By Charles W. Orton
If I subscribe to the current belief that "Everyone's responsible for what happens to me except me," I'd feel tempted to sue the people who headed the school district of Chippewa Falls, Wis., during the late '50's and early '60's, and--also in tune with our time--my parents. Although they didn't know it (and we all know that lack of knowledge is no excuse when it comes to lawsuits), these adults failed to protect my tender young self from horrible hazards to life and limb.
My proof is a set of "recommendations" set forth in a Consumer Product Safety Commission publication called "Handbook for Public Playground Safety." Among these guidelines are ones that practically outlaw every type of playground equipment I ever used as a child. The CPSC says they are dangerous and can harm the unwary child. The guidelines make special note of what are called "head-entrapment risks"--such things as having the timbers of railings too close together. And when it comes to wooden construction, the dire danger of splinters. One does wonder, however, why the CPSC goes on to "recommend" (that's Fedspeak for "thou shalt") wood mulch as a possible "shock resistant" cushion. Oh, yes; the CPSC says that any area where a child might fall or be dropped, such as under swings and slides and seesaws, there should be a shock-resistant cushion of wood mulch or pea gravel or sand at least 12 inches thick and six feet in radius.
At my school, there were fulcrum seesaws (we called them teeter-totters) without springs in the middle and without padding beneath the seats! The swing seats were made of wood! There was a trapeze! The CPSC says that kind of seesaw is dangerous; why, a child on the low end might suddenly dismount, causing the child on the high end to hit the ground with a spine-compressing thump! Wooden swing seats hurt more that rubber or plastic seats do when they hit you! You can fall from a trapeze or suspended rings!
Of course, I knew all this when I was a child. I came down hard on my tailbone when one of my classmates leaped off his end of the teeter-totter. It happened only once. Thereafter, I learned to let my legs take the shock. Maybe today's kids don't learn quite so fast. And wooden swing seats do, indeed, have capacity for harm. One day, Gary Krumenauer and I took turns shoving one another into the path of an occupied and swinging swing. The game ended when the seat caught Gary alongside the head. He spent the afternoon on a cot in a corner of the classroom. We both spent the evening being punished by our parents for stupidity. (In our neighborhood in those days, parents didn't sue one another for their children's' acts. They took the kids to court--woodshed court.) Gary got even some time later, in a way, at least with the family. He was the batter during a softball game. My younger sister was the catcher. She was crouching too close to Gary. He missed the pitch and the bat carried around and hit her on the head, knocking her cold. She spent the afternoon on that same cot.
The grounds of Oak Grove School were a bit less than an acre, bounded on three sides by one of Gordy Buttenhoff's fields and on the fourth side by a county road. A barbed wire fence separated the schoolyard from Gordy's field. There was no fence along the road side. Had the CPSC focused its attention on our school in those days, they probably would have mandated soft rubber fencing along the field and a childproof barrier along the road. The CPSC wouldn't have cared that any self-respecting cow would just walk through a soft rubber fence, and they wouldn't have cared that the ditches along the road were our favorite play areas in the winter. Those ditches were perfect for snow forts. We would form alliances and built a fort on each side of the road, using shovels to dig the blocks from the ditch so the ramparts were effectively higher. Then each side would take turns attacking the other, a la WWI trench warfare, with the hundreds of snowballs we had stockpiled the previous recess. It just might surprise the CPSC to learn that none of us poor, defenseless, unprotected children was ever hit by a passing car or truck or tractor. Maybe because we weren't overprotected, we had a sense of self-preservation.
