for after all, what are friends for? More to come, and some of it of a far more inappropriate nature.

More Inappropriateness, and an “Awww” Moment

Lest there be concern that I am abandoning The Dangerous Quest for The Dangerous and Inappropriate Quest, well, I don’t think so. I’m not sure where any of this is leading me, frankly, although I can see how well-intentioned men and women might disagree on what is appropriate, or not, for their children. For instance, Scott Lynn confesses that he has taught his three-year-old son James how to intentionally belch, and that the two of them have engaged in father and son belching contests. As you might suspect, Mom is not entirely pleased with these developments. Unlike with arm farts, Gabe and Hank seemed to have learned how to intentionally belch without my guidance, although—and this is the first time I have ever confessed this in public, and you will find this information nowhere else on the World Wide Web—I am a champion intentional belcher. Although “champion” may be overstating the case a little, since I have never entered any formal burping contests and do not in fact know if any such contests exist. But I feel confident that I could easily handle James in a competitive belch-out, although I am not so sure about his father. In any case I am waiting for the exact right time to reveal this hidden talent to my sons and my guess it will be a moment when my wife is not around.

One of the loveliest things about The Dangerous Quest is that many of our activities take place over time. Like creating a homemade battery (read here) or making crystals, planting sunflowers, and identifying trees in our neighborhood (all things we’re doing or have done, although I haven’t had a chance to write them up yet), Hank, Gabe and I are taking on challenges that can extend over days and weeks, even months. So it is with Gabe and his cloud photography. So far in his quest to take pictures of different cloud formations, the eight-year-old junior Ansel Adams has snapped cumulonimbus clouds (see here) and altocumulus and stratus (and here).  Now here’s a cirrus to add to his list, taken on a recent outing to Clear Lake:

See there’s nothing inappropriate here. Everyone say “Awwwww.”

Feeling the need to get current with The Dangerous Quest? Click right here, and you can see all our amazing adventures and challenges, from beginning to now.

From Secret Inks to Memories of My Father

The latest in my quest to do all the challenges in The Dangerous Book for Boys with my sons in a year … After our last episode in The Dangerous Quest, I asked my sons what they most enjoyed about creating invisible ink. Gabe said it was being able to write a message in urine. Hank said, “You get to burn stuff.” Fortunately, as I noted in my post (see Fire! Flying Urine! Our Most Dangerous Quest Yet), one of the things we did NOT burn down was the house.

After I nearly started a fire by waving a match too close to the paper with the secret writing on it, I remembered an incident from my childhood when I was home with my brother and father. I was twelve, my brother fifteen, and my dad was less than a year away from dying. He was ill with diabetes and related problems, which forced him to retire in his mid-forties as managing editor of the Hayward Daily Review. This was why he was home with us while my mom was off at work. She had returned to her job as a social worker to help pay the bills because my dad couldn’t work anymore.

My dad was fixing hamburgers for us in the kitchen, and I guess the grease from the burgers caused the skillet on the stove to burn. My dad then did the exact wrong thing, sticking the skillet in the sink and turning on the faucet. The water splashed onto the sizzling grease with a hissing sound and burst into flames and smoke. The fire jumped from the skillet onto the kitchen window curtains. While my dad tossed water on the fire, he told my brother to call the fire department. Not having a job to do, I ran down the stairs and out of the house into the street in panic.

My dad succeeded in putting the fire out, but they sent a couple of fire trucks over from the Fairview Fire Station anyway. The trucks sounded their sirens of course, which drew onlookers from all around the neighborhood to see what was the hubbub at the Nelson house.  Kids and adults were crowded around the fire trucks, one parked in our driveway and one in the street out front, when my mother drove up. She had come home on her noon hour to have lunch with us.

I’ll never forget the look on her face when she got out of her car. She thought something awful had happened to her husband, and this was why the fire trucks and all the people were there. Finding out the real reason didn’t make her feel that much better.

I thought about this story after the fire incident with my two boys. I told them about it, leaving out some of the personal stuff about my Mom and Dad and focusing on the fire safety lessons. But this is another reason why, despite considerable resistance on my part to the idea of this quest, I’ll continue on with it. It’s helping me brush some of the dust off my childhood too.

The Blotting Paper Chronicles, or How We Made—Or Didn’t Make—a Battery

Faithful followers of The Dangerous Quest (and you ARE growing in number) deserve an apology because more than a month ago the boys and I started making a homemade battery. (See “Hearing the Voice” and “What the Heck is Blotting Paper?” to catch up.) But since then I have not said one peep about it. One reason for this is that with all the time I spend with the boys, I have trouble finding the time to write about all the time I spend with the boys. Then there’s this little matter of trying to make what I laughingly call a living as a writer. When a paying gig comes along (which, believe me, these days is about as often as a blue moon), I’ve got to jump to it.

But no more excuses. Our battery-making project turned out to be quite a lively affair, albeit a frustrating one. It began with a treasure hunt of sorts, with Hank, Gabe and I going on a fruitless search for blotting paper. To be honest I had no idea what blotting paper is, which occasioned at least two comments from readers (here’s one from Lillian Kaiser and here’s another from Karen Kath) straightening me out on the subject. I was happy to hear from them because as I’m finding out on virtually every quest we embark upon, there is a lot I don’t know about lots of things, blotting paper included.

