Hickory nut baseball

</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[I probably should have known playing "hickory nut baseball" with an eight-year-old boy was not a great idea. But what do you at Jackson Falls when the falls are dry and you want to entertain a kid full of energy who loves throwing things?

David Matthews was wearing his St. Louis Cardinals Pujols shirt as he squinted at me, holding his crooked branch over his right shoulder. The red shirt contrasted with the green leaves dripping from the recent rain shower.

Disheartened rock climbers milled about. The rock climbing was spoiled for the day by the rain that slickened the sheer sandstone bluffs. The climbers were making the most of their bad fortune, wandering the trails with their packs of rope and clanging carabiners.

Matthews' mother, Vicky, sat in a shallow overhang, her feet just inches from the drip line. She looked up as I pitched the green hickory nut underhanded toward David's strike zone. He swung, missed, and the back swing smacked the tree beside him, snapping the bat in half.

"Strike one!" he yelled.

I should have seen the trouble ahead. But David laughed, found a new bat that was even more crooked than the first and positioned himself for my next pitch.

It was not hard to strike David out. A hickory nut is a small target about half the size of a walnut. Four football shaped wedges of dense, wet, green husk surround the grape-sized nut.

I swung at his pitches a couple of times before making contact, but did not hit it past David which we had earlier determined would be considered a home run. The hit knocked one of the wedges of husk off the nut rendering our baseball into a sort of mathematical model. It was 3/4 of a sphere.

The next hit freed the nut from the husk in a small explosion and we bashed it open with a rock. At my urging David tasted the meat, then spat it out in a stream of chunky saliva.

Playing baseball with David is a workout. What he may lack in control over ball and bat he makes up for with an inexhaustible store of energy and good humor.

We each got a couple of hits, but neither were scoring any runs. Then the pitches became faster and less controlled so that I was ducking and dodging more than batting.

"Ball!" he said, as I flinched away from the nut zinging past my nose.

"Two strikes, one ball, man on first!"

A smart man would have called for a time-out to calm down.

But I raised the bat, ready for the next nut, which came with the speed and precision of a striking viper, to bash my top lip, crushing the soft tissue into my pointed incisor, overwhelming my central nervous system with blinding blast of pain.

I stared at the ground in a daze, bent over, hands on my knees, trying desperately to remain calm and let the pain subside.

This was the time to shake off the pain and humiliation.

"Are you OK?" Vicky called from the overhang.

"Just a busted lip," I said.

"You get a penalty walk," David said.

"OK," I said.

"Do you want me to take a penalty?" he said.

"No. Two strikes, one ball, man on first and second," I said.

The words "remain calm" echoed through my head as my lip throbbed and swelled.

David and I had settled with an apology a tense disagreement earlier in the hike, involving moral issues surrounding the tossing of sticks into other peoples' heads, those other heads being mine.

I still harbored doubt in his insistence the thrown stick had been a pure accident. One clue was his joyful laughter at my expense. Having been a little boy once I know the throw is always an accident when the projectile strikes its intended target and someone gets upset about it. His mother had intervened as I stridently threatened to return to the car to sulk and David and I made up.

There will always be accidents in sporting events, especially in those as crude as hickory nut baseball. So I took no offense in the busted lip. We continued to play and I continued dodging nuts.

The bat deteriorated. I struck a nut that broke the bat, but was confident my stob would get me the homerun I sought. The next pitch was a speed nut whose trajectory I predicted through instinct or luck.

A part of me wonders if what happened next was truly an accident, like David's thrown stick, or if a dark, secret part of me sought revenge for David's earlier insult.

There is no way my conscious mind could have predicted the speed of the throw and power of my swing could have combined at the bat's weakest spot and snap it cleanly in two, rendering the broken end into a spinning weapon bent on crippling my 8-year-old friend.

"Baahhh!" David said, doubled over clutching his injured left shin.

"Ooowww!" he said, with a shrillness determined to bring rock climbers to us to render aid.

But the wet woods swallowed David's cries and there was only his mother and me to utter reassuring words.

"I think we had better stop playing hickory nut baseball," I said.

"It's too dangerous."

The three of us sat under the dry overhang and played Scategories before packing up. A white haze formed on the forest floor as we climbed the treacherous pass through The Keyhole and returned to the trailhead. We slipped regularly over the wet leaves and sandstone glades as that haze formed into a low cloud that rose above the trees.

-- DeNeal is a staff writer for the Daily Register in Harrisburg, Ill., and the Daily Journal in Eldorado, Ill. He may be contacted by electronic mail at bdeneal@yourclearwave.com or at (618) 253-7146.