* * *

Yelena waited about a week before she took us to the place that I believe had been her goal from the beginning. She wouldn’t tell us anything about it except that it was a playground; she hoped we liked it; not many foreigners knew about it; and she and Chuck had a nickname for it: Savage Park.

Just as the Diana Ross Playground is located in the larger Central Park, Savage Park, also known as Hanegi Playpark, is located in a larger park called Hanegi Koen. It took us a while to get to Savage Park because we had to walk past several other playgrounds within Hanegi Koen, and given that half our ranks were age five or less, we could not easily walk past a playground. As the eight of us walked, first up a slight dirt hill, then past a gaggle of unlocked bicycles, we smelled it: smoke.

The smell became stronger as we went ahead. We followed it until at last we were all standing beside a traditional Japanese hut that was perched atop a downward-sloping one-acre patch of dirt and trees.

The hut’s front porch was completely overflowing with crap, including a pink-painted piano at which a girl, five, was sitting and playing a John Cage-ian ditty. It was a strangely radiant sound to be hearing as we stood there looking down through the smoke—we could see it as well as smell it now—to the smoke’s source: open fires.

There were three of them. At one, a boy about eight years old was kneeling, poking at the flames with paper fans; at another, a father was sitting and roasting marshmallows with his toddler son. A third fire seemed to be unattended.

Frank and I turned to look at Yelena, who had stepped to one side and was smiling twinklingly at us.

We stood there, dumbfounded, staring at the dirt and trees and the structures that were woven around and between them, structures that were clearly not made in any place where safety surfacing had ever been a subject of serious discussion. These were structures that looked like what remained when my sons decided to build an airport out of Legos and then abandoned the project halfway through, only these half-made baggage carts and control towers were much larger and crafted not from nicely interlocking plastic rectangles but from scraps of wood and nails.

This was possible because (as our boys would soon discover), the materials to make the structures—hammers, wood, saws, hole punchers, screwdrivers, nails, paint, brushes, and donated scraps of all kinds—were available at the playpark for everyone to use. The boys took off running. Frank and I stumbled after our children. The ground was uneven; the park did not seem to be landscaped in any recognizable way. There was dirt underfoot, one presumed, because grass could not possibly survive the trampling; likewise, there were trees around the area because that’s where they grew.