Unable to find blotting paper at any of the stores we searched, friend and neighbor Lori Triplett suggested we substitute construction paper in its place. The boys’ grandfather, Bruno Kaiser, thought felt was the ticket. Even the Home Depot clerk had a suggestion for us after Jennifer told him that she was looking for a small LED for her son’s science project at school. “I have one question for you,” he said. “If it is for your son’s science project, why isn’t he here? I’ve had three mothers come in here for LEDs and not one of them-not one!-has brought their child in here with them. They should be the one asking the questions, not the parents.”

Jennifer bought a small LED plus two copper wires and some felt, and escaped without any more hard questions being asked of her. The miracle to me is that she even found a clerk at Home Depot to help her find what she needed.

Thanks to Jennifer, we now had a better LED for the job, and we spread it and all the rest of the ingredients—paper, coins, copper wire, aluminum foil, salt, masking tape—across the dining room table. Hank and I plunged in together, pouring the vinegar in a bowl and mixing it with salt. After this we started cutting the felt into pieces, Hank waving the scissors around and nearly stabbing me in the eye. We cut the felt into circles the size of quarters. Each felt circle was to be dipped into the vinegar and salt concoction and placed on a quarter. On the other side of the quarter was the foil, also cut into a circle. Then we would stack ten quarters in this fashion—felt, quarter, foil, felt, quarter, foil, felt, quarter, foil—attach the wire to either end of the stack, connect it to the LED, and light it up. That was the theory anyhow.

Unfortunately Hank is not as interested in scientific theory as he is in blowing things up or lightings things on fire. He grew quickly bored by all the cutting we had to do, although I was having a pretty good time. Being mainly a liberal arts guy when I was in school, I really hadn’t ever done anything like this before. I don’t even remember doing a science project like this as a boy. But when Hank attached the wires to the LED, no magic occurred. The light emitting diode emitted no light. Thinking that maybe the felt was to blame, we built another stack of quarters with construction paper. But again, nothing. The only thing produced by the LED were feelings of failure for the young scientist, who retreated into a book in disappointment.

We did not quit there, though. My wife got involved and we tried again. And again. And again. Hank hung in there and built more stacks of quarters and suggested new ways to make the thing work. We tried electrician’s tape instead of masking tape. We replaced the old set of quarters with fresh quarters. We tried new foil, thicker construction paper, cut bigger paper circles, soaked them less in the vinegar, added more salt to the recipe, shortened the wire leads. We even got a third LED, the tiniest of all, and it worked just as well as its two big brothers. That is, not at all.

We went on the Internet to see if anyone else had been able to do what we could not. We found one amusing video done by a Mom who tried to make a battery with their son (watch it here) but failed just as miserably as we did. In the spirit of Thomas Edison, who tested more than 3,000 theories on how to make an incandescent lamp before finding the right one, we let our battery “charge” for fifteen minutes before before trying it. You guessed it—nada. We could have let that battery charge for a week and it still wouldn’t have lit that damn LED.

Even so, I regarded the experiment as a success. Aggravating, frustrating, time-consuming, demanding the efforts of one child and two determined parents—but a success nonetheless. It did indeed make for an excellent science experiment that Hank presented at the school science fair. Asked to draw some conclusions about his project, Hank said, “Sometimes science projects don’t work out the way you want to.”

I’ll drink to that. A fourth-grader at Hank’s school made a science project similar to ours. But in an absolute stroke of brilliance, he did not attempt to light an LED. Rather he hooked his homemade battery up to a voltage meter or voltmeter, a little device that can test the power level of a battery. Its needle moves across a screen with numbers, indicating the amount of charge a battery is generating. So even though his battery couldn’t light an LED either, it still produced a measurable charge on a voltmeter. Take it from me: If you’re a parent who ever gets sucked into making a battery for a school science project, buy a voltmeter. It will enrich your child’s sense of accomplishment and reduce your headaches.

Fire! Flying Urine! Our Most Dangerous Quest Yet

For this challenge, we finally put the “Dangerous” in The Dangerous Book for Boys.

As many of you know, for the past couple of months I’ve been doing activities with my sons from The Dangerous Book for Boys, a bestselling manual written by a pair of Englishmen on what every boy should know as part of his youthful education. Mostly I’ve chosen to do the easier challenges to allow me to warm up for the tougher tasks ahead (shooting a rabbit, making a bow and arrow, learning grammar).

It would not be accurate to describe this challenge, “Secret Inks,” (p. 149, DBFB), as particularly hard, but it did prove to be a dangerous one because I nearly set the house on fire while doing it. Well, that’s an exaggeration, but not completely. Let me tell you the story:

You can make invisible ink by using milk, lemon juice and yes, urine. Just in case someone thinks I’m making this up, let me quote directly from the book that has sold hundreds of thousands of copies around the world: “Milk, lemon juice, egg white and yes, urine will work as a secret ink.”

