The Big Kids’ Playground


Our small-town elementary school encompassed kindergarten through fourth grade. Naturally there were efforts made to keep the different age groups apart as much as possible. Kindergarteners, first through second grade, and third through fourth grade all had their own separate recesses. Third and fourth graders also had their own separate playground. Naturally this was known as “the Big Kids’ Playground.”

The Little Kids’ Playground was nestled into an “L” between the kindergarten classroom wing and the cafeteria. One of the playground’s open sides looked toward the teachers’ parking lot. The fourth side faced the Big Kids’ Playground. A long drainage ditch served as a boundary. There was also a strip of grassy ground on the Little Kids’ side that they were not encouraged to play on. The distance seemed vast to my Little Kid eyes.

The Big Kids’ Playground sloped up from the drainage ditch to a kind of low ridge. To an adult the rise is barely noticeable; to grade-schoolers it was a regular hillside. Sometimes, when our recesses overlapped, we little kids could see the big kids playing up on their elevated play area. As the eldest in my family I had little experience with bigger kids outside of church. Big kids to me were like a race apart, bigger, more knowledgeable and privileged, and a little bit scary. Watching them play up there, it was hard to remember that we were all students at the same school.

One thing the Big Kids’ Playground lacked was playground equipment. We Little Kids had swings, slides, and monkey bars. The Big Kids’ turf had none of those things. When I was in second grade, my final year on the Little Kids’ Playground, we saw workmen erecting mysterious structures on the top of the Big Kids’ place. They were getting playground equipment! We looked at the gleaming, white-painted metal assemblies and wondered what they were. All anybody could suggest with any confidence was that the platform raised on tall legs must be a new slide. We could hardly wait until next year, when we would go over there. Then we would be Big Kids and would learn the mysteries of their playground.

We second graders were in for something of a disappointment when we reached third grade. The “slide” we thought we had seen turned out to be nothing more than a platform reached by a hard-to-climb chain ladder. Early during our third-grade year the ladder disappeared. Perhaps the powers-that-be decided it was too dangerous. At any rate, for most of the two years that we played on that playground we had no way of getting up to the platform. It rose above our heads on its white-painted pipe section legs, tantalizingly out of reach and absolutely useless.

Actually much of that playground equipment was of doubtful utility. There was a set of parallel uneven bars that one could somersault over, but nothing else. There was a set of pipe sections that rose up from the ground and were linked together at the top well above our heads. You couldn’t climb it, really, and the pipe sections were too close together to grab them and swing around them. At best the thing served as a very mediocre piece of outdoor sculpture.

Then there was a ladder-like structure, made of that ubiquitous white piping, which one could climb up and over and back down like something on a military obstacle course. It was easily the most popular of the playground structures. I was not then a very good climber, and did not spend a lot of time competing to get on it.

Finally, there were two low-mounted balance beams, one noticeably narrower than the other. The narrow beam was just as wide as my eight-year-old’s shoe. Nobody else seemed to be interested in it. I started spending much of my recess time walking back and forth on it. After a while I could practically run on it. I’ve had a very good sense of balance ever since. If only our school had offered gymnastics, I might actually have been good at a sport!

Fortunately the playground had more attractions than the rather inadequate play equipment. It had its own unique geography, barely noticeable to an adult, but very apparent to those of us whose eyes were still low to the ground. The playground was roughly the size and shape of a football field. That was a lot of room for the roughly 150 children in our two grades. There were several distinct zones.

As already mentioned, it was bounded along one side by a ditch. Today the ditch is a very shallow, grassy depression. In those days only the upstream end looked like that. Downstream the ditch had sheer sides of bare clay. It was deep enough for most eight- and nine-year-olds to disappear up to their chests. The teachers did not like for kids to get into the ditch, of course, but that never stopped anything.

Three little wooden bridges spanned the ditch. The upstream bridge did not lie across any natural lines of traffic to and from the rest of the campus and was little used. Several kids who did not fit in with other groups on the playground sort of hung around together there. I was one of them. On frosty mornings we were joined by boys who liked to slide back and forth on the slippery bridge. They even found a loose plank that they could tip over into the ditch to make a ramp.

The center bridge carried most of the foot traffic. My brother and some of his friends began mining red clay from under the bridge. The teachers made them stop. They moved their mining operation downstream to the third, barely-used bridge, and began undermining it instead. The teachers made them give that up as well.

Next they crossed the ditch and discovered a vein of clay on an outlying portion of the Little Kids’ Playground. They sank a vertical shaft into that. After each play period’s mining, they would cover the hole with a lid made of clay to keep it secret (Interestingly enough, this lid is the only thing my brother recalls their making from that clay—apparently mining it was something of an end in itself). One day they discovered that their lid had been knocked in. They were convinced it was sabotage. Only much later did my brother realize that it was probably some hapless wandering dog or Little Kid who fell through by accident.

Across the playground from the ditch a patch of woods formed the boundary. In those days there was no fence on that side, so the woods were wide open. Naturally kids weren’t supposed to go in there, but many did. I was so conditioned to obedience of adults that I never tried it. I was still curious. Actually there wasn’t really anything back there in that little wooded lot. I suspect that kids never got more than a few yards into the tree line.

The playground equipment, such as it was, crowned the ridge above the downstream end of the boundary ditch. Upstream there was a huge old oak tree with a softball backstop. Little League teams practiced there after school. During the school hours I sometimes hung out around the great trunk and roots of the tree.
In fourth grade some of our afternoon recesses were turned into an organized P.E. class. I didn’t like that. P.E. meant standing around in line, running while being timed with a stop watch, and playing organized games with teams, none of which had any reason to want me on them. I was no good at running or kicking balls, and nothing we did made use of my one physical asset—my much-practiced balance.

But most of the time we were free to amuse ourselves during recess. My brother and some of his friends used the wide open space on the end of the playground beyond the big tree to play games of team Frisbee. They had lots of fun. I did not join them, since in addition to being unable to run or kick I couldn’t really throw either.

I liked recess, though. It gave me the chance to get up from my chair, get outside, and exercise, something all children really must have several times a day. I loved walking around under the big blue sky, alone with my thoughts, daydreaming, blissfully as yet unaware (as I would be made painfully aware in middle school) that children who did a lot of this and did not socialize much were considered weird.

The days weren’t all blue-sky days, of course. Sometimes it rained and we had to stay in. What dreary recesses those were! And sometimes, on cold mornings, a dense fog would blanket the playground. Children who walked up the slope into the fog seemed to disappear into another world. When I walked out there myself into the fog, the rest of the world seemed to vanish. All I could see of the school were the outlines of the buildings. But I knew that they and the teachers and everything else to do with school were still there, waiting. In a little while the buzzer would sound, and I would join the migration across the little bridge and into the building, to begin a long day of study.

The school and playground are still there. Now the ditch is shallower and (ironically) has a much more substantial bridge over it. The puzzling array of white-pipe structures are still there, joined by some actual, fun-looking slides and such. Fences clearly demarcate all of the boundaries. The old oak tree is still there. Last time I looked, the upstream bridge where I used to go was there as well, looking abandoned and forlorn.

For the most part, I suppose, the playground looks much the same now as it did then. Yet now it seems shrunken and flattened, a world away from the open, hilly field I remember. Even when the haunts of childhood stay the same, the changes we experience ourselves make them seem a totally different place.

That's a very insightful point. I enjoyed reading this piece very much. It reawakened many childhood memories. Thanks, D.L.!