This Old Swingset

by John Christmann

There are very few things that mark our passage on the face of this earth. Oh sure, we will leave behind keepsakes and photographs—maybe even some trophies or plaques commemorating our accomplishments—and if we are really lucky, some cash for our kids. Some of us may even feel compelled to plant a heavy slab of marble as a memorial to our passing. But unless we are pharaohs or contractors, most of us aren’t going to leave behind anything significant of permanence.

But here I must gloat. I am one of a handful of men that will leave something for generations to come. Like Roebling and his bridge to Brooklyn, like Eiffel and his tower, like Hearst and his castle, I will leave a landmark that will become my legacy: the swing set in my yard. I built it with perseverance, will power, and sweat; and it will never move from its foundation of mulch in my backyard.

Swing sets have changed a lot from when I was a kid. The swing set I used to play on was big and dangerous and located in a nearby park. Nowadays, swing sets are big and dangerous and located in backyards. They are made of wood instead of metal, making them ecologically more palatable and less likely to attract the tongues of experimenting children in winter. But more importantly, these modern play sets lend the impression that they are affordable and easily constructed. Judging by how many of these huge sets have been erected in our neighborhood, I assumed it was true.

I was inspired to acquire a swing set after my kids spent a summer with our next-door neighbors. The previous spring they had installed an attractive cedar play set with two swings and a brightly colored slide. It sat in a neat garden of hardwood mulch surrounded by trees. It was very unobtrusive, and the kids in the neighborhood swarmed the play set like flies. My kids joined in and never left, much to the delight of our neighbors, I’m sure.

For a while everything was perfect. I threw them peanut butter sandwiches for lunch and called them home for dinner and spent relaxing days reading the paper in a lawn chair. But when our neighbors left town on vacation for three weeks in the dead of August and my kids started to complain about not having anything to do half way into the sports page, I began to think seriously of erecting a play set of our own.

Asking around a little bit, I discovered that the monstrosities we see in our neighbor’s backyards are all kits. They are nothing more than big erector sets designed to appeal to a man’s inner Home Depot. The sets come with pre-cut and pre-drilled wooden pieces that are ready to be assembled, even though the pieces weigh over 500 pounds and must be lifted with small cranes. But there is nothing more satisfying to men than model building and heavy lifting.

I also discovered that these kits are priced exorbitantly, with a nominal installation fee tacked on for those customers who are not seduced by model building and heavy lifting. Of course, real men like me that keep a dusty collection of power tools in their basement are outraged at the price, insulted by the additional installation charge, and lulled into saving a couple of hundred bucks to prove they are not wimps. I am not too proud to admit that this was my undoing.

My wife begged me not to install it myself.
“You know what will happen,” she said, “you will get frustrated, teach the kids all sorts of language you will later regret, and take five months to finish it.”
“It’s a kit!” I said. “How hard can it be? All I need is a socket wrench and a hammer. I can have it delivered by the middle of May and get it up easily in time for Memorial Day. The kids will have all summer to enjoy it.”

My wife looked at me with an expression not unlike the one I lived with for weeks after I refused to hire a painter and her mother stayed over Christmas in a guest room decorated in spackle and drop cloths.
“Why don’t you just spend two hundred dollars to have someone install it for you?” she asked. This, of course, set my inner Home Depot into Chapter 11 proceedings.
“The darn thing costs fifteen hundred dollars,” I said. I’m not going to pay another two hundred just to have someone put it together. Besides,” I added meekly, “I want to build it. It will set an example for the kids and they will learn something about working with wood.”

In the middle of May, as I had been promised, a large flat bed truck arrived with a crate and twelve large pallets of lumber. The truck bed was raised and the materials slid into the driveway in front of the garage door. The car was still inside.
“Not to worry,” I reassured my wife. “I’ll move all of this so you can get to your hair appointment.” My wife looked on impatiently as I tried to undo the heavy steel bands that bound the lumber together.
“Not to worry.” I reassured her, “I’ll just run to Home Depot and get some tin snips.”
“In what car?” she asked, before turning her back on me and walking inside.

The following weekend I started the project in earnest. I found the printed instructions and read and re-read the steps necessary to construct my swing set. There were a total of 66 steps, although half of them were upside down and written in Spanish. All of the pieces were stenciled with markings like S5 and L1 and B8, which would have been clear had I known which side was up. Even so, I thought, surely I will realize if I confuse part S5 with part 5S or the left piece marked with a lower case “l” with the first piece marked “1”.

