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

He is determined that his daughter not suffer from this distance, that she find nature, that she walk in beauty, and that she understand the ice. Though self-confidence and awareness can come from experiencing nature, the generations do not go to nature to find safety or justice. They go to find beauty. Quite simply, when we deny our children nature, we deny them beauty.

15. Telling Turtle Tales: Using Nature as a Moral Teacher

Let Nature be your teacher.

—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

FOR MY FAMILY, spring brought tornadoes and turtles. Just as the twisters roared up from Oklahoma and crossed over to the hills of eastern Kansas and western Missouri, the box turtles began their migration. The blacktop roads and cement highways would be dotted with spinners, crawlers, and splotches. Spinners were what we called those turtles that, while traveling to turtle Mecca, took a glancing blow from a tire, flipped over, and spun like tops. Crawlers and splotches were . . . self-explanatory.

Each year, my parents would load my brother and me into the Dodge and ride the road to save the turtles.

When we saw a spinner or a crawler, my father would brake the car and my mother would jump out, white blouse fluttering in the wind, shoot across the pavement—sometimes dodging cars—and grab the turtle. Often she would race back to the car with a turtle in each hand. She would deposit these lonesome travelers on the backseat floor mat, at my brother’s and my feet. As we rode along on this mercy mission, we would collect as many as a couple dozen turtles.

Then my father would turn the wheel and head back home, weaving to avoid the new waves of crawlers and spinners.

The saved souls were deposited in what we called “the turtle pit” at the base of the backyard, under the shade of a hedge. Beyond the hedge were cornfields, and beyond those fields woods that went on forever (at least in my imagination). Under the hedge, my father dug a pit, lined it with chicken wire, pushed dirt back over the wire mesh, and then folded a flap of chicken wire over the top of the pit. He weighted the wire at the edges with stakes and rocks. Into the pit went the crawlers and the spinners. Each summer, I spent hours under the cool shade of the hedge, on my belly, peering into Turtle World. I fed berries and lettuce to the turtles, studied the patterns of their shells, the veined colors of their faces, the way they bobbed their heads, the way they defecated.

A hefty old turtle named Theodore was my favorite. He was a circumspect turtle. At first frost, I would lift the flap of wire and pick the turtles up and walk down into the brown, crackling cornfield and release my summer friends. Except for Theodore, who hibernated in our basement. One spring, Theodore did not awaken. I cried and wrapped him in toilet paper and gave him a decent burial near Turtle World. My mother attended the funeral.

I often think about the crawlers and spinners that would have been splotches, and sometimes I wonder if other parents cruise for box turtles in the spring, their children in the backseat, still in their pajamas.

Today, some folks would frown at a boy collecting turtles. But unless a child is collecting endangered species, the aggregate of good outweighs the damage to nature. Turtle collecting (and later, collecting snakes, which lived temporarily in a terrarium in the garage) offered me a hands-on experience with nature, and it was one of those acts that brought my family together. Biologically, we are not that many generations removed from the hunting and gathering family, in which each member of a family or clan had important work to do. That may give turtle-collecting undue weight, but I do remember that strange and wonderful feeling on turtle road, and I felt it, too, when my parents and brother and I fished together, because then we were whole.

The Case for Fishing and Hunting

For reasons that have more to do with emotion than reason, I don’t hunt, nor do I encourage my boys to hunt—and they are appalled at the idea that others hunt. I acknowledge that there is slim moral logic dividing hunting and fishing, but I am prejudiced in favor of fishing as a way for children and adults to experience something beyond the voyeurism that sometimes passes for nature experience. In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean writes, “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” In my childhood family, there was no clear line between carp and the garbage can. Like many folks, I come from a family obsessed with fishing, but we weren’t snooty about it. In fact, we leaned toward carp, which, unless you know how to cook them, are inedible. We heard rumors that some people knew how to tenderize them with a pressure cooker. So, my father, being a chemist, experimented with this technique. A vague recollection of an explosion and flying carp pâté sticks in my mind.

To my delight, both my sons understand the healing qualities of nature. Matthew has claimed fishing and now birding, too, as his own medicine, and I suspect these will help him thrive the rest of his life.

Fishing is not a solely male activity. Women comprise the fastest growing segment of fly-fishing. “I almost hate to call it fishing,” says Margot Page, who lives in Vermont and calls herself a “fishermom.” A well-known fly-fisher, she’s passing the fishing tradition on to her daughter. “I’d rather call it water treatment. Yes, it’s about the line and these wild flashes of light you see in the stream, but it’s really the water that we go to and the water we’ve always gone to. When you become more familiar with the creatures that inhabit water, you