As you might guess, the possibility that Hank and Gabe could write on a piece of paper using their own pee immediately captured their interest, although I was a little skeptical about the whole thing. “What’s the point of secret ink when no one writes letters anymore?” I asked the boys.
“It could be for a secret club,” said Hank,
speculating that its members would need to write in secret ink in order to enter the club. Gabe added that it “could be for summer when we make our clubhouse.” (He had to remind me: Building a tree house is another of the challenges from the book that I’m regarding with dread.)

While reading the directions in the book, Hank noticed that the authors neglected to include a vital piece of information. “What do you write with?” he said. Good question. Seeing that the Iggulden brothers do not say, we improvise our writing instruments, coming up with a pen cap or lid, pencil, screwdriver and a nail. This last-a sharp, dangerous object that they could hurt themselves with-interested the boys most of all of course, and is why this activity should never be attempted without adult supervision. (This proved especially true later on, when we started burning matches, at which point the thought occurred to me: Yes, but who’s supervising the adult?)

The pencil proved inadequate because the idea was for the writing to be invisible, and it wouldn’t do if one could see lead marks on the paper. That would be an obvious tip-off if the double agent working undercover tried to sneak a secret message past the bad guys to another person being held prisoner. (I talked a little with the boys about why one would need to write a note that certain people could see and others could not, and this was the scenario Hank came up with.) After the pencil, we tried the pen cap and the screwdriver, but the most effective instrument for writing an invisible message was, naturally, the nail.

As for the ink itself, we started with milk. Each boy dipped the nail in a little milk and wrote his message on a lined piece of paper. Then we cut a lemon in half, squeezed the juice into a small bowl and did the same with lemon juice. The messages weren’t long—a short sentence at most, and both boys experimented with how thick to apply the milk and juice to the paper. But all of this was just killing time, really, before we got to the main attraction: writing with urine.

One of the things I continue to be surprised by in this quest is how often I am surprised—that invariably, the things we set out to do (such as making secret inks) lead to discoveries that I never anticipated or intended. I had no idea when I started this challenge that my sons would learn how to pee in a cup. I gave them each a small plastic cup, told them what to do (“pee a little in the cup and the rest in the toilet”), and closed the door on them. Each in turn emerged from the bathroom holding his cup of pee, looking as proud and happy as a boy who thinks he’s getting away with something can be.

After carefully bringing their cups over to the kitchen table, our work area, they dipped their nails in and wrote their messages, not revealing what they were. To see what they had written, we needed matches. By waving a match under the paper, the heat produced a chemical reaction that made the invisible writing visible. Here was yet another unexpected opportunity to work on an essential life skill: being able to safely strike a match and hold the flame away from you so you don’t get burned. We used large Diamond-brand kitchen matches, and both boys practiced striking a couple of matches against the box with Dad guiding and advising them. But when it came time to put the match under the paper to see the invisible writing, Dad took over-and nearly started a fire.

I waved the match too close to the paper, and it caught on fire. I’m standing in the kitchen with my two sons, holding a burning piece of paper in my hand. Real flames are rising from the paper. Reacting instinctively, Hank and Gabe then grabbed the cups sitting on the table and tossed them on the flames, dousing the fire but covering me with piss.

Nah, just kidding. I made that last sentence up. The boys stood by as I blew the flames out, ending the crisis as soon as it started. Nevertheless it startled all three of us and led to a fire safety discussion: about how you never use matches unless there is a parent around and how you never play with them at all, how dangerous fire can be and how quickly it can get away from you, and how teenagers who are smoking cigarettes or whatever in a field can casually toss a match aside and the dry grasses can light and a very serious fire can spread and burn homes and hurt or kill people. And the most important safety advice of all: Never let your father use matches during a science experiment at home.

All I can say is, thank God the instructions didn’t call for the use of explosives. Amidst all the excitement, we did manage to complete our experiment. Gabe’s invisible writing came out the best. The heat turned his messages goldish-brown on the paper and you could read some of the words. One of his messages, in lemon juice, referred to the patriarch of the Simpson clan: “Doh,” wrote Gabe, “is Homer’s favorite word.” For some reason none of Hank’s secret messages was readable, and so I had to ask him what he had written in urine. He wrote, “I’m writing in pee.”

If you enjoyed this episode of The Dangerous Quest, you might enjoy this one as well:.

Playing Poker—and Dress-Up…One of the first things I learned about The Dangerous Book for Boys is that it isn’t just for boys. A friend of ours was visiting the other night, and so her six-year-old daughter Cielo pulled up a chair with my sons and me for a few hands of Texas Hold ‘Em….

Skipping Stones

The latest in my quest to do every challenge in The Dangerous Book for Boys with my sons in a year…
There are some real tough challenges in The Dangerous Book for Boys (building a tree house and bow and arrow, hunting, cooking and tanning a rabbit, learning grammar), and then there are some challenges that can only be described as “low-hanging fruit.” I’ve been picking off as many of the low-hangers as I can before moving on to the tougher challenges.

