Swing Set: The Giant’s Footsteps - Belt Magazine

By Jim Daniels

After the end of World War II, as Americans returned to a life of prosperity, families moved to the suburbs, and everyone wanted the best outdoor swing sets in their own backyard. The home swing set was born…Early 20th century playgrounds were made of steel, and this caused many injuries and inspired later play sets to be constructed of softer materials like plastic and wood.

transcendence: existence or experience beyond the normal or physical level: “the possibility of spiritual transcendence in the modern world.”

On the edge of Detroit, in our backyard in Warren, Michigan, the third-largest city in the state despite having no downtown, we had no trees, no swimming pool, no trampoline, no statuary, and very little grass. What we had was a swing set.

When you look at pictures of swing sets on-line, they’re always in some ultra-lush green idyllic yard. Something Cain and Abel might’ve played on before they had a fight over who got the good swing. Our backyard was clearly post-fight. The weeds we called grass quickly turned into dirt ruts beneath the two swings, worn away by pushing off before we were high enough to start pumping.

*

The factories were our city centers, rimmed with strip malls and tract housing. Three major auto factories stood within two square miles of our home. My father worked at the Ford Sterling Axle Plant at Seventeen Mile and Mound Roads. We navigated by mile roads, from Six Mile Road out to 38 Mile Road. Those, along with the slightly more creatively named crossroads, created a grid of square-mile boxes filled with the tiny boxes of our identical houses surrounding the much larger boxes, the boxes of industry, the car factories. Our neighborhood of factory workers went up in the Fifties.

One of those houses was ours, and I was one of five children in that tiny three-bedroom ranch, along with my parents and grandmother. One Saturday when he was off work, my father erected the swing set in our backyard while we stood watching at a distance as instructed.

Backyard swing sets came without anything to anchor into the ground. If you just set it up in the yard, it was likely to tip over, particularly if you had five kids rocking it back and forth. My father quickly realized the problem and tried to solve it the way he tried to solve most problems: with a bag of cement. He dug out circles around the swing set’s four feet and filled them with concrete, thinking they’d hold it down to earth. Nice try, Dad.

The swing set didn’t change everything, but it changed a lot.

*

Human blood, which also contains water and iron, has a smell similar to rust.

Our swing set had two flat metal swings hanging on chains that quickly rusted. I remember them as always rusty, our hands orange-brown from gripping them as we pumped the swings high. Higher. The comfort of the gritty rust in my hands. A safety feature for the soul. Visible, tactile, with a metallic smell that gave a tangible connection to earth, even as we flew.

It also had a “glide ride,” a heavy metal contraption that two kids could ride on, facing each other on connected metal seats with matching handles and footrests. By pumping the handles, you could get the thing swinging back and forth, more horizontal than vertical due to the limited length of its metal arms attached to the cross bar above.

None of us wanted to look at each other that close up. None of us wanted to be stuck on that small track going back and forth. The glide ride had no maneuverability, or even the illusion of it, particularly as it rusted.

Not only were we limited by its low arc even when we were pumping hardest, but the pumpers and foot rests were welded in place. Once we reached a certain height, when we put our feet down, our knees ended up around our shoulders, which gave us no leverage to pump and left us hunched over like some of the old factory workers I ended up working with. We had the rest of our lives to bend down into human question marks. And why bother with the glide ride when we had swings? Despite its limited mythology of smooth grace, it rusted out so badly that our father unscrewed it from the cross bar and threw it out. Cain had slain Abel by then, so what was the point.

*

While I only later learned of the concept of the “golden handcuffs” our fathers wore, the glide ride was like a simulator. Working in the factory provided a decent middle-class income. You could afford to buy a house, raise kids, and get a new car every so often—a big car, so all the kids fit. Yet an assembly-line worker had no upward mobility—like the glide ride, there was a very limited range of motion, no escape route that wasn’t risking a financial plunge into a minimum-wage job. The glide ride lifted us up a little in each direction, but never got us anywhere. It mimicked the repetitive, mechanical work of the assembly line where you couldn’t stray far. The rigid assembly line relentlessly kept on moving, and you had to be there to attach your flanges, your brake cables, your axle housings—somebody was standing right next to you waiting to attach something else. Machines controlled the pace of our work. Regardless of gender, factory workers had a glass ceiling—or maybe a rust ceiling, entirely too visible.

When I worked in the Ford Axle Plant in the late 70s, like my father and my younger brother, all of the various jobs I had were equally repetitive and mechanical. Put in a part, push two buttons, take it out, put in a part, push two buttons, take it out. At the end of the shift, I got off the glide ride and went home. No physical evidence of the work I did—it had been carried off by hi-los into the bowels of the factory to be loaded on train cars and shipped off to some assembly plant.

