Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder, Louv, Richard [best free novels txt] 📗

As we wound our way down the trail, Jason, my older son, held his brother Matthew’s hand on the rougher spots while Schad’s son, Tom, rushed ahead. Schad told how he grew up in the Santa Clara Valley, now better known as Silicon Valley. He never went camping as a kid. When he was twelve, however, he began sleeping in the backyard during the summers and became fascinated with the night sky, which ultimately led to his career teaching astronomy. As an adult, he favors sleeping on a simple pad beneath the stars in the wilderness.

He spoke with awe about the mysteries of the lost corners of the county, and especially of the night sky—for example, the strange shadows that Venus can cast along the desert floor. Being at a particularly scatological age, the younger boys, Tom and Matthew, were more interested in coyote poop than Venusian shadows. They poked at it and offered an assortment of names for it. Matthew wanted to know why we didn’t see any large animals.

“Because they have super powers,” I explained.

He stopped in his tracks.

“They can hear and smell us from far away,” I added. He was impressed by this, but only briefly. So many rocks to collect; so little time. The two young boys, competing to be leader of the hike, rushed onward. Small children are not like adults: Schad and I, who had just met, were overly polite; Matthew and Tom were immediately familiar, trading intimacies and insults as if they had known each other for twenty years.

“I want to go bushwhacking here!” Tom announced. He disappeared for a moment into the bushes. “Look out for snakes,” he called. “One could pop his head up any time.” Over the years, Tom’s father has sighted two hundred Bighorn sheep, one mountain lion, and a lot of rattlers. April, Jerry advises, is the month one should be most careful about snakes. He avoids going off trails or bushwhacking—carving your own trail through the brush—during that month. Snakes wake hungry from hibernation then, and are likely to be aggressive.

“Usually, I take Tom on hikes closer to home, but I like bringing him out here, too,” said Schad. “He’s able to test himself, to explore and take some risks. It’s important for him to learn good judgment about hiking.”

His advice to parents: take your children on easier, shorter hikes, close to urban areas, because small children tend to get bored long before they grow weary.

Matthew was the first one to hear the falls.

We came to the end of the path at a grove of oaks where Cottonwood Creek rushes down through the gap. We walked along the creek to the first of several falls and deep pools that are fed by snowmelt and runoff from the recent rains. As the boys clambered up the boulders and ran along the ledges, Schad and I called to them to slow down to look. “See the darkness?” Schad said to Tom, pointing to stripes of slime that trailed down a rock face into a deep pool. “Don’t step on those; they’re very slick and you’ll slip into the water.”

The boys skittered like lizards up the rocks. Watching them, Schad admitted to a vicarious thrill: “When I take Tom with me, I see all of this freshly, through his eyes.” We sat for a while on a boulder overlooking a deep pool; the small boys used the boulder as a slide. At the precipice, Schad and Jason and I used our bodies to block their descent. After a while, we tired of this and herded Matthew and Tom back up the path, our pockets heavy with rocks Matthew had picked up along the way and insisted we carry.

WHAT IMPRESSED ME most about Jerry Schad was not his formidable knowledge but his infectious enthusiasm. If such joy is dormant, we must reawaken it. This is not an easy task for parents who previously missed the chance to connect with the outdoors. But that opportunity is still available. “If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder,” wrote Rachel Carson, he or she “needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.”

The main thing is to find or rediscover our own sense of joy, excitement, and mystery. André Malraux, the novelist and French minister of culture after World War II, once wrote (quoting a priest), “There’s no such thing as a grown up person.” Certainly it’s never too late to rediscover the awe of a child. The most effective way to connect our children to nature is to connect ourselves to nature. If mothers, fathers, grandparents, or guardians already spend time outdoors, they can spend more; they can become birders, anglers, hikers, or gardeners. If children sense genuine adult enthusiasm, they’ll want to emulate that interest—even if, when they’re teenagers, they pretend to lose it.

Reading about nature with a child is another way, as an adult, to revive a sense of natural wonder. Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling’s world within a world; Twain’s slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave? Environmental educators and activists repeatedly mention nature books as important childhood influences.

Like many children of the 1950s, author Kathryn Kramer grew up on The Lord of the Rings. She spent entire summers “on an uncomfortable wicker couch in the living room of our summer place, my legs straight out like those of a stick figure drawn by someone who hasn’t the skill to make knees,” rereading the trilogy. “Maybe I’d glance up occasionally at the squares of sky through the windows; that seems to be all