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

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART I

  NSEW

  Above and Below

  What There Is to See

  Savage Park

  More

  PART II

  SSOF

  Red Butterflies

  American Wind

  The Structures Tremble

  Resources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2015 by Amy Fusselman

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Fusselman, Amy.

  Savage park : a meditation on play, space, and risk for Americans who are nervous, distracted, and afraid to die / Amy Fusselman.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-544-30300-3 (hardback)—ISBN 978-0-544-57020-7 (trade paper)—ISBN 978-0-544-30329-4 (ebook)

  1. Fusselman, Amy. 2. Authors, American—21st century—Biography. 3. Playgrounds—Japan—Tokyo. 4. Play (Philosophy) 5. Space—Philosophy. 6. Risk-taking (Psychology). I. Title.

  PS3606.U86Z46 2015

  813.6—dc23

  [B]

  v1.0115

  All photos courtesy of the author unless otherwise noted.

  Part opener illustrations by Patrick Barry

  Parts of this book have appeared in different forms in The Rumpus, Two Serious Ladies, and the Columbia Journal.

  To the players in playgrounds everywhere

  PART I

  1

  NSEW

  | 1 |

  Early one spring morning several years ago, I received an e-mail from my USSR-born, New York City–bred theater-director friend Yelena inviting me and my family (which then consisted of my husband, Frank, and our two sons, King and Mick, ages five and two) to visit her and her family (which then consisted of her husband, R, and their two sons, Chuck and Gen, ages four and one) at their new home in Tokyo, with the understanding that if we chose to come, we would stay for at least a month.

  I do not believe the English language contains a word that expresses all that this gesture was. Her invitation to us was a feat. She inhabited her space with such generosity that she enlarged it. And then, from that expanse, she called to us: Come in.

  She summoned us without much consideration, it seemed, for the space between us. The distance between New York City and Tokyo, after all, is almost seven thousand miles. It was as if she didn’t view the journey we would have to take to get to her as daunting, formidable, or even, really, interesting.

  The distance was just space, for her. And she did not see space as an enemy. She was not worried, as I was, about what it would be like to fly thirteen hours with small children, never having flown longer than two and a half hours with them before. She did not regard space as a thing to be crossed in a belabored, linear way, like Columbus suffering for months, sick and arthritic, in his leaky, worm-rotted ship as it bobbed unevenly toward an unknown continent.

  Space, for her, was like a toy. It was a thing that could and should be manipulated; a medium to be expanded, contracted, and fiddled with. As far as she was concerned, we would get on a plane, which was not a machine for crossing space but a machine for contracting time, and we would be here/there in the blink of an eye.

  When we got the invitation, my husband, Frank, and I looked at each other: When would we ever have an opportunity like this again?

  Frank and I told the boys we were going on a journey to Japan. I pointed out New York on the globe. “From here,” I said, dragging my finger across the world as I simultaneously spun it, “to there,” I said.

  They glanced at us, unfazed, and continued pushing their smiling toy trains around the figure eight of wooden track that was set up on the train table.

  | 2 |

  Nervous about the long flight from NYC to Tokyo, I decided that we would fly from NYC to LA first and then stay over there for a night in order to cut down on the number of hours per flight and get used to the time change.

  Of course, this only made the whole transition worse—more drawn out, and thus more nerve-racking—but I had not yet wrapped my brain around the concept that traveling across space was not a thing to be suffered through.

  Naturally, the journey was long and arduous. After arriving in LA, we dropped our luggage at a hotel, visited a train museum called Travel Town, returned to the hotel and slept, fitfully, and then woke up groggy the next morning, only to pack our bags and head to the airport again. Then we flew.

  When we finally loaded our sweaty, sleepy selves into a cab outside the Tokyo airport, I dropped my head back on the pristine white doily placed like a pressed flower on the top of the seatback and slept like a drooling drunk, if drooling drunks can still be nervous. I was nervous in particular because I wasn’t sure if we had accurately communicated our destination to the driver; he spoke no English, and we spoke no Japanese. With no idea where we were or where we were going, we couldn’t even tell if we were lost.

  I rode like this, almost unconscious, my head flung back, my mouth open, my eyes half closed, passing indecipherable signs in the dark. When we pulled up in front of Yelena’s apartment—how long did it take to get there? A minute? An hour?—she was sitting on her stoop in a witch’s hat. It was Halloween. Her four-year-old son, Chuck, who was dressed as a skeleton, stood beside her holding a bowl of candy.

  I hugged Yelena. “Trick or treat,” I said.

