Prison Tag

My 5th grade gym teacher taught us a game called "prison tag". The base form of the game is simple. Take a group of kids and split them into 2 teams. Team 1 are jailers, team 2 are prisoners. Everyone starts out standing in the designated jail space, then the prisoners "escape" while the jailers cover their eyes and count. When the count reaches 100, the jailers move out in pairs or groups to catch the escaped prisoners, leaving one person behind to guard the jail. If there's no guard, the prisoners are allowed to go free again. When a jailer touches a prisoner, they're caught, and must submit to being escorted back to jail. Once a prisoner is jailed, the only way out is to have a free prisoner pull him or her out of the designated jail space. When all escaped prisoners are caught, the teams switch sides and begin again. Simple!

When we became teenagers, my sister and I revived the game. The jail was our front porch. The play area was half a block, from the yellow line down the middle of California Ave. to the alley, and anywhere between Sidney street and the yellow brick Victorian house. There was no covering of the eyes, instead we marked 5 minutes on a watch. You were not allowed to climb trees, or go up on anyone's roof. Hiding in your house was also considered cheating.

The game was only played at night; when the white sodium streetlights cast nice, dark shadows. It was fun to hide, but it was even more fun to creep through the darkness, tingling with adrenaline, going quiet as a mouse as a seeker ran past you, or jumping out of your skin when you got caught. We became the masters of invisibility and stealth. I learned that with the proper shadows, you could hide in a 6 inch deep doorway. I learned to hide right out in the open, with jailers passing mere feet in front of me. Any patch of darkness would do, really. The trick was to quiet your presence.

As a jailer, I loved to startle the heck out of some kid in a near-trance of "I'm not here, you don't see me." I knew the best hiding spots, and I never failed to check them. We became so good at the game, that more often than not, we'd have to call a start-over after about 45 minutes. Kids would come creeping out of the strangest places to begin the next game. I remember when Joey had actually jammed himself up in the wheel well of a large car. He wasn't a big kid, but that was still impressive! Another favored hiding spot was the 10 inch space between my house and the bar next door. Kids would work their way almost to the roof, then start wriggling sideways toward the alley. We couldn't reach them to tag them, but they couldn't get out, either. Sometimes I'd hide in that same space, but I was smart. Everyone knew the climbing thing, so I'd get down on the ground instead. Nobody thought to look down, until I came out of there after "were starting over" was called. The gap between the buildings held decades of trash and several inches of compost. I guess it was disgusting. It never bothered me at the time.

Nobody wanted to be the kid left behind, so everyone joined in on shouting the all-clear. We were amazingly civil to each other. We all played by the rules, and there were no arguments. Prison Tag was so much fun, we played it 3 summers in a row.