Children Building Cities out of Sand

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We quickly learned how to find a place on the playground’s perimeter, the six of us, where we could build our cities made of sand. We were all in fifth and sixth grade, at a standard prefab elementary school in Southern California, one of countless identical schools in countless identical suburbs erected hastily in the building boom of the 1970s and early 1980s. But we built the cities we wanted to live in.

The playground sand was dry and granular, basically low-density road gravel, not suitable for building. That didn’t stop us. We swept it down to create a level surface, and marked out roads. Then we scooped up double-handfuls of sand and began building our elaborate urban arcologies: massive arenas for stout-hearted competitions, for instance, or grand halls for universities or laboratories or kings. Our cities were vast places of epic architecture.

We weren’t building cities, of course. We were building stories. We built the kinds of metropolises we wanted to occupy, cities designed to inspire awe and motivation. All our roads were majestic boulevards; all our buildings were vast palaces of art, science, and leadership. Utopian cities of great aspiration, where somehow, the fiddling business of cities—sewage removal and building maintenance, for instance—happened automatically, outside the story.

Nobody outside our group wanted us doing this, of course. Though we were within the playground fence, adults frequently scolded us for getting literally as far from the classroom buildings as rules permitted. They cited fatuous claims that maybe we wouldn’t hear the bell summoning us back to class, or kidnappers might leap the fence and abscond with us before adults could intervene. Don’t you want, they asked, to play over here with the other kids?

I don’t blame those teachers. Given what I now know about liability insurance and bad PR in the years following the Adam Walsh case, they were bombarded with demands to keep students safe no matter what. They meant well. They just couldn’t comprehend that the places they wanted us to play, and the games they encouraged, were noisy, crowded, and hectic. We didn’t want to run around; we wanted to build and tell stories.

I have considerably less sympathy for the other kids. Frequently, if adults didn’t compel us to abandon our stories and play “accepted” games among the crowds, other students would find ways to thwart our inventions. Sometimes they’d outright lie, claiming adults had summoned us back, with threats of punishment. Other times they just ran through our cityscapes, dragging their feet and making the maximum mess possible.

Didn’t matter much. Either way, we saw bigger kids maliciously destroy our cities, our stories.

We learned, as a result, to dream and tell stories surreptitiously. We continued building our science-fictional cities, but learned to keep one eye out for interference. Whether it came from well-meaning authority figures, or mean-spirited peers who got pleasure from destroying what we’d built, interference was always present at the margins. If our aspirations became too independent, well, then we aspired illicitly.

As a grade schooler, I enjoyed academic subjects, but I didn’t necessarily enjoy them at officially approved times. Schools have designated times to read and write, perform math or science, and the omnipresent phys-ed. Having spent time teaching myself, I understand the importance of having everybody working on the same wavelength simultaneously. In chronically short-staffed, cash-poor schools, independent learning wasn’t much of an option.

But I wanted to write when I wrote, not when my well-meaning teacher said writing was appropriate. I invented elaborate stories for myself involving math, far more interesting than the “skillz drillz” practiced in the textbooks. The approach advocated in textbooks worked, insofar as kids learned basic skills sufficiently to ace standardized tests. But only when allowed to play with words and numbers like toys, was I able to care enough to actually master the concepts.

Our sandcastle cities were the manifestation of this principle. We learned collaboration by building the cities together. We learned math by determining how high we could stack unstable playground sand to make our cathedrals of innovation. As our stories became increasingly elaborate, we learned important language arts skills, in persuading teammates why having this boulevard here, not somewhere else, served the city.

Sometimes I wonder what became of my fellow builders. The military reassigned my father every two years, so most of my childhood friends retreated to the anonymity from which they arose. How many of them are architects, storytellers, schoolteachers now?

And how many of them daily apply the skills we learned at the farthest verge, building cities out of sand?