St. Peter is the patron saint of (among other things), "cordwainers," which is a specific kind of shoemaker who makes shoes from new leather. In the olden days, "cobblers" were allowed to repair shoes, and to make shoes out of old leather, but only members of the cordwainers' guild could make you a shoe from new leather.
Under Catholic doctrine, you can call on St. Peter to help you in dealing with frenzy, fever, or foot problems.
Some Protestant faiths say that Peter never existed at all, let alone existed and was Jesus' disciple and was crucified upside-down at his own request because he didn't feel worthy to be crucified the same way Jesus had been.
When people say St Peter they are almost always talking about the Peter who palled around with Jesus and now holds the keys to Heaven. They are probably never talking about St. Peter Nolasco, who made it his business to free Christian slaves and formed an order made of knights who guarded the coast during their duty and sang in a choir when off-duty.
St. Peter Nolasco is said to have seen seven strange lights glowing for four consecutive Saturdays over the same place; these lights would drop from the sky and land in the same place each time. St Peter Nolasco ordered his men to dig there, and they found "a clock of prodigious size bearing a beautiful image of the Virgin Mary," so he ordered that an altar be built there.
You mean like our lives are all mapped out for us, from birth to death,
no chance to change our paths? As in are we all simply following a course
down a hill, blindly, believing that we are in control when
in fact we are merely automatons?
Yeah.
No.
So you believe in free will then?
No, not really.
If you don't believe in predestination, then
doesn't that automatically mean that we have free will?
Well?
They aren't necessarily opposites. Or the only choices.
How can that be?
You just want to have it both ways.
Predestination presupposes a higher power, whether that be a god
or merely orderly machinations of physics, beyond our control and
pushing us around like gamepieces: we go where we must,
regardless of whether
it is what we would prefer.
True free will, though, posits that there are no controls on us whatsoever; although, even if you meant 'the freedom to do what is in our physical capacity to do,' we are never truly free, because the universe has been shaped around us by the choices we, and every other thing ever, have made, and as shaped, it pushes against us from all sides, narrowing our options at times, widening them at times, but at every interval it is the same: We have only so much choice as we, acting in concert with everything that has existed to this point in time, have allowed ourselves.
TO-DAY a rude brief recitative, Of ships sailing the Seas, each with its special flag or ship-signal; Of unnamed heroes in the ships- Of waves spreading and spreading, far
as the eye can reach; Of dashing spray, and the winds piping and blowing; And out of these a chant, for the sailors of all nations, Fitful, like a surge.
-- Song For All Seas, All Ships,
Walt Whitman.
___________
The thing about kayaking to a place is you have to kayak back.
This is something I of course have always known, although knowing something as a part of your brain, and knowing something as a thing you act upon are apparently two very different things for me.
In the past I tried to ameliorate, at least in part, the whole paddling back thing that goes along with paddling to somewhere. Many many years ago, I and my brother decided that we would go canoeing and camping 'up North," as we say here in the part of the country that is in the north but is not quite at the absolute top of the country and so we can still say that we are going up north to do something.
We went up north and rented a canoe and had our backpacks and tents and everything ready to go, plus we had a foolproof plan. The plan was this: we were going to canoe upriver all day Friday and Saturday. Then, when it was time to return, we'd drift leisurely back down the river, enjoying canoeing the way the kings used to enjoy it before all the kings were beheaded or whatever.
That plan fell apart about two hours into paddling upstream on a hot summer day. Paddling upstream is a ridiculous thing to do, and I would say I don't know why we thought we could do it, except that I do know: we were idiots. We were the kind of people who, having been raised in the suburbs and exposed to only the most extremely tame kind of 'wilderness' for twenty years, figured we had this thing, nature, licked. After all, if you can go camping for two whole days at Ottawa Lake State Park and survive, then what else could nature possibly have in store for you?
We were therefore two hours upriver before we finally got some common sense, realized this was not going to get any easier as we went on, and decided to stop exercising and just camp for the rest of the day and night, with the idea that the next day we might maybe go hiking or something around there because screw all that paddling. Then that night we heard what was almost certainly (in our minds) a bear, or possibly a tiger, and decided that if we survived the night we would the next day quit camping and go instead to River Falls to see if we could spot Joe Montana at the Kansas City Chiefs' training camp.
That was not my only canoeing trip, or my only camping trip to take a drastic left turn into something way way more civilized. Nearly every camping trip, with or without canoes involved, has ended in disaster/early retreat to civilization. I have given up on camping for that reason (plus: bugs). I no longer imagine that I would enjoy camping. I have no desire to sleep outdoors, or even spend very much time there.
But I have not yet given up on canoeing, or it's ilk, provided that there is a good reason to do so and it doesn't last too long. Which is how I ended up on Lake Mendota one day not long ago, kayaking myself and Mr Bunches out to Picnic Point and back. I lived to tell about it, albeit just barely as evidenced by the fact that it has taken me nearly three weeks to find the strength to put the adventure on paper. (Literally: the strength. The kayaking caused such a bout of asthma that I had to go see a doctor.)
This picture is put here as a service because the story is about to digress for a while
from the actual POINT of the story (kayaking) to something about "mountweazels."
The latest BIG Adventure Squad outing took place without Mr F, and also took place without me calling it Adventure Squad. There is a reason for both omissions.
First, I am not to call it "Adventure Squad." Mr Bunches let me know that in no uncertain terms, which is a weird expression if you think about it. No uncertain terms. I suppose that is simply a fancy way of saying he said it clearly. He said it without using any terms the meaning of which was uncertain. That is, at least, the first meaning of the idiom; the alternate or secondary meaning, according to the Collins Dictionary, is forcefully, which raises the question: can you copyright a dictionary?
This is something I have been wondering for the last few days, since driving home from Milwaukee late Thursday night and being unable to listen to It on audiobook because It takes two hours to download onto a phone. So I listened to a podcast which talked about mountweazels, which are fake words that are stuck into dictionaries in part to catch someone copying their dictionary. (I just looked into it: Dictionaries are copyrightable; phone books are not.)
I digress. Mr Bunches does not want me to call this Adventure Squad, because, to quote him: "We are people, not a squad." Both of those are not uncertain terms. So this is the Secret Adventure Squad, with 1/3 of our team not knowing that he is actually on Adventure Squad, no matter what he says.
Mr F, meanwhile, was left out of today's adventure because I am not entirely sure that Mr F would want to be on a boat. I am entirely sure that I would not want to be on a boat with Mr F. Mr F is almost magnetically attracted to water. He can sense it, wherever it is. One night, for example, we went to "Tall Park," which is actually Rosecommons Park in Fitchburg. Mr F is my charge when we go to that park, because Sweetie gives out the childcare assignments, and she takes the easy ones. So while she hung out with Mr Bunches, who was playing DC Justice League vs. DC Supervillains (TM) on the large slide, I chased Mr F through the mud and then had to roll with him down the hill. While both of those things are fun, I have (as noted) terrible asthma and can't keep up with him that well. Also (this is where I started this thought) Mr F found, somehow, a puddle to roll us through.
On a hill. He found a puddle, on a hill.
