This was a personal narrative for my college creative writing course. I wanted to describe the several nights my cousins, brothers, and I played an intense game of “Underground Church” in my grandma’s yard in Harvey, North Dakota.

Lights in the dark void hovered five feet off the ground, rotating in long, haphazard arcs like small, drunken lighthouses that sliced the night as a sharp blade. One of the lights haunted an old shed, the holder of the flashlight tromping around and pivoting his weight, as if he had nothing better to do than to stand alone in the sea of darkness.

Our soft thuds of sneakered feet were too quiet to alert our hunters. We weaved in and out of trees, our powers of invisibility only compromised when we broke into an occasional pool of house lights. Dark paths, hidden holes, and dangerous strung clotheslines were determined to slow us down, yet we pushed on in a subdued rush.

As my cousins and I tore blindly through the darkness, we knew we were in huge
trouble—bigger than we ever had been before. What awaited if the searchlights caught us in its glaring eye was only up to the imagination: imprisonment, insults, possibly torture.

There were maybe five of us huddled together, striding through the yard like a band of Navy SEAL wannabes. Micah, the oldest cousin by several years, was nowhere to be seen, swallowed up in the darkness—possibly already captured. Without him leading, it was up to Esther and me to take control of the young clan.

A beam of a flashlight flared like the strike of a match, flickering in the corner of our eyes and threatening to reveal us. I shoved someone running in front of me as I felt the light spin over our heads and pass. I held my breath, expecting to hear voices raise an alarm, but the silence remained strong.

“Move, move, move!” I heard myself chanting in a strained hiss. Esther took the lead and herded the younger cousins forward, melting into the night.

I remained in the back of the pack with Esther’s younger sister Anna as we approached an abandoned school bus. If we could just duck behind it, we would maintain momentary cover and avoid the open yard, as if we planned to come up for air from a dark pool before diving down again. But then the flashlight flared a second time, now bobbing in our general direction.

“Anna!” I said, changing my direction and heading toward the bus instead of around it. “They’re coming! Dive, dive.”

Anna and I dove to the ground like professional stuntmen, rolling under the bus and flattening ourselves against the prickling grass beneath it. Flashlights loomed from the other side of the large black tire by my head, and coarse dirt ground into my cheek. Despite the warm night, I wrapped my dark jacket around my body until I was a burrito—a burrito with a pounding heart and gasping lungs. The buzz of cicadas and the blood rushing in my ears were the only sounds for a moment, the country air wafting over my nostrils—pure, empty, calm.

I heard footsteps and closed my eyes, willing our hunters to neglect the underside of the school bus. My skin was so pale and my eyes so white, that I knew I would light up like a candle if the flashlight caught me in its beam. For a brief moment, I closed my eyes, pretending I could meld into the grass and disappear from view. I tried to calm my breathing and relax my muscles to mimic nature’s quelling stillness, hoping my attempt at “inner peace” would be enough to convince my hunters that I was just a black rock.

Finally, the footsteps moved on, and I let out a sigh. I looked to Anna, her face peering out from the frame of her bushy brown hair, and the two of us rolled out of the other end of the bus and stood. With one wild look around to check for safety, we tore off into the night, making a beeline for the meeting place where we hoped we would find the rest of our cousins.

If I were to represent the historic Harvey, North Dakota family reunion with a single image, I wouldn’t use one of the twenty photographs we took on Uncle Paul’s porch in the chilling rain. The ones that took an hour to coordinate, where Michael coughed, Jack cried, Micah grimaced as he ignored his mother’s request to “take off that hat,” and I held my breath, hoping David wouldn’t accidentally shove me off the step. All forty-one family members would senselessly tumble down like a waterfall of dominoes if someone so much as sneezed.

Nor would I use the impressive photograph Aunt Cheryl took of us twelve girls camping out in the unnaturally large, triple-decker bunkbed in the Camp Victory cabin behind the church building.

I wouldn’t even use the classic cousin photos of all twenty-four of us cousins, adoptees, and future “cousin-in-law” lined up by age—or the one where we attempted to reenact an old photo of all of us in a poorly-constructed human pyramid. I wouldn’t use the one of Caleb and Connor falling off the spinning merry-go-round, or the one of Micah hooking the power line with his fishing rod.

The photo that I think of when remembering the Harvey trip isn’t even a very good one. We’re smashed haphazardly in a cluttered school bus at one o’clock in the morning. The camera flash blinds half of us. Esther’s eyes are closed, and Tia’s eyes are open too big. My forehead closely resembles a big, white, full moon with my sweaty hair tugged back in a hopeless ponytail. Anna is barely visible behind a great dusty cardboard box, and Ben is the only boy cousin in sight, almost lost in the shadows beyond the range of the flash.

Unfortunately Connor’s camera couldn’t capture every cousin stuffed inside the bus, but his poor image was enough to immortalize the memory of the Underground Church game—my highlight of the biggest Dyck family reunion in history.

For the entire day leading up to the game, we cousins strategized extensively, planning custom rules and special features. We decided on a few basics: three cousins would be the secret police, and the rest would be Christians trying to organize an underground church meeting. One cop would secretly be sympathetic to the church, however, and would give us the location of the meeting place as we played. Christians could be captured and rescued over and over until either they were all assembled in the makeshift church, or until they were all captured.

As Anna and I tried to make our way to the meeting place that night (a shadowy tree line on the edge of my uncle’s church parking lot), we heard a snap of a twig from behind. We froze, falling to our knees in an effort to hide. Looking over my shoulder, I saw a hulking bear of a man rising out of the tall grass and weeds, his massive shadow pooling and billowing into the form of our Uncle Brian.

