This is an installment in our ongoing “Renegade’s Guide to Dallas Parks.” To find out what this is all about, visit here.

When I moved to Oak Cliff as a teenager a dozen years ago, Kidd Springs still had one of those wooden-planked castle playgrounds that felt like a blown-out version of a tree house, complete with moat and swaying drawbridge. You know — the kind where you’d go dashing across some wooden ledge, holding tight to the railing, only to come up on the flip-side with a palm full of splinters. But it was dreamy and romantic in the most basic, brute kid-fun kind of way, that is, dangerous and liable to collapse. Four years ago it did collapse, as was bound to happen, and the city rushed to remove the fortress wonderland of rotting wood and rusty screws. Liable indeed. The timber castle was replaced, you guessed it, with a plastic one – all primary colors and squiggle slides and tic-tac-toe games. And mulch. And glaring sun at all times of day that bakes the plastic until you can smell the off-gas and you feel your farmer’s tan forming as you wrestle small toddlers away from rock-climbing walls and fireman poles and ice cream-coated apparatus.

But pry your kids away from these aforementioned recreational delights, and head west across the grass and into the woods beyond, and you find yourself in an arboreal paradise, and that’s not just by comparison to the sun scorched playground. The small, treed hill that overlooks the spring-fed lake at Kidd Springs was once turned into a variation of a Japanese Garden. Sidewalks wander, leading down paths least efficient for the sake of leisure –they keep their own grammar, as a professor of mine used to say. At one time there were fountains that stair-stepped down into each other, but now these are only circular holes, filled with loose dirt, leaves, and stray feathers. Plantings have gone wild, weeds abound, but the trees here are old and big and sheltering. It’s cooler by degrees in this part of the park, with breezes coming off the lake, and the sun locked out by so many felicitous limbs. The few, good-willed repairs here: benches, a trellised canopy, do the disservice of making everything old seem neglected, but they insight an odd desire, in me at least, to grab a shovel or rake and set to work making it all just as lovely as it could be. Just as lovely as I imagine it once was. The few relics from the park’s inception that have survived: an Asian birdhouse and two free-standing friezes that are tucked into bushes and nooks, are almost undetectable, not unlike this garden that’s not really a garden anymore. But with all its ragged edges, this little hill is a shady sanctuary even still.

How to get there:
711 W. Canty St. Dallas, Tx. 75208