The thought of putting Mr F into a kayak and trying to keep him in the kayak while we paddled around Lake Mendota is enough to give me a stroke. I am 100% sure that we would not have gone kayaking, per se, but would have simply been swimming next to an upturned kayak for most of the day.
So we left him home, which was fine anyway because technically this was not just an Adventure Squad mission but was also Mr Bunches' Birthday Transportation Present.
Mr Bunches is enamored of transportation. He talks constantly about cars, buses, motorcycles, you get it: Things that move people. From when he was a little boy he has had a book called Let's Go, which details various modes of transportation. He has graduated from that book to detailed books about airplanes, rockets, cars, trains, you get it: Things that GO. So a couple of years back, we started giving him Transportation Presents. First was a ride in an airplane, a little four-seater that flew us around Madison. Then last year was a helicopter ride that was absolutely terrifying if you were old enough to understand that helicopters should not work the way they work. I know they do work, but they don't feel like they work. They are abominations unto God.
This year, we went the quieter route: Kayaking. Mr Bunches likes kayaks, and we see them all the time around town. Madison is made up primarily of an isthmus between two big lakes, with a smaller lake off to the side, and a bunch of other rivers, wetlands, waterways, ponds, and stuff. We're almost like Venice with less garbage and more college students who don't bother paying attention to traffic signals. (Or blood alcohol limits.)
I would go so far as to say that Madison, Wisconsin, is the kayaking capital of the world, only when I went to check out whether that was true, or what might actually be the kayaking capital of the world, I learned that Homer, Alaska, is the 'halibut fishing capital of the world." Homer, Alaska, is the town that was "The End Of The Road" in those stories by Tom Bodett; it's also featured on pretty much every reality show set in Alaska, or at least the ones that don't feature Sarah Palin putting carcasses into a wood chipper. Homer also apparently has a pretty vibrant kayaking scene, along with being a hot "foodie and art vacation" spot.
I like the idea of Alaska, but I doubt I would like living there. I already hate having 15 months of winter every year here in Wisconsin. Alaska would be a living Hell for me. Nonetheless, I almost went there once as a college student, to work in a national park. I applied for a summer job but didn't make the cut. So I went to Morocco instead.
I always figured kayaking would be pretty terrible. Growing up, I saw kayaks and they were always these thin tubes of fiberglass or something, with a person plunked into the middle of them, sealed in so they looked like a half-man/half-boat hybrid creature. It was like a kazoo had been shot with gamma rays and then tried to eat a man. The kayakers had helmets and those cool double-paddles and goggles and wetsuits, and you'd see them shooting rapids and barrel-rolling like crazy. That was what kayaking meant to me: claustrophobic seating and constant barrel-rolls. I wondered, watching them, how their legs didn't cramp up, and why anyone would want to use a boat that was upside-down half the time. I couldn't see how kayaks had ever been a good idea for Eskimos. Why would a boat that deliberately dipped you into arctic waters be a good thing?
The "modern kayak" was brought about by a man named John MacGregor, in an early bit of Columbusing. MacGregor designed the "Rob Roy" in 1845. This is apparently what passes for kayak 'humor'. MacGregor, see, was apparently playing off the fact that Robert MacGregor went by the name "Rob Roy." Robert MacGregor was the famous (??) Scottish outlaw whose exploits were exaggerated by a poet attempting to turn him into a "Scottish Robin Hood." He succeeded insofar as someone eventually made a movie about him, and that movie sucked. John MacGregor, I am assuming with zero evidence to back me up, was somehow tying himself into Robert MacGregor and/or making a pun. The reason John MacGregor is revered among modern kayakers is because John MacGregor designed a canoe. Look, I'm not the one who comes up with these dumb things. John MacGregor, canoe designer, made kayaking popular around the time Andrew Jackson made having bank panics every 10 years popular. Give or take a decade.
John MacGregor was also a lawyer, back in the days when all you had to do be a lawyer was to say you were a lawyer. That was pretty much how everything was back then: if you wanted to be one of the 'learned' professions (doctor, lawyer, teacher) you pretty much could just be one. It was the late 1700s when people began getting medical degrees. Licenses weren't issued until 1806, but even then a license simply meant you could collect your fees in court, not that you weren't just a sawbones with a bag of leeches.
The modern MODERN kayak, i.e. the ones you can rent for about $17 an hour on a lake around here, don't really resemble those Wide World Of Sports kayaks. They look like canoes. They pretty much are canoes. To me, a canoe is any boat shaped like a canoe. A kayak is any boat shaped like a canoe but covered over with a hole in the middle. Wikipedia seems to focus on the kind of paddle you use to propel the boat to differentiate between the two, which is dumb. Why would that matter? That's like saying a bicycle is a bike because it's pedaled while a motorcycle is... never mind. It's dumb, either way, and Wikipedia recognizes that about two sentences later when it (smartly) agrees with me and says a kayak is a canoe with a cover on it.
(The Brits use the terms interchangeably, which is about what you'd expect, from them.)
We didn't tell Mr Bunches the particular day he was going kayaking. He knew he was going kayaking for his birthday, but having only a vague sense of time/days, Mr Bunches barely knows what a birthday is . We had plans to take him on the Saturday before his birthday, near the end of August. But we didn't tell him that because if you tell him you're going to do something, and then have to change those plans, he does not take it well. Mr Bunches does not care what your reason for not doing something you'd planned to do is. He will cry, give you the sad face, have an awful day, and otherwise make you feel like you are the worst parent in the world, and he is so effective at this that you eventually will start to change your mind against all reason and common sense. "Well," you will think to yourself, "What are the odds that lightning would actually strike us, out there on the lake in a thunderstorm?" This is why you cannot tell Mr Bunches about things that are subject to cancellation.
It was a good thing, too, that we hadn't told him because it did thunderstorm the Saturday we'd planned to go, so rather than face his disappointment, we simply went to the library and had a wonderful day.
The next day, Sunday, it was pleasant and sunny and warm enough to go on the lake, and the kayak rental place was open, so we were ON.
"How would you like to go kayaking today?" I asked Mr Bunches.
"Okay!" he said.
"We're going to go to Lake Mendota and kayak over to Picnic Point," I said.
"No," he said. "We go kayaking on the river."
Mr Bunches said this because the only place he had ever seen a kayak in the wild was at the river where we go to throw rocks in the river. We were there, the Adventure Squad (this was in our pre-squad days), throwing rocks into the river, when two kayakers came by.
It was sort of weird, seeing boaters come into the river while we were on the land. It's like we were in two different worlds, and they suddenly overlapped, the world of boaters on water in kayaks and the world of kids with dads on land. The boaters sort of didn't acknowledge us, and we sort of didn't acknowledge them. The whole thing was strange, as if we'd run into a family member in the grocery store, unexpectedly, while also realizing that we weren't wearing pants.
We could not go kayaking in the river, because not only do I remember all too well the nature of river paddling, but also the only place I knew to rent kayaks was down at the Memorial Union Terrace, where the "Hoofers" rent boats of all kinds.
