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

by Fusselman, Amy

  Play is ultimately less of a what and more of a how. Yet we do not generally think of play like this; we think of play as being a stereotypically playful-looking action performed primarily by children, and we put this play action in context by defining it as not-work. So we don’t so much define play itself; we define play by emphasizing the importance of work in relation to it. For example, we tell children that they must stop playing and do homework, and then, eventually, like Mom and Dad, get work (a job).

  And yet: We are here for only a short time; we are going to die. How will you live your life? is really the only important question there is, and playfully is one of the most courageous, most generous, and most fully human ways to answer this question.

  | 10 |

  In “The Nature of Gothic,” Ruskin wrote:

  And therefore, while in all things that we see or do, we are to desire perfection, and strive for it, we are nevertheless not to set the meaner thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above the nobler thing, in its mighty progress; not to esteem smooth minuteness above shattered majesty; not to prefer mean victory to honourable defeat; not to lower the level of our aim, that we may more surely enjoy the complacency of success. But, above all, in our dealings with the souls of other men, we are to take care how we check, by severe requirement or narrow caution, efforts which might otherwise lead to a noble issue; and still more, how we withhold our admiration from great excellencies, because they are mingled with rough faults.

  Given all the things I saw in Hanegi Playpark, all the astonishing gewgaws the children made, I do not know that I could choose a favorite if I were ever able to curate my own exhibit with all those wonders.

  But there was one that I loved dearly. It was set at the northwest corner of the park, at the bottom of the slope. From the outside it looked a bit like the piles of cardboard boxes stacked up for recycling in front of my apartment building in New York.

  Noriko, the head play worker at the park who was my hostess, roommate, employer, babysitter, protector, and tormentor during the miraculous week when I returned to Tokyo alone a year after our visit with Yelena, revealed the thing to me as we were picking up upturned nails and other hazardous bits along the park’s north end.

  She gestured toward what was actually a clubhouse, saying that even in this playpark—this somewhat secret, wild place—the children still had a need to create a place that was even more secret, even more wild.

  I admired the clubhouse. Assembled from wood scraps, boxes, and crap, it was essentially a miniature of Savage Park itself.

  Exterior of clubhouse, Hanegi PlayparkKOJI TAKIGUCHI

  Finally Noriko pointed out a feature of the clubhouse I hadn’t recognized.

  “Toyet,” she said, chuckling.

  It took me a few seconds to understand.

  It was a twelve-foot piece of bamboo that had been sliced in half and turned cup-upward, and it was supported on one end with a network of sticks and branches so that if you were seven years old and standing in front of it, it would be just under waist-high. This conglomeration of sticks and branches served as rigging, supporting the bamboo trough so that it sloped down gently, eventually touching ground just beyond where the plywood walls of the clubhouse ended.

  It was a toilet: a graceful piece of engineering. And the added beauty of it was that the spot where you (if you were a seven-year-old boy) were meant to stand with your penis out and begin the peeing process was right under the lookout window, which had been cut out of the cardboard wall. One could stand there peeing and simultaneously enjoying a broad and yet concealed view of the playpark’s north end.

  I tried to imagine it: a seven-year-old boy standing at the window of his secret clubhouse looking out at his domain while peeing in a toilet of his own making, recognizing the greatness of his place within a place that is still greater.

  That Hanegi Koen has very clean bathrooms—luxurious ones, compared to the public bathrooms in New York City—a ninety-second walk from this clubhouse is unimportant.

  4

  Savage Park

  | 1 |

  Mick playing, Hanegi PlayparkFRANK L. SNIDER

  The vast majority of American playgrounds cannot look anything like Hanegi Playpark, not because we don’t love play in America or because we don’t have good intentions for our children or because we don’t love building with tools, or because we don’t love trees, fires, and pianos.

  American playgrounds can’t look like Hanegi Playpark because Americans refuse to make peace with their own death and dying. This approach is built into the culture at the most profound levels, and the mostly unconscious indoctrination into this perspective begins very young.

  | 2 |

  I came home from that first visit to Tokyo with my family and began, like a girl with a lingering crush, to do Internet searches on Hanegi Playpark regularly, just to see what would come up. For months, it was nothing.

  And then one day, there was a website, and then another day, the website had been expanded, with a page that had a form you could fill out and then send.

  I had no idea what the form was for, or where, exactly, I was sending it to—the site was written entirely in Japanese—but I typed into the form that I was a writer from New York City working on a book about Hanegi Playpark, and were there any employees there who spoke English who could write me back?

  Noriko leading her bike up the steps of Hanegi Koen on her way to Hanegi Playpark

  In a few days, I heard from Noriko. In her not perfect but still comprehensible English, she wrote that she was the head play worker in the park, and, indeed, in some of the pictures I took of the boys on that first day we went to the playpark, I can now pick her out in the background.

  Frank and King, moments after arriving in Hanegi Playpark. Noriko is in the triangle slightly to the left and over King’s head.