  Frank and I shouldered our heavy bags and our sack-like, sleeping children and carried them up the steps and into Yelena’s apartment, the chocolate Chuck had just given us melting in our mouths. I set Mick down on one of the two foldout couches that were to be our beds for the next three weeks and then lay down beside him. Yelena tried to convince me to stay awake—it was about six in the evening—but I could not.

  Sure enough, at three in the morning, Mick and I were up. We snuck out of the apartment in order not to wake anyone, and I put him in his stroller and strolled him through the dark, silent streets, talking nonsense—it was the Day of the Dead, I remember informing him helpfully—trying and failing to find the logic of Manhattan’s crude but reliable grid in Tokyo’s delicately unfolding swirl.

  We ended up sitting in the deserted, lit-up parking lot of an all-night convenience store at four thirty in the morning, sharing a chocolate steamed bun. Mick washed it down with some strawberry milk. I drank hot coffee out of a can.

  Yelena was right, I understood then, in her dismissal of what it took to get here. What was harder was this other thing she was encouraging me to do, which was to call her home my home and, beyond that, to call wherever I was my home; to view space not as a place that is mine here, and yours there, but as a venue that is ours and that we are in together.

  Being exhausted and, I thought, out of my element, I continued to resist her and her big ideas.

  | 3 |

  Among the first things we learn about space, as infants having very recently arrived in it, is that we can’t just leave it. We can move ourselves around in it, and we can be transported in it, but the fact is, we are here.

  Years go by. We grow accustomed to t
his strange and interesting situation—this hereness. And, as adults, what we end up saying to our children about space and our human place in it is mostly a long and complicated narrative of how to move our bodies safely and respectfully in relation to other people and things.

  This adult-generated stream of language—which basically completely ignores the idea that space is a medium that can be experienced and responded to sensitively—is like a darkly magical incantation, in that it makes space disappear.

  A place to sit and rest, Hanegi Playpark, Tokyo

  What children receive, then, is the notion that space does not exist but people and things do, and it is people and things that must be navigated to, from, and around, and it is people and things that represent hazards or pleasures. They are not told that space itself is a beautiful and powerful medium that we are all connected in and through, and that space can, and should, be felt.

  Of course it is understandable that we adults should hold this rather shortsighted perspective. There are many wonderful things to focus on here on earth. The trees are lovely, the food tastes great, there are toys, and, not least important, other human beings are fantastically interesting and may serve as warm, comforting ballast to cling to as we float along, all of us more or less aware of the fundamental situation: that we are here, for reasons unknown, and one day we will not be here, also for reasons unknown.

  | 4 |

  There was a swimming demonstration at Mick’s Upper West Side day camp this morning. It’s almost the end of the season, and parents were invited in to see how their children’s swimming had improved after the lessons provided by the camp all summer.

  The parents gathered in the lobby after drop-off, chatting, with sweaty, clear plastic cups of iced coffee in hand. At 9:00 sharp we were led into the pool area, where we were instructed to walk single file halfway around the pool and then sit on a narrow metal bench bolted to the wall. The children were then led in, in their swimsuits and goggles, to sit on the metal bleachers directly across the pool from us.

  With everyone in place, the show began. Clutching her clipboard, the aquatics director introduced herself and then launched into an explanation of how the children were supervised in the pool.

  There were eight plastic orange chairs stationed around the pool, she explained. In each of these chairs, a lifeguard sat and watched a group of six to eight children as they worked with another lifeguard in the water. There were never fewer than two lifeguards—one watching, one teaching—per group. There were also helpers, people who were not certified as lifeguards—floaters, she called them—who were in the pool during this time, keeping their eyes on the kids.

  She turned to the lifeguards, who were standing beside the bleachers: Take your places, she said.

  Eight lifeguards trotted over to sit in the orange chairs; eight lowered themselves into the water.

  She turned to the floaters, who were also standing beside the bleachers: Go ahead, she said.

  Sixteen floaters splashed into the water and fanned out across the pool.

  She turned to the children: Go to your groups, she said.

  The children filed out of the bleachers and dispersed to the orange chairs, where they sat down at the edge of the pool and churned the water with their feet, the only ones in this humid, chlorine-y aquadome who weren’t completely one of two things: in the water, or out.

  In order to comply with city safety standards, the aquatics director told us, each child was assigned a buddy.

  This camp was well run, all right; that word, buddy, was a cue. Upon hearing it, each child grabbed his partner’s hand, and each hand-clasped pair of children flung their hand-knot overhead like a flag, and the aquatics director stopped speaking to us and began performing for us, with the following call-and-response:

  “Group one?” she called to the lifeguard standing in the water with the group-one children.

  “Seven,” the group-one lifeguard said, meaning seven children were in the group.

  “Group two?” she called to the lifeguard standing in the water with the group-two children.

