Scramble

When I was in second grade my family moved to Holland. We lived in a town called Wassenaar and went to school in The Hague (Den Haag) – a big city about 20 minutes drive away.
Every morning, a bus would swing through our neighborhood and pick me and my brothers up on the corner, just around the block from where we lived.
There was a small, circular park across the road with a pair of benches and plenty of thick bushes — the kind you could crawl through or just sit inside for a while, at least as a kid. And this whole scene relaxed in the shade of an old Dutch church with a deep-voiced clock tower that kept the town moving on collective time.

The bus bounced along with kids of all ages and grades inside, jumbled loosely together. I remember riding with both my older brothers — even the oldest, six years my senior. And we’d tear out of town onto smooth Dutch highways lined with rows of flowers and no billboards, out to “Scramble.”
Scramble was a big open parking lot plopped somewhere in a deserted stretch of sandy dunes. I went there every school day for five years. And I couldn’t take you there today for ten million dollars. You know how that goes — I was 7. Someone else was at the wheel.
Classic, creaky, yellow buses would rattle into the lot, gathering together a tribe of English speaking kids from all around the greater Den Haag metro area, aged 5 to 18. And I’m not sure if there was a whistle? Or maybe my oldest brother, our school bus captain, would shout out “Go go go!” and we ran? Or was it just that the bus doors would snap open and we’d react on instinct?
Whatever the trigger, scramble’s what we’d do, racing out from our neighborhood buses into the parking lot mob, zipping around like subatomic particles sporting thin-metal Partridge Family lunch boxes, looking for the right fit, the bus that would take us on to elementary, middle, or high school.
Just a little bit of frenzy every morning and then off to second grade I’d go. Then third. Then fourth… All in that heavy-stoned old building with the grim courtyard and the unnaturally high walls. I’d always figured that old school building had been used as Nazi headquarters back during The War. But looking back really, that seems improbable.
As a parent now, I like to picture some grownups inventing Scramble back in the late ’60s or early ’70s while slashing loud and furious charts and key words onto a hard, cracked pre-War blackboard. “Yeah, well, you know, we’ll send all the buses (chalk! chalk!) with all our kids out to some spot in the dunes right around…here (slash!). And they can, I guess, they can run around and sort of…sort themselves out like this (chalk chalk!). And we’ll call it: “Scramble!” (underline!) Cuz they’ll all be…racing around. Whaddya think?”
And you know, I have to say, as high-speed child-sorting systems go, this one worked pretty well.