The softball field would have given the CPSC a collective heart attack. It was a very small, perhaps 50 feet across and 60 feet deep, so Gordy's field was our outfield. So there we have our first hazard: The barbed wire fence--bloody cuts just waiting to happen. I did tear a new pair of blue jeans going through that fence to retrieve a ball one day. If my mother had only known! She could have sued Gordy and the school board for that, or at least have filed a complaint with some federal agency. Instead, she sweetly said that if it happened again, she would suggest to my father that he "take his belt off." Jeans were expensive, and any nine-year-old boy who didn't know how to go through a barbed wire fence was a dunce. In the meantime, I would just have to live with the ignominy of wearing patched jeans to school (in those days patched or holey jeans were mark of poverty and shame). The bases on our softball field were--horrors--old tires. Insidious traps just waiting to break the leg of the clumsy child. For some reason, no one ever twisted or broke and ankle running the bases; perhaps because no one was foolish enough to step in the middle of a tire. Then there were the oak trees scattered about the playing field (hence the name Oak Grove School). Batters were frequently disappointed when a nicely hit ball that should have been a home run hit one of these trees instead of Gordy's corn, but none of the fielders ever ran into a tree.
Speaking of trees, in a corner on the other side of the school building was the largest of the oaks, a good tree for climbing. Placed around its base were a number of large rocks that served perfectly for playing "house"--not quite the "shock-resistant" padding the CPSC would like to see. Yet none of us even fell from the tree onto the rocks. Just as dangerous in the eyes of the CPSC, yet just as safe, given the injury record, was my home turf. Although my father didn't farm, here were a barn, a silo, a granary, several sheds, and a 50 foot windmill. To the CPSC, it would have been the seventh ring of hell: There was no shock-resistant padding, there were no safety railings; there were splinters and head-entrapment apparatuses and heights from which to fall.
But what a glorious place for a young boy to play!
Here in the old tobacco shed we walked along the rafters 20 feet above hard-packed earth to inspect the nests of pigeons and barn swallows. We suspended a rope from one of those rafters and swung in a long arc, taking turns as Tarzan.here in the cow barn, we scampered up and down the foot-worn vertical ladder tot he loft. We actually tested "head-entrapment risks" on ourselves: the stanchions meant to keep the cows in their places.
That the environments of our schoolyard and my father's property never seriously injured (and certainly never killed) any of us would not have mattered to the CPSC. Both would have been declared child-hazard disaster areas. At school, we would have been given a perfectly safe, padded, and extremely dull play area. We would have been protected from the laws of physics and the consequences of making wrong choices. We also would have been protected from learning about some of the world around us. We never would have found a monarch butterfly chrysalis on a weed among those dangerous rocks. We never would have brought it into the schoolroom to be kept in a jar and inspected daily until the butterfly emerged. We never would have felt a strange, almost spiritual lightness of the soul, when we set it free and it fluttered across the road to explore its big, new world. We never would have gathered the acorns that fell from the black oaks and learned that they might be great food for squirrels, but as a snack for people, they are too bitter. If the CPSC could have kept us safely inside our houses at home, we never would have learned at first hand the difference between a pigeon's nest and a barn swallow's, nor the difference between their eggs. We never would have learned that hard-packed earth is indeed hard, and that one should avoid falling onto it from a height. We never would have decided that, since cows spend a lot of time with their heads in stanchions, being a person is preferable. Without the CPSC to protect us, we learned many things about our environment and about ourselves. Perhaps the most important lesson we learned is that no one can watch out for you better than you can. It's your responsibility to keep out of harm's way. If you get hurt, it's your own fault.
The universe was not crated with human safety in mind. Rocks are hard; trees don't have CPSC sanctioned "shock resistant" cushions beneath them; our bodies are soft and easily cut, bruised and scraped; gravity dictates that if you go up and slip, you're going to come down. You learn these things as a child; you must learn these things a child or risk becoming a disappointed, ineffectual, quick-to-sue adult. But such personal responsibility is not popular today. If you fall from a ladder, you're urged to sue the ladder manufacturer (even if you did set it at the wrong angle), the maker of the flooring you hit (it should have been softer), and maybe even the maker of the shoes you were wearing (they should have had a prominent warning label: "Not to be used on ladders"). There is a problem with these lawsuits: They target the wrong parties. If you get hurt, why not sue the one defendant who's really the cause of it all? Sue God.