I’m down on my belly in the scrub oak, not moving, barely breathing. I can hear my brother about 80 yards away, shouting something to his friend about moving to the left. But I’m not focused on what they are up to. There is only one prize, and he is somewhere behind a tree, terrified, because he knows I’m out here.
I can see his elbow. That’s not good enough. I need him to move further from behind the tree. Slowly, he circles around the tree and then there he is. Shifting just a little so as not to rustle the dry leaves, I line up my shot. One green-black swirl Marballizer sails out the barrel of my Tippmann 98 at 300 feet-per-second. It hits the upper edge of my father’s mask, sending colored vegetable oil all over the lens and, more satisfyingly, coats his bald head. He shouts with surprise, and then yells my name in anger.
The trophy is mine.
Don’t feel too bad – my father was the one who bought the paintball guns in the first place. One Christmas in the late nineties we woke up to giant cardboard box full of brand-new paintball guns, CO2 tanks, masks, and paintballs. My brother, father, and I were thrilled. My mother, the nurse, was uncertain in everything except that there was no stopping this. We were becoming paintball people.
The arsenal expanded. There would be enough paintball guns when friends and family came over. My uncle was the first to buy a really good one, and so then we all had to buy better ones. The woods on our ranch were alive with the clacking pops of our family warfare and there was only one other sound that could stop it -- the low, telltale muffler rumble of my grandfather’s gold Silverado.
We boys had our toys, but grandpa was The Man. And he didn’t like paintball.
People who have grown up on a ranch know how much work it is. But there are also a lot of opportunities and space to have fun. The man-toys on the ranch were everywhere: fast cars, four-wheelers, tractors, guns, golf carts, trucks, boats, jet skis, and RVs. Even the riding lawn mowers were fun, evidenced by how often they got rolled down a hill or ended up in a pond.
Before this sounds like too-gendered of an experience, I’ll point out that my grandmother was a crack shot with a .22, and our girl cousins got that golf cart up to scary speeds.
But I don’t think that there was one object in my life that had more intergenerational meaning than my first car. We paid $2000 for a rotted-out 1966 Ford Mustang GT and for the next two years my father and I stripped it down to the chassis and restored it from the wheels up. He taught me how to use an angle grinder, how to weld, to upholster, to sandblast, to paint, to wire a dash, and how to use duct tape and a clean rag as an oversized bandage when we cut our hands and skinned our knuckles.
My brother helped out and, even though he was young, he had a vested interest. On the other side of the garage was his project car, waiting partially disassembled under a tarp – a blue 1965 Mustang that, in a few years, would be transformed into a growling grey beast with black le mans stripes.
My grandfather would regularly stop by to check on our progress. I don’t remember if he ever picked up a wrench. His presence was a rare expression of approval that was important to me, especially because it signaled approval of my father’s desire to build a car together.
At the time, we acted like we were building me a car. Did we know we were building something more?
After two or three years of sitting mostly unattended in a barn, we sold the Mustang in 2011. My dad would go down a few times a year and start it up or drive it to town. I’d do the same most summers, but I’d moved on to a Volkswagen as my daily driver. I didn’t feel like me in the Mustang anymore.
The things we own are temporary. We sold the car and kept the bond. I don’t miss the car as much as I treasure the time he invested in me: hundreds of hours, fights, milestones, injuries, laughs and plenty of frustrations. I don’t think either of us really knew what we were getting into.
It’d be nice if men could say, “I would like to spend meaningful time with you.” Maybe that would change some interactions for the better. But you have to admit, it’s more fun to say, “Let’s go into the woods and hunt each other with paintball guns.”
There are very few people who should own boats. Fewer still really need a jet ski. An impractical thing matters enormously when the return on such an absurd investment is time spent with the people we love.
The toys won’t last forever. But neither do the people. So let’s have some fun.