One of the easiest skills for a child to learn is how to skip stones (p. 171, DBFB). On Easter Sunday we drove up to Clear Lake, found a beach, and skipped stones as a family. Every kid can skip a stone, and should. It’s part of growing up. The word’s record for skipping a stone is more than fifty times, which is amazing (see it here). I don’t think I’ve ever had a rock skip more than four or five times, which may not be all that surprising when you consider my form:

The key to successfully skipping a stone is the stone. You need a flat rock that’s not too heavy but not too light, and sometimes you have to hunt around to find one.

The boys and I have skipped rocks many times (and my daughter too, when she was younger). We live on the Carquinez Strait, the neck of water that connects the Sacramento River with San Francisco Bay, and there’s a nice little strip of sand near the boat launch on Ninth Street that has small rocks mixed in with the bits of glass, driftwood and trash. Obviously rivers and lakes are best for rock-skipping, with the ocean being the least desirable because of the chop kicked up by the waves.

At Clear Lake the wind was up a little, which is not perfect for rock-skipping. Ideally the water should be calm and smooth so your rock has a long, flat runway in which to do its dance. When you throw, your arm should come almost underhand like Chad Bradford (obscure baseball reference: see his motion here) so that, as my wife says, “the angle of entry” in which the rock hits the water is as level as possible. Too much overhand action and the rock will sink into the water like a, well, stone.

After a few minutes of skipping rocks, the boys moved on to collecting shells and dried-up fish bones, and Jennifer and I went for a short walk on the beach. If all the quests in The Dangerous Book for Boys were this easy..

Making a Bow and Arrow: Boys’ Rite of Passage?

More from The Dangerous Quest: “At some point,” says The Dangerous Book for Boys on page 35, “you may consider making a bow and arrow.” Actually, in all my life I have never considered making a bow and arrow until now, until I began this rather strange quest with my sons.

After reading the book’s instructions on how to make a bow and arrow (they go on for four pages, with illustrations), I was so utterly stumped that I felt that, in my heart of hearts, there was no way I was going to be able to do this thing. Not just make a bow and arrow, but every hard task in the book-building a tree house and making a go-cart and tanning a skin and all the rest of it.

Nevertheless I have not given up—not yet anyhow—and I recently read a couple of excellent young adult novels that have given me a new perspective on what making a bow and arrow might mean to my sons. One of the books was Blood on the River, an historical novel about the settling of the Jamestown colony. The author Elisa Carbone has won awards for her writing and deservedly so, for she tells a wonderful adventure story grounded in the actual events and people of the Virginia settlement. Mrs. Julie Seymour, Hank’s fifth grade teacher, assigned the book to all her students, and after Hank was done with it he recommended it to me and I read it.

A boy, Samuel Collier (a real-life personage), narrates the story. Samuel is the page of Captain John Smith and travels with him by ship to the New World where he, Smith and the other colonists encounter Native American tribes that are both friendly and not so friendly. (Pocahontas belongs to the former group.) Samuel lives for a time in the village of the Warraskoyack Indians and learns, among other useful skills, how to make a bow and arrow.

“Kainta teaches me how to peel the bark off the sapling,” writes Carbone in the voice of Samuel, “cut notches for the bowstring, and string it with strong gut. We make several arrow shafts from straight, thin wood. He shows me how to make an arrowhead, chipping a piece of rock until it is in the right shape. It is a slow process…but finally I am able to make my first arrowhead. Then I tie it to a shaft and balance the shaft with feathers so that it will shoot straight.”

Samuel talks about the power and pride he feels in doing this, and similar to what the Iggulden brothers recommend in The Dangerous Book for Boys, he uses his self-made bow and arrows to hunt a rabbit. “The next day the three of us go hunting,” Carbone/Samuel writes. “We walk quietly through the white forest, stalking rabbits…They [his Warraskoyack guides] want me to shoot, to have a chance to make my first kill. Silently I pull out an arrow and string it on my bow.” Then, to paraphrase Chick Hearn’s famous radio announcing call for the Lakers, he shoots and scores! And they have rabbit stew for dinner.

Making a bow and arrow-and then shooting, gutting, skinning and eating this wild game-is clearly a rite of passage for young Samuel, as it is for 13-year-old Brian Robeson, the protagonist of another superb young adult novel, Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen. After seeing me read one of Hank’s books, his younger brother Gabe recommended one of his favorites, Hatchet, to me. I read it too, being struck by the fact that late in the book the fictional Robeson makes, yes, a bow and arrow.

“He had sat a whole night and shaped the limbs carefully until the bow looked beautiful,” writes Paulsen. “Then he had spent two days making arrows. The shafts were willow, straight and with the bark peeled, and he fire-hardened the points and split a couple of them to make forked points, as he had done with the spear.”

Traveling to see his father, the 13-year-old Robeson is in a small airplane that crashes in the Canadian wilderness. The pilot dies, and the boy must fend for himself in the north woods without food or survival gear. He builds a shelter, learns to make a fire using his hatchet, and shoots a fish in a lake using his self-made bow and arrow. “With his bow, with an arrow fashioned by his own hands, he had done food, had found a way to live,” writes Paulson. “The bow had given him this way and he exulted in it, in the bow, in the arrow, in the hatchet, in the sky.”

