Great article in this morning's Chronicle about the last remaining local Adventure Playground, located in Berkeley at the Berkeley Marina. Oddly enough, I've never heard of such a thing before, and had no clue that there was one in Berkeley, which is not altogether that surprising given that my Cal years were spent doing things other than hanging out at a kids' playground, which would have been kind of strange and creepy. Anyhow, despite my apparent ignorance at its existence, the Adventure Playground concept sounds pretty cool. Essentially, it's a 1-acre lot full of junk like old boats, telephone poles, tires, and pianos, as well as structures such as forts, slides, and rope swings. Kids can run wild and play, build, paint, and get filthy. How cool!

It's amazing that such a place would survive in this age of liability and overprotective "helicopter parents". The Chron's own Peter Hartlaub pronounced the Adventure Playground cool in SFGate's parenting blog, the Poop, but then opined that he wouldn't let his own kid play in such an obvious death trap. Personally, I'd love to bring my 3-year-old son there, and perhaps we'll plan a trip over to the East Bay some time soon. I just better not tell my wife where we're going because most likely she'll agree with the death trap assessment. Maybe I'll tell her we're going to go hang out in People's Park, instead.

Personally, I worry about the lack of free play and, for want of a better term, adventure in children's lives today. When I was growing up, not so very long ago, we lived surrounded by woods, marshland, and rolling hills. On weekends and during the summer, I and the rest of the kids in the neighborhood would literally disappear into the hills all day, reappearing for meals and eventually, bed time. The open space around the neighborhood was our place of discovery, our nature preserve, our battleground for the inevitable war games, and our construction site. Actually, there were construction sites a-plenty in the growing neighborhood, and we thought nothing of, ahem, borrowing things like nails, 2 x 4s, and, once, an entire 4 x 8' sheet of plywood (which took a dozen 7-year-olds to carry off), to construct our forts and tree houses. My excuse for blatant childhood thievery is that I was younger than most of the kids I played with and they successfully convinced me that this was stuff the contractors didn't want so we were actually doing them a favor.

Did we get hurt? Yes (one day I'll blog about the infamous Rock War of 1979). We also contracted poison oak and became infested with ticks (ew... and a real concern these days due to the appearance of Lyme Disease in California). But the fun made up for all of that. Having to have a tick extracted from your forehead one day never stopped any of us from heading back to the hills the next. So maybe, just maybe, Adventure Park can give kids a taste of that kind of freedom, creativity, and adventure.

Read the article on SFGate.com: "Off-leash play area for kids".