Doc Rats

The Ramp

On Peaks Island, Maine, jumping off the ferry ramp is a rite of passage. Nobody organizes it. There’s no signup sheet, no waiver, no adult with a whistle. There’s a rusted steel ramp built to load cars onto a boat, a tide that decides how far down the water is that day, and a loose line of kids waiting their turn. That line is the only formal structure involved, and it’s enforced more strictly than anything at their schools.

These are my kids and their friends. They swim like seals. They’ve earned this, and that’s the last you’ll hear from me on the subject of safety, because the whole point of the ramp is that it belongs to them and not to me.

I’ve spent too much time thinking about what Haidt and Lukianoff call safetyism, the idea that a child should be protected from every risk, including the ones that build the child. I don’t buy it. The ramp is high enough to make your stomach drop and your feet sting, and that’s exactly the dose. The kid who climbs up scared and comes down grinning has learned something no padded playground will ever teach him, which is that fear is a door and he can walk through it.

Norman Mailer had a line about this, cruel and just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same. I was thinking about Mailer while I took these pictures, which is a ridiculous thing to admit, because Mailer would have jumped and I was standing on the dock with an iPhone. But that’s fatherhood in middle age. You stop being the one who jumps. You become the one who watches, and pays attention, and tries to get the light right while your son grows a little, midair, before the splash.