So this is what I am contemplating doing with the boys: making a bow and arrow and possibly going out to hunt with it. I was talking about this at dinner the other night, and I mentioned how hard it would be to do this. “But if we get stuck,” I said, “I know where there’s a bow and arrow shop in Martinez.”

Gabe brightened immediately. “We can go buy one,” he said. “Yeah,” added Hank, “and say we made it.”

“Right,” said Jennifer, listening patiently to this conversation. “I think that’s the spirit they’re going for in the book.”

Slaying the Dreaded Video Game Beast

The latest in my mad quest to do every challenge in The Dangerous Book for Boys with my sons in a year…Today I gave my son the choice between learning to make paper airplanes or playing his new Mario Party 8 game on the Wii. Gabe chose the Wii, leaving me to build the planes myself. Frankly, though, I was a little skeptical about the DBFB’s claim (page 2) that these were the instructions for “the greatest paper airplane in the world.” Recently my wife made a Rachel Ray recipe that purported to be “the world’s best chicken salad sandwich.” While it was “delish” it wasn’t even the best I’d ever had, and certainly not the world’s best. Sorry, Rach.

So that is why, despite my son’s non-interest in the subject, I felt the urge to continue on with my mission-to determine if this, truly, was the best paper flyer on the globe. The Dangerous Book for Boys, by Conn and Hal Iggulden, provides instructions for two planes-the more primitive Bulldog Dart and the world’s greatest Harrier. Figuring I’d better start simple, I began with the Bulldog Dart and immediately ran into a problem that is surely going to dog me through this next year. I’m terrible at following directions. If the directions tell me to do one thing, I will invariably do the opposite, although I am trying my best to follow them. Nor am I particularly handy or mechanical, even when I can comprehend the directions.

But I managed to build a fairly serviceable Bulldog Dart, thanks in large measure to the simple but highly useful line drawings that accompany the instructions. Feeling buoyed by my success, I turned my sights on the sleek and stylish Harrier. It begins the same as the Bulldog-by folding a piece of 8 1/2 x 11 piece of office paper lengthwise in half and turning the corners inward-but then spins off into a variation of its own. The Igguldens make a point of saying how simple these planes are to build, and that they fly better than more complicated designs. The problem for me was that by step four—fold the triangle over the corners? Huh?—I was  lost.

I was building the planes on the kitchen table near the TV where Gabe was playing Wii-my ulterior motive being to see if my craft project could lure him away from his electronic stimulation. I called him over for help on the Harrier and Gabe, who, unlike his father, has a strong tactile intelligence, took a quick look at the illustration, told me what I was doing wrong, and returned to the Wii. Even with his advice I folded the paper this way and that and before long it was a mess of folds and I had to start over.

On my first go-round with the Harrier I reached step four before needing Gabe; this time I made it to step five before calling him over. “You’re welcome again,” he said to me after fixing my error. I completed the sixth and final step on my own, and I had done it. I had built the Harrier. Now it was time to see if its performance lived up to its billing.

For me, it did. It was truly amazing, the best paper airplane I’d ever built. I went to the top of our stairs and set her off on repeated test flights. On its best flights it rose and dipped and made curlicues in the air, one time ripping across the living room and past the open kitchen door where Gabe, still absorbed in his game of Wii, even noticed it.

If the Harrier were a chicken salad sandwich, it truly would be the world’s greatest. But as for my subtle ploy to get my son off the Wii, it didn’t work. Paper planes could not compete with Mario Party 8, and I never could interest him enough to get him to leave his video game. His attitude changed, however, after we went to pick up his brother at band practice. When we came home Hank started on his homework and Gabe, much to my pleasure, asked me if he could build an airplane too. While appearing to be bored by it initially, something about what was going on—maybe the sight of that sleek Harrier swooping past the kitchen door—had intrigued him.

We built Harriers together on the dining room table while Hank finished his homework and Jennifer cooked dinner. We flew them off the top of the stairs and then went outside to the driveway. Gabe’s Harrier actually spun around in the air and came back to him, another promise made by the Iggulden brothers that they delivered on. Afterward we painted our planes with Crayola pens—mine with Von Dutch-style black and red pinstripes, his with a red, turquoise and black color scheme. But we found that the painted planes did not fly as well as the plain white ones, perhaps because the ink weighed down their paper-thin wings.

The next morning Hank said he’d like to learn how to build a Harrier too. The younger brother taught the older one how to do it, and we all flew planes in the driveway and yard before walking to school. Gabe now keeps all the planes he’s made (about twenty at last count) on his dresser, and he has strung ribbons through the wings of a dozen of them and hung them from the ceiling of his bedroom. “You’ve created a paper airplane mania,” my wife said to me. Yes! Victory!

One more small victory: The other night, while setting the table, Gabe folded the napkins in the form of Harrier planes.

Shel Silverstein to the Rescue!

“Tight Hat,” Where The Sidewalk Ends

By Kevin Nelson
The latest in my quest to do every challenge in The Dangerous Book for Boys with my sons in a year—

Inspired by the DBFB’s dictum that in order to have a proper education every boy should read poetry—a dictum with which we wholeheartedly agree—we reintroduced the idea of reading a poem or two with our sons before bedtime.