*

In addition to the glide ride and swings, we used every inch of that swing set, finding new uses as we grew. The crossbar that held the two angled poles together was ideal for swinging upside down by our legs to make ourselves dizzy, and we also climbed onto it to allow us to reach over and swing from the thick crossbar across the top of the set. We did chin-ups on that bar. We had kick fights to knock each other down, imagining a pit full of snakes or sharks or alligators beneath us. Imagining ourselves as Great Apes. Imagining our lives at risk. Imagining.

The concept and meaning of risk changed as we aged. As kids, the risk of our fathers losing their factory jobs never occurred to us. The notion that anything as large and permanent as the factories would disappear seemed ludicrous. We drove by their gray massive rectangular boxes on the way to and from almost everything. They existed as permanent fixtures in our lives, as permanent as the church—and as boring and repetitious, ultimately—and we worshiped and resented them as the source for everything we had. To us, they were equally as mysterious and scary as churches—even more so, since, unlike with church, we never entered those factories. Until we did, as employees. If somebody had to work overtime on a Sunday, work took priority over church. As was often said, “Jesus doesn’t pay the bills.”

Priorities were a mixed bag for every person and every family, but it was a bag inside a large box we all shared called the factory. Every aspect of our lives took place in the context—in the giant shadow—of The Factory, whether it was Ford’s, Chrysler’s, or GM’s. Our swing set was situated in that context, much more than I realized at the time. I know the parallels I’m trying to draw here are often not parallel at all, but crossed lines, Xs of conflict—but in some ways, at some points, they all seem true.

*

If you’ve ever swung on a real swing—I’m thinking of the large ones with rubber saddle seats, something black, durable, and flexible for your ass to drop into—then you know the goal was to get as high as you could, then jump off and land without breaking a leg. Exhilaration and fear. The same emotions that drive race car drivers, mountain climbers, and perhaps bank robbers.

When I use “real,” I am referring back to the days before playground equipment was designed for three-year olds—safety swings that only swung as high as the height of your average adult, and slides at that same height. Hardly worth the effort to climb the four steps. Not even a climb, really, the slope so gradual that my own children took to walking up them—a low, plastic incline that made the slide so slow that the kids often had to scoot their butts and push their hands off the edges just to make it to the bottom.

One of the things contemporary playground designers (and/or the insurance companies) don’t seem to understand is that play benefits from a little fear. How many kids on playgrounds today look bored out of their minds? The ones that seem to be having fun are those kids chasing each other—motivated by the excitement of catching someone, and the fear of being caught. They need no equipment for this. I believe this is a game called Tag.

*

I probably shouldn’t be idealizing our rusty swings when often the metal seat would ricochet off somebody’s head in its wild dance once you jumped. I acknowledge sounding like an old fogey nostalgic for broken limbs, even though I want to sound like someone with a longing for risk and individuality—the glorious seconds of flying, free of the chains, the exhilaration of possibility, even if it meant injury, in a world where even for us as children, it felt like nothing would ever change. I’m trying to make sense of those brief seconds in the air after jumping off as the happiest moments of my childhood.

Our houses were identical, and we rarely left them. While I suspect some families went on vacation during the summer, in our neighborhood it was a rarity. Men like my father used vacation time to work on their homes. Over the course of several years, he built a bedroom in the basement so that the four boys would no longer be squeezed into the one tiny room upstairs clogged with two bunk beds. My older brothers were teenagers when he finally finished it—well, he admits that he never really quite finished it, but it was good enough for them to move in down there. The swing set came down shortly afterwards.

On our streets, I could walk into any house and find the bathroom. I knew what kind of car everyone drove, how many kids in each house, and all their names. We all knew where our fathers worked: The Factory. While it was one of the Big Three, or one of the hundreds of small tool and die and manufacturing plants (baby factories surrounding momma and papa factories), our fathers wore similar coveralls and carried identical lunch pails, thrown in the car every morning, just like we carried our brown paper bags to school with our initials on them to distinguish them from all the other bag lunches.

*

I worked in the factory right before the bottom fell out of the American auto industry, back when one of the few ways to distinguish yourself from the thousands of workers doing nearly identical jobs was to engage in workplace sabotage. Ideally, with some payoff that involved avoiding doing our jobs correctly, since that consisted of working exactly like a machine worked. It was a natural impulse to literally throw a wrench in the machinery.