  In the back-and-forth after that initial e-mail, I eventually told her that I wanted to come to Tokyo to shadow her at work for a week. Her unabashed and open yes—followed by a fortuitous meeting between her and Yelena at the playpark (She’s really cool, Fuss, Yelena e-mailed me)—emboldened me to ask if I could also stay with her.

  That she said yes to my staying in her home for a week, never having met me, was wildly generous, especially when I realized, once she met me at the subway station after my long flight (straight from NYC this time, no layover) and took me to her place, that her entire apartment was about the size of Mick and King’s train table. We slept there, side by side, on the floor, in a way I haven’t done since the days of my very first sleepovers, at nine years old, in my sleeping bag, which was orange and printed with a picture of Snoopy asleep on top of his doghouse and Woodstock standing on his belly, awake, and the text One of us always stays awake in case of vampires.

  I was the Woodstock on that trip. Noriko and I spent twelve-hour days, on average, at the playpark, and I was, there was no doubt about it, working. I was taking notes, talking to people, trying to understand, trying to be understood, trying to be respectful, and trying to play, the last of which I found pretty difficult to do. I was nervous; I was exhausted. I missed my boys. During times when I was supposed to be acting spontaneously, I found my mind blanking.

  The perils of my blanking out were brought home to me particularly harshly one night when we were at the playpark quite late, again. The playpark hours were supposed to be 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., but in reality there were always people hanging out there after-hours—teenagers, predictably—and Noriko, whose job was something along the lines of social worker/handyman/diplomat/nurse/landscaper, routinely did not leave until nine or ten o’clock.

  As I wandered around the playpark, I found myself thinking a lot about how to characterize what Noriko did there. She was not a playground worker in any way that I had seen one before.

  When I’m at home in New York City, for example, and I see men or women in green-jumpsuit uniforms come to the playground at Forty-Third Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, I know what
they are there for. They are there to unplug toilets and sweep up gunk, among other manual tasks. And of course they may call the police if something untoward is happening or call 911 if someone is injured, just like anyone else.

  But this work is not the same as what Noriko does, which is less of a focus on and fixing of objects (that type of repair can be absurd in a place where all structures are handmade and many are intended to be temporary) than a kind of continual, low-key fussing; not quite like a mother, because a mother wants to keep her children safe and clean; and not quite like a party host, because a host wants to ensure fun; but more like a gardener, because in tending to the health of plants, the gardener tends to the birds, bees, and other animals, as plants, birds, bees, and other animals can’t be separated from one another in relation, and ultimately what Noriko does is tend to a space that is acknowledged by everyone to have everything in it.

  The playpark has everything in it, including nature in its beauty and treachery; including man-made spaces in their youthful heroism and then inevitable shabby disorder; including people—old people, adults, teenagers, children, and babies; including fire; including lunch on the fire; and including the possibility of death. And it takes a particular person to hold all that and to say it is here, and we are here with it, and there is no cleaning it up; there is no point in that. There is only time with it, and what we choose to do in that time, and how we do what we choose to do.

  And so, on this particular night, as the sun went down, Noriko told me that we were going to be out extra late, because we were going to play a game in the park called angels and devils. As Noriko explained it, we—we meaning Noriko and I and a group of, it appeared to me, about twelve teenage boys—would be using not just the playpark but all of Hanegi Koen, the beautifully landscaped park in which Hanegi Playpark was set, as our field. The whole concept seemed so outlandish that it was hard for me to take in. Surely Noriko will let me be excused from this, I told myself.

  But no. There I was, playing game after game of rock, paper, scissors with boy after teenage boy, because it was by playing rock, paper, scissors that we were deciding who was going to be the devil.

  And as we transformed our hands, the rules of angels and devils were explained to me, and I was thrown back to a game that I was involved with as a very small child, when I lived in a neighborhood full of kids on a cul-de-sac in a nice town in Connecticut. This game was called war. And although I don’t remember anyone getting hurt in this game, which must have been a miracle, I do remember that the entire tone of the street changed when we played it. It was dark, intense, and scary. The stakes were high, and they were real. War involved a lot of secret meetings and yelling insults, which I was a part of, and running around people’s houses spying, which I was a part of, and rock-throwing, which I was not a part of. That was handled by the bigger boys. (My Boy Scout–leader father, revealing a Cro-Magnon-esque wisdom I did not fully appreciate until some forty years later, told me when I was a little girl that all I would ever need to know about boys was that they could be divided into two categories: bed-wetters and rock-throwers.) It always took our little community a couple of days to recover after war broke out.

  Angels and devils, I feared, was going to be dark like this. The game was essentially a combination of hide-and-seek and tag: one person, the unfortunate loser of the umpteen games of rock, paper, scissors, would be the devil—that is, the seeker. Everyone else was an angel, and angels did not seek, they hid. The angels’ goal was to creep back to base—in this case, the playpark hut—without being tagged by the devil or the devil’s henchmen, because once you were tagged by the devil, you then had to join him in his search.