The first one we tried, with mixed results, was “Jabberwocky,” a delightfully fun poem although the language proved a tad difficult for Gabe, a second-grader, and even challenging for Hank, a fifth-grader. Gabe is a strong reader but he feels self-conscious reading in front of his older brother, and the Carrollian word play—“O frabjous day! Callous, callay!”—was daunting for him. This immediately pointed out a problem for other parents who may also wish to have a family poetry night: different comprehension, reading and confidence levels among their children. Clearly the goal is not to sweep one child gleefully along a river of words while leaving the other behind in the wake.

Seeing what happened with “Jabberwocky,” I realized that the poems I had chosen for reading with the boys were not going to work: “The Tyger” by William Blake (“Tyger, tyger burning bright/In the forests of the night…”), “This Is Just To Say,” by William Carlos Williams, Yeats’s heart-stirring “Lake Isle of Innisfree,” Baudelaire’s “Get Drunk” (not exactly a children’s poem, that) and John Donne’s poem to his lover, “The Sunne Rising” (nor, that). All these are wondrous poems and eminently worthy of being part of a child’s education, and we will surely get to them at some point. Just not now.

So what, then? My wife suggested Shel Silverstein, and this was brilliant. We used to read his poems with my daughter Annie when she was about the same age as the boys (she’s now in college). Silverstein’s clever and funny poems, brimming with word play and unexpected twists, accompanied by his witty and artful illustrations, are truly a delight for all ages, as they say. His books—Where The Sidewalk Ends,  A Light in the Attic, Falling Up, The Giving Tree—should be in every family library. Here are two samples from Where the Sidewalk Ends:

“Rudy Felsh”
Rudy Felsh
Knows how to belch
Better than anyone ever did.
Margo says that Rudy Felsh
Is a nasty vulgar kid.
Someday he will go to hell
Or jail or Canada, but now
Every night I pray that first
Rudy Felsh will show me how.

“The Land of Happy”
Have you been to The Land of Happy,
Where everyone’s happy all day,
Where they joke and they sing
Of the happiest things,
And everything’s jolly and gay?
There’s no one unhappy in Happy,
There’s laughter and smiles galore.
I have been to the Land of Happy—
What a bore!

With Shel Silverstein acting as guide, things went a little smoother for us on the poetry road. Anybody have any suggestions for poems that every children should know?

Kasey’s Advice: “Keep Up the Fun”

By Kevin Nelson
The latest in my quest to do every challenge in The Dangerous Book for Boys with my sons in a year—

Karen Kath, a retired teacher who goes by the name of Kasey, weighed in recently on the surprisingly lively debate about blotting paper versus construction paper in the building of our homemade battery project. She votes for blotting paper.

“Let’s see, first, blotting paper is in most schools that have been around for awhile,” she writes. “The new teachers probably don’t have any idea what it is, but we used to each have a blotter with blotting paper that was changed at least once a month. And it wasn’t the “Dark Ages”!! Only about forty years ago. Construction paper won’t have the weight of blotting paper.”

Kasey also has some ideas on how to get more parents, fathers especially, involved in this quest: “My suggestions for getting people involved would be to give ideas that come to you, from things in the book.  If the people reading do not have The Dangerous Book for Boys, you might get them interested, first, with your ideas. Also, suggest that they check the book out from the library. Right now, families are trying to do things without having to spend a lot of money. You might try telling the boys’ teachers what you are doing. When we, teachers, hear a good idea we tend to pass it on to others we think might be interested. Many classes and schools have a newsletter that your website could be put into. I know my principal liked to give parents ideas of things to do with their kids. I’ve been passing along your info, as I think it is a wonderful plan. I have challenged a couple of my relatives to do the same thing, as I had given them the book. I’ll keep thinking, but I hope this helps you somewhat. Keep up the fun.”

Will do, Kasey, and thanks for the suggestions. This week is “No TV Week” at the boys’ elementary school. They and their schoolmates are being urged to turn off the television, computer and electronic games and instead play board games, go on walks, read stories and do other activities that do not involve staring at a screen. (I just read how the average American looks at a screen eight hours a day.)  Children keep a record of their activities and the class with the lowest amount of television watching for the week earns a pizza party. Some of the activities from The Dangerous Book for Boys (or some similar title) would have been perfect for this.

Educational Value of Poker

On a recent post about playing poker, I talked about the educational value of teaching children how to shuffle and deal cards and play Texas Hold ‘Em. But I had no idea that poker could potentially have future educational uses for young people later in life. As Lillian Kaiser explains,

“I was in Borders in San Francisco one day a few months ago and an Asian woman sat there with her son of about five years old. They had a regular deck of cards (I mean the KQJ traditional rendition, not some modern juvenile ones). There was rapid back and forth between the two, mother and son. I asked her what game she was playing and she said it was poker practice; the kid had a poker date with his grandpa every Wednesday. And the exercise she was doing was helping him memorize poker hands. It reminded me of a story someone once told me, that their college age kid was a good enough player that he earned his tuition all four years by playing poker with his dad’s money at stake. That may be and apocryphal story, but I like it anyway!”

