Page 5 - C.A.L.L. #28 - Spring 2007

The Ultimate Thrill!! By Ezra From Leaves of Twin Oaks no. 102

What do you get when you combine 6 – 10 Twin Oakers and a round plastic disc on a sunny
Saturday afternoon? Well, if it’s anytime in the past few months, you would get a lively game of
Ultimate Frisbee, the latest athletic craze to sweep the commune! Although the game is a recent
phenomenon at Twin Oaks, “Ultimate” (as it’s usually known) has been around for years as the
quintessential ‘sport for people who hate sports.’ The rules are simple enough: one team tries to
move the disk by throwing it down the field and catching it in an ‘end zone,’ and the other team
tries to stop them by intercepting or blocking the throw. You can’t run with the disk, and if a pass
is dropped or intercepted, it’s a ‘turn-
over’ and the frisbee goes the other
way. The sport has a reputation for
being low-key and free of the ‘in-your-
face’ competitiveness and machismo
that can unfortunately ruin the sporting
experience for us laid-back commune
types. Although everyone runs around
and plays hard on each point, we don’t
keep score, and the teams are reshuffled
if it seems like one team is scoring too
many points in a row. Players of all
ability levels are welcomed, and no-one
keeps track of who’s winning.

The merits of Ultimate Frisbee are well
known to many Oakers, and its absence
has been for years an oft-lamented aspect of life on the commune. For Yours Truly, giving up my
weekly pick-up game in Oakland, Ca. was one of the greatest sacrifices I made in moving here. But
in the past, Twin Oaks just hasn’t had the ‘critical mass’ of committed disk-heads necessary to start
a regular game (you need at least six people for a game, eight or ten is much better). So what
changed? Earlier this spring, a group of Oakers made a LEX trip to Dancing Rabbit, where Ultimate
Frisbee is an established part of the culture. They returned to Twin Oaks determined to make it
happen here, and their spark of inspiration fell upon fertile timber—a group of enthusiastic Oakers
who were just waiting for that initial push to “get the disk flying.” Thanks, DR!

Our primary obstacle was location, location, location—although 450 acres sounds like a lot of land,
most of our property is either wooded, hilly, or earmarked for agricultural purposes. We’ve made
the best of it in a field known as ‘Wellhouse West,’ one of our lesser-used pasture areas. You
wouldn’t quite call it manicured, with it’s gently rolling hills and slightly asymmetrical shape, but
we’ve got our herd of four-footed friends who pass through every so often to keep the grass short
(leaving behind neat little organic ‘land mines’ to enliven the game), and it’s free of poison ivy,
mud-pits, and navigable bodies of water..

For the past few months, we’ve managed to put together at least one game (and sometimes two)
nearly every week. Our first, well-publicized, outing drew over two-dozen participants, and from
that group, about 8 people have become ‘regulars,’ playing as often as they can. Other Twin Oakers
drop in once in a while, along with a rotating cast of visitors, guests, and folks from Acorn. Our
first few games were marred by injuries, causing some lasting skepticism among non-players of
our claims that it’s a “non-contact” sport. But, at the time of this writing, it’s been at least two
weeks since anyone has broken, torn, mangled, or lacerated any part of their anatomy, and over a
month since anyone has been carried semi-conscious to a hospital for stitches. And for those of us
who have escaped injury, the regular exercise has begun to pay off, with a noticeable decrease in
the amount of hacking, wheezing and dryheaving exhibited after each point!

Having soared into the hearts of many Twin Oakers, it seems that Ultimate Frisbee has ‘caught on,’
and will (hopefully) become a lasting part of Twin Oaks culture. Who knows, maybe someday we’ll
even be able to challenge Dancing Rabbit to a tournament (non-competitive, of course)!

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