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DANGER AND MASTERY
There was a time when kids skateboarded on the west side of Sidney Smith
Hall, at the University of Toronto, where I work. Sometimes I stood there and
watched them. There are rough, wide, shallow concrete steps there, leading
up from the street to the front entrance, accompanied by tubular iron
handrails, about two and a half inches in diameter and twenty feet long. The
crazy kids, almost always boys, would pull back about fifteen yards from the
top of the steps. Then they would place a foot on their boards, and skate like
mad to get up some speed. Just before they collided with the handrail, they
would reach down, grab their board with a single hand and jump onto the top
of the rail, boardsliding their way down its length, propelling themselves off
and landing—sometimes, gracefully, still atop their boards, sometimes,
painfully, off them. Either way, they were soon back at it.
Some might call that stupid. Maybe it was. But it was brave, too. I thought
those kids were amazing. I thought they deserved a pat on the back and some
honest admiration. Of course it was dangerous. Danger was the point. They
wanted to triumph over danger. They would have been safer in protective
equipment, but that would have ruined it. They weren’t trying to be safe.
They were trying to become competent—and it’s competence that makes
people as safe as they can truly be.
I wouldn’t dare do what those kids were doing. Not only that, I couldn’t. I
certainly couldn’t climb a construction crane, like a certain type of modern
daredevil, evident on YouTube (and, of course, people who work on
construction cranes). I don’t like heights, although the twenty-five thousand
feet to which airliners ascend is so high that it doesn’t bother me. I have
flown several times in a carbon fibre stunt plane—even doing a hammerhead
roll—and that was OK, although it’s very physically and mentally
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.
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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
work to optimize our future performance, while playing in the present.
Otherwise we lumber around, sloth-like, unconscious, unformed and careless.
Overprotected, we will fail when something dangerous, unexpected and full
of opportunity suddenly makes its appearance, as it inevitably will.
The skatestoppers are unattractive. The surround of the nearby sculpture
would have to have been badly damaged by diligent boardsliders before it
would look as mean as it does now, studded with metal like a pit bull’s collar.
The large plant boxes have metal guards placed at irregular intervals across
their tops, and this, in addition to the wear caused by the skateboarders,
produces a dismal impression of poor design, resentment and badly executed
afterthoughts. It gives the area, which was supposed to be beautified by the
sculpture and vegetation, a generic industrial/prison/mental institution/work-
camp look of the kind that appears when builders and public officials do not
like or trust the people they serve.
The sheer harsh ugliness of the solution makes a lie of the reasons for its
implementation.
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