A couple of summers ago, a brave young boy about 10 years old knocked on our front door and, a little breathlessly, indicated he was in need of assistance.
No wonder. He had a gash in his calf, the result of a fall from the spruce tree in the park across from us.
He’d fallen from a limb maybe three metres in the air but his leg had caught the pointy end of the 15-centimetre stump of a branch broken off some time ago.
I got the antiseptic gauze. My wife applied her first-aid skills.
We wrapped up the wound, had him call his mother and tried to buoy his spirits until she arrived and drove him off to the local emergency ward.
The next day, they both showed up on our doorstep again, this time with a delicious homemade apple pie as thanks for our help, which, of course, was only what anyone would have done.
In the meantime, I went over to the park with a handsaw and removed the pointy projection, which clearly was dangerous. Case closed, problem solved, I thought. Kids could return to climbing the tree, a popular pastime since we moved into the neighbourhood 20 years ago and, judging by the height of the tree — about 15 metres — for a couple of generations of kids before that.
It was a great climbing tree because it had a couple of low, strong limbs and a perfect ladder of branches the rest of the way up, almost to the top, with the whole climbing route hidden inside the cylinder of camouflage provided by the outer needles. Sitting on the front gallery and having the delighted voices of unseen children waft down on us from above was a lovely, otherworldly experience. Children we have heard on high, was the effect.
Unfortunately, a couple of days after the accident, a city crew came by and sawed off all the lower branches. I’m six-foot-six and can just about reach what is now the lowest one, but my tree-climbing days are past me and it’s a rare kid who can shinny up the fat trunk to get to what is now the tree’s bottom rung.
The incident hardly qualifies as news, but I report it because it describes what has become a typical bureaucratic overreaction. In a satirical piece titled “Kill the trees — before they kill us,” the National Post editorial board wrote last weekend about a similar decision by the Saskatchewan Ministry of Parks, Culture and Sport to cut down a tree out of which a child fell this year and broke a leg.
First off, who knew there were trees in Saskatchewan? But seriously, where’s the ministry’s sense that tree-climbing in parks is an important kids’ sport and a key part of our culture? Yes, a tempting tree might cause kids to (literally) go out on a limb and suffer disastrous consequences — even if a broken leg at a young age might be more learning experience than full-fledged disaster.
But still.
Just about all newspaper commentary on this and similar issues takes this line, which is fundamentally correct. But, to be contrarian for a moment, pity the poor bureaucrat. What if someone sues? Sensible people respond the way our boy-hero’s mother did: Take him to emergency, bake a pie for the good Samaritan, and get on with life.
But what if some not-so-sensible parent, prompted by a lawyer, goes legally ballistic and takes the town to court? Personal injury judgments in Canada haven’t yet reached U.S.-crazy levels, but they’re getting there.
How does the insurance company react if the town doesn’t chop off the lower branches of the spruce tree? If I’m a town bureaucrat, should I be confident enough to decide that higher premiums are worth it to preserve the fun and adventure of tree-climbing?
Better safe than sorry, yes, but in the case of our defanged spruce tree, we’ve ended up both safe and sorry.
William Watson teaches economics at McGill University in Montreal.
