I grew up with a bayou at the edge of my backyard, and on the other side of the bayou, a field.
We—my three siblings and a motley crew of neighborhood kids, kids whose afterschool care came in the form of grandparents who lived in the neighborhood, friends who lived in other neighborhoods but were coming home with one of us for a visit—would normally avoid the bayou itself, on account of it being full of snakes.
And alligators.
(In retrospect, it was far too shallow for there to have been an alligator, but at the time we were 10000% confident that 1. There were alligators; and 2. We had totally seen one there.)
So, we would rarely venture too close to the bayou out of fear of the dangerous reptiles.
Then, the Jurassic Park phase hit us like a dino-DNA social contagion, and inspired a game that took us not to the bayou with reptiles we could “see,” but to the tall, dense field behind it where whatever was growing there was too tall for us to see over, in a game all about imaginary reptiles.
One of the lackluster Jurassic Park sequels inspired us—velociraptors in a field of head-height grass chased after the humans—to invent the game that we creatively called Raptor in the Field, also known as one of the world’s dumbest ways to play chase.\
We’d ride bikes to the edge of the field, the starting and ending point. Gathered, we’d determine the roles. Most kids would be the “humans,” but in each round two or three kids would be appointed “raptors.”
The humans would get a head start, and while the raptors counted to whatever arbitrary number had been agreed upon, they would dash, on foot, into the field. They’d run as far into the field as they could before time was up.
The vegetation, a mix of hay grasses neglected since the time of dinosaurs apparently, was tall, above the head of the tallest of us, and it was dense too. You’d have to push your way through it, and bob and weave. But bobbing and weaving would be essential for what came next.
Once the raptors hit time, they would set off into the field to “eat” the humans. They would be on their bikes. To eat a human, they needed to find them and run over them with their bike.
Once the raptors were in the field, and only then, the humans could start running back to the entrance, the grassy home base where everyone dumped their bikes. You’d know that the raptors were coming because the bikes crashing through the field was LOUD.
All you had to do was make it to safety without getting run over.
Being on foot, you didn’t have the speed and power of an eleven-year-old engrossed in a psychotic fantasy of being a hungry lizard monster pedaling a mountain bike (in very flat Louisiana) for all he was worth, but you did have an edge in maneuverability.
The best strategy was dodging side to side, quick cuts so that the raptors couldn’t build up the momentum of a straight line to attack you. That, and running as fast as you could.
I’m not actually sure what would happen if a raptor “ate” a human, now that I think of it—as a human, I always made it to safety; as a raptor, I came close a couple times but never actually managed to ram anyone.
But once all humans were accounted for outside of the field, we’d yell to the raptors to return to base. Then, we’d reassign roles, and do it all over again.
Just, I don’t know, ten or twenty yards away from the field was where the bayou territory began—we could have just as easily been tripping over venomous snakes as we were stumbling on random roots in the next-to-no visibility field. But somehow, that thought didn’t bother us. Perhaps it even contributed to the game immersion—while running from fake reptile threats, we were also theoretically escaping from ambush by real ones.
That bayou is still there, of course, but sadly the field is long gone now. The place we once spent hours running for our lives—or racing to take lives, all the while cackling and making dino-noises—is now nothing but condos. Condos condos condos. As far as the eye can see. Condos.
But it will always be that field to me, and that field will always have potential raptors behind every tall stalk of whatever it was that was growing there.
In the meantime, though, if anyone is down for a pick-up game of Raptor in the Field, we’ll have to find a new playing field.
