The greatest love you can show a child is to let them learn to navigate the forest and the fields.
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“It’s only natural, that I should want to be there with you…” -Crowded House
Between the ages of five and ten, I led a privileged existence. We weren’t wealthy—in fact, we lived in borderline tenements infested with cockroaches in the City. We weren’t swamped with the ‘the stuff’ of leisure and play, no fancy toys. Birthday gifts were practical, like tee shirts and underwear. No fancy wheels for the family, and for me.
Those are the trappings of privilege as we conceptualize them. I had none of them, yet am grateful beyond measure for the privileges I had.
For five remarkable summers, I was given access to a world that changed how I would act and think for the rest of my life.
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I was pretty much a street urchin, playing in alleys and walking in large groups to school for reasons of safety. I was growing up in an urban, transitional setting, a pre-gentrified city where the neighborhoods were on their way out before they would revitalize. I remember thinking a robin was the most colorful bird I would ever see—a cardinal being a dream found only on Christmas cards and the helmet of a team from St. Louis.
And yet, for five remarkable summers, I was given access to a world that changed how I would act and think for the rest of my life.
My grandfather, an immigrant who was relentlessly self-sufficient, invested in a bungalow colony in the Catskill Mountains, just outside of Monticello. There, he set up shop—literally, for he was a skilled carpenter and builder, on fifty wonderful acres in “the country.” For five years from the early to the mid-sixties, my brother and I spent our summers in a large, rambling house, which sat on the property. We were royalty; we were the “owner’s grandchildren.”
There was so much to do. Those fifty acres were the door to a lifetime communing with nature and the environment.
Steven Kellart, along with biologist Edward O. Wilson, is one of the staunchest advocates of what has been called the “biophilia hypothesis.” Human beings, they assert, have always had an affinity for nature, and a connection with the natural world. It helped us survive, helped us to domesticate animals, and to identify helpful plants. After countless generations of living in and near nature, we are losing that connection.
Both the loss of natural settings to development, and the rise of technology, have created several generations of “indoor children,” whose contact with the natural world has been reduced to highly structured and time limited forays onto soccer and lacrosse fields. Instead, they have “Nature Deficit Disorder.” Kids today don’t have what I had. And my exposure to the natural world occurred at the dead center of the key developmental moment for acquiring biophilia—between the ages of five and ten.
After countless generations of living in and near nature, we are losing that connection.
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I wasn’t just exposed to it. I lived in it, wore it, breathed and heard it—I tasted it.
Early in the morning, my grandmother would make a bowl of oatmeal, seasoned perfectly, for my brother and I. We’d make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and by 8 AM, we were gone for the day. We’d return for dinner.
The property was divided into three large fields, bordered by woods that separated them. It was dappled with small running creeks, clusters of blueberry bushes, and outcroppings of very climbable rocks. It was threaded with all of the natural experiences any child could dream of.
Some were purely magical. We’d find the impressed grass bowl where deer had slept in the field at night. We would gather the sweeping branches of a weeping willow tree and step off of the larger branch where we stood, dropping slowly to the ground. We called it the “elevator tree.”
We’d build hideouts, burrowing tunnels through rows of bushes, creating larger central rooms deep within the thicket. We’d climb trees, feeling the late afternoon winds rustling the leaves around us. We ate fistfuls of fat blueberries. We would find salamanders in the thick moss near the stream, and toads among the rocky outcroppings, and bullfrogs and small fish in quiet eddies near the shore. Nearby, in the fields, we would find deer scat and rabbit droppings, testimony that there were things even we hadn’t seen.
We’d watch hefty, rumbling porcupines rooting around, amazed at the size—we’d only ever seen mice and rats and cats as feral animals in the city. Above us in the skies, vultures would soar on the thermals above the fields, and we’d shriek and remove our light-colored tee shirts, so the “chicken hawks” wouldn’t attack us. We’d marvel at the colors of blue jays, and the flaming red cap on the impossibly large pileated woodpeckers.
I believe that you give a lifetime gift by letting a child experience the world on its own terms, and to celebrate with them what they have learned.
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It was a perfect storm of experiences for two city kids, and a playground of monumental proportions tailor-made for boys and girls. And it shaped a worldview that sustains me today.
I understand how things are connected to each other, in fundamental ways. I understand that when you dump things into streams, that it rolls downriver. That my grandfather’s burning garbage stains the skies; that the delicate balance of life and death in nature takes away and provides within the context of a food chain.
I learned that some plants offer gifts, like poison ivy, or blueberry bushes, or raspberries. And that mosquitoes bite more in the shade than in the sun. I learned that pine branches full with needles make pretty good nesting material, and have the added advantage of being wonderfully aromatic. I came to understand the relationship between Monarch butterflies and milkweed, and bee’s and clover. To determine whether someone likes butter by holding a buttercup under their chin and gauging the luster of the reflected yellow on their skin.
I learned about life and death, and respect for both processes, too. About mishandling small creatures and unintentionally causing them injury, and about kindness and mercy; that sometimes you let the super-cute critters stay exactly where they are and bring the adults to them. I learned to stay hungry when there was simply too much to see and do to interrupt.
And I learned that the greatest love you can show a child is to simply let them be, let them learn to navigate the forest and the fields. Just be ready with a Band-Aid, or a warm wet washcloth, or an explanation or a question. Or be ready to march out to the field, and watch a seven-year-old climb to the upper branches of a tree; or crawl through thickets of bushes into the central space in their hideout.
I believe that you give a lifetime gift by letting a child experience the world on its own terms, and to celebrate with them what they have learned.
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Photo: iStock
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