How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself (11 page)

Now if you'll hold the gun, you'll find that by rubbing your thumb up, you'll push the rubber band up over the end of the handle and it will spring forward and flick the card.

I just now thought that maybe if you've made the cardboard boomerang, you could probably fit one of those into the crack, hold the gun sideways, and it would probably flick the boomerang better than a finger.

If you've got a lot of rubber bands, you can make the card gun into an automatic rubber-band gun. Just loop the rubber bands over and release them one at a time with your thumb.

If you don't have any rubber bands, you can make the real old-fashioned kind of sling, the kind David used on Goliath. All you need for this is some string and a piece of cloth or leather. Make the sling just the way you made the rubber-band part of the slingshot, using string instead of rubber, and make the strings longer.

 

 

We used to use acorns or horse chestnuts for ammunition, because we never got to control these slings very well. Put an acorn in the cloth or leather—here's really the only part that's different from the slingshot: when you tie the strings, try to make the cloth or leather into a little pouch—hold the ends of the string and whirl it around
your head. When you've got some speed up, let go of one of the strings, and the acorn will fly. Don't expect to hit things the way you do with a slingshot right away, or even ever. It takes a lot of practice to get this one going right, and we were never able to get nearly as accurate with this as with a slingshot.

If you live out in the country, you probably know about whipping apples, but if you don't, or if you only go to the country for vacations, here's the way it goes. What you need is a long, whippy branch or switch, and an apple tree that nobody's paying any attention to, like the one in my back yard. You'll find apples on the ground, either green or a little squishy. Sharpen the end of the switch, stick it into the apple, bring your arm back and throw, sort of like
casting a fishline. I think you'll be amazed at how far you can throw this way, much faster than just throwing with your hand. It's sort of like having an arm six feet long. I guess you could do this with any fruit or nut that was soft enough to stick on the end of a branch, if you don't run across an apple tree that nobody's paying any attention to in your part of the country. If you find some clay, and mold it into balls, they work well, too.

The Indians used this same idea to make throwing sticks. There are darn near as many ways of making throwing sticks as there were Indians, but the idea of all of them is the same, and it's the same as whipping apples, a way of making your arm longer.

The general idea is to make a stick with a bump, a hook, or a nail in it.

Then make an arrow to put on the bump or hook or nail.

You hold the throwing stick with your hand bent back, the arrow lying along the top of the stick. Whip it forward the same way as you would do with the apple whip or a fishing pole, so that as you throw the throwing stick comes up and over and releases the arrow. You can make these any way you like; you can put points on the arrow with a nail or by sharpening it, you can put feathers on the back—and you'll find it's a whole lot easier if you don't use feathers,
but make a slot and make the feather-vanes out of cardboard or thin wood.

Like the old-fashioned sling, this one takes a little doing, but the Indians used it; lots of tribes never used bows and arrows at all, but throwing sticks all the time. No, I'm not that old. I didn't know any Indians, except once a year, one used to come to our school and give a speech. It is my recollection that he was the Indian whose face you'll see on an old Indian Head nickel. He never said one mumbling thing about throwing sticks. To tell you the truth, I don't know what he talked about at all. I just know he came to the school every year, and said the same thing every year.

 

 

I don't know how old you are, and I really don't know any more how old I was when I did the different things in this book, so if you find that some of the things are too old for you—wait until you're old enough to do them. If you find that some of the things in the book are too young for you, first figure out if they're really too young, if nobody else knows that you're doing them. I know that when I was a grown man, my wife and I went to live in Mexico
for a while, and walking down the street one day, I saw a whole bunch of kids playing with what was, for me, a brand new toy. It was a yo-yo, and I'd never seen one before. I bought one—I told the shopkeeper that it was for my kid, but I didn't have a kid then, and I brought it home with me. Now certainly a yo-yo, as a matter of fact
any
toy, was too young for a man almost thirty years old, so I used to sneak out in the back yard when I wanted to learn how to use a yo-yo, and any time anybody came to the house when I was doing it, I stuck it in my pocket and pretended that I had been out back doing something important and grownup.

So, first of all, remember that the name of this book is
How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself
and if some of the things sound a little childish, figure it out: do you think they're too childish, or do
you
think that if someone else saw you doing it,
he
would think it was childish? And if you really are too old to do some of these things, why don't you show your kid brother how to do them, or your little sister, or any little kid on the block? He or she or they will think they're great things, and they'll think you're great for showing them.

Take, for example, polly-noses. You know how, in the fall, those little wing things fall off the maple trees. They look like this.

First of all, if you'll get up on a fairly high place and just drop one, you'll see some real flying. Then, after you get down from the high place, if you'll separate the two wings at the joint, you'll see that the base of each half is sort of double. If you'll stick your fingernail in between the two halves and pull them apart a little, you'll find that there's some sticky stuff that lines this place, and if you put it on your nose, it'll stay there and
you'll have what we called a polly-nose. Polly was what we called a parrot, and somehow we thought that with these on, our noses looked something like parrots' beaks.