Things your parents wouldn't let you do today

The other night, I was visiting with my good friends Mike & Annie, Denny & Trisch, and Roger & Helen. Denny & I got to talking about stuff we did when we were kids. He grew up near Columbus, Missouri, and one summer in high school, he and a buddy took a road trip to New York City. I said, “Your parents wouldn’t let you do that today.” We agreed that the life of the average minor seems highly organized and supervised, compared to “the good ol’ days.” I guess it’s safer, but safe is the opposite of adventure. Here’s a couple things I did as a kid that your parents wouldn’t let you do today:

(1) Ride a greyhound bus from Yuma, Arizona to Denver, Colorado alone at the age of 14. It was a 31-hour trip. I had to change busses in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. I swear I’m not making this up.

(2) Take all your high school buddies out water-skiing on the family ski-boat every Saturday (no adult supervision). This included towing and launching the boat. We used to ski on the Colorado River above Imperial Dam north of Yuma. My high-school-senior brother was in charge; I was 14/15. We always had a good time, and we learned a lot about fending for ourselves and staying calm when things went wrong. We also developed a lot of cool tricks, like two guys riding on one pair of skis, or changing the gas line to a new tank without stopping. At one point, Sheldon (big brother) thought it would be cool to have a really long (200 feet) ski rope. You could ski from one bank to the other, but otherwise, it didn’t really add to the experience. One time, Sheldon was driving the boat, pulling a skier, and watching me change gas tanks. He drove the boat right into the tulees (riverbank vegetation). It took us a couple hours to pull the boat out of the tree and back into the river. No harm; no foul. I think it was several years before Dad heard about this.

Got any good stories in this category? Something your parents actually let you do, not just something you got away with.

Polanyians in Dogtown

Just saw a really cool movie, “Dogtown and Z-boys,” which is the documentary version of “The Lords of Dogtown.” It’s about the little band of boys in the 1970s who basically invented the sport of skateboarding as we know it . Calling it a sport is a bit of a misnomer. It’s competitive, but it’s not ultimately about winning, but about the beauty of human skill—or the skill of creating beauty. For the Z-boys, a skateboard was a way to surf when there weren’t any waves. They had a lot of free time on their hands, and there was a big drought in Southern Cal, so they roamed the neighborhood looking for empty swimming pools to skate in. Concrete waves.

One of the best parts of the DVD is a clip of some of these guys going back to skate at a schoolyard where it all started. One reason I liked this is that they’re all about my age, a bunch of forty-something guys, balding and grey. But they still had the moves; their bodies had them memorized. It’s a great example of the Polanyian concept of indwelling. The really good skateboarder pays attention to the move he’s trying to pull off and almost no attention to the details of how he does it. In his consciousness, the skateboard is part of him—he indwells it. Polanyi (you might remember Michael Polanyi is the subject of my thesis) also proved that freedom and community are critical factors in the process of discovery. This bunch of kids had lots of both. Minimal adult supervision had some bad consequences, too, but these guys shifted the skateboard paradigm. You might say it’s a life wasted on trivia, but I think the skill and physical grace they demonstrate is a work of art. There’s a bit of the image of God here, a bit of truth.