No shortage of adventure in Arlington Heights

Once again, the world is catching up with Arlington Heights.

When I read in The New York Times recently that zip lines that allow zooming through treetops are the latest ultimate thrill, I thought, "Old hat!" A century ago, the kids who lived across the street from where we now live on Dunton Avenue created their own zip lines in the middle of their block where Vail Street was vacated.

How they loved telling me decades later how dangerous and exciting they found the "zip lines" they created in that middle-of-the-block forest. Like the adventurers in The New York Times story, those kids fixed up a platform in a tree. They attached their own line to the platform. They'd take turns grabbing the line and hurling themselves out over the trees and into the sky.

Yes, it was hazardous, they told me gleefully. But that was the point. Like The New York Times zip-liners, they craved that element in their lives.

I could comb through all the oral history tapes I collected in the 1980s for similar stories of danger courted in the empty fields and copses of this town in early days. But off the top of my head, I most remember a plumber's vivid description of his friends' version of zip lines.

In his case, the venue was a small grove of trees just south of the St. James School parking lot. One of our kids recalls a stream running through it in the spring. In the winter, kids hid there the embarrassing boots their mothers made them wear to school.

What the plumber told me was that he and his friends would bend back immature trees to the ground. Then all the conspirators but one would let go, and the remaining cling-on would shoot through the air, like a stone in a trebuchet.

Robert Frost called it "swinging on birches." Calling himself a "swinger on birches," he described flinging himself outward, "feet first, with a swish, kicking his way down through the air to the ground."

There were also risky adventures with cars. Stephen Urick once told me how he and his friends played car-tag in the area north of what is now the Christian Liberty Academy. "When we saw a quarry across the block, we thought nothing of veering up over the curb and speeding across the block to catch him." He explained that when he was a kid, there were many subdivided areas near his house where the homes planned for had not been built.

Stephen's friends were also great for hitching on cars with their sleds. Not content, after a while, with bumping along relatively sedately, they attached longer and longer ropes to the car bumpers until they were swinging in great wide arcs off the road and into the fields. Back and forth. Back and forth.

The point in all cases is adrenaline-seeking. A hundred years ago, seeking that adrenaline cost nothing, unless you count the damage to the trees. Today, according to The New York Times, a zip line installation costs $750,000.