Children not having to confront their mortality is marbles

When I was 8 years old the neighborhood kids and I would ride our bikes to go swimming* at a local rock quarry that had been filled with water and equipped with rafts and such. It was awesome. The next year, however, it closed, leaving us with no swimming hole - an intolerable situation. Fortunately for us, a similar quarry was available a few towns over. Fortunately for our parents, they got to drive us to it.

I have one memory of this new quarry that has really stuck with me - its frightening and deadly floating playground equipment (sorry, best category I could come up with). It had its share of high dives and such, which were of course normal and reasonable. But what really stood out were two huge metal devices, one called "The Bobber" and the other "The Rocker,"** -- instruments of death the likes of which have long since been banned or litigated into obscurity.

The Bobber, shown here in full engineering detail, was a single person device that floated upright on a hollow metal ball several feet in diameter, with the rider perched about 8-10 feet in the air in a little crow's nest type thing. There must have been a counterweight underwater, too. The purpose of The Bobber was to stand in the nest and shift your weight from side to side to make the thing increasingly rock back and forth. After a few cycles, fat kids could regularly get the nest (and themselves) to partially submerge. It looked like fun, until you got up there and realized that you were barefoot on painted metal, many feet in the air, clinging to few widely spaced metal bars, and trying to keep your balance as the momentum of the thing built and tried to throw you off. And you had to rock until you touched water, lest you be chided by your fat friends. But all along it was clear that death was a real possibility. Among the possible outcomes of this exercise were slipping mid-rock and hitting your head and dying, slipping at peak-rock (causing the Bobber to whip back) and hitting your head and dying, or - after the Bobber had come back to rest - attempting to jump off (causing the Bobber to move equally and oppositely to your jump) and hitting your head and dying. All the while with Don Henley blaring from the shore.

Suburban children these days just aren't afforded the same opportunity to confront their own mortality as we were. I'm sure our parents had an even greater opportunity to do so during their youths. The evolution of dry land playground equipment bears this out as well, with rickety monkey bars, splintering treehouses, and slides that burned your ass having been replaced by smooth plastic versions with safety nets. A trip to the quarry might provide a valuable life lesson for these kids.

*Note that this was the beginning of the water-in-the-brain problem
**The Rocker was a two person, teeter-totter-like apparatus that was marginally safer, being much shorter and equipped with a carpeted surface to stand on (though when wet it was just as slippery as metal)