Terabithia (and the Distance Between Planks and Bridges)
I read to my children every night. In fact, the most feared (though least often fulfilled) threat in our house after 7 PM is, “If you don’t ______, we won’t have reading tonight.” The reason it’s so seldom fulfilled is because all three of us enjoy reading time equally. It’s a chance for all of us to shake off the day and enter a fantasy world together. And for the kids, it’s a chance for them to relinquish the imaginative heavy lifting to me; most times, they tell me, I get the voices right.
I recently selected Bridge to Terabithia as our evening reading book, knowing full well where it was headed (spoiler alert — if you haven’t read it, take an hour to do so; you’re behind, and it’s a classic). As you perhaps vaguely remember, the main characters are two fifth-grade children from very different families and backgrounds, and one of them— inarguably the more interesting, creative, and dynamic one — dies suddenly near the end of the book. It’s a real heartbreaker. I’ll never forget reading Bridge in 6th grade, and being absolutely crushed. I was in Mr. Kline’s reading section (back when sixth grade was still part of elementary school), and we also read Where the Red Fern Grows and Old Yeller… So, yeah, a pretty bleak year for a 12-year-old with a vivid imagination and a perforated heart.

Why, as the father of sixth- and fourth-grade children, would I choose Bridge? Because it was in my personal sixth-grade canon, and, more importantly, because it was the first book that had really shaken me as a young reader and thinker. It had confronted me with the surprising reality that the characters I came to love in books — the personalities I identified with and aspired to be like — could suffer real tragedies, and could strike palpable grief in my heart. I never looked at reading, writing, or even real-life friendships, the same way after Leslie Burke’s death. It yanked me out of the role of reader/bystander and thrust me irreversibly into the role of experiential surrogate. What Jess felt, I felt, and it was brutal. Unforgettable. Bridge taught me a respect for the power of literature similar to the respect I learned for the power of the ocean, the first time a wave slammed me face-down into the sand, then dragged me, roiling and disoriented, back out to sea. It was a formative novel that awakened me to the exhilaration and heartache of growing up.
My kids took it hard, as I knew they would. On the night that Leslie’s death was revealed, my daughter curled up in a ball and cried inconsolably. (My son was less visibly affected, but he’s more of a quiet thinker.) But the next day, we had a great conversation about the book, her reaction and thoughts, and the precious and unpredictable nature of life. It was a loss for which she was not prepared — just like every loss we experience. What made it harder was her profound connection with all the facets Paterson had purposefully cut into the novel. Leslie’s ability to empathize with the novel’s lone antagonist and transform her into an ally, Jess’s appreciation and admiration for the Burkes’s foreign family dynamics, and the juxtaposition of Leslie’s death with the “perfect day” Jess had savored all alone with his teacher. My daughter felt the full force this decimating fictional loss that had similarly decimated me, and we’ve been talking about it off and on ever since.
What brings all of this to mind tonight is that I spent this afternoon dismantling our family’s wooden playhouse — properly dubbed “The Clubhouse.” We inherited it several years ago from a neighborhood family who had outgrown it and wanted to give it a good home. I helped unscrew every plank, pack the lumber into our minivan, and re-construct the whole thing in our backyard. To fight the effects of aging, I reinforced the floor, bolstered the main support beam for the swings, repainted the whole structure (WOW, was that a lot of paint!), and even hand-routered a new sign… and then the kids went to town. They made clubhouse rules and regulated membership like Tom Sawyer and his band of robbers. They invented legions of good and evil and fought on both sides (Death to the Evil Peanut Army!). They swung across lava pits and fought off pirates, shot their way out of tractor beams and defended the universe. They far exceeded The Clubhouse’s expectation of being loved and played with, and gave it an entirely new life. We even hung twinkle lights from the rafters so we could read books up there in the middle of the night. It was, as Leslie exclaimed early in the novel, “a place just for us…our castle stronghold.”

And today, I tore the whole thing down to the ground.
Sadly, it was time. The twice-used wooden planks were showing signs of rot. My irrepressibly growing children rocked the whole structure when they swung, or climbed its walls. In heavy rainstorms, my “new” paint was sloughing off the roof’s planks like corrugated snake skins. Neighbors could be seen pointing at it while talking to their realtors. It was time to either sand and repaint the whole thing, replacing about twenty of the most worrisome planks, or just take it down and continue focusing on softball, baseball, clarinet, guitar, and all the other demanding pursuits that have recently kept us from just “playing.” When I approached the kids this morning about letting The Clubhouse go, I expected to be greeted with a gnashing of teeth and howls of execration. What I got, instead, was a shockingly even and logical agreement that, “Yeah, you’re right. It’s probably time.” Without much more thought, I took hammer and saw in hand and began the demo process. By dusk, the deed was done — t’were well it were done quickly.
Now we have our lawn back, and all that’s left of our clubhouse is a ghostly square cutout of its foundation. The lights are bunched up in a pile, and the wood is stacked neatly beside the garage. Each plank has been reduced back to its individual, literal value, having been yanked out of the whole to which it was a contributing part.
Look, I don’t presume to offer any groundbreaking insights here, or even a fitting platitude that can sum up the whole experience. But there is something about the whole thing that’s left me feeling unsettled…yet strangely balanced. In the same week that both my children faced and coped with a devastating imaginary loss, I imagined a loss that neither of them felt as keenly as I did. My wife and I are left isolated, together in our grief, over a heap of inanimate lumber; we understand, more than the children who breathed life into it, all that its demolition represents.
But it doesn’t really matter the specific structure or story, because it’s all about the spirit and belief that make them real. One of our most fervent hopes is that no matter how old our children get, they will always believe in magic — “the great bridge into Terabithia — which might look to someone with no magic in him like a few planks across a nearly dry gully.” I want them always to be able to see, simultaneously, the individual planks, the structure they come together to create, and the higher purpose imbued by the spirit of belief.
I have to say, I like their chances.
