Buckeye ammo ~ My column from Sunday's paper

It’s a thousand wonders I didn’t grow up to become a terrorist or at the very least a lifer in the military. That’s because when I was a kid I was into tanks, guns, and Armies of clothespin soldiers slaughtering each other. Most of the carnage took place under the front porch of our old house in Sloss. The battlefields were in inch-thick dirt which was as fine as snuff.  There was no better place to be on rainy days.

As I got older, the warfare evolved. The enemies depended on which neighborhood kids were in my army and which ones were the scum-sucking enemy that drew the short straws when selecting sides. 

The best weapons in those summer battles were buckeyes.  Not padded monsters that wore red and played linebacker for the University of Ohio, but a golf ball sized nut that was in the horse chestnut family. Jabbing one of these babies onto the end of a sharp pointed stick gave me real firepower.

The buckeye grows wild and is among the first wave of blooming things here in Alabama. In early spring, the buckeye bush produces beautiful red flowers. Then in summer when Alabama gets hotter than Satan in a snit, the buckeye plant produces nuts in a soft-brown shell that hang on the branches like tiny apples. The woods are full of them.

I've never tried to eat one, but they made excellent artillery ammunition. They loaded easy and had better knock-down power than a slingshot at long distances.

I don't remember who showed me the flinging-buckeye trick, but it came in handy during the many battles we fought over land rights, world domination, and what not.

When broken open, the buckeyes contained three or four nuts inside. They were hard when green, but the sharpened end of a long limber stick slid easily into the flesh of the nut.

When one of these smacked into the side of the head, it didn’t kill you, but experience taught me that they hurt like the dickens.

Distance was a factor when selecting the correct length of stick. For closer combat, shorter sticks were best because the aim was truer and they were easier to reload. 

But if the battlefield was wide and I needed to hurl the buckeye a hundred yards or so catching the enemy napping, a longer stick was essential.

Accuracy was problematic with this technology, so it took a great deal of practice. Experience showed me that the wind was a factor and moving targets were a challenge, but a direct hit with one of these babies was a game changer. 

I thought of those battles this week when I walked through the woods down at the back of the property. A buckeye bush was in full bloom. I pulled the phone from my pocket and snapped several pictures. One looked good enough to share on Instagram (rickwatson.) 

Rick Watson is a columnist and author. His latest book Life Changes is available on Amazon.com. You can contact him via email at rick@homefolkmedia.com.