CATEGORY: CENTRAL OREGON

Eric’s favorite toys when we were living in Tumalo were bottle caps.  He would get them out of the soft drink machines and bring them home in paper bags.  He had hundreds of them.  He divided them into their categories and kept them in boxes under his bed.  Then he would get them out and have wars with them.  The red ones (coke) were the redskins (Indians).  Usually these got arrayed on the edge of the beds.  The beds were cliffs where the redskins could shoot down on the brown uniformed soldiers (root beer).  Other categories were pioneers in wagon trains, ranchers, farmers, sailors (squirt), pilots, miners and loggers.

He liked to play with then in Jari’s room because it had narow beds one on either side of the room which were the cliffs on both sides of a valley.  The “valley” was covered with an eight foot round braided rug.  The rug was one I had made, mostly out of war surplus blankets.  These were navy blue and off-white.  I had also used some wool coats that I had gotten at rummage sales which added a variety of other colors in lesser amounts.   Eric liked this room better than his own and often slept in the other bed.   The different areas of color in the rug became roads or territories for different groups of fighters on opposite sides of the battles.

The problem with using the beds as cliffs was that he would have to pick them all up every night so that he and Jari could go to bed.  But it didn’t take him any time at all to put them out again the next day.  In fact picking them up (killing them off) and putting them in place (sending out new troops) seemed to be a great part of the combat strategy.

Little did the people in Tumalo, who popped the caps off their bottles, know that they were discarding a member of the troops.