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

by Fusselman, Amy

  | 2 |

  Several months ago, I was looking online for a bathtub ring to put my baby daughter in. I had given away our old one. The ring is a pretty standard baby object, I thought, with a simple design. The baby sits on a plastic disk, which adheres to the floor of the bathtub with suction cups. Three columns, one in between the baby’s legs, arise from the disk and support a doughnut-shaped piece of plastic that encircles the baby’s torso under her armpits. The apparatus basically operates like scaffolding to help wobbly infants sit upright while they are bathed in the tub.

  I could not find this product for sale; instead, I found a new version of it. It was the same bath ring by the same maker, only it had been “improved” with a huge appendage: a long, thick plastic arm that affixed the doughnut top of the bath ring to the lip of the bathtub. The arm was strangely anthropomorphic. Why did the manufacturers put this giant prosthetic arm on my bath ring? I wondered.

  In my Google search for baby bath ring, I found a document that explained it. It was entitled “Consumers Union Comments to Consumer Product Safety Commission on Staff Briefing Package Recommendations on Baby Bath Seats.” The Consumers Union (CU), the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, issued the comments “in response to the Consumer Federation of America’s July 2000 petition to ban baby bath seats, a petition that argued that they pose an unreasonable risk of death and injury to children.” Curious about this risk, I read the paper, which included their baby-product guide’s warning to parents not to buy the very bathtub seat I was searching for.

  A typical scenario: A baby is left playing in the seat when someone comes to the front door or the telephone rings. The mother believes the seat will protect her baby. She walks away and is gone briefly. The baby reaches over to retrieve a toy or tries to stand up. The suction on the bottom pops loose. The baby falls forward or slips. In a few minutes, the mother returns to find her baby face-down in the tub. But by then, it’s too late.

  I was surprised. The problem with the above scenario, to my mind, was not the bath seat. It was the mother’s belief that the seat would “protect her baby” while she was gone. I kept reading, looking for whatever else might be wrong with the seat. Finally, I was stopped short by the following concluding sentence:

  “While this CU Guide warns parents never to leave a child alone, it also acknowledges reality: a parent can become distracted, and a child should not have to pay with her or his life as a result.”

  This sentence gave me pause. If parents are distracted while bathing infants in the bathtub, it is because they do not understand the risk of putting a tiny child who can’t yet sit up in water. A mature and respectful relationship with water—let alone with baby—includes this understanding.

  What kind of reality is this, where a parent should be protected from having to face the fact that water is precious and perilous, where she should be encouraged to entrust her baby’s life—this would be funny if it weren’t so sad—to a bath seat? Who is the child here? And what is being protected? It is not, ultimately, the baby. It is the parent’s “right” to become distracted.

  It is indeed work to give a tiny baby a bath, to be present with her in the phase when she can’t sit up, when the soap is slippery, when the water can easily scald her. It is work that requires attention, that requires Be Here Now–ness because of that pesky death problem again.

  Be Here Now was a mantra of the 1960s; these days, I think we might, realistically, need to simplify the goal a bit: Be Here. And with that goal, we may finally begin to ask ourselves the question: Where are we?

  | 3 |

  Daily, inevitably, we submitted to Yelena’s increasingly ambitious itinerary for us. She waited about a week—Mick and I were not getting up at three in the morning anymore; we were sleeping until maybe five—before she took us to the place that I believe had been her goal from the beginning. She wouldn’t tell us anything about it except that it was a playground; she hoped we liked it; not many foreigners knew about it; and she and Chuck had a nickname for it: Savage Park.

  Carrying our snacks, water bottles, wipes, money, cameras, phones, clothes, comic books, and toys, Frank and I and the boys dutifully waddled behind her to the train.

  Just as the Diana Ross Playground is located in the larger Central Park, Savage Park, aka Hanegi Playpark, is located in a larger park called Hanegi Koen. It took us a while to get to Savage Park because we had to walk past several other playgrounds within Hanegi Koen, and given that half our ranks were age five or less, we could not easily walk past a playground.

  The first playground we stopped at was a fairly traditional one, with the safety surfacing and the brightly colored immobile play equipment that we were familiar with. The second playground, located closer to the center of the park, was less modern but more compelling to the boys. It was essentially an S-shaped, four-foot-deep concrete canal spanned by a series of arching, metal monkey-bar bridges.

  We four adults—Yelena’s husband, R, was off from work that day and joined us—sat and watched as the boys climbed in, around, and above the canal.

  After an hour, we lured the children out of the playground with gummy candy. The eight of us continued walking, first up a slight dirt hill, then past a gaggle of unlocked bicycles.

  As we walked, we smelled it: smoke.

  The smell became stronger as we went ahead. We followed it until at last we were all standing beside a traditional Japanese hut that was perched atop a downward-sloping one-acre patch of dirt and trees.

  The hut’s front porch was completely overflowing with crap, including a pink-painted piano at which a girl, five, was sitting and playing a John Cage–ian ditty. It was a strangely radiant sound to be hearing as we stood there looking down through the smoke—we could see it as well as smell it now—to the smoke’s source: open fires.

