When you grow up in an impoverished rural area, you learn to make do with what you have.
When you’re a young boy who wants to play Army, Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers, toy firearms are your stock in trade. So when your parents can’t afford to buy them, you improvise. A discarded shock absorber, stripped of its protective sheath, bears more than a passing resemblance to a British Sten gun or a U.S. Army “grease gun.” The tip section of a solid fiberglass fishing rod becomes a grenade launcher, capable of throwing green-apple “grenades” mind-boggling distances.
The same goes for materials used to restrain prisoners of war, captured settlers, rogue Indians, nosy cops and dangerous gangsters. Zip ties didn’t exist back then. We didn’t have access to rawhide thongs, and handcuffs -- well, even if we could have afforded them, those were things only real cops used. So again, we improvised. Clotheslines got a lot of use. So did strips of cloth, bootlaces, shoelaces and extension cords.
All of those items had advantages. Clotheslines could be found in any backyard, and they could be cut to any needed length. Every household had rags that could be torn into strips, and rags were both light and portable. Everyone had boots and shoes, and laces were portable, too.
All of those items had one giant disadvantage, though; they took time to apply. The minutes we spent binding a captive inescapably but safely were minutes we became susceptible to retaliation from the captive’s confederates.
We needed something quick, something strong and something inescapable. When I was 12 years old or thereabouts, I stumbled onto what I thought was the answer -– and almost got into a heap of trouble for it.
The town we lived in lay in the heart of the state’s coal-mining territory. Most of our dads worked in the mines, and those who didn’t worked for one of the many mining-support industries or for the railroad. All of those industries used heavy equipment, and many of those pieces of equipment used electrical cable.
Scraps of old cable could be found everywhere. One day, while prowling about the neighborhood, I stumbled across a piece of forearm-thick three-phase electrical cable, probably used to power an underground mining machine.
The piece was about 18 inches long, and as I examined its flattened cross-section, I saw that each of the three embedded sub-cables was composed of 3 mm strands of aluminum wire. I pulled out my trusty pocketknife, stripped off the insulation and untwisted the spiraled strands.
To my delight, I discovered that the individual aluminum strands were light, flexible and, of course, quite strong. When I twisted one strand into a loop and wrapped it tightly around itself, I found that it could be unraveled, but not without considerable effort.
That single scrap of cable yielded more than 60 lengths of aluminum wire, which I took home and squirreled away in my meager stash of game-playing implements. Not long afterward, an opportunity to use them arose.
As fate would have it, we had decided to play a game that involved the neighborhood girls as well as the guys. I was the leader of a Shawnee raiding party whose aim was to abduct the womenfolk of a pioneer settlement and use them as bait to draw the menfolk into an ambush.
That would mean capturing and holding five girls at once:
Aileen, a girl my own age – medium height, slightly chunky, with brown eyes and long, straight reddish-brown hair;
Darling, age 9 – a little on the short side, medium build, with bright blue eyes and long, straight blonde hair;
Gina, age 9 – quite short, skinny, with brown eyes and long, straight dark brunette hair;
Sue, age 10 – tall, lean, with green eyes and long, straight medium-brown hair; and
Ann, age 8 – short, thin, with blue eyes and curly blonde hair.
I have no idea why the girls agreed to play the part of captives. Perhaps they were bored and had nothing better to do, or maybe they were interested in hanging out with a bunch of guys. Suffice to say they went willingly to the small field that would serve as the pioneers’ settlement, where they busied themselves “tending crops” and “doing laundry” while their menfolk “went away on a hunting trip.”
Accompanied by two fellow warriors, I crept to the edge of the clearing and waited for a couple of the girls to approach. When Sue and Aileen came down the edge of the field, hoeing their imaginary garden, we sprang out of the brush and seized them.
“Not a word, white woman,” I said menacingly as Aileen wriggled in my grasp. “Raise the alarm and all of you die.” I pulled her hands behind her back and twisted one end of a wire around her right wrist and the other end around her left. My friend Brandon held Sue while I did the same to her.
We hid Aileen and Sue in the brush and had Stan, my kid brother, keep them quiet while Brandon and I stalked the others. We returned shortly with Darling, Gina and Ann, all bound and ready to be spirited away to our Shawnee village.
The “village” was another clearing about 200 yards away. We marched our captives through the woods, strong-arming them whenever they offered any token resistance, and in short order arrived at our destination.
I had prepared a secure holding area for the settler-women -- five poplar saplings, each chopped off about 3 feet above the butt. Their straight, limbless trunks made perfect binding poles, and we backed the girls up to the saplings and, slipping their arms over the cut ends, eased them down so that they sat at the poplars’ bases.
Their ankles got the same treatment as their wrists. Each girl got a knotted bandanna cleave-gag and a bandanna blindfold. We left the girls in the care of our youngest and least capable warrior and slipped into the surrounding woods to set our ambush.
I don’t remember who won the game. I do, however, remember its rather unpleasant aftermath.
The girls apparently spent a good bit of the half hour or so they were bound trying to wriggle free. Had they been tied with rope, this probably wouldn’t have been much of an issue. Restrained as they were with wire, though, they all ended up with rather deep and ugly ligature marks around their wrists and ankles.
The marks took many hours to fade. The girls’ parents noticed. And since the use of wire was my brainchild, I justifiably got most of the blame. Had Jack the Ripper been caught and convicted for the murders he committed, I don’t think even he would have been grounded for as long as I was.
Not surprisingly, almost all the girls got ordered never, ever, ever to play tie-up games again. That was a pity, because three of them had been among my most frequent and willing TUG buddies.
One good thing came of the incident: Ever since then, I’ve been exceptionally careful when applying restraints. Rope gets tied with lots of turns to distribute the pressure. Handcuffs get padded with elastic wristbands. Even so, I've never since attempted to bind anyone else with wire. It would bring back too many unpleasant memories...