Enjoying a Piece of American Mud Pie

In the thick of a county teeming with small manicured lawns, tiny backyards and highly regimented activities for children, there’s a little piece of summers gone by in Huntington Beach.

It’s where children, their clothes stained by mud, raft on slabs of plywood around a small muddy pond. They slide down a plastic tarp into another smaller, muddy pool. They zoom precariously on a tire, down a cable. They work with hammers, nails and blunt saws on treehouses.

Welcome to Adventure Playground in Huntington Beach, where it seems as if Tom Sawyer, not the city’s Community Services Department, must be running things.

The signs in the changing rooms and on the tool bins are hand-painted. The children can run carefree from treehouse to tire to raft, unaffected by the dirt or water.

“This is a boy’s dream,” explained Jacob and Justin Tomes’ mother, Rebecca, who came with her church group from Yorba Linda.

Jordan Law, 9, from Brea assured the grown-ups that it was OK to jump in a mud puddle in this small park nestled behind the city’s Central Library in Huntington Central Park.

“It’s dirty water, but that makes it funner,” Jordan explained. “You don’t have to worry about getting dirty because you are already dirty.”

Nisha Marco, 5, zoomed down the plastic-covered hill and slid into a muddy pool. “I’m soaked!” she yelled with a smile.

At a time when parents often are eager to shape their children’s experiences and fear that their youngsters can’t safely play in the streets without adult supervision, such a playground is an oddity, said Scott Bollens, a professor of urban planning at UC Irvine. At the gated park, they can run free and explore while their parents look on.

“It’s unusual in Orange County to have a hands-on park where children have a sense that they can do things themselves,” Bollens said. “The kids love it.”

Few parks like this exist because cities fear heavy liability, problems from abutting landowners and are experiencing budget shortfalls, Bollens said.

David Dominguez, facilities development and concession manager at the city’s parks and beaches, said there had been no major accidents at the park. The city has no intention of changing the old-fashioned appeal of the facility, which has maintained local popularity since it opened in the early 1970s, though it is not well-publicized, he said.

“We want to keep it rustic-looking and old. We don’t want modern play toys. It gives kids good ol’ playing. It’s a throwback to the older days when kids could entertain themselves. That is the intent,” Dominguez said.

Parents say these elements allow them to contemplate the world their children are growing up in and compare their childhood with that of their children.

“Where in Orange County can you get dirty on purpose?” wondered Luana Bastien, 40, a mother of three children ages 7, 9 and 12. Bastien grew up in rural Ontario, Canada. “We have block walls and 20 feet for a backyard. Every tree is cut just so. I remember when you could just walk in an alley and find a stick or a ball and the discovery was fun.”

From mid-June to mid-August, the park is open every day but Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. It closes Aug. 19 this year and is expected to reopen June 19, 2006. The park attracted 8,780 visitors in 2004, program coordinator Mark Hoxie said.

Adventure Playground is open to children ages 5 to 12, but no one is turned away because of age. The park requires everyone to wear tennis shoes, even in the water. Other shoes are not allowed.

Admission is $2 for children who live in Huntington Beach and $3 for nonresidents. Parents don’t pay admission. There are a few snacks and drinks for sale. The park’s income, more than $20,000 annually, pays for most of its expenses, Hoxie said.

Parents are advised to bring a change of clothes for each child and a trash bag for dirty clothes.

Hoxie says the park is one of only a few of its kind in California. A facility in Irvine offers a mudslide and a water pit, though its activities are more structured. Visitors to an adventure playground in Yorba Linda can enter only by getting into its two-week camp through a lottery system, for which city residents get preference.

Hoxie and officials of these parks say the only other adventure playground they know of in the state is in Berkeley.

The Huntington Beach playground was first built at Talbert Avenue and Gothard Street in the early 1970s. It remained there for three years, until the land flooded and it was moved to Goldenwest Street and Talbert Avenue, where it remained from 1978 to 1982. In 1983, the playground was moved to its current location on Talbert.

Before passing through the park’s gates, children sit on the grass to hear instructions from Hoxie.

“Who is ready to get wet and dirty?” Hoxie asks them.

He then explains that they must wear tennis shoes and can never throw anything. If they do, he says, he will punish with them a timeout.

Hoxie, 40, first visited the park 13 years ago when he was a volunteer at the Braille Institute in Anaheim.

He then began working at the park and comes back each summer, perhaps because he too yearns for old-fashioned summers, he said.

“When I grew up in Huntington Beach,” he said, “there were fields everywhere. Now there’s hardly anywhere you can go. Parents don’t want a mess in the backyard. Here, [children] can do what they can’t do at home.”