Playground Detectives

I don't know that I had a terribly vivid imagination as a kid, but I was a highly suspicious and somewhat paranoid kid. I liked knowing exactly what to expect and having explanations for things I didn't understand. That being said, I was shy of adults and didn't particularly like to ask questions that I thought might be obvious. Which left me with little else to do when I discovered a mystery during recess but speculate and think about maybe investigating.

There were two major mysteries that existed on my grade school playground: The Mystery of the Red Colored Wood in the Mulch Pile on the upper playground and The Mystery of the Missing Fence on the lower. My team of fellow investigators included Coleman, Joey, and occasionally Kara.

Joey fancied himself an intellectual, but one who liked NASCAR and pro-wrestling. He got all A's, and the teachers were always fond of him, except for when he constantly interrupted their questions with the answers. Coleman had decided to become the class clown and my sidekick, which was great because I loved people who made me laugh and let me boss them around. The teachers were less fond of him, especially when he had a tantrum because I didn't win the class spelling bee. I was baffled by his loyalty, but he was fun to have around. Kara mostly just hung around to watch Coleman do something foolish and maybe get hurt.

I decided early on that the mulch pile mystery was definitely the inferior one. Coleman's conclusion of MURDER, because of the presence of reddish wood chips, just seemed too obvious. And frankly, his later addition of the escaped zoo gorilla seemed silly.

"There is no wood that is red! Look around! All the trees are brown! THERE HAS TO BE A BODY SOMEWHERE," and then he would furiously dig into the huge mountain of wood and dirt. Joey would scoff.

"What about REDWOOD trees?" he asked. Coleman shook his head, still digging.

"This wood is TOO red. Too red for anything but MURDER." He gave up digging soon, and we bounced around on top of the pile, until the teachers told us to get down before we hurt ourselves.

The fence mystery captured my imagination for almost two years. It was perhaps more intriguing because of its lack of evidence of foul play, unlike the red wood chips in the mulch pile. One day a panel of the chain link fence surrounding the lower playground and separating it from the patch of woods at the back of the school, was present, was there, and the next it simply wasn't. The panel beside it appeared twisted, the pole half out of the ground and the wire poking out the sides. It was all very suspicious.

"Maybe it was a wild boar. My dad read about a wild boar in North Georgia that got up to like, 100 pounds," Joey informed us as we examined the gate. This time Coleman scoffed.

"ONE HUNDRED pounds? Have you seen pigs? They are definitely not that big," he informed Joey.

Eventually interest in the gate died down, but I would glance at it every so often, with its strange gaping entrance into the woods, and wonder. Finally I decided that I would never know. A few weeks before summer after third grade, I saw the school janitor replacing the panel, and concluded that it must have been a routine maintenance thing.

OR WAS IT.