Sometimes a rope frightens me.

It’s not that odd, and, no, my mother wasn’t frightened by a lariat while she was pregnant with me.

When I was a junior in high school, I took a class called phy ed or gym. It was physical education, although no one called it that. It was a class meant to provide exercise for boys who spent their off-school time doing chores like splitting wood and carrying huge cans filled with milk.

The class was held in the big gymnasium. Our school was well-equipped gymnasiumally with both a big and a small gymnasium. The gym was divided in half so that the girls’ phy-ed class could take place simultaneously with the boys’ class.

Whoever came up with that plan was a genius.

It was a gymnasium half-full of beautiful girls in ugly gym clothing. The girls could not be comfortably ignored.

The planets had aligned perfectly. We loved to watch the girls pretend that we weren’t watching them. We tried to look without looking like we were looking because the girls had a guardian to protect them from rabble like the members of my class. Each class, the girls’ gym teacher would growl, “What are you boys looking at?”

I guess no one had ever answered her question before — at least with so much enthusiasm. I’ve just about completed my detention hours.

We played games in phy ed. The games were supposed to make us physically educated. I’m not sure what the games were because eventually, they all degenerated into a brutal game of dodgeball.

Dodgeball is a game where the object is to hit your opponent with a ball in the most embarrassing and vulnerable spots possible. The ball had to be thrown like it was shot out from a cannon.

The dodgeball battles began as a vicious combat meant to impress the girls on the other side of the gym.

I discovered that it was difficult to look cool with a bloody nose, a large ball jammed in my mouth and a world-class wedgie. Women say they love men who make them laugh, but I guess that doesn’t apply to beautiful girls wearing ugly gym uniforms.

After the dodgeball game was complete, the few survivors were faced with one more daunting test before hitting the showers. The showers were another ordeal. They provided only cold water. If we wanted hot water, we went to the drinking fountain. Many a boy longed to retain the manly scent of sweat and unwashed gym clothes, but our keepers were adamant that frigid water should hit our skin. They’d check for goose bumps the size of bowling balls before letting us return to our studies.

The tribulation that we faced before freezing in the showers was the rope. The rope was a thick one that ascended from just above the gym floor up through the clouds into the ceiling of the gymnasium.

Our task was to climb that dreaded rope.

I could hear the theme to “Mission Impossible” as I readied to battle the fat twine.

I knew that there was nothing to be afraid of. I was protected by a thin red mat below the rope and an enormous knot tied in the end of the rope. The mat was red so that it wouldn’t show the blood. That was reassuring. The gigantic knot gave little comfort to a boy sliding down the rope.

There were guys like Dennis Spear, a wrestler who would sit down with his legs straight out in front of him, grasp the rope with his hands, and shimmy up the rope at breakneck speed. We hated him.

I would climb that stupid rope with visions of chalked body outlines dancing in what passed as my brain in those days. I hoped that I was the kind of guy who would bounce.

I had heard stories of inept rope climbers who had disappeared. Their parents had been told that the boys had joined the French Foreign Legion in an attempt to forget their mid-term grades. The truth was that the University of Minnesota used their bodies as cadavers to train mortuary science students.

When someone falls it’s not a good thing. The very young and the old are the ones who specialize in bad falls. When anyone in the rest of the population falls, it’s often funny. A fall from a rope snaking to the sky would be bad at any age. Nobody ever fell. We were afraid to. Who wanted to serve detention?

I suspect that if any of us had fallen, our gym teacher would have saved the day. Not by any miraculous first aid knowledge, but by those magical words that every coach and gym teacher lived by.

“Walk it off.”

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.