Forward!

We welcome these new subscribers and fellow Questers to this space: Lillian Kaiser, David Nelson, Annette Kaiser, Peytie Schuler, Karen Kath, Cynthia Kaiser and Bruno Kaiser. You are in the advance guard of what promises to be a grand army of questers. Forward!

Accidental Discoveries

Doc Green

The latest in my ongoing quest to do every challenge in The Dangerous Book for Boys with my sons in one year:

I keep being surprised by the accidental discoveries we make. When we’re doing a specific challenge from The Dangerous Book for Boys, we have a task at hand and we’re focused on completing that task. But what fascinates me is all the things we’re learning that have nothing to do with the specific task at hand.

Blotting paper is an example. When we started our battery project I really had no idea what it was and now I’m finding that people have quite strong feelings about it.

Here’s another example: We keep two jars of coins in our kitchen pantry-one jar of pennies and one of nickels, dimes and quarters. This is an old family tradition that began with my grandfather, Dr. Otto I. Green. He died when I was very young and I don’t remember him at all. But my mother talked of him a great deal and the way I know him best is from the pennies he collected in jars on top of his rolltop desk in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. In the early 1900s, just after Oklahoma had become a state, they were in dire need of doctors and nurses. Doc Green, a graduate of the University of Illinois medical school who had served as a physician in Panama during the building of the Panama Canal, came to Oklahoma and set up practice in Bartlesville, north of Tulsa, becoming the first Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat man in town.

At the University of Illinois Doc Green met his future wife and my grandmother, Ellen Durgin Green, who became a nurse and later assisted him at his practice after they moved to Bartlesville. They had four daughters, one of whom was my mother. After Doc Green died my mother wanted only one possession of his—and that was the rolltop desk. It was shipped west to our home in Hayward, California and set up in our den where as a boy I saw the jars of pennies on it. I think these were the same pennies that Doc Green had collected—not because they were rare and valuable but because they showed the value of thrift, of a penny saved. The jars of pennies came west with the desk because my mom and dad were unable to part with them.

Then after my mother died a few years ago I inherited Granddad’s desk and although I don’t think we have his pennies anymore, we do collect pennies and coins in jars the way he did. I brought out one of these jars with the idea of learning the coin tricks on page 191 of The Dangerous Book for Boys. But I got distracted by something else, and left it on the kitchen table. There my sons Hank and Gabe alighted upon it, brought it down to the floor, spilled out its contents, and started separating the nickels from the dimes and quarters. In the process they showed me something I did not know-that a series of modern nickels tells the story of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Thomas Jefferson is on the face of the nickel. Its traditional flip side is Monticello, his home. But in 2005 the United States Mint issued a series of four nickels in commemoration of the bicentennials of the Louisiana Purchase and the amazing explorations of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their band. On the backside of one nickel in this series is an image of two hands clasped, symbolic of the signing of the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803. Another shows a buffalo, what Lewis and Clark saw in such magnificent abundance on the prairies. The third is the keelboat they used to raft the rivers of the West on their way to the ocean. And finally, the last in this series, there is a picture of the ocean and the words they uttered when they first came upon it: “Ocean in view! O the joy!”

I never would have noticed this had it not been for this dangerous and inspirational book, my two sons and their love of play, and old Doc Green and his coin collecting hobby.

Ellen Durgin Green

Getting Serious

This is the latest in my ongoing quest to do every challenge in The Dangerous Book for Boys with my sons in one year:

I figure if I am truly going to get serious about this thing (though I never want to get too serious), I’d better take stock of what we’ve done so far (not much, to be sure) and what’s left for us to do. Here’s what we’ve done so far:
• Discovered what blotting paper is
• Built a battery (well, the beginnings of one anyhow)
• Photographed cloud formations
• Read poems
• Played Five Card Draw and Texas Hold ‘Em
• Learned to shuffle and deal a deck of cards
• Folded a piece of paper-well, one ply of tissue-eight times (an impossibility, according to the authors)

Pretty pathetic, I think you’ll agree, especially when you consider all the challenges that are still ahead for us. A partial list:

• Learn knots
• Play stickball
• Build a tree house
• Make a bow and arrow
• Understand the rules of grammar (Oh my god! Who understands that?)
• Make crystals
• Build and ride a go-cart
• Learn to juggle
• Fireproof cloth
• Sample Shakespeare
• Perform coin tricks
• Learn some Latin phrases
• Grind an italic nib (come again?)
• Build a workbench
• Make a pinhole projector

I’m stopping there. I’m getting tired just listing all the things we haven’t done, and I haven’t even mentioned my personal favorite, “hunting and cooking a rabbit and tanning a skin.” And when Conn and Hal Iggulden, my personal tormentors (though we’ve never met and they have no idea what I’m doing or who I am), say “tanning a skin,” they don’t mean going to the beach and catching some rays. They mean tanning the skin of that rabbit you’ve just shot, killed and eaten. I think I’ll have a beer.

A Pox on Cuteness!

