Recess After Asphalt
Asphalt was never a material of childhood. It came to schoolyards the way it came to parking lots: cheap, fast, easy to drain and to hose, a dark plane that asked almost nothing of the ground beneath it and gave almost nothing back.
On a June afternoon the blacktop of an elementary school can hold 150 degrees. Recess becomes a problem of heat and glare. Rubber balls report with a thin, hard sound. Knees learn the particular bite of aggregate. Teachers occupy the single stripe of shade thrown by the classroom wing.
The unpaving, when it happens, is rarely dramatic. A crew saw-cuts a rectangle. The slab lifts in pieces. Underneath there is usually compacted fill, sometimes clay, occasionally the ghost of an older lawn. Then soil arrives, trees in wooden boxes, a few logs, a low hill, a channel of river stone meant to carry rain toward a planted basin.