Savage Park : A Meditation on Play, Space, and Risk for Americans Who Are Nervous, Distracted, and Afraid to Die (9780544303294)

by Fusselman, Amy

  | 7 |

  One of several places where many of us do acknowledge that we are experiencing space is at a restaurant. At restaurants, we eat, drink, and take in the space or, more specifically, a quality of the space, which we call its atmosphere.

  The kind of atmosphere one might experience at a restaurant and how, exactly, one goes about feeling it are not subjects that are generally discussed at length in polite company or studied in depth in high school. Instead, each of us approaches a restaurant with expectations and attitudes accumulated through a convoluted personal osmosis that varies wildly according to one’s age, place, and income.

  When you enter a restaurant or café, you usually assume the place will be something along the lines of warm, clean, and nice—words one might also use to describe Mommy—and this is not incidental, it seems to me, because there are so few man-made places in the public landscape where people acknowledge that space exists to the extent that they describe it as having an atmosphere at all, so it seems significant that the one place where most of us anticipate feeling a space is also a place where we expect to be fed.

  That we should conflate eating with experiencing space makes sense, however, considering that one of a human’s first and most enduring experiences of being here is likely being fed at the breast of his or her mother. In your first days, you are fed by, warmed by, sheltered by, and comforted by a who, a who that is actually, in these earliest moments, less of a who and more of a where.

  If you’re going to be brave enough—and it generally does take some courage—to acknowledge the existence of, and experience your relationship with, space, it is logical that you would want to do that in a place that you designate to be the space equivalent of a mom, a place where you will be warm, secure, and fed.

  There is nothing wrong with this construct, of course; bon appétit. The only reason I point it out at all is simply that it underscores all the places where this construct does not exist; that is, where an atmosphere is not expected or experienced, which is to say, just about everywhere that isn’t a restaurant, hotel lobby, bar, airport lounge, or similar public space.

  Yet, of course, atmosphere does exist. It is a quality of space that is present everywhere, all the time, and experiencing it is a free and ongoing privilege of being human and being alive. One does not need to enter a restaurant—one certainly does not need to spend money—to have access to it.

  It’s as if we already feel that arriving here, in this time/place, is more or less like being thrown in the pool. We can’t, we think, spend too much time dwelling on what the water is like. Instead, our approach is more along the lines of Hurry up, already! Swim!

  | 8 |

  A day or two after the aquarium jaunt, Yelena took us to a playground. The playgrounds are fantastic in Tokyo, she kept telling us.

  The first playground she wanted to introduce us to was one she and Chuck called the Junk Playground.

  As guests in her house—our stuff was strewn across her compact living room, where the four of us were sleeping on two bright-red-and-yellow foldout couches that we dutifully returned to their upright positions each morning—we respectfully submitted to whatever itinerary she had for us.

  Frank and I gathered our backpacks and our children and followed Yelena and her children to the subway, slowly getting our bearings around the loop of the Yamanote line. We negotiated the subway stairs, the subway elevator, the departure platform, the train itself, the arrival platform, more stairs, the sidewalk, the sidewalk some more, the corner with the traffic lights, and finally, at last, we opened the playground gate, where we promptly stopped in our slow, heavy mastodon-family tracks.

  To our right was an old steam engine. To our left was a decommissioned bulldozer. I could see a fire truck and a backhoe in the distance; all were hugely, incontestably, still.

  The boys took off running.

  Frank and I followed, pushing Mick’s suddenly very fragile-seeming travel stroller through what amounted to a heavy-machinery graveyard.

  The Junk Playground, or Haginaka Park, as it is known, is a lovely place in the Ota Ward of Tokyo. The machines sitting there are dead, yes, but they still reverberate with traces of their former force: a yellow steamroller sitting near the playground entrance, its cab empty above its motionless barrel, has all the mysterious beauty of the Sphinx.

  I relaxed on a bench with Frank and Yelena and ate delicious sushi from a convenience store as my boys scampered gleefully over objects that had always been off-limits to them.

  King rolling tires into the rowboat, Haginaka ParkFRANK L. SNIDER

  Eventually, all four boys became very engaged with two boats: one large rowboat and one fishing boat, both partially submerged in concrete. Someone had had the brilliant idea of surrounding the boats with tires. The boys spent a solid ninety minutes—it would have been longer if we had allowed it—negotiating where and how to roll as many tires as possible into the boats. It was an urgent task, and the graveyard rang with their yelled commands to one another.

  Sitting there, drinking coffee—my normally fairly modest coffee consumption jumped about threefold during this trip—I thought how hungry my boys always seemed in their play for moments when their actions could take on real gravity, and how seldom in my parenting of them I took this hunger into consideration. It was as if the things they hungered for were so impossible to satisfy—no, we can’t have an airliner for lunch today—that I just had to dismiss their desires completely.

