The Woods

I grew up on a football field. Across the way, a cinder track stretched a lazy circle around our practice field, which was mostly dirt. Corn stalked in the evenings like spectres watching a young crop of men grow from sweat and blood. Set back off the highway and draped in farm fields, our stadium was notched into a little plot of woods just behind the school. When I played, we would walk in uniform from our weight room toward the trees until the parking lot spit us out onto the gravel path that led to our field. The banners that lined those ancient trees were plastered with the faces of young men hardening themselves to look like their fathers. As I hear now the crunch of stones under worn-out cleats, the late summer crickets chirping in the corn, and the grade schoolers cheering to my brothers and best friends from the west end zone as we walk unflinchingly toward kickoff, I think of Aeneas leaving Troy. Young men choose to play, not always out of pure desire or the hope of glory, but because even farm boys recognize the call to duty is undeniable. Why would a young man shrug the pads off his shoulders? Why slip the helmet quietly from his head? So far as there is a civil religion in hometown America, it is a game, its altar a gridiron.

There came a time each summer, huddled around the water cooler, drenched in some unholy smell, when each of us wondered, itchy and bleeding, between pounds in our head, why we stay. Looking back down Consear Road, the school would flicker in heat waves like a stone at the bottom of a puddle, and we’d remember. Looking out over the fields a mile or so, toward where Goose’s house and the surrounding farms stood silhouetted against the Michigan sun, we’d remember. And jogging back the line together through the dust and grime when the whistle called, we’d remember. It was a duty and, more than anything, a right of passage. Neither life nor death hung in the balance, but it felt that way.

Only a few miles separate Whiteford and Ida Township, but the schools hadn’t played since the ’70s. Ottawa Lake hadn’t won since long before that. The din of the world disappeared for a week when the forty or so boys who had chosen to take the field that year set before them victory and victory alone. The coaches barred none with the boys. They minced no words in telling the strength of the Ida Bluestreaks. For every Bobcat to don a helmet, there would be two Bluestreaks waiting to tear it off. Still, Whiteford knew its own strength. They were a tightly knit corps of victors. Coming off a disappointing year, they knew they had the strength to turn their former woes into something far greater. Victory would mean vengeance forty years in waiting. And it would mean a statement to other challengers that the warriors in The Woods would fight anyone from the first quarter to the last.

Friday. The fans, mothers, fathers, grandparents, friends, crushes, waited a short distance from where the team sat in silence. Soon, we walked the walk to The Woods, heard a pregame speech that rang like a war cry in the barn we used for a locker room, and then kicked off the biggest game of the year. Goose scored twice. In the far end zone just before halftime, my brother, the quarterback, threw a touchdown to our middle child in our family, a feral safety and receiver. We beat Ida 34–14. And dominated from the first play to the last whistle. Still, to win was not a walk in The Woods. The coaches were right. Ida hit harder than any team we had played that season. Their linemen were meaner, their running backs faster, their linebackers more brutish than those from the other farm towns. That’s the promise of high school football. That’s the promise of those blazing summer days: The privilege to do battle for the hometown, the privilege to reclaim the county, to let victory ring in the lungs of those who had whispered for so long. Three generations separated Whiteford’s wins on the gridiron against a powerhouse. The night we did it, three generations lingered, listening to legends from The Woods, until the lights went out. The myth now had a line written in our own hand.

The boy in that arena knows he cannot leave because it’s more than a game, more than tallies in a column. The scoreboard hangs like a votive to the tradition of fathers and grandfathers. When the clock runs out for the last time and the whistle blows a final death to boyhood, The Woods are a silent promise that a new generation will, in God’s good time, take a town’s dreams upon its own shoulders and set duty upon its own head. Each son will walk the path to The Woods and tear the same soil with his cleats. The dirt will sting his eyes; the grass will grow by his own sweat and blood. He will harden himself to fight the same rival. The pigskin will be their household god, preserved through a summer’s fire. The numbers they wear will be their fathers with them and what they pass to their own sons. The Woods will be the temple they must leave, the promise to which they always return.

Ty Ruddy