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

one’s idea of nature is also their idea of a paradise or a heaven on earth. In my case, I felt perfect when I was at The Spot.

Fred Rogers knew how to listen. A few years before he died, I interviewed him for my newspaper column. I took my son Matthew, who had just turned six. My son has always been ebullient and outgoing, but on this day, he was tense and silent. As I introduced him to Mister Rogers, I noticed that my son’s upper lip was quivering. Rogers smiled and shook his hand. Later, he interrupted his conversation with the adults and sat down next to Matthew, who had pulled a book about rocks out of his little backpack.

“I love rocks, too,” Mister Rogers said. He owned a lapidary machine, he said, which he kept in an outbuilding on his property because of its constant whirring. Matthew’s eyes widened, because his own birthday present had been a lapidary machine to roll and polish the most beautiful rocks he collected. Rogers and Matthew leaned together over one of the pages of his book, whispering the secrets of stone.

I remembered that Rogers was an ordained minister, so I mentioned to him Matthew’s theological question about God and Mother Nature. “Are they married, or just good friends?” When my son had asked this, I had involuntarily laughed. Mister Rogers did not.

“That’s a very interesting question, Matthew.” He thought about it for a long moment. “Your mom and your dad are married and they’ve had two fine boys, and they’re mighty important to those two boys, and I think that’s one way we get to know what God and Nature are like, by having a mom and a dad who love us.”

Maybe the statement wasn’t exactly politically correct (what about single parents?), but it worked for Matthew. Then Mister Rogers said something so quietly that only my son could hear, and Matthew smiled.

Later, as everyone prepared to leave, Mister Rogers sat down next to Matthew and said to him, “Will you let me know, as time goes by, what answer you find to your question?”

22. Fire and Fermentation: Building a Movement

AT FIRST LIGHT, my wife, Kathy, woke up and walked outside to get the paper. She felt a wave of heat and looked up. The sky was amber and black and foul.

“Something’s wrong,” she said, shaking my shoulder.

Four hours later, we were driving out of Scripps Ranch as a blazing orange thing with its single burning eye stared down at our cul-de-sac. Our van was packed with the past—photo albums and children’s drawings, our kids’ baby clothes, pictures pulled from the walls. Binkley the Cat, in a cardboard box, harmonized with the sirens. “How can this be happening? The rug pulled out like this,” Matthew, our then-teenage son, said, the words choking in his throat. He was stunned, incredulous. He was sure that his world would end in flames. “It’s okay,” I answered, in a poor attempt to reassure him, “Think of it as an adventure. Hey, I grew up with tornadoes. We did this kind of thing every spring.”

“Well, I didn’t,” he said. And he was right to say that.

We drove west and north, keeping the rising cloud of smoke in our rearview mirror. The traffic was bumper-to-bumper. Forty minutes later, we pulled into a parking lot at a freeway-side Hampton Inn, near the ocean. The hotel was offering price breaks to evacuees. The lobby was filled with dazed San Diegans and their pets. People gathered around a large-screen television, holding their hands to their mouths in disbelief.

Three blocks from our house, the fire stopped and reversed; the wind blew it back over the backcountry.

By the time the largest fire in Southern California history was over, in October 2003, two dozen people had died, more than two thousand homes were burned to the ground, and the Cuyamaca forest—the place in my county to which I was most attached—was gone. The fire burned so hot that boulders the size of houses exploded. Trees estimated to be eight hundred years old were turned to charcoal.

Some of the special places offering nature programs for children that you have read about in these pages were destroyed or damaged as well. Candy Vanderhoff, the architectural designer who for two years had devoted herself to the establishment of Crestridge Ecological Reserve—the mountainous land where high school students confronted the wonders and peculiarities of the backcountry—reported that most of the reserve was burned away.

Vanderhoff and other Crestridge volunteers had spent weeks constructing an educational kiosk at the entrance to the preserve. The kiosk, designed by artist James Hubbell and made primarily of biodegradable straw bales, was also destroyed as the firestorm roared through Crestridge. All that remained were twisted fingers of burnt oak and blackened boulders pocked with the acorn-grinding holes of ancient Kumeyaay.

Hubbell’s family compound, nestled in the chaparral and oak thirty miles to the east, was burned as well. He had spent forty years creating structures—sculptures, really—of concrete, adobe, stone, wood, wrought iron, and glass. Over the decades he added a flourish here, a piece of glass that caught the light there. The buildings weren’t built as much as grown from the land. Over the years, thousands of visitors came for day visits to soak up the spirit of Hubbell’s creation. The fire incinerated much of the compound; the deer that moved like ghosts are gone.

Still, Hubbell—a gentle, aging man whose hands shake with palsy—believes in seeds, in rebirth.

A few weeks after the fire, he and his wife, Anne, were back on their land, planting possibilities and reattaching themselves. Later, I received a letter from Jim that perfectly described poet Gary Snyder’s reference to the spirit of natura—birth, constitution, character, course of things—and beyond natura, nasci—to be born:

This year good work will grow out of the ashes, just as green grass grows out of the ashes of the burnt chaparral, for along with the destruction came something unexpected. As we