  And suddenly I had an image of myself as a fourth-grader on a sunny Saturday afternoon sitting at my dad’s desk, hunkered over his manual typewriter, spending hours writing my last will and testament, divvying up my stuffed animals and skating trophies among my family and friends. I must have produced, as an elementary-schooler, at least ten of these wills. I also remembered that my parents cast a rather bemused eye on this project, which annoyed me immensely: I was serious. I was going to die, and I knew it, and I was preparing for it as best I could.

  I would have loved for someone to speak to me then, earnestly and without condescension, about death, and what it was, and what we did about it while we were alive. But that was impossible. So I consoled myself with my will-writing activity, and there was nothing funny about it, and the fact that my parents thought I was being cute in these efforts only solidified my disdain for what they considered productive uses of my time.

  I emerged from this memory still feeling indignant and took stock of my current situation: far from home, out of my comfort zone, without privacy or refuge, exhausted, grumpy, and uncomfortably beholden to my kinda crazy friend.

  I stroked the arm of my foul-weather coat and watched as the boys worked to feed the boat against the clock.

  I must have come here for something, I told myself.

  | 9 |

  Last winter I was waiting for the uptown train at Thirty-Fourth Street. There were two trains that could arrive, the C and the E. I wanted the C, but if the E came, which was the more likely event, I would take it.

  The C came after all. I got on it.

  I sat there, feeling good, my music on. I had new earbuds: two blue Lego bricks.

  I got off at Seventy-Second, which lets you out on Central Park West in front of the Dakota. I love that building. I love the black iron railing as you exit the subway, with the Poseidons and serpents swirling; they’re like old men friends walking their dogs.

  I walked down Seventy-Second toward Columbus and took the bricks out of my ears.

  Windy.

  Two young women ran by me. One had her mitten over her mouth. She was shrieking something to her friend in a foreign language.

  I heard a weird sound that I thought was perhaps mechanical.

  Windy. Pushing ahead.

  I kept going and recognized the sound as a human moan.

  I could see, down Seventy-Second, that traffic had been blocked off at Columbus. A crowd had formed in the street, in the shape of an hourglass: the top and bottom of the hourglass we
re the sidewalks on either side, and the tiny canal was in the middle of the street, where the man who was the source of the sound was lying on his side next to his twisted bike, clutching his knee.

  I walked into the configuration far enough that I was a grain of sand halfway down one side of the glass.

  A young man in his twenties was alternating between kneeling next to the injured man, patting him gently, and standing up and whirling around in a long brown coat like a Wild West gunman, only instead of shooting at us, he was looking beseechingly into each person’s grain-of-sand-in-an-hourglass face.

  After a few whirls back and forth, he finally called out, “Is anyone here a doctor?”

  It was a simple yes-or-no question, but it was impossible to answer. It was impossible to think straight with that sound, that excruciatingly painful human sound, which was so small and big simultaneously that it changed the landscape: it made all the gorgeous old buildings on that block—the Dakota, the Majestic, the Franconia, the Hotel Olcott, the Bancroft, the Oliver Cromwell—change so that they were no longer buildings—that is, human-made structures, ornately decorated by humans outside for humans inside. Instead, they were buildings that did not care about humans, inside or out. They were stones, monolithic and looming, and we who were standing on the street were no longer on the street; we were knee-deep in a cold river flowing at the bottom of a stone canyon. And the painful sound was there, and we were there, and we could not contain the sound, and we could not change it, we just, all of us, stood there, still, with the sound rushing up and around, past us, higher, making the old, solemn stones stand up and then hunch over like perplexed new fathers bending down to look in the crib.

  I am not a doctor. I started running down the block, looking for one.

  I could see my breath. I ran past the door of the slick pediatric ophthalmologist I had taken both my sons to, to find out that their eyes were fine. I ran past the door of the not-slick adult ophthalmologist I had been to a month before, for the first time ever, to find out that I finally needed reading glasses.

  I kept going. I was almost at the subway, with the park in front of me.

  I turned around and ran back to the adult ophthalmologist.

  The doctor was sitting at the receptionist’s desk fiddling on the computer as I burst in the door.

  “There’s a guy hurt in the street,” I said. “Can you help?”

  “Did someone call 911?” he asked quickly.

  “Yes,” I said, thinking, I bet.

  He came out with me without stopping to put his coat on. Once we were in the cold, he turned to me, his eyes widening: “I hear him,” he said.

  We ran into the crowd. I took him into the hourglass, then stopped, as before, a few feet before hitting the center; he walked into the center alone. I watched as he stood over the injured man. He stood over him with his legs apart and his hands on his hips. He was a trim man, with his shirt tucked in and his tie fluttering. He was a good ophthalmologist, I thought, somewhat insanely.

  I saw him tell the Wild West un-gunman that he was a doctor. The guy looked grateful and stepped aside.

  The sound had continued all this time, not really changing too much in pitch or intensity, just an unfathomable human noise filling up the block like the silence of a cathedral. People were behaving as they would in a cathedral’s huge space: milling around, heads down, chewing gum, crushing tissues, closing their eyes. Not ecstatic to be there, perhaps, but unable to leave just yet.

