Things are greening up. How blessed to be immersed in Indiana’s best natural theater for the changing of the seasons.

Just look at that Indiana map when you are watching the weather report on TV. Any trouble locating Brown County? No, of course not. It’s the greenest little square on the screen.

Juncos departing, sandhill cranes noisily headed north, bluebirds checking out the housing possibilities, and of course daffodils busting out all over. A great time.

Driving into town on Old 46 or new 46 there’s another great sign of spring: middle schoolers and high schoolers in their shorts and sweats making laps around the local track.

Track, what a wonderful sport. So basic. You don’t have to know how to dribble behind your back, or hit a curveball, or run over a 250-pound defensive lineman. It’s just who can run the fastest, who can jump the farthest or highest, or who can throw that flat disc or steel ball the farthest.

Seeing these exquisite pristine all-weather tracks with their perfect lines and markings often sends my mind back to my high school days and coaching days and to a time when the track was not covered with a mix of asphalt and shredded rubber tires but cinders. Crunchy, dirty, dusty, abrasive, blood inducing cinders!

Putting on a track meet in those days was pretty much a day-long project. For one thing the track had to be lined. Not completely around the track like you see today but the front strait where the dashes would be contested. That meant for us on our six-lane track five lines of 220 yards each (later of course 200 meters when the metric system further complicated things).

Lines did not always come out perfectly straight. More than once I heard a parent remark, “Was he drunk?!”

And of course with much of the track not having lane markings there were occasional collisions with little kids sprawling into the lethal cinders.

At the middle school we did not have bleachers or of course a press box so we had to get a staff member to volunteer their pickup truck so the announcer could sit at a table in the back with his bull horn to make event announcements and report results all the while trying to keep the little result papers from blowing all over the place.

When costly all-weather tracks came into vogue the corporation was not about to provide our little middle school with one. Cinder track surfaces however did have to have their surfaces replenished with new cinders every few years.

It was about this time that a transition was being made at the power companies and due to environmental concerns new burning processes were changing the consistency of the cinders. Loads of cinders now contained far more dust than ever before.

New problems developed.

With a building that was not air-conditioned spring temperatures meant open windows and the complaints began. By the end of each day teachers found their desks covered with a gray gritty film.

One blustery track meet day presented a scene reminiscent of old war movies. Timers standing at the finish line of the 100 or 200 waited for the sound of the starter’s pistol (they could not see the pistol smoke) and there emerging from the black cloud of cinder dust were the sprinters appearing like a scene from Braveheart.

Finally, at last, the participants and parents headed for home and their showers to scrub off the remnants of our disintegrating track.

It was pretty much the end of an era. But perhaps on a positive note it was also an end to those bloody cinder encrusted kneecaps.

Jim Watkins is a Brown County resident who was a public school teacher for 42 years and has special interest in history. He is also a member of the Brown County Historical Society. He can be reached at [email protected].