Fall is in the air, and whenever I think about fall, I think about the first job I had as a kid, which was collecting chestnuts.  It wasn’t so much a formal “job” as it was an unpaid obligation that I took more seriously than I did any other obligation in my life during the four or five weeks a year when chestnuts were in season.  The chestnut collecting took place in the front yard of a big yellow house  my street under the direction of Kevin, a kid in my neighborhood who through a mix of actual strength, and perceived ass-kicking ability, had established a certain power over me and some others in the neighborhood which allowed him to make us engage in a colossal waste of time and energy on par with most federal programs.

Each day, after returning from school, I rode my bike down to the yellow house and set up shop in the yard, gathering chestnuts, carefully removing their shells, and then placing them in a 20 gallon garbage can that Kevin had dragged from his house to the work site along with a fake lever-action .22.  When we had exhausted the supply of “drops” from the prior night, we began throwing rocks and other objects into the tree at Kevin’s direction in order speed up the process and because it was easier to get away with throwing sticks and rocks into the road and at cars if there was reason for throwing things up into the air next to the road, even if the reason was that your 8 year-old boss from your pretend job told you to do it to knock chestnuts out of a tree that was on someone else’s private property.

In general we worked uncomfortably hard given that we were working for no apparent reason and the only brakes that were permitted were the result of occasional impromptu fights caused when Jeff, another worker-kind-of-against-his-will, would throw a buckeye at either myself or another worker and hit them in the eye, which most of the people present would agree was a “cheap shot” but not so much of a cheap shot that they wanted to stand up to Jeff about it. 

Once we filled the rolling 20-gallon garbage can, we began collecting our supply in paper route bags and any other containers we could find and trekking them to Kevin’s garage and depositing them in another garbage can that did not roll where it was promised that the nuts would remain safe until we determined how they would be properly divided.

According to Kevin, chestnuts had three potential uses ranging from culinary, to hunting aid, to a means of self-defense.  Kevin’s belief was that chestnuts were good to eat or that they at least tasted like salt.  He had never tried any, but his mother told him that in some places, people cooked them.  Even though none of us had ever tried a single chestnut, we made a collective decision that we would like to spend countless hours gathering tens of thousands of chestnuts on the off chance that we tried and liked them. 

The second use was as a projectile for hand or slingshot delivery.   Though it never came to pass, our group would have been prepared to engage in an Iraqnam-length battle should a chestnut-based conflict have arisen, but mostly we just threw them at each other in various “cheap shots” discussed above until somebody got mad enough to start an actual fight.  

The last reason, and the one about which we all felt the most conviction, was their use as bait for white tailed deer.  According to a friend of Kevin’s father, buckeyes were more attractive to deer than apples, which we debated for hours and never resolved.  Given that none of us aside from Kevin’s father had any plans to kill a deer, and that the odds were not great that his father was going to drag 400 pounds of chestnuts deep into the woods to create a deer magnet, this was also not a great reason to kill ourselves in pursuit of chestnut accumulation but for some reason, mostly the fact that we were all afraid of Kevin, we kept gathering.

Eventually, the weather turned crappy and the chestnuts all fell and everyone forgot about the bounty in Kevin’s garage.  I imagine they all ended up in the trash, or being dumped into the woods near his house after they all rotted.  I suppose, however, there’s a chance they were carefully preserved and then used to make years of salty snacks, and to kill hundreds of deer, in which case, I’m inclined to ask for my cut,  unless he doesn’t want to give it to me, in which case I’ll keep my mouth shut as I’m still more or less afraid he’ll kick my ass.