I drove by Recreation Park on Route 903 the other day and glanced at the all-plastic playground.

The image in my head time-traveled me back to my childhood. My mind returned to a place behind my grade school, a summer battleground in the 1960s that was a near-death experience for us neighborhood kids: the all-metal playground.

Let’s start with the slide. The steps up were difficult to climb due to their straight, vertical position. Think about climbing stairs that have zero incline. On the way up, I was lucky if I didn’t bang my knees at least once on the metal steps.

I got to the top of the slide and stared down at the silvery slope that’s been baking in the summer sun all day, making the metal scorching hot. The reflection off its surface shot arrows of fire into my eyeballs.

I pulled myself forward. Down I slid? No, I didn’t. My bare legs stuck to the hot surface. I slid a couple of feet, my sneakers screeching on the metal, an irritable sound that had me covering my ears with my hands.

With bruises on my knees and scalded flesh on my legs, I slid down the final few feet until my body went airborne and I fell headfirst onto the brick-hard ground.

Now, let’s move to the seesaw. Two long pieces of peeling green-painted wood that with your strongest push off the ground sent the kid on the other side to the very top of the rise. Game on. Try to knock the bigger kid off. Faster. Stronger. Like riding a bucking bronco in the rodeo. I held on in fear of death by skull fracture after I was catapulted to the moon and came crashing down into the earth.

The swings, yes, the swings! They had iron chains, not covered in safety plastic like they are today. Every time I held on, the rust from the chains dug into my fingers. I sat on hot metal boards. Once I got high enough, I could feel the legs of the swing set pulling out of the ground, but I kept going higher and higher.

I wanted to swing right over the top and come around again. I braced myself for the landing. Off I flew into the wild blue yonder and, unlike a skilled gymnast who stuck a perfect landing on her feet, I hit the ground, rolled forward until my mouth was tasting dirt.

The monkey bars, coated in hot rust that burned your hands, was the next challenge. The bars were a daredevil climb to the top, but of course, I navigated the heavy metal like a skilled mountain climber. Well, sometimes I did.

A little rain never sent us home from the playground. When the monkey bars got wet, they got slippery. Oh, no! Another aborted mission. Again, I fell to the ground. A new battle scar — a blood-burning raspberry on the inside of my right arm was the reward for my carelessness.

There was only one objective on the carousel. Get it going so fast that another kid would panic and jump off or he’d let go of the bar and smash himself into oblivion. Either way, if you could make him cry, you greeted him with a big belly laugh.

Our playground was a war zone. If you didn’t go home with skin ripped of your arms and new holes added to the ones already in your jeans, then you weren’t playing hard enough.

Sometimes, reckless play caused a fistfight or two. There were no bullies you had to whine about. You stood your ground against bigger kids and what you earned in return was respect. To go home with a bloody nose and lip was a badge of honor. Mom ran for the cold washcloth. Dad just sat back, smiled and said, “That’s my boy!”

There has been a lot said about how we are raising children today to be soft. Every activity is monitored by protective mothers. While we spent parts of our childhood on crutches and wore casts on broken arms, today’s kids are afraid to get their pants dirty. We jumped in mud puddles and fell head over heels when we crashed our bikes wearing no helmets on our heads. It’s a rare sight today to see a group of young boys pedaling their bikes like we did, a posse of lawmen looking for outlaws on the run.

We rode our bikes to play sandlot baseball games. We made forts in the woods. We played King of the Hill upon mountains of dirt left at construction sites. The king was at the very top of the mountain and had to push away anyone trying to knock him down. We didn’t play Marco Polo in swimming pools. We floated upon hot black tire tubes, wrestling our pool mates off their tubes and into the water until only one remained, still seated in his tube, raising his arms in victory.

A kid I knew ran away from his dysfunctional home only to come back because the night was scary and his belly was empty. We picked wild blackberries, ate them right off the bush, and wore the same stained shirt the next day when we went outside to play again.

We had real face-to-face friendships, not ones created by texts from cellphones. We got poison ivy, mosquito bites, bee stings and bloody cuts from sticker bushes. It was all part of the rite of childhood. Not one of us ever wanted to grow up.

Now, when I pass the park and take another look, I see the metal playground in my mind. I glance up to the sky and thank God for giving me hell on earth.

Email Rich Strack at richiesadie11@gmail.com