The latest in my continuing quest to do every challenge in The Dangerous Book for Boys with my sons in one year…

This being a blog about fathers and sons and families and children, with pictures of same, there is an inevitable tendency to lapse into cuteness. I refuse. I will determinedly, decidedly and forcefully seek to avoid cuteness at all costs. And if ever you should catch me descending into cloying cuteness (“treacle,” as Lewis Carroll might have called it), I ask you—nay, I urge you, I demand of you—to call me out on it. A pox on cuteness!
(I can just imagine someone, a person of the feminine persuasion perhaps, reading this and saying, “Oh, that’s so cute…)

Turning Passive into Active

Thursday, 5:28 p.m. Light fading, beautiful clearing sky after storms. Gabe is playing basketball at our hoop in the side yard, and I see a striking set of what I think are altocumulus and stratus clouds in the eastern sky. Gabe stops what he’s doing—being constantly in motion, Gabe is always doing something—and we grab a camera and he snaps this picture.
Cloud watching is not precisely an activity in The Dangerous Book for Boys, but it has a section on cloud formations (p. 113) and it has inspired us to look for different types of clouds and take pictures of them. One thing I’ve discovered is that letting your child wield a camera can turn a seemingly passive activity (such as looking at clouds) into an active one. Obviously, if your camera is valuable (or even if it’s not), you may have to watch him like a hawk so he doesn’t drop it or wreck it. (One answer is to get him a cheap one that’s his to use as he wishes. Then if he breaks it or loses it, well, that’s no good but at least you’re not out of a bunch of money.) But photography is a nifty and fun skill for children to learn, and the chance to do it might stir some interest in an activity they might otherwise be less than thrilled about participating in.

Poems for My Sons

The latest in my continuing quest to do every challenge in The Dangerous Book for Boys with my sons in one year…

While I was looking over the “Coin Tricks” section of The Dangerous Book for Boys, my attention strayed to the pages before it, “Seven Poems Every Boy Should Know” (p. 185). Every boy should climb trees and learn to tie a useful knot but he should also know his way around a poem, say the authors. To this end the brothers Iggulden have reprinted seven poems in their dangerous and inspirational book: Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” “Sea-Fever” by John Masefield, “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley, “Vitae Lampada” by Sir Henry Newbolt, and two American offerings: “The Road Not Taken,” by Robert Frost and an excerpt from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

I think the Igguldens got their choices exactly right because, while acknowledging that there are conceivably hundreds of poems that every boy should be familiar with, these were the poems “that spoke to us when we were young,” they said. Which got me to thinking: What poems have influenced and inspired me and which ones should I be sure to pass on to my boys?

I went to a bookshelf in the living room and scoured the books of poetry to see what came to mind. One of the first I grabbed was “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll (another Brit, alas; but they know how to handle a pen, those Englishmen). My daughter Annie recited it for her elementary school talent show some years ago. Here it is:
’Twas brilllig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgabe.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite,
The claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch!

He took his vorpal sword in hand’
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in oafish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame.
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood.
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two!
And through and through the vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
He chortled in his joy.

Love that poem. We have a wonderful pop-up version of it done by artist Nick Bantock (his glorious take on the Jabberwock is above), although over the years rough young paws have torn the pages here and there. Tonight we’ll read “Jabberwocky” aloud and perhaps one or two from the list to see what the boys make of them, but I’m tempted to ask: Anyone care to suggest poems that were meaningful to them when they were young that kids today should know?

A Reader Writes: Bogus Paper?

Faithful readers of this space may recall our hunt for blotting paper in our as-yet-unfinished quest to build a battery. According to the recipe provided by the DBFB, you use blotting paper, metal foil, a stack of quarters and some other things to form a primitive battery-like contraption that can light an LED. But I really didn’t know what blotting paper was and could not find it anywhere, a point that Lillian Kaiser, an antiquarian bookseller and a faithful reader of this space, found incredulous.

“About blotting paper, surely you jest???” she wrote to me in a note (and I am carefully reprinting all three of her question marks). “Every art supply store I know of has lots of it. And of course every pen store sells it. It actually comes in pads as well as single sheets. I keep a poster size sheet just for use in the washing machine area. I cut a long strip and poke it under the machine to make sure all is safe back there and no leaks. That’s why I have the large size sheets; they probably would have been perfect for your battery project. And of course, being fountain pen freaks, we have lots of little blotters all over the place. But here’s a real paper puzzle for you: Did you ever hear of “bogus paper”? When I was a kid in the l930s, we had to buy a pad of Manila paper and a pad of bogus paper for grade school art and craft projects. They came in letter-size. The bogus paper is grey and somewhat rough, probably made from the slurry used in making egg cartons. If a kid had a bright art idea, she was supposed to practice first on the bogus paper before wasting a sheet of the twice as expensive Manila paper. The pads were 10 cents and 20 cents each if I remember correctly.”

I have never heard of bogus paper, Lillian, but that is truly fascinating. In modern slang “bogus” means fake or phony, and I wonder if this meaning derives from the throwaway paper used in these children’s art projects. Anyhow stay with us, faithful readers, for in coming posts we abandon the hunt for blotting paper and try construction paper to build our homemade battery.