The Weekly Screed (#729)

“Stay in the yard!”
By David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — My morning walk takes me past the great old houses — sprawling duplexes and a few triple-deckers — of West Washington Avenue. This city’s planners designed this street, leading uphill to the Capitol building, to be majestically broad. They planted a dozen varieties of shade trees — maple, oak, ash, elder. Every day, I admire the grass verges on both sides, wide enough — and lush enough — to serve as yards for children at play, family picnics, touch football, games of hide-and-go-seek, stoop tag, red rover…

But these classic homes are now mostly rentals, for students, singles, transients. The green space in front is mainly a lavatory for canine convicts whom downtown-dwellers incarcerate in their apartments (as surrogates for kids?).

When I was a kid in Tomah, not far from here, the yard was a place of both liberation and exile. In that era, any kid beyond diaper age was unwelcome indoors. I was “underfoot.” Regardless of the weather, Mom shooed me outside, with vague instructions to “play,” but warned me, “Stay in the yard.”

If, at age five, I’d been inclined toward epistemology, I might have replied: “What IS the yard?” On our block of Pearl Street, there were no fences. Our plot between Pearl and “the alley” bled into the Kimpton compound nextdoor and flowed through two more broad lots beyond, all the way to Ann Street. But I didn’t really need to define terms. Once I’d been kicked out, Mom didn’t care where I went or what I did. My exploratory instincts steadily expanded my “yard” into a four-block realm where the only parental stricture that gave me pause was “Don’t cross Jackson.”

Jackson Street scared grownups. As the direct route from the town’s main drag, Superior Avenue, to the hospital, it had a little more traffic than the average sleepy Tomah street. Typically, parents resorted to exaggeration, depicting Jackson as a sort of outlaw dragstrip beyond the rim of civilization. This worked for a while. I didn’t start crossing Jackson ‘til I was almost eight.

“The yard,” as an altar of traditional American family values, a playground for kids, a cozy outdoor bistro of picnic tables, chaise lounges, birdbaths and jungle gyms, is more myth than reality. When I lived in one of California’s most lawn-intensive communities, I never saw a family outdoors. The only humans who ever set foot on an immaculate row of front lawns that stretched as far as the eye could see were Mexican landscapers, pouncing on dandelions or blowing leaves.

Even when I was a kid in a small town, grownups pretty much avoided the yard. In daytime, parents worked. At night, mosquitoes kept sane adults indoors. Kids often used the yard on summer nights, for all those games that nobody plays anymore — blindman’s buff (or “bluff”? I’ve never figured that out), kickball, statues. We played a version of red rover so brutal that, by and by, the littlest kid would head toward home whimpering tragically and clutching his wound. In response, we would cheer his departure, mocking his theatrics ‘til he came stalking back, face red, lower lip stuck out, eyes wet, saying, “I ain’t no crybaby.”

For any kid with any pride, the point of the yard was to not stay in it. Halfway between our little house and my grandparents’ bigger house on Pearl, there was an ancient honeysuckle bush. In our toddler stage, my sister, then me, then kid brother Bill were leashed to the The Bush. We were left, often for hours, to sit in the sun, throw our toys beyond leash range, eat dirt and ants and launch the occasional squalling conniption (which got no sympathy). Bill was the only one who ever slipped the leash. He crawled up the yard, crossed sidewalk, grassy verge and Pearl Street. Toward dusk, he was found in the Konicek’s yard, and returned intact.

Bill was simply keeping faith with the ancient Code of the Kid: If they tell you to stay in the yard, cheezit.

The American yard is, indeed, more shibboleth than lebensraum. It is more often ignored than enjoyed, more groomed than occupied.

Later in my childhood, Mom moved us to an apartment above the S&Q Hardware. Instead of a yard, we had a rickety porch bolted to the rear wall of our building, below which was a muddy, rutted parking lot. We were joined wall-to-wall to other buildings, which made it possible for a kid to traverse an entire block of Superior Avenue by hopping from rooftop to rooftop.

This zinc-and-tarpaper paradise was better than any lawn I’d ever been told to stay in. Down in the parking lot, I chalked a strike zone onto the nextdoor wall of Jaffe’s emporium and played a thousand games of wallball with my rubber-coated baseball. Every morning, old man Jaffe had to deal with the mystery of why some of his stock had been shaken off the shelves in his storeroom.

When old man Jaffe finally figured it out, he ordered me to stop banging his wall. This was like saying “Get out of the yard.” So I stayed — and flung my ball in the hours when Jaffe’s wasn’t open.

Madison today, a city of vast and verdant lawns, is a sort of California. I rarely see anyone sitting outside with a beer, a family partying, dads and sons playing catch, kids playing red rover. Yards have become artifacts. Nobody hangs tires from tree branches anymore. The kids, I assume, are booked solid — for Little League, ballet, soccer, tai chi, voice lessons, computer camp, personal trainers, Pilates, transcendental meditation, violin, mixed martial arts, Bible study, butoh.

Even when the American yard was a credible living space with grass, trees, morning glories, clotheslines and purple martin hotels, the command to stay in it was more dismissive than obligatory. A yard was a staging area for adventure. The few obedient shmucks who stayed in the yard missed out on the stuff that made a kid’s life footloose, creative, treacherous and worthwhile.

Today, there are more lovely lawns than ever before. Yards look better because nobody sends kids out there anymore. In their eternal war against whimsy, parents have cunningly devised a labyrinth of virtual yards. Now, we have ways to confine our kids — with sedative electronics and hypnotic gadgets, in supervised sports, esteem-building games, cloistered clubs and helmeted excursions, with coaches, tutors, nannies, mentors, counselors, schedules, appointments, playdates and GPS surveillance — that put to shame the skinny old rope that tethered me to Annie’s honeysuckle bush.