Here in San Francisco, the Mission District neighborhood is home to Dolores Park, one of the most unique, bizarre, weird and fun places anyone can ever go. If it’s sunny and warm and after noon on any day of the week (literally, any), there will be people engaging in anything from major hangs to pick-up basketball or Frisbee, croquet, corn-hole, dog walking, spiritual gong healings, solar-powered crocheting, political campaigning, slip-and-sliding down the hill to electronic-synth music and naked solo book reading.
You see, these are the things happen at (according to Dolores’ About Tab on Facebook) a place “unanimously voted the greatest on earth.”
There’s also slacklining in the park. Slacklining is a Zen-like practice in balance that uses nylon webbing tensioned in between two anchor points. The slackliner tries to stay on the webbing for as long as possible as the tension bounces up and down with the body’s force and movement, and individuals do tricks and stunts or just walk clear across the line. I was first introduced to this in the southern portion of Dolores Park, where groups of slackliners congregate around the palm trees that serve as the anchor points. It’s hard. And people fall, though it’s only from about three feet up.
Volvo, trying to show how smooth their FH commercial trucks handle, employed the Women’s World Slacklining record-holder Faith Dickey to slackline between two FHs on a closed highway in Croatia. This is significantly more dangerous than the non-moving palm trees of Dolores Park, and, honestly, thrilling to watch. The video below shows the stunt in its dramatic whole.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
More companies should exploit thrill seekers for commercial gain; it’s the perfect symbiosis of capitalism and mind-altering addictions (Faith Dickey’s words about slacklining).
And if you want to see more of those mind-altering addictions, spend an afternoon in sunny Mission Dolores Park.