"Hoofers" seems like a kind of weird name for a club that sails and boats and etcs, but it turns out that Hoofers aren't just into sailing. They're into all kinds of stuff. I went to their website to find out why they are called "Hoofers" but I got frustrated because first I kept typing "Hoffers" and then when I finally got that right the page took a million years to load and I couldn't stand it so I clicked away as quickly as I could. The Hoofers motto is "Adventure Is Out There" which means we have reached the point where kids who watched Up! as kids are now making their websites for their college years. I remember when I first realized how old I really was: I was driving back from a hearing in Waukesha County. I'd taken four of the law clerks with me so they could see me in court and start learning. On the way back, all four of them had a very serious discussion about the Harry Potter books and I have never felt more like a babysitter than that ride.
The Hoofers don't accept reservations for kayaks. Getting into a boat is strictly first-come, first-served, and they opened at noon. I tried to get there as quickly as we could and as close to noon as possible. We were going on the Sunday before Labor Day, and college classes would start two days later. Sweetie and I spent a little time Sunday morning trying to debate how busy it would actually be, and we settled on not very busy because while the weather would be very nice and it would be the day before a day off, which could mean that students would eagerly take to the water for a final day of recreation, we were putting our money on most of those kids are going to be way hung over to go kayaking. Better safe than sorry, though: Mr Bunches and I headed downtown about 11:40 a.m.
Wegot to the Memorial Union by walking through the construction that has surrounded it for the past several years. The Library Mall, with the churches and art museums and monolithic scary library building that looks like it belongs on one of those planets that Meg would have to tesseract to in order to teach people the importance of nonconformity, and the Red Gym Armory castle building and Science Hall which looks more like Hogwarts than Hogwarts, is usually a spectacular place to walk through. But for the past year or two or ten, it has been blocked off by various cranes and trailers and fences, the fountain in the middle covered up, and today was no different. We had to kind of hustle by the construction and then into the Union itself, which is also being renovated.
We need more buildings like this, and fewer glass boxes.
That, too, had caused us some concern, Sweetie and I, because we do not know how to fit into society. We had heard that the Memorial Union was undergoing renovations, and that half of it would be closing down. I had, as it turns out, been in the part that had already been renovated, last year when I took the boys to see Newton's Apple Tree and jump off the pier into the lake. So I guessed that the newer half, which was where I thought they kept the boats and the college students who rent them to you, would be. Sweetie thought the whole thing might close down. It was kind of nerve-wracking, walking into the Union and not knowing whether we were going to actually kayak that day or not. I mean, by now Mr Bunches knew we were going kayaking. I'd had to tell him: even Mr Bunches, who is pretty easygoing, won't just get into a car and not demand to know where we are going.
We walked past the temporarily-closed ice cream stand, and past a sign that advertised what I am pretty sure was a beer and coffee drink, which almost dragged me to a stop with a why. I didn't stop, because Mr Bunches was pretty eager, and also because that would have been pretty melodramatic. Still, I couldn't help but feel superior to everyone around me after that, as I imagined them all being smart enough to get into college but dumb enough to combine two awful-tasting drinks into one awful-tasting mess, and somehow think that was cool, the way kids combined vodka and Red Bull a while back. I am pretty sure that nobody who drank Red Bull, ever, will amount to a person of consequence, and I am equally sure that anybody who mixed Red Bull with alcohol has at least one misdemeanor conviction on their record, one they'll downplay twenty years from now but still won't get the job. Serves them right. Seriously: Red Bull? Coffee and beer? Young people suck so bad.
We made it to the rental office, where Mr Bunches told the man that was helping us fill out forms, the girl answering the phone, and the girl who said, twice, that she was just waiting for someone to come back with her ID, but who probably had been dumped there and didn't know it (or didn't want to admit it to a man and a little boy and the girl answering the phone) that we were "Going Kayaking!" He said that, as soon as we walked into the office.
"Hi!" he told the man. "We are going kayaking!"
The man said "That's great," and then looked at me and said "So what can I do for you?" I couldn't tell if he was joking. He didn't seem to be. I thought about saying "Oh I'm just browsing" and seeing if he would go back to Mr Bunches and help him. Maybe he didn't know we were together?
We signed off on several waivers of liability in which we promised never to sue anyone ever no matter what happened to us even if it was the direct result of someone from Hoofers trying to harm us. I didn't read them. I never read anything I sign. I haven't read anything I signed since I got a law degree. Why would I read something? I have a law degree. I'll sign whatever, and sue my way out later. For all I know, the Hoofers own my house or my kidney or both. I'll see them in Court.
(True story: When I had my heart attack, which I feel compelled to point out was not caused by ill health but was caused by nearly being stung to death by bees five days earlier, a point I have to mention because while I am fabulously unhealthy, TERRIBLY unhealthy, my level of health has not sunk so far as to begin actively destroying my internal organs. Yet. I am not that bad. It took a plague of insects just to try to level me. Anyway, when I had my heart attack, I didn't know I was having a heart attack. They were about to put me onto a treadmill just to see if my heart was at risk of attacking itself or whatever happens there, and a cardiologist came in and said "He's having a heart attack right now," and they immediately made me lay down on a stretcher and began prepping me for surgery. While I was wondering if I should start praying, and also thinking I was going to punch the stupid nurse in the ER who had decided that I was just suffering heartburn and then given me his business card while telling me he was a LARP-er, someone handed me a form and had me sign it. I do not know what I signed, but it was obviously the least enforceable contract in the history of agreements.)
Once we signed away our mineral rights and trademarks, we were told that we could lock up our stuff in the lockers nearby, a handy thing to have for people who knew there were lockers AND who brought a quarter with them to pay for the locker. The rest of us have to just carry all our things with us and hope that if we do tip the kayak, the clever nesting of three ziplock bags we have devised will protect our wallet, cellphone, and keys.
Then it was on to the somewhat humiliating task of picking out, and then putting on, a life preserver vest. For Mr Bunches, this was as simple as grabbing a red one and having me clip it on him.
For ME, this was a matter of finding the largest size, loosening the straps, trying it on, taking it off, loosening the straps, trying it on, and so on, for four rounds, at the end of which I was trying desperately to suck in my stomach because a large sign said you absolutely had to have a life preserver and what if I couldn't get the thing buckled? Finally on round five I simply let out the straps all the way, an admission of defeat akin to buying jeans with a stretch waistband. (It hasn't come to that for me. Yet.) But I got the thing on, and then the two strong young people ho worked there, and who had graciously pretended not to see me stuffing my entire self into a puffy life preserver, picked out a kayak for us and dropped it into the
About the only instruction they gave us was how to get into the kayak (sit on the dock and slide in while they hold it) and which side of the paddle pointed which way (the paddle should be held so that the concave surface is toward you. Mr Bunches, not knowing concave, got his exactly opposite and throughout the ride I was unable to get him to correct it. Eventually I stopped trying. It's not like it made a huge difference.)
Then we were off.
It's always something of a shock to just be allowed to do something dangerous these days, isn't it? These people had me sign a sheet and then set me loose on a lake where people are operating motor boats and sailboats and where there are fish like this:
Technically that is in Lake Monona and we were on Lake Mendota, but the two lakes are only about 5' apart, and don't tell me THAT thing can't portage that gap.
