Built To Code

In every city park, they've lopped-off the branches that are low enough for the kids to use for climbing, then compensated with metal ladders that lead to platforms surrounded by railings with no gaps wider than 4-inches, all over fall zones of sand or wood chips.

I guess there are folks who would sue the city over a fall from a tree with branches growing where nature would have it, but not from a structure built to code. I guess we've decided as a society to raise our kids according to a bean-counter's fear of liability, leaving us all to learn to trust "the code" more than our own judgment. 

It seems we've decided to toss aside the ancient process of picking our way through thick and thin branches, testing to see which are sturdy enough for our weight. It's a story older than humanity, learning to find hand and footholds, to turn our bodies in awkward spaces, to swing out and around, to let our own sense of physics, structure, gravity, muscle, and confidence tell us how high we can go on this day. The informal, self-taught art of climbing trees is a thread that knits all the children together, everywhere, and across all the centuries. 

I hope we haven't decided that this is where it ends, like a steel ladder ends at a platform built to code. I hope we haven't given up entirely on climbing trees, where we are free from the limits imposed by railings built to code, where we could always climb a little higher if we just had the knowledge, the skills, or the courage: maybe next time. I'm afraid if we're finally coming down from the trees, we'll leave behind something in those branches, an essential part of what has always made us humans.

And no one can tell us what it is that we'll leave behind, fluttering up there in the branches: it might be our humanity.

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