For those not up to speed on prehistoric hunting tools, an atlatl (pronounced at-LAT-tul) is that prong-ended, dart-throwing, sticklike gizmo that bested the hand-chucked spear before losing out to the strung bow. Harking back some 20,000 years, from the days when flint tools were high tech, the atlatl extended a hunter’s reach and added spring to his throw. With it, he could propel a feathered dart with enough force and accuracy to bring down a woolly mammoth. So the Atlatl Rattle, I decided, would be a sort of dawn-of-time party, a Paleolithic bash for 21st-century hunter-gatherers eager to trade in their Palm PDAs for a jungle drum.
I’m wary of competitive sports, having had my head reshaped with a softball perhaps once too often as a tot. But I figured it would be fun nonetheless to cavort with a bunch of wild cave dwellers–the kind with teeth in their jewelry and fur pelts girding their loins. At the very least, I imagined, someone would drag me around by my hair. Never did it occur to me, rounding the last bend on a remote dirt lane just past the Hancock town dump, that I’d discover my ideal of Stone Age America to be threatened with extinction.
I mean, in four days of jamboreeing I saw nary a beer-logged WrestleMania fan in ersatz leopard skin. Not one single cave babe with bones through her ears showed me the mastodon tattooed on her gluteus maximus, nor did any Neanderthal flirtatiously ply me with “Flintstones” burgers or “Jurassic Park” daiquiris. No, this Rattle belied its suggestive name.
Atlatlers, I soon learned, are earnest folk, full of humane values and intellectual curiosity. Back in the misty reaches of the 1980s, it seems, students of Early Man experimented with the atlatl and realized throwing it could be fun. Interest spread, and with the peculiar drive to package pleasure that Americans enjoy inflicting upon such otherwise idle pursuits, rules and standards soon evolved that have since been codified, by no less than the World Atlatl Association. Thanks to the Webby reach of worldatlatl.org, atlatling has once again become the globe-spanning sensation of yore.
“Smart jocks” may be an oxymoron, but Green Flats is thick with them. Gary Fogelman, editor of Indian-Artifact Magazine, is sitting under a tent where people are chipping away at flints, making arrowheads. The word for this, he tells me, is knapping, silent “k.” Beside him is an ex-cop strumming a guitar and Chris Pappas, one of the weekend’s hosts, who’s making knives of stone and bone to sell from his Hancock shop, Two Rivers (neo-Neolithic art?). Ray Turner, whose property we’re on, talks admiringly about some Mayan knapping he saw on PBS. Down by the river, men, women and children hurl five-foot darts (thunk, thunk) into regulation cardboard targets affixed to bales of hay at the end of a long, mowed field. The scene is a conscious homage to the skills, simplicity and ecological modesty of Early Man.
Granted, they are celebrating a somewhat sanitized version of him. No one is trying to revive prognostication by entrails, I notice, not to mention bringing back the menstrual hut. That women are encouraged to compete at all, let alone on reasonable terms, is clearly historically fantastical. “Ooga booga,” atlatlists will murmur now and again, a knowing dig at about how cartoonish–and deeply felt–the whole notion of “primitive” can be. Of all the cultish little sports in a nation that grows them like mushrooms, I have to admit that this one has sprouted with more self-awareness and good sense than I would have imagined possible.
At least it’s so at the Rattle. Turner is pleased with the turnout of roughly 100. “People who acclimate to this sort of thing tend to have character,” he says. Having studied philosophy and civil engineering before returning home to found a gourmet smoked-food business, Delaware Delicacies, Turner himself clearly falls into this category. It’s no small triumph for him and Pappas that their party’s something like a wedding cake upon which New Age Greens, the National Rifle Association, Archeology U. and Wonder Woman all have figurines. Whatever the Rattle may refuse me in astounding American vulgarity, it can trump with its offering of unlikely but palpable social harmonies.
From every walk of life, I’m seeing, we Americans seem to long to return to something ancient, wild, basic. Hollywood entertainment grows ever more savage; our government seems bent on restoring brute force to the pre-eminence it enjoyed before the invention of diplomacy. Against such juggernauts the atlatl is but a pathetic twig. But if it can conjure up a notion of family fun neither asinine nor cruel, even if it puts Hulk Hogan on the endangered-species list for an entire weekend, then call me a sentimental old hippie. But I want one.
