There are segments of sociology, found perhaps only on Cape Breton Island, that need to be recorded, if not studied. The “Lee Hawkers” game is such a segment; a common summer night cry of “1-2-3 Lee Hawkers” heard in the woods surrounding the New Waterford neighborhood on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. This modified game of hide-and-seek involving two teams was part of the teens in the mid-1960s. Lee Hawkers was a creative game of hide-and-seek played in a specific suburban area of New Waterford called River Ryan/Scotchtown.
The River Ryan/Scotchtown area was, and remains today, a residential community. Unlike today, then the neighborhoods were more intertwined with forests and fields. Throughout the 1960s, summer days saw teenagers playing baseball, throwing horseshoes, building forts in the woods, practicing BB gun shooting, or biking out of town to Kilkenny Lake for a swim. But what would these typically testosterone-fueled males do for their nightly fun? What mischief could they find shrouded in the darkness of muggy summer nights?
The mischief arose when the childhood game of hide-and-seek morphed into a more adult-oriented game involving two teams, a “jail,” and few, but specific, rules of engagement around getting caught and released from jail. The best memory is that this night game was originally a men’s only sport. Two teams of teenage boys took turns being the captured (Hiders) or the captors (Seekers). To start, in a clearing, field or someone’s driveway, using a tree branch or the heel of a player’s boot or sneaker, roughly a large circle (6 to 8 feet) would be marked out. feet in diameter) in the sunburnt soil. . This would become the jail into which the Seekers would throw their captured Hiders.
In order to capture or trap a hiding member of the opposing team, the searchers would begin their search in the dark wooded areas looking for any hiding. It is dark. it’s the woods Seekers could jump over a Hider… so hunting was usually done in pairs of Seekers. But why the name Lee Hawkers? Read on… once a Hider was isolated, according to the original search and capture rules, a Seeker would have to spit (yes, a peddler!) at the Hider, hit him on the back while yelling “1 -2- 3 Read street vendors.” This marked the Hider as a “captured” or “captured”. The Seekers would take the captured Hider back to the jail (the circle) for safekeeping for him. The “Lee” (short for leeward) in “Lee Hawkers” was an obvious warning to spit, or hawk, downwind to avoid getting hit with your own spit (phew). And so this spit or yell, the “1-2-3 Lee Hawkers” capture sequence, would be repeated until all the Hiders were captured and imprisoned. Once all the Hiders were captured, the teams would swap roles: Seekers would become Hiders and Hiders would become Seekers. hide. Struggle. cell. Change. It was that the game was so simplistic. The game was more complicated and much more dynamic because imprisoned Hiders could be released from “jail”. What what!
The jail was guarded by a couple of Seekers. These guard seekers remained on high alert to prevent Hider’s teammates from freeing their imprisoned comrades. If an uncaptured Hider ran through jail, all imprisoned Hiders were now technically released from jail, free to run back into the woods and hide once more. How could the Seekers stop these repeated outbreaks?
The trick was to catch these escape experts from rogue stashes before they made it through jail. By using the same 1-2-3 capture sequence (hawks, back slaps, yelling “1-2-3 Lee Hawkers”), it would not only stop a breakout attempt but also result in a recapture of Hider. “To jail with you!” At this point in Lee Hawkers’ evolution, you’ve got a teenage male-dominated game of hide-and-seek, hawkin ‘n hittin’, after dark. A bit messy, somewhat primitive, but relatively harmless.
Enter the teenage girls. They want to play. Co-ed Lee Hawkers. This had new possibilities, new promise. Hmm, a thought. A thought that fulfilled an ancestral objective: have fun while you find a partner. Like the Stag Line (see ezine article: “The “Stag Line” – A Cape Breton Dance Hall Etiquette (Part of Cape Breton Social Heritage)”), Lee Hawkers seems to have evolved from an excuse for a dating game wrapped in the guise of team sports. Or was Lee Hawkers an early form of the game now called Paint Ball? Could Paint Ball’s splashes of color have replaced the spitter, or peddler, in Lee Hawkers’ culturally historic Cape Breton game? Or was this game called Lee Hawkers just a ruse for teenagers to play with girls? Surely these are questions that require further discussion.
The girls were in the game. But first the spitting and screaming had to go! So it was. Lee Hawkers became a gentler sport for the combined sexes. Catching a Hider now only involved “hitting” (lightly hitting) a Hider girl in the back while she was yelling “1-2-3 Lee Hawkers”. Since the new rules removed peddling, Hiders about to be captured would no longer run to avoid the ‘guber’. Instead, Hiders would resist being captured by the Seeker by lying on their backs to avoid getting hit. Based on Seeker-to-Hider’s size/strength ratio, attempts to turn around and “back off” could turn into a fairly lengthy fight. Sometimes the efforts of 2 or more Seekers are required to flip and hit a captured would-be Hider.
Now let your imagination fill in the blanks here. Imagine what happened when Hider was a woman, the Seeker was a man. Hider – female. Seeker – masculine. Fight. If the Seeker were a man and discovered a female Hider, he would never ask his Seeker teammates for help. This is the part where the subtle changes to the ‘unwritten’ rules took effect when the girls joined the game. The effort was always different in these female to male capture encounters. There was a tacit adjustment in the rules of the game and a certain neutralization of the masculine brute force. The male Seeker would gently wrestle the female Hider until she could turn or roll off her back, and the male Seeker could tap her back combined with the yell “1-2-3 Lee Hawkers”. The amount of time it took a strong adolescent male to perform a simple 45 to 90 degree turn of a woman to gain access to her back was amazing. It must be that inexplicable physics of women!
Just like the Lee Hawkers game, so it is with dating and so with love. The brute force in games driven by hormones is neutralized. He becomes a knight. He excites the chemistry of sexual attraction. And so goes life.
Lee Hawkers was one of those Cape Breton (or at least a Scotchtown-River Ryan) phenom of the 1960s who, perhaps like Stag Line, was a game-dating ritual wrapped up in the guise of team sports. . Or maybe it was the precursor to the current Paint Ball. Whatever it was, it sure was memorable!