SPECIAL ADVENTURERS NOTE FOR PEOPLE WHO, LIKE ME, HAVE SEEN JAWS AND THUS HAVE NEVER FELT SAFE AGAIN IN THE WATER: Being in a lake does not matter to me. It doesn't matter what kind of water I am in. I am deathly afraid that something -- if not a shark, then whatever that giant fish up there is -- is going to bite me. Lake, ocean, river, brook: It's all the same oat bag. Don't tell me it can't happen. Just three years ago an innocent man dangled his foot in the water and got it bit by a muskellunge, which is like the pit bull of fish. It therefore took an extra act of courage for me to get into that kayak and paddle out onto a lake that was filled with giant eels probably or something, because everytime I looked down at the dark water as we paddled, all I could picture was that scene where Roy Scheider was spooning chum into the water
Anyway, as I was saying, it's always strange in this world of releases and lawyers and leagues and Moms, to just be allowed to do something. No training, no coaches or guides or tandem bikes or whatever. Just here's a boat hope you know what you're doing. I felt sort of alive at that, like how the pioneers must feel. I also felt hopeful that if this turned out badly, I could sue them for not making us watch a mandatory 30-minute video on safety, which was (no lie) the only instruction I was required to undergo the time I went parachuting and was allowed to jump out of a plane all by myself.
I should add, the two healthy people did not entirely skip the safety tips. As we slowly drifted away from the dock, the muscular guy who helped us and who probably had no trouble putting on his life vest, said -- accurately surmising my boating skills -- "If you get stuck and can't get back, wave your paddle straight up in the air. Rescue watches from over there and they'll come get you."
(It's almost like he knew about the time I went windsurfing near Oshkosh on vacation. I went windsurfing entirely in one direction, and then couldn't figure out how to windsurf back, and had to paddle a giant windsurfing board all the way back into shore. I am no longer a fan of windsurfing. People hear that story and say you had to tack your way back in. YOU tack your way back in. Tacking is witchery, and I can't do it.)
With that, we were off.
"Where should we head?" I asked Mr Bunches.
"That way," he said, indicating no particular direction while splashing me with his paddle. So we set out to paddle through the sailboats anchored all around the Union Terrace, and it was super easy to do. Just paddle and paddle and paddle and paddle, smoothly shifting the paddle up and over and down and over and up and paddle and paddle and my god what did we decide to do? After roughly one hundred million strokes, when I was nearing cardiac failure, I took a break from paddling and realized two things:
1. Mr Bunches was actively working against me. He would dip his paddle in the water, get confused, push it against the water, and say "It's stuck!" before pulling it back up.
2. We had gone about 100 yards.
I decided to take a slightly easier pace. We settled in: I would paddle once or twice, and we'd coast, and Mr Bunches would get his paddle stuck, and we'd coast, and that way in about 10 minutes we made it out into open water. It was really kind of spectacular. There's something really neat about being farther out in the water than you'd ever imagined, and it's even neater when you're in a boat under your own power. Watching the shore recede, even in the little way we did kayaking 10 or 15 minutes out into Lake Mendota, gives me the kind of feeling that Lewis and Clark must have had for the first 10 or 15 minutes of their journey.
"See you in fifteen months, Mr Jefferson!"
Once out there, we looked around. Picnic Point was off to our left, a slim peninsula not too far away.
"Should we go to picnic point?" I asked.
"Yeah," Mr Bunches said. So we began paddling there, watching for motor boats or jet skis to come near us so there'd be waves. (I used my expert boatsmanship to steer the kayak directly into the waves so that we wouldn't swamp, a trick I learned from the movie poster for A Perfect Storm:
If they'd had me, Diane Lane wouldn't have had to marry Richard Gere only to have him kill her lover to save their marriage.)
About twenty minutes in, a pod of paddleboarders passed us; it was beautiful.
We slowly drew in on Picnic Point, where things got awkward again. We were paddling up there, and Mr Bunches wanted to try to get all the way into land. I said we weren't going to get out of the kayak simply to land on Picnic Point, because I was afraid we'd never get back in or the kayak would drift away or something. So we opted to cruise in to the end of the peninsula, where there were a few guys sitting and watching us paddle in. They had been talking, but as we came in closer, they just stopped and stared at us. All three of them, just staring, as Mr Bunches and I paddled in closer and closer. Their eerie silence started to spook me, and I began talking too loudly and too much to fight it off.
"Okay, a little closer, paddle, careful, want to go over by the tree? We can head in this way," and the entire time, the three guys just stared until we paddled away under an overhannging tree branch.
At that point, we hit the part of kayaking that always occurs when I am on or in the water. This is the What Now part. People love the idea of boating, swimming, kayaking water skiing, etc. (I love the idea of all those things, except boating. I do not get the appeal of boating. It's just driving around. If I called you up and said Hey let's take my car and go drive around this one really big flat parking lot that's like three miles across you'd hang up the phone, even if I said no really it's okay lots of other people are doing it too and they're probably drunk. Why does it make it better that you're driving around on a body of water? At least sailing requires some technical skill to make a jib or whatever. Canoeing and kayaking and paddleboarding are physical exercise. Boating is just sitting, at high speed.
The What Now point comes in any water-based activity once you remember that we are not aquatic animals and that therefore there is only so much we can do in the water, and 'so much' is actually not very much at all. If you are swimming, you will go through the basics:
1. Wade in slowly until someone splashes you or you get brave and dive under water.
2. Splash some other people.
3. Do a few strokes of the crawl or something.
4. Do a headstand or somersault.
5. Stand there, bored.
(If you are a teenager you will also challenge another teenager to a fight of some sort, because: girls.)
Boating, etc. are worse. Once you have boated here, all that is left is to go there. Or just sort of cruise around aimlessly. It's not like we were out there to fish (THANK GOD) or explore. It's just a lake. We're not discovering the Northwest Passage or something. The time I went canoeing with the Wilderness Club in high school, we canoed from a place, to other places, going from island to island. That made sense: that was transportation. Recreational boating is just nothing after about 10 minutes. I bet people who can boat for more than 30 minutes are dead inside, just hoping that the wind will whistle through their eye sockets and make them feel, if only for a moment, like they have a soul.
We'd only been out 25 minutes or so, and we wanted to go an hour. The kayaks cost $17 per hour, and I had exactly $17 with me, so it wasn't that we didn't want to go over an hour, it was that I didn't know what would happen if we did, so the decision was already sort of made by that: we would head back, because if we got there early (?) we could sail around the boats again, but I didn't want to be late and held in Hoofer Jail or whatever.
It was a good thing we did, too: it took us most of the 35 minutes we had left to get back to where we came from, notwithstanding that I took a more direct route back than we'd taken out. I attribute some of that to Mr Bunches' discovery that his paddle could stuck this way, too, and part of that to the fact that I am basically a pile of gelatinous goo held together by my "Bob's Burger" t-shirt, as opposed to being, say, a functional human being with actual muscles.
TRUE STORY: The other day I got so sweaty and winded doing beginner's yoga that I had to quit after 15 minutes and use my inhaler. Middle age is not going to be kind to me.