  I sat there, pumping my fist up and down like an automaton, losing round after round of rock, paper, scissors. I was panicking. I imagined myself as the devil, alone, running around Hanegi Koen in the dark, for hour after interminable hour, trying to tag roving packs of sneaky teenage boys.

  And Noriko, finally, seemed to understand the fact that I was not physically or mentally prepared to be the devil, because as my losing streak continued unabated and I entered some zone of doom where I couldn’t think properly and could hear a sound in my head like a giant bulldozer backing up, she came over and stood above me, as if pulled by the force of my despair.

  I was stuck on one gesture: scissors. I just kept playing scissors. Scissors are sharp, I believe I was thinking. It was as if I had forgotten the logic of the game.

  My young opponents, seeing quickly that I was on scissors autopilot, played rock. Time after time I was beaten, and each time, my spiral of panic made yet another terrible curl.

  Finally it came down to me and one other boy. He was one of the youngest, probably just ten, and, like me, also panicking. The loser of this game would be the devil.

  I heard Noriko bark: “Amy-san, why do you never play paper?”

  Paper, I remember thinking in my robot fog. I had forgotten about paper.

  I threw a couple of papers in. My young friend, finally, lost.

  I walked away from the match with gratitude. Saved.

  An hour later, Noriko and I were crouching in some shrubbery along the edge of the park beside a disgruntled-looking stray calico cat. A herd of teenage boys—devils all—came thundering by us. I felt like one of the children hiding from the Nazis in the crypt with Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music.

  We finally crept back onto the porch of the playpark hut, aka Heaven, where I lay down by the pink piano and thanked God repeatedly.

  That was one of the hardest days at any job I ever had.

  | 3 |

  Some history: According to Hitoshi Shimamura, the International Play Association regional vice president in East Asia, the pilot park that became Hanegi Playpark was founded in 1975. It was modeled on the first adventure playground, which was created by landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen and which opened in Emdrup, Copenhagen, in 1943, when that town was under German occupation. According to play researcher Susan Solomon’s important book American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space, this first-ever adventure playground had, essentially, three components: a vacant lot; donated scraps (“useless fragments of wood, metal, or masonry” and “a few building implements such as hammers, saws, and nails”); and a single adult supervisor, who “was available only for guidance and was key to the success of the playground.”

  Sørensen’s playground, then known as a “junk playground,” was the seed for many more. According to adventure-playground advocate Lia Sutton, there are currently about a thousand adventure playgrounds in Europe, largely in Denmark, Switzerland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and England.

  Adventure playgrounds arrived in Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s, where they benefited greatly from a powerfully placed playground advocate, trained horticulturist Lady Allen of Hurtwood. As a result of her zeal, many adventure playgrounds were set up in the British Isles. In the United States, adventure playgrounds simply did not take hold in the same way. Playgrounds themselves began emerging in the United States in the 1880s, when, as noted by Howard Chudacoff in his excellent book Children at Play: An American History, the playground movement in the United States began, and “reformers established sand gardens in parks and schoolyards to promote play among very young children.” In the early 1900s, the Playground Association of America was founded, and that event marked “the professionalization of playground work.” By 1917, the country had 3,940 public and private playgrounds, and it employed 8,768 playground directors.

  With the advent of the automobile, the playground served a basic need: it got the children off the streets and out of the way of vehicles. In 1922, automobiles caused the death of an astonishing 477 children in New York City. But during the Depression, playground funding was cut, and the movement sputtered. The economy improved following World War II, but the public playground’s decline continued, because middle-class families provided their children “with their own play accoutrements at home,” as Chudacoff not
ed, and backyard playgrounds competed with public play areas.

  In the 1950s, the playground in America began a brief relationship with the art world, because, as Solomon wrote, the connection “between playgrounds and sculpture began to take hold.” In 1954, the Museum of Modern Art held a playground-design competition that received significant media attention and heightened the legitimacy of playgrounds in art circles and elsewhere.

  The association between playgrounds and art did not last long; safety issues became important, and commercial products filled the playparks. Lady Allen of Hurtwood toured American playgrounds in 1965 and called them “an administrator’s heaven and a child’s hell.”

  In the 1970s, with the emergence of an energetic new do-it-yourself movement, homemade play spaces became more compelling. Jeremy Joan Hewes’s inspired and inspiring 1975 book Build Your Own Playground! focused on the West Coast designs of Jay Beckwith, who incorporated many of the adventure-playground ideas in his instructions for making tunnels and ramps out of rope and discarded materials. It was on the West Coast during that period that one of America’s few still-operating, year-round adventure playgrounds was founded: the Berkeley Marina Adventure Playground.

  The Berkeley playground opened in 1979, around the same time as Hanegi Playpark, but it is structured somewhat differently than its Japanese counterpart. Whereas Hanegi Playpark is for all ages, Berkeley is meant primarily for children seven and older; younger children are welcome as long as they are kept “within arm’s reach” of an accompanying adult, administrators state on the playground’s website (italics theirs). Also, every child who enters the Berkeley playground must have his parent or guardian sign a waiver releasing the playground from liability for any injuries that might occur there.