There are segments of sociology, found perhaps only on the island of Cape Breton, that need to be recorded, if not studied. The “Lee Hawkers” game is one such 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 still is 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, shooting with air pistols, or biking out of town to Kilkenny Lake for a swim. But what would these typically testosterone-fueled males do for late-night fun? What antics could they find shrouded in the darkness of sultry summer nights?
The mischief emerged as the children’s 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-only sport. Two teams of adolescent boys took turns being the captured (Hiders) or the captors (Seekers). To begin, in a clearing, field, or someone’s driveway, using a tree branch or the heel of a player’s boot or sneaker, one would roughly mark a large circle (6 to 8 feet in diameter) in the sunburned soil. . This would become the jail that the Seekers would throw the captured Concealers into.
To capture or trap a hidden member of the opposing team, the seekers would begin their search in the dark wooded areas looking for any hiding. It is dark. It’s the forest Seekers could jump on a Hider … so the hunt 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 Lee Hawkers “. This marked the Hider as a “captured” or “captured”. The Seekers would take the captured Hider back to the jail (the circle) for safekeeping. The “Lee” (short for leeward) in “Lee Hawkers” was an obvious warning that you should spit, or haul, in the direction of the wind to avoid being hit with your own saliva (phew!). And so this spitting or yelling, the “1-2-3 Lee Hawkers” capture sequence, would repeat itself until all of the Hiders were captured and imprisoned. Once all the Hiders were captured, the teams would switch roles: the Seekers would become Hiders and the Hiders would become Seekers. Hide. Capture. Cell. Change. It was that the game was so simplistic. The game was more complicated and much more dynamic because incarcerated 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 releasing their imprisoned teammates. If an uncaptured Hider ran through the jail, all of the incarcerated 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 rebel escape experts from Hider before they made it through jail. By using the same 1-2-3 capture sequence (hawks, blows to the back, yelling “1-2-3 Lee Hawkers”), it would not only stop an escape attempt but would also result in a re-capture of Hider. “To jail with you!” At this point in Lee Hawkers ‘evolution, you have 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 ancient goal: have fun while you find a partner. Like 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 up in the looks of team sports. Or was Lee Hawkers a primitive form of the game now called Paint Ball? Could Paint Ball’s splashes of colors have replaced the spitter, or the peddler, in Lee Hawkers’ culturally historic Cape Breton game? Or was this game called Lee Hawkers simply a trick of the teenagers to play with the girls? These are surely 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 genders combined. Catching a Hider now only involved “hitting” (lightly hitting) a Hider girl on the back while yelling “1-2-3 Lee Hawkers”. Since the new rules eliminated street vending, the Hiders about to be captured would no longer run to avoid the ‘guber’. Instead, the Hiders would resist capture by the Seeker by lying on their back to avoid being hit. Based on the Seeker-to-Hider size / strength ratio, the attempt (s) to flip and “back rap” could turn into a fairly lengthy fight. Sometimes it takes the efforts of 2 or more Seekers to flip and hit a potential captured 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 – male. Fight. If the Seeker were a male 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 went into effect when the girls joined the game. The effort was always different in these female-to-male capturing encounters. There was a tacit adjustment in the rules of the game and a certain neutralization of male brute force. The male Seeker fought gently with the female Hider until she could turn or roll off her back, and the male Seeker could touch her back combined with the cry “1-2-3 Lee Hawkers”. It was surprising how long it took for a strong teenage man to perform a simple 45 to 90 degree turn of a woman to access her back. It must be that inexplicable physics of women!
Like Lee Hawkers’ game, so it is with dating and so is love. Brute force in hormone-driven games is neutralized. It becomes smoother. Thrill the chemistry of sexual attraction. And so life goes.
Lee Hawkers was one of those Cape Breton (or at least a Scotchtown – River Ryan) freaks of the 1960s that, perhaps like Stag Line, was a dating game ritual wrapped up in the guise of team sports. . Or maybe it was the precursor to today’s Paint Ball. Whatever it was, it sure was memorable!