By 40 minutes into the trip, all the idea of fun was swiftly evaporating. For me, it was because I was beginning to actually be unsure I could paddle us back, at least in time. To spur myself on, I tried to imagine how big the fish were underneath us, as well as how it would look on the news if I had to actually be rescued from a kayak on Lake Mendota. Because of fatigue. For Mr Bunches, it was the disappearance of a bunch of people on a giant inner tube.
A boat had gone by us dragging one of those inner tubes that carry seven people, only one of whom is having any fun while the rest either are jealous that they didn't get to be next to Kelly, or upset that everyone wants to be next to Kelly. (Kelly, by the way, isn't so great.) Mr Bunches had been entranced by it, thinking it was an awesome thing. Then, about five minutes later, it had come back around, this time the tube hauled up and everyone safely drinking "Bud Lite Limearitas" again and listening to No Woman No Cry.
"They all fell off," Mr Bunches said.
"No, they just got on the boat," I said.
"No, they fell off," he insisted, and then began calling to the boat "Hey! Man Overboard!" but they didn't pay any attention. Death's grim spectre now hung over our journey, making sounds like the creaking of my vertebrae.
We kept paddling on, or at least one of us did, and wended our way through anchored sailboats. We got back into the dock with a few minutes to spare, and sailed in, exhausted but victorious, and proud.
We were now men of the sea, joined to our earlier brethren who navigated Earth's waters by our courage, our strength, our daring,
I couldn't tell if the Belleville Printing Company, with the fading logo on the sign here, is still a real business or not. But the drawn shades and the way the sign is slowly drifting into the past suggest if it still exists, it won't for long.
"A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money." -- WC Fields.
Four Corners Park is hard to find. It's hard not to think that's by design. Nestled into the (super)rich area known as Shorewood Hills, Four Corners even hid itself from my GPS, probably because the wealthy own all the satellites, telecommunications companies, death rays, etc. and when I typed in "Four Corners Park Shorewood Hills" on my phone, supercomputers around the world announced that a middle class person was trying to go to a rich park.
To get to Four Corners Park, you should first be born into a wealthy family, the kind that can afford to live in a decrepit-looking house within spitting distance of Lake Mendota. The truly rich, the ones who have ridiculously large and ornate lodge-style houses with 17 stories and private docks all actually located on the lakeshore, would never go to a park in their neighborhood. They are all Sherman McCoy types who publicly would say No I'm not but privately would try sticking out their patrician chin while sending their child to a private park located on their own island in the Maldives.
Guys like me don't know where the Maldives are, so for a taste of the good life we head over to secret(ive) parks in the nice parts of town. Four Corners Park was named one of the best playgrounds in Dane County by the Isthmus 9 years ago, which was why we were headed there today: it was the closest of those playgrounds and hence the one I chose for this, the first expedition of Adventure Squad.
Like I said, Four Corners is hard to find. Shorewood Hills itself is one of those communities that's off to the side of a real city and made deliberately hard to get into and get around. Suburbs do this to discourage people from coming into them: few entrances, twisting narrow streets, and the like are meant to subtly keep rabble like us out. This feature did not generally dissuade us from driving through Shorewood Hills in the past; many a date, Sweetie and I would drive through there at sunset, to discuss how awesome the houses were (at first), then how ungodly expensive they must be (later on), then how we wouldn't even want such a house not even if you would give one to us for free and pay the property taxes (reasons for this include the need to get furniture to fill it up, and losing the boys somewhere in the house) and then finally our discussions devolved into how do we get out of here and back to our real life? To top it off, one night lost in Shorewood Hills we drove by a house that had scary yard art, weird sculptures that were probably meant to be playful or fancy or something but which (a) almost certainly were hated by their uppity neighbors who would have to see them whenever they came back from buying salmon frappe at the Whole Foods that sits directly across teh street from Shorewood Hill, and (b) which looked like witch-summoning weird piles of wood at night and made me think of the Milwaukee Witch House that was on the cover of the Violent Femmes' album and which we used to say, when we were teenagers drinking wine coolers and smoking Marlboro Lights and driving around aimlessly, was owned by a lady whose son had drowned in Lake Michigan and the sculptures were her way of calling his spirit back. (Not only is that latter part of the story not true, the house being merely owned by someone who practiced outsider art, but the house is no longer there, having been moved to Sheboygan.)
The Adventure Squad did not plan on getting lost: we had GPS, and followed it to not Four Corners Park. "Your destination is on your left," the GPS voice told us, and on our left was a chain across a path, and a slight indentation that I sort of figured was maybe to park a car? It all sat in front of a path that ran down through what would be a trestle bridge except that instead of trains it was only ever traversed by Land Rovers, Mercedes Benzes, and other cars that cost more than most people make in a year.
So we got out, over Mr Bunches' protests that we "Can't go look at parks," because I had tricked Mr Bunches and Mr F into going to look at other parks; they thought we were on our way to the pathetically-named M.Y. Dream Park in Monona, but I'd detoured without telling them.
The path led under the trestle bridge down towards the lake, which is always a big draw for Mr F because: water! and for Mr Bunches, who hopes that maybe he might be able to jump off a pier or something.
We paused for a scenic picture:
before continuing down the path to see that there was nothing down there but a rocky shore, a chain-link-fenced in picnic area, and a few boat launches or something. The day did not lend itself to jumping off a pier, either, as this is Wisconsin and so summer ended last May, slightly before it began. Today it was 64 degrees and Lake Mendota was doing its Cape Cod impersonation:
"Smile!" I told Mr Bunches, who promptly did 'The Robot'.
The black and white makes it seem artsier, as always, but the whole scene actually did sort of look like it was in black and white anyway, almost as if the Shorewood Hills elite (who aren't really the one percent, as the 1% in Dane County live in Bishop's Bay or Maple Bluff, they're more the 3-5% over in Shorewood Hills but don't tell them that if you run into them at Whole Foods, they'll get hurt feelings) had managed to keep the riffraff from seeing color from their boat launch. After a few more scenic pictures,
we climbed back up the hill and got into our car and continued down Edgehill Drive to see if we could get to Four Corners park, and if not we were going to actually go to the (sigh) "M.Y. Dream Park."
About two blocks past the scenic boat launch, we passed a little recessed sign, really more of an indentation in the neighborhood than anything else; it had kind of a bus-stop feel to it, but I slowed down and read the sign, and realized we'd found it: Four Corners Park really did exist!
Maybe? We drove by really slowly but I couldn't see the park part of it. What it looked like was, as I said, an indent in someone's yard. Could this be the park? I wondered. I couldn't remember the Isthmus' description of it but I was pretty sure that a 10x20 flat area with a sign wouldn't make even the Isthmus' top 10 list of parks.
So I turned right and turned around in the driveway of a rich person, thereby lowering their property values by 0.00001% ("A middle class person drove here, didn't they?" future home buyers will ask, instinctively feeling the presence of a car bought on sale and used to transport generic sodas from Woodmans.)
We drove back again, looking more closely, and I caught a glimpse of what might have been a swingset through a break in the trees.
"It's Four Corners playground," I told the other Adventurers, who greeted me with silence because they were reading books about the solar system and/or trying to get out of the elaborate system of harnesses some of them must be rigged into to avoid them clambering all over the car as others of us drive.
