DETROIT -- For the record, hopscotch is not easy, especially when the course is 4 miles long.
"I was happy I did one block," 15-year-old Alicia Walker said of the record-setting course that wove through downtown Detroit. "Quite an accomplishment."
"You think Dance Dance Revolution is a workout?" added her brother, 12-year-old Darrell Walker, Jr. "This was terrible. My ankle is, like, numb right now."
No kidding. All that jumping and skipping can be tough. Few seemed to mind, however, as they hopped, skipped and jumped their way through Hopscotch Detroit.
You don't hear a lot of good news coming out of Motown, where at least the Tigers made the playoffs. It’s a city where Robert Collier, a 16-year-old artist, sometimes wonders if he’ll see adulthood. “My fear of the city is to die young,” he said. “All you hear about is young people getting killed."
That’s why the thought of a record-setting hopscotch through Detroit is so epic and wonderful. And weird.
The artists at design collective Wedge joined the folks at Imagine Detroit Together to create the world’s longest hopscotch course. The previous record, 3.4 miles, was set 12 months ago by students at the University of Guelph in Eden Mills, Ontario.
The point of the Sept. 22 exercise was to set a record, yes, but also to unite people by encouraging them to play together. Honestly, though, there wasn't a sudden surge of hopping in the Motor City. Young kids going to the YMCA skipped along the course with their parents or students headed to class, but more often than not, people walked along either oblivious or indifferent to the hopscotch course at their feet.
There were a couple of “hoppers” who did the entire course, which stretched from downtown to Wayne State University, passing landmarks like the Detroit Institute of Arts, a liquor store, Comerica Park and local icon Slows To Go BBQ. There were also some logical, logistical hurdles along the way, too.
"That's not a bike lane," Collier's mom, Bridgett Miller, yelled playfully at a passerby. "That's a hopscotch lane!" (Oops.)
And just how do you lay down a 4-mile hopscotch course of 22,000 squares? Slowly.
The process starts with the “chalk,” a not-so-secret mixture of water, corn starch, sugar, flour and tempera paint. More than a dozen volunteers spent more than four days laying down the path of white, orange and pink squares. Mother nature didn't help, washing away some of the course, requiring touch-ups here and there.
Although the organizers hoped to hit 4.2 miles, the course came in at 3.75. No one involved in the project harbors any illusion that a game of hopscotch will solve the city’s ills. But it can bring a bit of happiness to a city that needs it, and get people thinking a little differently about where they live.
"I'm an optimist," Ajooni Sethi, an activist with Wedge. "We wanted to show people what was happening in this crust of Detroit because there's this negative perception against this city. I don't know another city where a bunch of young people could feel that they contributed something."
