demanding. (To perform a hammerhead roll, you pilot the plane straight up
vertically, until the force of gravity makes it stall. Then it falls backwards,
corkscrewing, until eventually it flips and noses straight down, after which
you pull out of the dive. Or you don’t do another hammerhead roll.) But I
can’t skateboard—especially down handrails—and I can’t climb cranes.
Sidney Smith Hall faces another street on the east side. Along that street,
named St. George—ironically enough—the university installed a series of
rough, hard-edged, concrete plant boxes, sloping down to the roadway. The
kids used to go out there, too, and boardslide along the box edges, as they did
along the concrete surround of a sculpture adjacent to the building. That
didn’t last very long. Little steel brackets known as “skatestoppers” soon
appeared, every two or three feet, along those edges. When I first saw them, I
remembered something that happened in Toronto several years previously.
Two weeks before elementary school classes started, throughout the city, all
the playground equipment disappeared. The legislation governing such things
had changed, and there was a panic about insurability. The playgrounds were
hastily removed, even though they were sufficiently safe, grandfathered re
their insurability, and often paid for (and quite recently) by parents. This
meant no playgrounds at all for more than a year. During this time, I often
saw bored but admirable kids charging around on the roof of our local school.
It was that or scrounge about in the dirt with the cats and the less adventurous
children.
I say “sufficiently safe” about the demolished playgrounds because when
playgrounds are made too safe, kids either stop playing in them or start
playing in unintended ways. Kids need playgrounds dangerous enough to
remain challenging. People, including children (who are people too, after all)
don’t seek to minimize risk. They seek to optimize it. They drive and walk
and love and play so that they achieve what they desire, but they push
themselves a bit at the same time, too, so they continue to develop. Thus, if
things are made too safe, people (including children) start to figure out ways
to make them dangerous again.^165
When untrammeled—and encouraged—we prefer to live on the edge.
There, we can still be both confident in our experience and confronting the
chaos that helps us develop. We’re hard-wired, for that reason, to enjoy risk
(some of us more than others). We feel invigorated and excited when we