The danger slide

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you know how to climb steps, all staircases are an invitation to go up in the world.

Alexandra has been climbing steps a little more than a month now, including a few recent trips when she’s climbed back down. Turn your back on her for two minutes, and chances are good that she’s been making a beeline for the staircase to see if she’s missing any excitement on the upper story. Take her to a playground, and it’s guaranteed that she’s going to discover the live-action chutes and ladders.

Thursday morning I took Alex and her oldest sister to a park day with the homeschooling co-op we’ve connected with this school year. The park has the standard no-risk, boring-as-hell plastic play sets that bedevil parks across the nation these days, but it also has one of those forgotten relics, the sort of legendary attraction that these days survives almost only in memories whispered from parents to their children: a real, honest-to-God, 8-foot-high slide made of greased lightning.

It’s the grounsort of thing that made municipal parks so much fun to visit when I was a kid. Children would line up for hours to climb the steps, sit down, and then zip down the slide at a speed so great that even if they didn’t puncture the sound barrier on the way down, they would still be gloriously airborne before they were through.

These things were great, and I’m rightly amazed when I see one still standing at a park, let alone one municipally owned. The risk of kids enjoying themselves is too great these days to allow.

Alex saw the steps, and did what she does best. I climbed up the steps of the ladder directly behind her, ready to catch her last she fall backward or to either side, the railing having been designed in the days before children could fall off the steps of a slide, and therefore having a large enough space under it for a child to easily fall through. When we reached the top, I maneuvered us into position, and we started the trip down together, Alex in my lap.

I assumed my frame, which widened between childhood and adulthood, would be enough to keep us from reaching escape velocity, and I was correct. At no point did we fly off the slide.

Unfortunately, these relic slides also were installed before the days when children had to land with their feet neatly planted on the pile of wood chips. In addition to the greater speed classic slides provide, there is also a greater drop.

And drop I did, right onto my keister. I would have said my sorry keister, but my keister was fine. When we dropped off the aluminum slide, my back struck the foot of the slide, right between my right scapula and my neck. There were no bruises and no broken bones, but we are, late on Saturday night, and the dang thing still hurts if I yawn or twist my head too much.

For her part, Alex was fine,. She looked at me as if to say, “What was that about?” and ten minutes later, she was climbing the steps again, raring for another trip down.

I’m nobody’s fool. I took her down immediately, and carried her over to the baby swings.