For example, at the Sterling Axle Plant, we had, for a surprisingly long time until it was finally exposed, a secret “punch card club.” Each job had a production number—how many parts you were expected to make per shift (mine was 800). Once you achieved this magic number, you could disappear for the rest of your shift. On the midnight shift, disappearance was taken literally, with workers sneaking out of the plant halfway through their shifts to drink or sleep while still on Ford’s dime. Making production was accomplished through a variety of shady methods, including “stealing” axle parts made by the two other shifts and splashing “midnight-blue” paint on them and driving pallets of them on hi-los to the midnight-shift storage area; through what we called “jacking off” (physically manipulating) the automatic counters on machines; through retrieving scrapped parts, ripping off the red “Rejected” tags and labeling them with the green “O.K.” tag. One way or another, workers were able to give the illusion they’d made their production number for the shift.

The next trick was getting out of the plant. At that time, our plastic photo I.D. cards had computer holes cut in them so that they could be also used to punch in and out at the time clocks. Some genius realized that you could cut the plastic out of, say, a bleach bottle, punch the same holes in it, and use it as a spare ID card. You’d give this card to some guy, along with a dollar, and he’d punch you, and dozens of other workers, out at the time clock at the end of the shift while you were long gone.

Left to their own devices, our fathers could build a better mousetrap. A better swing set. Walking out of the factory during the middle of a shift was as exhilarating as jumping off a swing into the midnight air.

Though I never saw my father sit on a swing. He preferred a good, firm chair like his

La-Z-Boy, manufactured down the road in Monroe, Michigan. His pushing off the floor to tilt the chair backward toward the horizontal was a counterpoint to our push, pumping our arms and legs on the swing toward the vertical.

*

The absence of a slide on our swing set is a mystery. Most swing sets came with slides. You climbed up, you slid down. Why didn’t ours have one? Perhaps the narrow dimensions of our yard did not allow it. Perhaps our father could not afford it. Perhaps he felt like life was all downhill as it was, and felt no need to emphasize that to us when we were still kids.

We had to go to public playgrounds to find a slide. The ones in our area were all constructed on cement slabs. Swings, monkey bars, merry-go-rounds, and slides, all anchored in that concrete sea. Our closest playground was at Neigebaur Elementary, about a mile or so away. To walk to it required us to cross one of those reckless mile roads congested with mad cars rushing to and from the factories. Thus, it was off limits, and the backyard swing set was decreed less dangerous in all respects until we reached a certain age where it was deemed safe enough for us to cross those streets alone.

We could safely get to that playground in order to risk our lives. Real slides were scary—just climbing up the metal steps could be daunting. You could easily trip and fall off those steps, particularly if the person behind you was pulling on your leg, telling you to hurry up.

Daunting, yet magnificent. Skyscraper slides. Steep and treacherous, with a concrete landing awaiting at the bottom. In summer, in order to make them even slicker, we’d throw dry sand down the slide in front of us, and if you dared to wear shorts, you had the added risk of burning your legs on their reflected metal heat. In the winter, you could throw snow on the slide, which also made them quicker. We tried to sabotage any safety with the goal of scaring ourselves even more.

*

Our factory, like many others, had a sign at the entrance that listed how many days since the last work-loss accident. Based on my observations, it never made it into the triple figures. I would guess if the cement playground had a similar sign, that number would be similarly restricted. I chipped a permanent tooth on one of those monkey bars.

Numbers. Restrictions. Cement landing pads. Control. No control. Emergency chutes on airplanes. Don’t inflate your life vest until you land in the water or else you won’t fit down the chute. Learn to swim. At least dog-paddle.

*

But we had swings.

The official playgrounds took theirs down in winter. But on the Daniels swing set, the swings remained. The rough winters of the 60s may have contributed to the rusting, but jumping off a swing onto untrampled snow was truly magical, and maybe even safer than in summer. Deep, soft snow. The crisp whump and sprawl of the landing, washing your own face in snow in ritual cleansing. Snow pushed its way up your pants, down the neck of your jacket, inside your hat and mittens. Life was deliciously cold when landing in fresh snow.

*

Pushing off was the most useful skill we took away from our years of swinging. The simplicity of a swing is that it has no engine. Just the human engine. In order to get a start, in order to launch, you need thrust, gravity, feet boosters—I don’t know the technical terms. You need a firm base on the ground to push off from. A strong push backward with two feet to get a good start on swinging height. Then, you begin to pump your legs and arms in synchronous motion—loose, natural, as if you were born with the instinct to swing. You pull your torso forward, then lean back. High. Higher. Until on the backswing, your head rises higher than the crossbar. Your stomach flippity-flops in the millisecond of cresting, then back down, and you feel the moment coming in the next swoop upward and you release the chains at the highest point and you are flying, momentum carrying you even higher before the inevitable plunge to earth, and you tumble forward through the weeds, unhurt and inexplicably laughing, exhilarated. Maybe you even get the giddy hiccups of laughter. You could be alone in the backyard, but the laughter is contagious nevertheless. You infect yourself with it.