  There were three of them. At one, a boy about eight years old was kneeling, poking at the flames with paper fans; at another, a father was sitting and roasting marshmallows with his toddler son. A third fire seemed to be unattended.

  Hanegi PlayparkKOJI TAKIGUCHI

  Frank and I turned to look at Yelena, who had stepped to one side and was smiling twinklingly at us.

  We turned back and stood there, dumbfounded, staring at the dirt and trees and the structures that were woven around and between them, structures that were clearly not made in any place where safety surfacing had ever been a subject of serious discussion. These were structures that looked like what remained when my sons decided to build an airport out of Legos and then abandoned the project halfway through, only these half-made baggage carts and control towers were much larger and crafted not from nicely interlocking plastic rectangles but from scraps of wood and nails.

  This was possible because (as our boys would soon discover), the materials to make the structures—hammers, wood, saws, hole punchers, screwdrivers, nails, paint, brushes, and donated scraps of all kinds—were available at the playpark for everyone to use.

  Hole punches and box cutters hanging in the playpark toolshed. I found out later that the writing on the wall is each tool’s name and that the tools are named in part to endear them to the children, so instead of “Go find your tools and return them to the shed,” the children hear, “Go find Blackie! Blackie needs to come home!”

  The boys took off running.

  Frank and I stumbled after our children. The ground was uneven; the park did not seem to be landscaped in any recognizable way. There was dirt underfoot, one presumed, because grass could not possibly survive the trampling; likewise, there were trees around the area because that’s where they grew.

  Mick and Chuck wielding hammers on a platform, Hanegi PlayparkFRANK L. SNIDER

  King and Chuck on the platform, Mick underneath, Hanegi PlayparkFRANK L. SNIDER

  Frank had followed Mick. I caught up to King. The man who had been roasting marshmallows over the fire with his son walked toward us, smiling, and extended two freshly marshmallowed sticks.

  Ki
ng and I bowed and smiled and sat down with him and his boy and began the type of conversation we were getting rather good at, where a feeling of camaraderie was engendered by an exchange of only three words: New, York, and Yankees.

  We were sitting on a log about halfway down the slope, facing the way we had come. It was then that I realized that at the top of the slope, I had been so busy looking down—at the fires, the smoke, the tricky ground, and where I was stepping—that I hadn’t looked anywhere else. It was only now, when we were sitting, nodding, saying our words, and eating marshmallows, that I thought to look up and around.

  I looked up at the trees. I was astonished to see that there were children in them.

  The more I looked, the more children I saw. There were children fifteen feet high in the air. There were children perched on tiny homemade wooden platforms, like circus ladies dressed in glittery clothes about to swan-dive into little buckets. There were children sitting up there, relaxed, in their navy blue sailor-type school uniforms, chatting and eating candy on bitty rectangles of rickety wood as if they were lounging on the Lido deck of the Love Boat.

  A place to sit and rest, Hanegi PlayparkKOJI TAKIGUCHI

  There were children in creaky homemade structures like this in the trees all over the park. There were children, preteens, crouching fifteen feet up on the roof of the playpark hut and then—I gasped to see this—leaping off it onto a pile of ancient mattresses.

  Hanegi PlayparkKOJI TAKIGUCHI

  King and I sat there on the log, eating warm, white goo.

  We were in the park. The park was around us, and the people were around us, and the trees were around us, and the dirt was around us, and the smoke, and the music, and the crisp fall air was around us. The children were around us. The children were in the trees, in the smoke, in the air around us. The children were hanging out; the children were flying in the air around us.

  We stayed there as long as we could.

  | 4 |

  Of all the bumbling and somewhat humiliating experiences I had as a writer-interloper in a wirewalking class with a genius, there was one moment that stands out as neither bumbling nor humiliating, but sublime.

  It happened at the end of the first day of class. PP pointed to the wire that was carefully suspended overhead and said that, as the last activity of the day, we would have our “baptismal walk.”

  I was about to have a heart attack—I had realized rather quickly that, although I would not call myself uncoordinated, I do not have anything near the physical capabilities required to be a wirewalker of even the lowest sort—until PP explained what this meant: he would walk across the wire with his balancing pole, and each of us would walk behind him, one at a time, with our hands on his shoulders and a safety harness on.

  I exhaled. Okay, I thought. I can handle that.

  I did not think it was going to be a big deal, walking behind PP, world-famous, never-falling wirewalker, with a safety harness on, a harness secured by PP’s gentle giant of an assistant, Zaire.

  After deciding that it was highly unlikely that I would die, I basically reverted to autopilot, and I wound up pulling a maneuver not unlike that of the distracted owner of the aforementioned baby bath seat. Death will not get me here, in this particular place, I’d thought. There, I’m done. I’m done thinking about or even paying attention to whatever else it is that will happen.

  If you had asked me: What do you think it will be like, walking across a tightrope, seven feet up, behind master wirewalker Philippe Petit?, I probably would have told you, unmoved: It will be like walking.

  This would be a nervous, distracted, afraid-to-die person’s way of talking.