I laid out all the pieces in front of me on the lawn in the exploded view, just as in the installation guide. I counted all 114 pieces, and then referred somewhat puzzled back to the guide, which claimed there were 115. One by one I compared the pieces in the grass with those in the diagram until I discovered the missing a piece: a carriage bolt used to secure a large piece of plastic onto post S6 or 95, depending on which way you were looking at it. (Much later, I discovered this piece was important when I conducted a trial run down the fledgling slide and it collapsed, sending me to a chiropractor for a few days.)

Not one to be deterred by petty annoyances such as missing parts, I feverishly began assembling, starting with the center-most upright support columns—large tree trunks that no doubt sought a better life-style in the suburbs. I could barely lift them, but it didn’t matter because it started to rain. I left them on the lawn and quickly moved the hardware back into the crate and quit for the day. That was the last I ever saw of the packet containing the swing hardware.

My wife was right, of course. I was not able to erect the swing set by Memorial Day. My kids learned new and exotic language that they were told never to repeat again. After the first day watching me struggle with the directions and rotate large pieces of wood trying to identify the correct pieces, they grew bored and retreated to their bikes and scooters. My older son hung in there with me for a while until I started to lecture him on the finer points of wood working.
“Dad,” he said, “I’m bored. Can you just call me when you are done?”

To my wife’s credit, she never once said, “I told you so.” There was no need. All she had to do was take large, exaggerated steps over the pieces that lay strewn about the yard. She did that for the remainder of the summer and well into the fall before the last of the pieces made their way to the structure that was organically evolving in the deepest recess of our backyard.

By the first snowfall it stood sixteen feet tall and spanned twenty-four feet across. On one end was a complex maze of platforms and bars that listed at a slight angle. On the other was a wooden ladder with two rungs missing at the top. A large wooden I-beam spanned the structure with pre-drilled holes awaiting the delivery of the hardware that would one day suspend three swings. The slide sped down from the maze on one end straight into a tree.
“Don’t worry,” I told the kids. “I’ll just move the swing set.” I left the problem of shifting three tons of bolted wood for the spring and looked out proudly at the hulking shell in our backyard for the rest of the winter.

Then in late April, when I had all but forgotten about the unfinished tower in the backyard, I received a call from the neighbor whose property abuts our yard in the back.
“Do you have a permit for that?” he asked. When I didn’t respond right away, he jumped in helpfully, “Let me fax you the city requirements. I went to the zoning commission and got them for you.” Then, as I begrudgingly gave him my fax number, he asked: “By the way, what is it you are trying to build?”

I did a little research and here is what I found out: the city requires fifteen feet to the property line for active structures like swing sets and my rear neighbor is a rat fink lawyer who doesn’t like large sculptures made of wood. I did nothing for a while just to irritate him. But after three threatening letters and a visit from the police, I was forced to do something.

I hired a landscaper who built up a bed of mulch away from the property line. He built a retaining wall to correct for the slope of the property. He brought in twelve day laborers to lift the swing set into place. He subcontracted a carpenter to fix the set, which basically required dismantling the entire structure and switching out the two primary upright posts marked M1 and 1W.
“It was a simple mistake.” the carpenter reassured me. He then reconstructed the set alone in about two hours.

As I predicted a year before, the set was ready by Memorial Day, just as the weather started turning nice. It cost me slightly more to re-install it than I originally paid for the set the year before. I will never, ever take it down. I don’t know how.

But it was all worth it. As I watched our kids frolic on the swings, my wife joined me and took my hand.
“It’s really a great play set,” she told me. I nodded in agreement and surveyed the gargantuan structure that would surely go on to be the eighth wonder of the modern world.
“I wonder if archeologists thousands of years from now will marvel at its construction and ponder its significance?” I asked my wife. She just squeezed my hand and smiled at me, as if she knew something I did not.

Before long some of the neighborhood kids began to saunter into our backyard to explore the commotion. “Awesome!” they screamed staring up at the enormous wooden jungle that blocked the sky. And then, unwittingly sucked into the structure’s gravitational field, they ran uncontrollably forward in delight. Amid the accumulating masses of children my son stood proudly atop the high wooden fortress like a conqueror. He waved to us, and shouted “Thanks Dad. Thanks Mom!” We responded back with the waves of heroes.

Instantly our backyard was filled with the sound of happy, loud, energetic children. It was the sound, I realized, of kids that would be spending the summer with us.