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Making a mud pie… consists of creating a mixture of water and soil and playing or pretending to make food or a pie. Mud pies are not meant to be eaten.

Mud pie argument: The argument against the labor theory of value pointing out that mud pies that take an immense amount of labor still have little to no value.

We eroded our own launch pads beneath us. The push-off zones quickly turned into mud puddles in any kind of rain. But part of our joy involved embracing the mud splattering onto us. Maybe we looked something like our greasy fathers when they finished a shift.

Getting muddy was one thing. But making mud pies was something entirely different. We never made mud pies. I’m convinced it’s some sanitized upper-class notion of how poor kids play to go along with the idealized images of the swing set on the perfectly groomed lawn. How cute. To us, it seemed stupid to pretend mud was food—our fathers worked hard so we would not have to eat mud. What was the point, the payoff? The risk? Our lives didn’t allow for the luxury of that kind of imagination. Where was the possibility of transcendence? Yes, transcendence. Not wallowing. Not pretending mud is not mud.

*

If our anonymous streets were part of a maze, they would all lead to those factories and offer no exit. How early on were we conscious of our futures being mapped out in this way? I’m not sure. We knew our father worked in one of them. We knew he rarely came home before dark. We knew he didn’t want to play with us when he got home.

Or, maybe our lives were more funnel than maze—the inevitability of us working in those factories, gravity pulling us down into them. But we might be able to at least afford one of those box houses for ourselves someday. And maybe our kids could make mudpies and live happily ever after.

*

Yes, in 2023, that maze has more dead ends and less inevitability than ever, due to the ongoing process of deindustrialization, robots, the impact of foreign competition, and, I admit, some quality-control issues back in the glory days when we couldn’t get the cars out onto the lots fast enough. Or, maybe ut;s not a maze. In the Rust Belt, we still wear that belt, despite its imperfections. Or, maybe it’s not a belt. But that smell of rust is still in our blood—not visible to the naked eye, but something coursing through us. An attitude that appreciates the flight as much as the fall. That mythologizes it due to the inability to find real swings anymore. The attitude that got me in trouble in my forty years of university teaching, struggling with “Imposter Syndrome.”

Despite the diminishing factory jobs, the Ford Sterling Axle Plant still employs approximately 2250 people to make those mudpies on its 171 acres. It opened in 1956, the year I was born. The axle plant and I will celebrate our 68th birthdays this year. It’s been 46 years since I set foot in that factory, and at least a couple dozen since I swung on tiny swings with my own children on a spongy safety surface of ground-up car tires, unable to pump any higher than my own height. Maybe 56 since I swung on the swing set back in Warren.

*

The cement globes around the swing set’s feet to hold it down were installed by our father. It’s like he made us cement shoes to match his own. As if we were holding ourselves down. Was that cement made of crushed-up dollar bills and coins, pressed together into a middle-class life, high enough, but no higher?

But the cement around the four legs did not deter us. As we grew bigger and got stronger, we realized that two kids swinging hard in sync could rock the rear legs out of the ground with their forward momentum, cement and all, and when we swung back, the front legs would pop up. One kid alone could not make this happen, but together…together anything was possible. Coordination, cooperation, solidarity, moving forward (and backward) as one.

When the cement-globed legs returned to earth, the ground shook with the thick thud. We were taking control. Imposing our will on that metal structure. And as we got bigger and stronger yet, we could even get the legs to hop out of their holes and move forward, inch by inch. We called them Giant Steps when we got the swing set rocking forward. Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum.

None of us ever broke a bone in the mucky weeds of our backyard. We learned how to land, just like we learned how to push off. Sometimes we got the wind knocked out of us.

*

I can still imagine those orange rust stains on my hands, the rust that did in the swing set finally, the crossbar dangerously eroding. To be honest, I don’t remember how my father got rid of it. We must’ve been big enough to help him then, but I don’t think we did.

We didn’t move mountains, or even hills. We moved a small swing set a few feet forward in an anonymous backyard. Baby steps, really, but for us, growing up in that land of cement and steel, we briefly felt like giants rocking the earth, and we felt like birds when we let go and flew into the air. Giants and birds. What more could anyone ask for in a small yard of a three-bedroom tract house on the edge of Detroit, in sight of the factory down the road puffing its impatient heavy breath, waiting to swallow us?

Jim Daniels’ latest book, The Luck of the Fall, fiction, was published by Michigan State University Press. Recent poetry collections include The Human Engine at Dawn, Wolfson Press, Gun/Shy, Wayne State University Press, and Comment Card, Carnegie Mellon University Press. His first book of nonfiction, Ignorance of Trees, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. A native of Detroit, he lives in Pittsburgh.