“You two,” he whispered, beckoning us toward him. “Follow me. I’ve made a path we can use.” We jumped up and slipped through the grass, crawling along behind our uncle as the foliage brushed our shoulders. With Brian being a real-life police officer from the middle of Chicago, I couldn’t help wondering if this game was like an enjoyable exercise for him as he paved his way through the underbrush, strategizing and plotting. Anna and I followed him dutifully, while I ignored the idea of tics and spiders that were probably nesting in my waistline. The stakes were just too high at the moment.

We followed our uncle along the circumference of the large yard, dropping into a pattern of crawling forward then flattening to the ground as lights played over the area: crawl, flatten. Crawl, flatten. The secret grass trail ejected us only a few hundred feet from our goal of the shady tree line, and we closed the risky distance in a run, plunging through the pool of darkness.

As we settled in the darkest pars of the shadows, Uncle Brian nestled into the grass and shrubs. He still reminded me of a great black bear as I practically watched the tall grass hug his burly frame and enclose him in an indistinct blackness. As we waited, watching the searchlights and hoping the others weren’t captured, I caught sight of a white figure make a dash across the lit parking lot. His lanky body dodged around parked cars and flattened against truck beds, bare muscular arms shining under the streetlights in the figure’s own sweat. Had to be Micah.

Our oldest playing cousin took only a moment to scan the tree line and fix his eyes on our dark shapes. He skidded to the grass beside me as I took in his appearance. Since I had seen him last, Micah had given up the idea of sweating in his T-shirt. Instead, he’d taken it off and tied it around his head, leaving only a drenched undershirt on his back. Because the shirt was white, I guessed the costume change was more of a convenience issue than a fashion statement—it was definitely not an attempt to blend in with the dark.

“So we’re meeting here, then?” he asked us, his thick Tennessee accent sharp even in a whisper. “I was wondering where ya’ll were, since the parking lot’s so bright.”

“Yeah, we thought it was safer. Once everyone is here, then we’ll run to the church,” I said, remembering it was my brother Connor who had chosen the underground church to be in the center of the parking lot—the brightest place within half a mile. It wasn’t his fault, though, because his communist comrades kept discovering all of his other locations—the junkyard, the side of the garage, the wood pile—and he was running out of options. We had, after all, been playing this for several long hours.

“Okay, that’s smart,” said Micah. “Now that I know where ya’ll are, I’ve got some more Christians that I’m going to bring over here. I’ll be back.”

And then he was gone. Like a ninja, he leapt from the ground and tore off across the lot and back into the inky shadows. From where I lay in my puddle of sweat and grass, I watched the pickup truck parked in front of the garage on the far side of the yard. Micah’s shadow moved around it for a moment before the scene changed. At once, half a dozen silent, black shapes simmered into view from the bed of the truck and slowly boiled over the edges, little bodies crawling over the lip of the truck like black spiders. Micah herded them along as they raced back over the lit parking lot, skidding to a stop in the shadows. Uncle Brian did a quick count, hissing out our names to see if we were all there—Daniel, Jared, Anna, Micah, Jenneth, Alyssa, Ben, Cynthia…—but came up short. With eleven Christians to keep track of, it would sometimes take two hours to finish a single round of the game.

We’d been so close to winning, too, but David—our KGB cousin who’d rather sound like Colonel Klink from Hogan’s Heroes than a Russian—found us on his patrol of the perimeter. He was by far the best—and most obnoxious—Nazi to ever play with us, because often when he discovered our hiding places, he’d shine his strobing flashlight into our eyes and smile with a wide boyish grin, asking us “Vaaat are you dewwwing ‘ere?” in his chilling mimic of Klink.

When we switched up the roles, Uncle Brian got to play cop. He took the job almost religiously. Leave it to a strategist who runs as fast as Tom Cruise to pick the worst place for the prison to be located: right in the middle of the parking lot under a bright streetlight. And to make it realistic? Torture. By mosquitoes. Not a single one of us could make it past Brian and his locomotive piston arms when he could see us coming from five-hundred yards. The only thing he regretted was not having his police flashlight, with which he claimed he would be “able to see through time.” We were very thankful he only had an iPhone flashlight, because his cop skills struck a bit of very real terror in our hearts.

With forty-one of us cousins, uncles, aunts, and Grandma Dyck at the reunion, I knew we were about as assorted as a box of Lindt chocolates: James, the oldest and soon to be married, his hand distorted after a factory accident; Micah, the Tennessee hick with a snapback always on his head and a hopelessly cracked iPhone in his pocket; Kelly, the Texan who has an obsession with smuggling throwing knives into Maranatha Baptist College; Esther and Anna, the two Canadians; Alyssa, the most mature thirteen-year-old girl I’ve ever had the privilege to know—the list went on, all of us vastly different, but all of us able to come together for a single week in our lives to spend quality family time together—even if that meant running around like fugitives in the night, or flying off old-fashioned merry-go-rounds, or building sand castles on the lakeshore, or accidentally hooking power lines with our fishing hooks.

While playing the game, I knew we were far from comfortable burrowing into bushes as David stomped by shouting “Achtung!” in his German accent, but the tics, scrapes, and dirt-coated bodies never mattered. We were together. Finally. After years and years of attempted reunions, the Dyck family was finally tramping around the little town of Harvey as one big unit, all our differences irrelevant for one blissful week.

I’m not sure a reunion like Harvey will ever happen again, but even if it doesn’t, I’ll still fondly remember the family as Christian fugitives, dashing through the dark, country night.