  What is walking, anyway? I see a bag of potato chips on the table. I am a head, disembodied, floating toward a crinkly bag of salty, fatty goodness.

  Must.

  Get.

  Chips.

  This is what walking is like, sometimes.

  I was standing on the small wooden platform behind PP, who was also standing, only with one foot on the platform and one foot on the wire. I had my hands on PP’s shoulders. He did not have his hands on me. He was holding his twenty-foot balancing pole against his waist.

  He was wearing his class uniform: a black sleeveless shirt and black pants. I was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt. It was a hot day, even for August in the city. The dance studio had no AC. We were sweating. I could smell him, human-flowery.

  I shifted my weight on my feet a bit up there, trying to find something.

  There was no finding anything.

  I stood still.

  PP seemed to have been waiting for this settling. With his back to me, in his French accent, he asked me, gently: “Shall we go?”

  He had already told us that he reserved the right not to take someone on the wire for a baptismal walk for any one of a variety of reasons: if the person was obese, or drunk, or not in the right frame of mind. What the right frame of mind was, he did not explain, but I think it is safe to say we assumed—there were four students in class besides me—that we all had it.

  He noted, however, that this same privilege was also ours: we could refuse the baptismal walk if we wanted. And that’s why, after all the preparation was done, after we had observed how the cable, which had been fashioned specifically to PP’s specifications for this class, was rigged securely and under appropriate tension; after each of us had clambered more or less awkwardly up the ladder to the wooden platform, put the safety harness on, checked that the harness was completely buckled, tested the harness, and seen that Zaire held it firmly; after all of that, in the final moment, PP asked each student this question: “Shall we go?”

  And in this asking, he reminded us that after all he had done to make this walk possible (which was to say, pretty much everything) we still held tremendous power in it, because, despite the magnitude of his efforts in relation to our own, it was possible for the two of us to do this action together only if each one of us, individually, first did something alone that was internal, and invisible, and this was agree to fly with him with the understanding that we could do this—the impossible—only because we had surrendered to him in a way that was not meek and resentful but assertive and glad.

  “Yes,” I said.

  The walk was, in this way, very intimate, although there was very little physical contact between us.

  And when it was over, it struck me that this question—Shall we go?—and the very particularly pitched assent would be an excellent text for a wedding ceremony. It was so much better than, for instance, the trembly I wills Frank and I had said, and not even to each other but to a guy, as nice as he was, whom we never saw again.

  Frank and I saying “Shall we go?” to each other and then starting to walk would have been so much more powerful, in some ways, than my asking no questions at all and just saying “Yes” to someone who was not even Frank, a guy asking a question with big words in it, words like love and honor, words whose meanings we will be discovering all our lives, and then, after having said yes to these giant words, both of us standing there, waiting for the never-to-be-seen-again guy to say, It’s okay to kiss, as if kissing in front of friends because a stranger told us to was an appropriate coda to having made the most gigantic vow we would probably ever make.

  I suppose this is really just a fuss about language, however, and of course marriage ceremonies as we have created them are mostly about language. What if marriages were not about language but about action? What if dancing, for instance, were not merely the way to celebrate the wedding but the wedding itself? Or what if the wedding action was not dancing, but an everyday action? What if a marriage, which is about beginning an epic lifelong being-together, began by two people being together, not in any way that is supposed to evoke the concept of epic-ness, but just by being together in exactly the kind of regular, everyday way they might be together for thousands and thousands of days? What if couples began their epic being-together by walking around? By sitting down? By stopping for a lemon
ade?

  It’s funny that now, writing this, I realize that I know someone whose wedding was exactly like that: Yelena’s.

  She had a summer wedding ceremony with R that I dismissed at the time as being kind of nuts. In it, she and R asked their guests to meet them on the sidewalk in front of their apartment, which was at Amsterdam and Ninety-Fifth, above the illustrious New York City baby-supply store Albee Baby, and from there, they would all make their way—not necessarily as a mob but as a group that ebbed and flowed, with stops for beer or snacks or a rest or shopping or whatever—to a triangle in Tribeca, where the marriage vows were to be said four or five hours later.

  After that, everyone was invited to get on a yellow school bus Yelena and R had rented that would take everyone to Yelena’s parents’ house in Long Island, where there would be feasting, drinking, and dancing until the wee hours.

  I thought that this was crazy. People who are getting married should think about their guests, I fumed. A wedding should be in a sheltered, comfortable place with a heating/cooling system, abundant snacks, and sufficient bathrooms.

  Frank and I skipped the walk. Late in the afternoon, we got into a cab with King, who was a toddler at the time, and met the wedding party at the triangle where the ceremony was taking place.

  I could not hear the vows; I was chasing King around the traffic island and keeping him from darting in front of cars. Then Frank chased him while I waited in line to greet the bride and groom.

  As I hugged Yelena, she whispered in my ear that she was pregnant. She was very early on, with Chuck. The shock of her news pushed me out of myself and caused me to see myself, hugging her, from the outside. I saw us as if I were looking down from a tree branch overhead, where I had noticed a sparrow. I watched from up there, my head cocked to one side, as she transformed herself in my tentative embrace into two people.