Manhood for Amateurs, Part 9: Freedom and Adventure

[Soundtrack for this post: Aimee Mann’s The Forgotten Arm; Tom Waits’s Small Change]

On to the eighth essay in Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs (for previous posts on Michael Chabon and MfA, click here). [n.1]

The Wilderness of Childhood

In this essay Chabon writes about growing up in his suburb in Maryland (I’m pretty sure it’s Columbia, a planned community outside of Baltimore), specifically how he and the other kids used to roam his neighborhood and the nearby woods. He also talks about how things have changed, and how his kids, and pretty much all kids these days, don’t get that experience.

I grew up in an exurb of Los Angeles that is completely ringed by hills that buffer it from the surrounding towns. It was a remarkably safe place in the ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s when I lived there—it probably still is. It was pretty consistently ranked the safest city in America with a population over 100,000, and even when it wasn’t number one it was always still in the top three. [n.2] I don’t think I ever once thought I was in any sort of real danger when I roamed my town.

And roam I did. I have memories of walking with a friend to the closest shopping center when I was six. Maybe even five. And because my house was almost square in the middle of our expansive housing tract, the store was about a mile and a quarter away. Through the course of my childhood I made that walk countless times. We used to go to the liquor store or the pharmacy and buy baseball cards and bubble gum, and later the video store to rent movies and games. When we got a little older we’d ride our skateboards or bikes, and we’d go much farther. We’d go to the movies, or Target, or a restaurant, or the hills, or wherever. The park, the library, friends' houses. Sometimes I’d go alone but usually I was with at least one friend. Often we rode in a pack—a little bike or skateboard gang racing down the hills. It was great. We explored everything, we took care of ourselves, and we did it all the time. We even did it in the middle of the night, when our activities were almost never malicious but were often…impolite.

Those sorts of things are things I can’t imagine letting Carver do. Chabon talks about this, about how things have changed. But what’s changed isn’t the level of violence, or abductions—he cites Department of Justice numbers that say the frequency of these things hasn’t really changed all that much, and that abductions by strangers (possibly the biggest fear of many parents) are extremely rare [n.3] —it’s that the horrors are much better known; that parents are practically encouraged to develop deep, irrational fears about things happening to their kids; that we’ve developed a cult-like obsession with protecting our children to a level of absurdity. But he acknowledges that he’s like that too, that he’d never give his kids the kind of freedom he had.

This change is most unfortunate. This is at least the second post I’ve written about how I’m concerned that my children’s childhood is going to be different than mine and thus extremely disturbing. But I honestly think there’s more to it than just a “kids these days” and “the world is going to hell” thing. Chabon talks about how children wandering their neighborhoods and the nearby wilderness is a historical thing that pretty much every generation so far has shared. And I think that’s true. My grandfather and father were raised in very different places (my grandfather in depression era Prescott Arizona, my father in post-war Los Angeles), but they still shared a similarity in their childhoods that were rooted in parentless adventures. My dad used to tool around his town on a Flexi Flyer or Flexi Racer and was in near constant peril of smashing into or under a moving or parked car. He has stories of riding his bike around town, going fishing, sand skiing, heading down to the beach, et cetera et cetera, without a hint of parental involvement. Much of my childhood was the same. I sometimes liken it to the movie Stand By Me—it was always a group of kids making their own adventures, heading out on their own quests, walking down railroad tracks out in the middle of nowhere, with no adults involved (or even informed). [n.4]

These parentless adventures were invaluable in creating independence, developing problem solving skills, socialization, and so on. I have been a fiercely independent person since I was about 13, and while I was a child in many ways for many years after that, I was quite capable. I was very prepared to leave home at 18, and I’ve never felt like I needed help in getting by (except when it comes to dry-wall repairs and electrical work—that’s an inside joke). What happens to the kid who doesn’t have that? I don’t know; all the people I knew very well when they were in their late teens and early twenties had it.

So when I think about this issue I can’t help but think about whether it would be better to live in the suburbs, or a small town, rather than in the city. Everywhere I’ve lived in the last 10 years has been near a city center. I want to live in the city. But I’m not sure if living in the city is the best thing for my son. My wife grew up in the city of Chicago, but I don’t know enough about her childhood to discern how it compared to mine pros and cons wise. All I know is that just about everything I loved about my childhood was possible only because I lived in a safe exurb. But I also don’t really know what I was missing by not being in the city as a child. So I don’t know.

But even if we were to move to a suburb or exurb or small town, would it even then be the same or similar to my youth? Or are parents so paranoid even in those places that that lifestyle of unsupervised children roaming the streets and hills and woods is gone everywhere? I think it might be. Chabon mentions how one of his kids got a bike and wanted to ride around, but the only thing he was comfortable letting her do was to peddle to the store with him walking behind her. He also mentioned that there are two nine-year-old kids on his street (in Berkeley), one kid a couple houses up the street and another a couple houses down. These two nine-year-olds have lived a few houses from each other their entire lives and have never met. So he notes: even if he were to stifle his fears and let his daughter ride around on her bike without supervision, who would she ride with? No other kids are out there doing it.

Note 1: I just looked back and realized that it’s been more than a month since I wrote a substantive post (stuff other than lists of what I’ve been reading on line and words from Sutree). I’ve also been thinking that I’ve been dragging out these Manhood for Amateurs posts for way longer than I thought I would. I’m hoping to get through the rest of the posts much more quickly.

Note 2: Thousand Oaks, a neighboring town, and Irvine were always the other two.

Note 3: 115 total in 1999.

Note 4: Coincidentally, after I wrote this part of the post (it’s taken me a few sittings), I got an email from a friend who mentioned that he always thought of one of our mutual friends as the Corey Feldman character from Stand By Me of our group.