Thursday, October 11, 2007
Hoppy Days
We were walking in a part of the park we don’t usually visit, up near the model yacht pond and Chain of Lakes, when Kel suggested peeling off on a track she knew of through the piney woods. We dutifully followed into the carpeted cocoon of the woods, the air chirpy and dusty and charged with ozone and potential. The path pushed up a knoll; along it stood small tired-looking wooden constructions every hundred yards or so. Low thick balance beams, chunky zig-zag joists, a set of hanging-bars – it was all extremely simple, built of 4x4 beams and wrought steel rods. Beside each of those stations, as we walked up the hill, was a placard set into a wooden frame, explaining how the equipment there should be utilized for general fitness purposes. The placards were faded from sun and fog; the wood was all weathered to a skeletal grey and riven with moss. Everything looked thirty years old and rather tired.
“It’s a par course,” Kel noted.
“How 1970s,” I snarked in response. But really, isn’t it? Par courses were the it thing back in the day, what with the running from station to station and the cycles of different exercises and the little shorts and the thick moustaches and sideburns and all. They seem very much of an era to me – the Ford-Carter era. And this particular par course really seemed to connect directly to that heritage.
I was thinking as we peregrinated how strange it was that a sliver of 1975 could have been transplanted to my here-and-now, when two men jogged up. One wore shorts cut high on the outer thighs; the other wore midlength cotton trunks with contrasting piping. Both wore cotton t-shirts in strong simple colors. Their hair was bushy and was long enough to cover their ears; one had a moustache that was luxuriantly thick. Both sported sideburns. Big’uns.
They ran up to a station just down the hill from us – one with a framed placard that described the “hop-kick.” This exercise requires no weathered wooden equipment: one hops up on one leg, and then kicks up high with the other foot; reverse; repeat. Maybe it’s good exercise, but one thing is for sure: it makes you look silly as hell.
These two guys start doing their hop kicks, garish shorts and bushy sideburns and all. Lift-hop-kick-switch-lift-hop-la la la… They watched their feet and legs with rapt seriousness as they wordlessly worked out. After several rounds, they both stopped their exercapers and trotted on up the hill to the next station, to do chin-ups or squat thrusts or something. I was left wondering if perhaps this wasn’t so much a piece of the 70’s transplanted to the modern world, as it was a reversionary rift, where now turns back to then and the 70s never went away. It’s an interesting theory, anyway. I’d have asked those two dudes but I think they went back home to watch Emergency.