  About a minute later the ambulance pulled up, and the medics came out. My doctor gestured to the moaning man, and one medic trudged back to the ambulance and got the gurney.

  I turned and walked to the sidewalk as the medics hoisted the man onto the gurney and pushed him toward, and then into, the truck.

  When I turned back, about ten paces later, I saw my ophthalmologist walking toward me.

  “Too bad,” he said. “Broken leg.”

  We talked about my eyes for a minute, and then he left.

  The people who formed the hourglass broke up.

  I sat on a stoop and collected myself as Seventy-Second returned to its natural state.

  A few minutes later I went on my way, twisting the tiny blue bricks back into my ears.

  | 10 |

  These two very commonly held perspectives of space—that it does not exist, or that it exists as a safe, comforting place with an atmosphere—are almost diametrically opposed. They are like the directions north and south.

  The second pair of commonly held perspectives, or east and west, are as follows: first, that space is annoyingly in the way; second, that space is a terrifying black hole into which we will one day disappear.

  The idea that space is in the way hardly needs elucidating. Every day, people move through space while experiencing it as an obstacle. As a resident of New York City, I can’t count the conversations I have had about the merits of avoiding any type of commute for any reason at all across the length or breadth of the city.

  This is not specific to New York, of course. Part of being here in space, with a body, is adjusting to this experience of having to take time—sometimes a lot of time—to make one’s way through space.

  Finally, space is the place into which we are born; it is where we grow old, have accidents, and die. This is why space is also fundamentally terrifying. We must have a respectful relationship with it—we must learn the crucial principles of how our bodies and space relate—or we will not survive long.

  All four of these cardinal perspectives—that space does not exist; that it exists as a safe and nurturing atmosphere; that it is frustratingly in the way; that it is a hole into which we will one day disappear—are all driven, ultimately, by our fear and denial of this fundamental, sacred relationship to space.

  It should not be surprising, then, that it is largely fear and denial of space that we communicate to our children.

  2

  Above and Below

  | 1 |

  I was recently fortunate enough to take a two-day class with Philippe Petit, the virtuoso wirewalker who, on the morning of August 7, 1974, when he was merely twenty-four years old, famously and illegally rigged a wire between the roofs of the World Trade Center towers and then walked back and forth across it eight times.

  I was not at the class to learn about wirewalking, although that was what the class was about. I was there to learn about space from someone who clearly has a genius’s understanding of it.

  I did not learn exactly what I came for. I learned that wirewalking is difficult.

  I stumbled through class as best I could, trying to be game, as PP, as I called him in my head, imparted to us various details of the wirewalker’s art and asked us to trek several times across the elevated wire—thankfully, only seven feet up—in the dance studio in Brooklyn where the class was taking place.

  We did one exercise, however, that made my ears perk up.

  In it, PP asked each of us to take a prop—if we were, say, jugglers, this would be a ball or club—and formulate a move that would serve as a way of greeting it, of grounding oneself with it, and of waking it up.

  As a writer, I suppose that my true prop would have been my computer, but I did not have the balls to try to work my computer into class, or to mention my art at all in proximity to such a master; I chose one of the white juggling balls he offered without comment.

  As we stood there with our props, he reminded us that these greetings we were creating could be very simple.

  As I was figuring out how to say hello to my ball in a meaningful way, I was smiling, and I thought: This does not seem stupid to me. Why?

  I thought of my Italian design heroes, in particular the men and women who have designed for Alessi, and how they understand that objects have spirits and that it is worth the time and energy to create, for instance, a sugar pourer that is shaped like a standing, smiling, neon-colored human breast.

  These designers understand the significance of greeting the object. More import
ant, they realize that most of us fail to do this—not out of laziness but out of a lack of consciousness—and they work to change this situation by creating objects that overtly and unmistakably greet us. This, to my mind, is not frivolous; all the friendly, huggable saltshakers and paper-towel holders in the Italian kitchen store are nothing less than heroic attempts to change human perspective. This is art in the same league as painting and poetry.

  Every time you hold the sugar pourer over the hot coffee and calibrate the amount of sugar you want in the cup, you and the sugar pourer are one. This is part of what PP knew and demonstrated when he stepped onto the wire with his life attached to a balancing pole—a stick—a quarter of a mile above downtown Manhattan one summer morning in the 1970s.

  Fiddling with my ball, trying to solve the problem of the exercise, I thought of my daughter, who was almost two at that point and who said hello—a squealing, delighted “Hi!”—to all things animate and inanimate; who greeted with equal and unmitigated pleasure live puppies, stuffed puppies, and dog poop on the sidewalk.

  Why do we ever stop saying “Hi!” to everything? How is the understanding that the entire world is worthy of conscious consideration ever lost?

  In class, we took turns demonstrating our moves.

  I nervously popped my ball lightly from one hand to the other, an almost nothing gesture.

  PP nodded approvingly.