"Should we get out?" I asked.
Silence.
I looked at the road we were on, which looked like the kind of road I couldn't park on. There were no No Parking signs that I could see, but I never trust my instincts when it comes to stuff like this, ever since I once got my car towed for (supposedly!) parking it in front of someone's driveway while I went to class back when I went to UWM. The city where I (supposedly!!) parked my car? Shorewood, in Milwaukee. Coincidence? NOTHING IS COINCIDENCE.
I figured at the very least there was probably some small sticker or something that real Shorewood Hills residents have on their cars and mine wouldn't have it. So I went up a half-block and saw a car parked in front of a house on the right side of the road. I pulled up behind it and figured if he can park here so can I, which should in no way be taken to be a demonstration of my otherwise-stellar legal reasoning skills. I don't keep them activated on Sunday afternoons.
"You parked in a bush," Mr Bunches told me.
"Can you get out?" I asked him back. He looked dubious. But he tried, and he did.
I got Mr F out, and we began walking back to Four Corners, trying to act like we totally belonged there and were just a trio of rich folks out driving someone else's middle-class car over to our neighborhood park which we paid for with our property taxes using money from our trust funds. I had on blue socks and a Captain America t-shirt. I think I pulled it off.
Have you ever gone to a park outside your neighborhood? We go to parks in other areas of cities, and even other cities, all the time. That is because the parks in our neighborhood suck. There is Baskerville Park around the corner, which is full of spiders, is practically in someone's yard, and which sits on a very busy street with only an obviously-inadequate fence in between the playground and the Road Of Death. There is the other park on the other side which has lake access but the "beach" (and this is totally serious) is a plot of sand in front of large boulders. Also that park is filled with people in campers and tents, and I am afraid of the kind of people who come to camp in Middleton, because they obviously are not camping. They are clearly transient people who drift into town to make meth and/or kill little kids who are more than 3' from their dad. I don't like to walk by them; they smell like lighter fluid and jerky.
So we have to go to other parks, and that's fine if you're in Middleton where we at least pay property taxes. Going to parks in other cities, we lose even that little bit of moral standing. I can go to a park in one of the tonier suburbs of Middleton and if someone ever singles me out and says something like Hey you don't live in this subdivision I could at least say Oh yeah well I pay property taxes plus I was busted like four times for speeding in Middleton so I've paid my dues buddy. I am always in fear, at those other neighborhood parks, that I will be picked out of the crowd and shamed into going back to my own neighborhood where black widows (probably) infest the tornado slide.
Imagine how I felt sneaking into a rich park in another city? I expected a doorman, who would ask whether I had a membership card and then sneer while I pretended to look through my (red, velcro, free from the library) wallet, only to meekly turn away. Come on boys, I would say, we'll go play at the tire fire on the dark side of town.
But there was nobody there and there also was a real park! From a small gap in the trees, Four Corners opened up into an actual park:
The first thing we came across when we came in was the honest-to-goodness metal Merry Go Round:
If you had asked me before we saw it, I'd have told you that these things were almost certainly outlawed. While we had one in the park up the street from where I lived as a kid, the only one like this I'd ever seen as an adult was in a park on the West Side of Madison. That park was so near the highway that the noise made you have to shout to be heard, and the footing was gravel, which tells you everything you need to know about that playground. Gravel? Why not sprinkle glass fragments and rusty screws over blacktop?
Four Corners had a merry-go-round, probably because all the kids' parents are third-generation descendants of the kings of industry, making enough money to have decent homeowners' and medical insurance. No large deductibles for them! The worst that would happen would be little Chauncey would have to miss a season of lacrosse. You just know all the kids in Shorewood Hills play lacrosse. It'd be just like them.
(Spoiler Alert: I know one of the kids' names from Shorewood Hills because they marked them on the walls of the park. It's not Chauncey. It is almost certainly the name of a Norse God. You'll see.)
Mr F got onto the merry go round and immediately began pushing himself around by laying on it with one arm, leaving me free to examine the rest of the park, which meant I almost immediately noticed that it was full of stuff the rich folk had left behind. There were, I would find, several lawn chairs, two hula hoops, some of those hair things girls wear that go across their head, a pair of Crocs, a pair of sunglasses, and even two towels:
[
All of which gave the park (which was deserted except for us) the feel of someone's backyard, a feeling enhanced even more by the fact that the park basically was someone's backyard. Aside from that narrow entrance between the trees (which had an almost Narnian feel to it, as though a kindly lion were here to breathe on us and get rid of the chill from the Turkish Delight), the park was surrounded by the houses of the rich. They were shielded by the majestic trees and by fences, but that didn't change the feeling that we were trespassing onto their land, a feeling made more direct by the fact that some of their yards opened directly on to the park:
If that wasn't enough to give the feeling that this was really a private piece of land we were trespassing on, the shelter up near the top would have pushed it over the edge. The structure had some picnic tables in it, and some nice flower pots in front of it, but what set it apart was that on all the cornices (I am not sure what a 'cornice' is but it seemed to fit) there were handprints made in paint and names painted next to them. I saw 2008 through about 2015, each with about 15-20 names per year. When did those kids do that? They couldn't have been on a group field trip or school trip or something: this is (ostensibly) a public park: since when can school groups just deface (theoretically) public property, and do so in such a brazen way as to sign their names? No, I figured this must be the kids who live in the neighborhood. I immediately imagined fancy garden parties, the Buchanons and Gatsbys and... Eudora Weltys or whoever... gathered here, in white linen, girls' hair ribbons trailing behind them as they ran with sparklers from boys who were carrying frogs, a fire pit (there was no fire pit there but in my mind one existed) glowing, servants in jackets and shorts carrying silver trays with aperitifs (don't know what those are, the rich drink them). The sun would have set on the rest of the world but here the afterglow of sunset would pierce through the trees, as just before the evening ended all the kids put their hands into whitewash, pressing them against the wood and tracing their name, before washing their hands in a silver bucket filled with the coldest spring water...
Beautiful.
The spell was broken a bit by first the fact that the idle rich also left behind some idle trash:
and also by the fact that they named one of their kids "Loki."
You can claim that says "Luki" but Luki is a stupid name. Loki is also a stupid name but it has a history behind it. I am 100% sure that some rich person with a $750,000 house and a boat named something dumb like That's The Breakers also has a kid named Loki. "It'll set him apart from the others," one of the parents would have said, and the other would be prevented from disagreeing because the prenup wouldn't pay squat for three more years at least. I am sure of all that. DON'T RUIN THIS FOR ME.