  “Six,” the group-two lifeguard said.

  And so on, the numbers ping-ponging in the air over the pool, sailing from the aquatics director standing beside the now empty bleachers, her brow tense; to the eight lifeguards standing in the water, smiling as they faced their groups of children; to the eight lifeguards sitting in the orange chairs, watching silently from their colorful posts; to the children themselves sitting at the edge of the pool, their flagpole arms held high, their buddy-ness unfurled, their reliance on and connection to other people absolutely joyful and absolutely grave; to us, smiling across the water at our children, each of us knowing like no one and everyone else here the exact, happy grief of an inviolable responsibility to another person; to the floaters standing in the pool, casually arranged in this humid air, like party balloons scattered on a picnic blanket.

  The numbers having been run, the aquatics director stopped singing and told the children to enter the pool.

  There was a pause. The children unclasped their hands and lowered them to their laps, birds adroitly returning to their nests.

  We sat clutching our empty cups as the children, from their perches, with every adult eye on them, leapt.

  | 5 |

  In general, in this country, we hold dear several conflicting views of space.

  To clarify, the space I am referring to is small-s space, or space on earth. This small-s space is commonly regarded as being completely different from big-S Space, or outer space. That is, whereas big-S Space is often seen as a mysterious and powerful thing worthy of constant scrutiny and wildly expensive exploration, small-s space frequently just disappears, and no one notices.

  It happens like this: You are here; you are driving to the store. You exist and the store exists. You are generally far more aware of the time that it takes—stuck at that red light again, harrumph—to cross the space between your house and the store than you are of the space itself, the space that contains the car, the house, the store, the light, and you.

  This is not to say that people do not believe in space. Most of us do believe in the concept of space as the place where things and people are located. Space in this sense is like a giant, invisible handbag, and we are lipsticks and mirrors bouncing around in it. But for the most part, space does not exist for us as a thing we consider ourselves immersed in and connected with. We just do not, in a thousand large and small ways, pay attention to it.

  This prejudice is understandable. Small-s space has the misfortune of being invisible, and most humans are hugely dependent on, and seduced by, the power of sight. We see through space to people and things; it is people and things that exist for us.

  We see through space to things we want—lunch, bed, a lover, the phone. We steer our bodies through the invisible-ness to get to what we want. We do not pay much attention to the experience of steering. We look; we mobilize; we arrive. We experience how long the mobilizing takes. What it feels like walking through space, floating across the room to answer the phone—we do not generally experience that with much sensitivity, especially those of us who are healthy and for whom the process of mobilization is easy and causes no pain.

  Much of this approach is learned.

  | 6 |

  The first place Yelena took us, on our first day in Tokyo, was the Shinagawa Aquarium.

  The Shinagawa was about par for the course, as aquariums go. What I found most interesting about it was the relief I felt, wandering around, in not understanding what I was hearing. It was not my first trip to a foreign country, but it was my first trip to a foreign country where I knew almost none of the language. Knowing almost no words of a language, I found, was completely different from knowing twenty or thirty words and a few phrases. The few words and phrases kept me listening. Without them, it was as if I were swimming in a different medium, a medium I had previously been unaware of, the medium of human-made sound.

  I detached
from my old way of listening. And knowing that I was not alone and that I could rely on my husband and friend for communicating any urgent matters, I was free to revel in being released from the burden of constantly hearing words that I could not help but decode, muse upon, or judge. I stopped listening for meaning; that is, I dropped my continual engagement with language as an omnipresent, aural mathematics assignment, a one-to-one, sound-equals-word-equals-meaning equation that had to immediately be solved and responded to. I simply let it go.

  Instead, I listened to the shades, colors, and tones of language as music, wondering if this freedom I felt, this detachment from the demands of human speech, was a feeling enjoyed by infants. I walked around like this with my family, the music bubbling around me, the impossibly beautiful aquatic creatures floating by me in their transparent boxes, and then I followed Yelena and her sons to sit in the stands and watch the dolphin show.

  Two really cute Japanese girls stood on a narrow ledge at the edge of the pool. Both wore the headsets that I associate with customer-service representatives. Their voices were amplified. It goes without saying that I could not understand what they said. It seemed that the dolphins could, though, and the dolphins leapt up impressively, jumping through hoops held high by the girls, and then they tasted some fish.

  Disconnected from the show’s narrative, I watched what then became a very elaborate way of being fed: the dolphins mastered their bodies in space, exhibiting their tricks and their leaps, in order to receive food from the headsetted young women. The small gesture that the audience was not even supposed to notice—the feeding—became the main event once I was freed from listening to the girls’ patter and having it organize what I was seeing.