Also, rich people apparently do weird things, and need to be reminded not to. There was a sign saying not to put sand in the bubbler, which I though was odd because the sandbox was like 30 feet away from the bubbler, and you would really have to be a devoted kid to put sand in the bubbler. Not that kids wouldn't do that, I'm sure. It's just that given that the sandbox wasn't really proximate to the bubbler, it might not have occurred to most kids -- until, that is, you put up a sign telling them not to put sand in the bubbler. NOW you have put the idea in their heads that such a thing can be done, and you've given it the allure of forbidden fruit. I honestly did not want to put sand in the bubbler and before that moment had never even considered the thought of doing so. They were just two things, sand and bubblers, that I never had juxtaposed in my mind. But the minute I saw that sign I was almost overpowered by the need to put at least a little sand in the bubbler. I am 46 years old. What do you suppose a sign like that does to a 7 year old? 7 year olds are nothing but impulses. I'm pretty sure if you opened up a 7-year-old's mind, it would just be one of those Van de Graaf generators, throwing random sparks off in odd directions: Jelly the cat! Stand on my head! The moon is scary! When you put up a sign like Don't Put Sand In The Bubbler it's like putting your hand on one, pulling all the current that way.
That was weird, that sign. Weirder was this one:
I like the pictogram. Especially because it's actually more confusing. It reads Toilets = Not sandboxes, which is the most confusing way to say Don't put sand in the toilet. (Again, I wasn't going to but I had to fight the urge not to after that.) If a kid can't read, will he or she be able to make out that inequivalency? Plus it begs the question: what else is a toilet not? And then what is a toilet? All we know is that it is not a sandbox, which must be especially confusing for kids who have a cat, as the cat's toilet is a sandbox. This would not bother kids in Shorewood Hills because while I am certain that 100% of them have a cat somewhere in the house they have almost certainly never been tasked with emptying its litter box. [Their cats are most likely a Siamese or a Manx or some other cat that is sort of like an investment. The rich don't have pets anymore than they have cars. Everything a rich person has in in some way an investment. Even cats. You know this to be true. No rich person ever got a cat from a pound. They bought a pedigreed cat with papers, and have considered possibly breeding the cat if they can find another cat of pure enough stock].
The Isthmus review 9 years ago said this:
Wrapped around the base of a tree, a small wooden stage awaits impromptu performances.
That is 100% something I can see happening here. Ordinarily the idea that neighborhood kids would put on a show is one I would find laughable. But I have no doubt that there have been miniature jazz recitals (WHAT is the deal with jazz? Can we stop pretending it's ok?) and tiny Shakespearian dramas and even the odd improv comedy routine from the 'youth' of Shorewood Hills.
The tree is no longer there; instead, in the middle of the stage is a totem pole that is probably not at all offensive to Native Americans, although none of them have ever made it far enough into Shorewood Hills to object:
That represents all the things Shorewood Hills' forefathers went to their cabins up north to hunt. According to Wikipedia,
Totem poles are not religious objects, but they do communicate important aspects of native culture.
Rather than animals, the pole should have sculpted reliefs of soccer camp, being promoted at dad's business, a set of golf clubs, a Coldplay CD, and a salmon frappe from Whole Foods.
Playground-equipment wise, the park had okay-to-good stuff. The swingset
had more than enough swings; usually you have to go to an elementary school playground to find that many swings. Plus there were two of those chair swings. Is there anything worse than having your kid waiting for the chair swing while some parent lets her kid keep going on the swing completely oblivious to the fact that my kid is waiting? NO. There is NOT. Parents: if I, specifically, am waiting for something with one of my kids, do the polite thing and clear off, will you? I got three hours' sleep last night and am at this playground because not only do I have to keep Mr F awake until bedtime and if I don't get him out of the house I never will do that, but I have to tire him out because that is the only hope I have he will sleep tonight.
Yes: that is every night. I get three hours' sleep every night. The other four hours Sweetie and I are lying in bed wondering whether it is worth it to go in there and see if Mr F has to go to the bathroom. If we don't, he will wet the bed. If we do, he will not go back to bed and one of us is going to have to take him for a ride at 3 a.m. and then stay downstairs with him the rest of the night, getting up off the couch every five minutes to make sure he closed the refrigerator door. So I hate to pull rank on you but I need that swing.
Mr F went on the swings for just a few minutes, then was back to the merry go round. By then he had taken off his shoes. Because nobody was around I didn't have to go through the token parenting I do for public consumption. Had their been someone around I'd have said "Oh, don't take your shoes off, come on put them on" before giving up. I would have done that only to not look terrible in front of another parent. I don't care if he wears his shoes unless it's a safety issue. We have to pick our battles, and clean socks is not where I choose to die.
Mr Bunches, meanwhile, had wandered over to the structure that at first I took for a truck but he immediately pegged as a school bus:
If it is a school bus, that seems mean. Hey kids here's a big reminder of that thing you hate and have to go to every day until you are 18, right smack in the middle of the playground. (Actually it's off to the side.) So these kids can't put sand in the toilet and have to stare down the end of summer every time they spin round on the merry go round. No wonder the park was deserted.
Mr Bunches sat down and asked "Can I sign The Wheels On The Bus?"
"Sure," I said.
"Can you not sing, Daddy?" he asked.
I wandered back over to the Merry Go Round, which Mr F had come back to. Throughout the day, Mr F would rarely venture far from the Merry Go Round, which posed problems for me because if you want to keep an eye on your kids in case one of them suddenly decides to run as far and as fast as he can in one direction, you don't want to be very far away from that kid. So if you are way up here
by the totem pole and Mr F/your kid is way down there, it's hard to relax and look around to find things to make fun of rich people about. Still, the road outside was far enough away, and quiet enough, and full of enough houses of rich people who were probably hidden inside their safe rooms because of this entirely unwarranted intrusion into their Shangri-La that I felt like I could be a little ways from him.
The other major attractions at Four Corners were the 'play structure' which sounds like a lame New Age way to refer to things but I guess is just a functional description, and the sandbox. Let's tackle the latter first.
The sandbox in Baskerville park, just a block or two away from us, is a travesty. It is full of bugs, for one thing: sit down in it and you instantly don't just feel like things are crawling on you. They are. Things. Crawling. Plus the sandbox is about 4' x 4', and while you may have been able to do the math and think hey 16 square feet that's still a really small area especially if other people insist on using the sandbox at the same time as you do. And they will. Other people always horn in. Other people are the worst.
The sandbox at Four Corners, on the other hand, is large and octagonal or hexagonal or somethingagonal.
"The polygonal shape will stimulate your children's minds and make them engage in more structured play," it seems likely some designer told some citizen's committee charged with deciding what to put in this park.
I'm not going to try to figure out the volume of the sandbox. It's big, and it's suitably far away from the toilets. It also had a higher quality of left-behind toys in it for public use. When did that start? Every sandbox we go to nowadays (and there aren't many) has a collection of toys left in it. These usually are pretty broken down, half-trucks and rakes with one tooth, a shovel that can't possibly function because it's tiny and bent at a 75-degree angle. (See? You're learning math! Polygons: Making Learning Possible. (TM).)
I have always wondered how those toys got there. The least possible option is that some city functionary is tasked with putting them out there in the spring, going to the city's store of confiscated beach toys or black-market trucks or something. I've always assumed that the toys are left behind by other kids, but this must be done on purpose, right? If the kid wanted to take the toy home, and forgot it, he or she would go back and get it, right? Or would get it some other day? If it was our house, he would. We have driven back home to get stuff we forgot, or driven off to find stuff that we have left places, because Mr F and Mr Bunches may be intrepid founding members of Adventure Club!! but they will not leave a toy behind.
So kids must be deliberately leaving them there. This is obviously a parental decision, because no kid ever voluntarily gives up on a toy. Toys and kids are like a band of Navy Seals. Nobody gets left behind. The single most accurate moment in Children's Film History (TM) was when Pixar showed the parents buying another Lotso Hugs Bear for that kid who left the first one behind. They obviously left the 37 hours of crying and screaming between leaving that rest stop and stopping at Wal-Mart to get another one before we all go #(%*$&# nuts okay honey! on the cutting room floor.
This proves that the commons are not always a tragedy, or possibly? Parents are convincing kids to leave their old junk at the playground for other kids to use. Economists ought to study kids, rather than talking about 'invisible hands' and 'value added taxes' and 'why I ought to stop lying on my taxes and claiming I spent $32,000 on home office supplies last year'.
The toys at Four Corners, while also left behind, are of a higher quality, as you'd expect in Little Richville. I could almost see some neighborhood Lacrosse Mom telling Heloise the Nanny to swing by and pick up some toys from "one of those stores your people go to" in order to scatter them at the park and replace last year's now-weather-damaged models.
There were actual whole trucks that appeared functional, for example:
As well as shovels and a bucket that didn't have any cracks in it, and which could be used for actually carrying or sculpting sand.
I had to resist the urge to steal them. Anytime anything is left out that might possibly be free and/or which I could potentially use, I have to resist the urge to steal it. I am the Tragedy of the Commons.
Mr Bunches spent some time in the sandbox, near the end, laboriously building a volcano, which he announced to me was in fact a volcano. In case I thought it was a hill with a hole in it. Mr F only went into the sandbox for a bit, to dump sand on himself (see above) but that was okay because there was no sign forbidding it.
Near the sandbox, hidden way at the back, and which I almost forgot about, was the 'Teeter Totter,' which Mr Bunches informed me was a See Saw. I like today's modern SeeSaws, because unlike the olden days when kids had to be more or less equal in weight, which is a constant source of shame and embarrassment if you are a ahem heavier kid like certain people who are writing this post were, your modern SeeSaw has springs that both let one kid play on it, and prevent 'Cherry Bumps,' which are where you wait until the other kid is all the way up on one end of the slide and then quickly jump off, dropping them onto their butt, hard.
The SeeSaw, Wikipedia says, takes its name from the French ci-ca, meaning "This-That". I was going to say that was dumb, because it's not a This-That, it's an up-down, but then I translated 'up-down' into French and it comes out haut-bas, and God forbid we have our kids playing on Hot Basses on playgrounds. The name Teeter Totter on the other hand is supposed to come from the Nordic language word tittermatorter, which I refuse to believe. Why would Teeter Totter, made up of two perfectly good English words, have to come from what is obviously a fake word someone put on Wikipedia?
In portions of New England, SeeSaws are referred to as "tilt boards," because those people have had all the fun bred out of them. Correct usage: "Look, Mumsy: those poor children are playing on a tilt board. *stops talking, gets onto private helicopter ."
Near Narragansett Bay, they call them "Dandle Boards," which is just gross.
The SeeSaw here was hard to use: it had seats, with safety bars, but the safety bars were very close to the seats, so if you had eaten a lot of "Zero" bars recently, you might worry that your thighs weren't going to fit in, and if you are 46 years old and have the bending capacity of an ancient oak tree, you will have a lot of trouble getting in.
Mr Bunches did okay; Mr F couldn't figure it out at first and didn't like it when I showed him. The seats are wide enough that more kids can join in than just two. (See Other People, worst, above.)
Then there was the 'play structure,' which was the crown jewel of this playground, because it had real metal slides.
In the annals of playground safety, the Consumer Products Safety Commission has generally estimated that 200,000 kids a year get hurt on playground equipment including burns from hot metal, which is why all the slides nowadays are so terrible. They're made of that plastic that never heats up, sure, but it has a coefficient of friction somewhere around the range of brick-on-hot tar.
DID YOU KNOW: The 'coeffecient of friction' is a measure of the friction between two surfaces. The lower the number, the less friction, obvs. The 'coefficient of friction' was invented by Arthur Morin, a man so important they put his name on the Eiffel Tower. On it. They clearly didn't name it after him. There are 72 names, total, on the Eiffel Tower, which is an honor I didn't know existed until I read about the coefficient of friction. The 'coefficient of friction' supposedly cannot be calculated mathematically; it can only be demonstrated through experiments. While I am all in favor of anything that reduces the amount of math I have to learn, I don't believe this one bit. It would be so easy to ascribe a measurement to a known surface, like sandpaper, and then measure everything in terms of how it relates to that standard. This is how we measure everything; it's why a "second" is measured by the frequency of radiation of a caesium atom, and why a kilogram is measured in relation to the kilogram.
DID YOU KNOW, II: The "second" is called that because it's the second division of the hour. Weird.
Metal slides go fast, and these weren't even hot -- the trees helped shade them, and even I could get some speed on them although the fact that I am way too wide for your modern slides and I scrape against the sides slowed me down on the races.
The play structure also had rings and monkey bars. I always was envious of the kids who could do monkey bars. I could never get them -- I could barely do a pull-up in grade school. Back when I was a kid, too, other kids would do "penny drops," which was where they would hang from the monkey bars by their legs, then drop down onto their feet, flipping in the process. Playgrounds are an endless source of envy and humiliation for fat kids with glasses who lack any hand-eye coordination and like comic books.
The boys do not do well on rings and monkey bars: I generally have to hold them up so they can make their way across.
Mr F is not sad in that picture because of the rings. He was just having one of his periodic sad spells. Sometimes he just starts crying for no reason, and we have to try to figure out how to help him. We take him for rides, or try to play with him, or rub his head or his legs, or give him medicine in case he has a headache, or offer him cheese puffs, or... well, that's pretty much all we can do. Then he either pulls out of it sooner, or later, and we are left in the dark as to what caused it. We will debate the possible sources: did he hurt himself? Is he sick? Does he want to watch another movie? Does he want a snack? Maybe he wants to go play? Mr F has many ways of letting us know what he wants, but in the sad moments, those ways break down.
All in all, we were at Four Corners for nearly 2 hours, and never saw another soul. I heard a lady talking loudly outside the park at one point but she didn't come in, probably because the park was being used by ruffians. TRUE STORY: I just looked up the word "ruffian" to see where it comes from, only to learn that there was a horse named Ruffian that had a movie made about it in 2007. That makes like ten movies about horses that Hollywood has made. Who are all these people Hollywood thinks like horse movies? Also, when will they get around to remaking Fury for kids of this generation? That episode where Joey went blind after hitting a branch was a classic.
The quick recap, Four Corners Park: Worth the trip, but be sure to wear your monocle so you blend in.
Mr Bunches' Two Cents Worth:
Me: Did you like Four Corners park?
Mr Bunches: Yeah.
Me: What did you like about it?
Mr Bunches: It's a good one. Because the Merry Go Round is crazy, because the twins made a man overboard.* We're crazy.
*He is referring to when he and Mr F fell off the merry go round, and he hit his butt, and said Man overboard!
