Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder (12 page)

When rainfall was especially heavy, I headed for Monroe Avenue, where backed-up storm drains would provide an instant “swimming pool” with thigh-high water where I waded and splashed. Leaves became sailing ships that dodged the perils of being swept away in the whirlpool of the storm drain. A good hard rain meant mudpies were in the making and my creative juices, like the rain in the gutters, began to flow. If a storm unleashed its full fury with thunder and lightning, I huddled bravely on the red-metal glider on the big front porch with others emitting appropriate cries of awe or terror. Fluke storms associated with unexpected cold fronts, transforming giant raindrops to icy hail, were the best of all—the sultry heat of a summer day magically dissipated. Hail as big as golfballs made great missiles to hurl at imagined foes.

Sometimes on a summer night close to bedtime, I would fill a jar with lightning bugs, bring it inside to my darkened room, and marvel at the iridescent and random illumination these marvelous insects emanated—liberating one in my room and returning the remaining jarful to freedom. Quietly I would lie in bed, watching this flying light-form, now isolated like me, from others of its kind. Soon mesmerized and calmed by the occasional tiny signal light, I drifted off to sleep.

Almost since the birth of her daughter, Julia Fletcher, mother and child spent time together in nature, not only in the mountains, but also in the semi-natural nature of their own yard. This time heightened Julia’s powers of observation. Janet recalls, “One of our favorite games was making names for unusual colors we saw in nature. ‘That one’s candlelight,’ Julia would say as we watched the sunset. I used to tease her that she could always go to work naming new colors for the Crayola crayon company!”

Janet and Julia also invented nature games. As they wandered through the woods, they would listen for “the sounds they could not hear.” Janet called this game “The Sound of a Creature Not Stirring.” A list might include:

sap rising

snowflakes forming and falling

sunrise

moonrise

dew on the grass

a seed germinating

an earthworm moving through the soil

cactus baking in the sun

mitosis

an apple ripening

feathers

wood petrifying

a tooth decaying

a spider weaving its web

a fly being caught in the web

a leaf changing colors

a salmon spawning

And then this list might expand beyond nature, such as the sound that occurs . . .

after the conductor’s baton ceases to rise

Although Julia’s adult life is just getting under way, Janet believes that early attention to nature’s details played a major role in Julia’s speech development, writing, and artwork, and that her daughter’s keen attention to detail will continue to serve her well. “Unlike many of her peers, Julia is not easily impressed by ‘stuff,’” says Janet. “What’s real, what’s enduring—a view from a mountaintop, a soaring bird of prey, a rainbow after a summer’s rain—these things leave a lasting impression on her.” Janet’s sphere of motherly influence has waned, of course. Her daughter spends less time outdoors. But Julia has not lost her love of nature, solitude, and simple pleasures. “These values are rooted deeply in those early years,” says Janet, the years when she and Julia listened to the sounds of creatures not stirring.

One of the world’s leading experts on butterflies, Robert Michael Pyle, teaches children about the insects by first placing a living butterfly on their noses, so that the butterfly can become the teacher.

“Noses seem to make perfectly good perches or basking spots, and the insect often remains for some time. Almost everyone is delighted by this: the light tickle, the close-up colors, the thread of a tongue probing for droplets of perspiration. But somewhere beyond delight lies enlightenment. I have been astonished at the small epiphanies I see in the eyes of a child in truly close contact with nature, perhaps for the first
time. This can happen to grown-ups too, reminding them of something they never knew they had forgotten.”

Perhaps the eighth intelligence is the intelligence within nature, the lessons waiting to be delivered if anyone shows up.

This is how Leslie Stephens views the educational necessity of nature. An at-home mother especially attuned to nature, she grew up in San Diego, a self-described “tomboy,” roaming Tecolote Canyon with her Weimaraner, Olga, by her side. In those years, Tecolote Canyon was a wild place, at the edge of a housing tract, filled with chaparral and sage. Coyotes and deer found their way there through suburban tracts. Her family spent most summer afternoons at Shell Beach in La Jolla, and every August she traveled to her grandparents’ home at Ryan Dam, on the Great Falls of the Missouri River in Montana. When she was thirteen, the arm of the canyon where she played as a child was plowed up by bulldozers, and homes were built.

When she became a parent, her family moved to the edge of another canyon, called Deer Canyon. It is, she says, “our little wilderness, narrow and deep.” She wants her children to learn from this edge of another universe, as she did. The canyon stimulates not only their spirits, but also their intellect. She tells how, when she was a girl, her canyon taught her a broader definition of shelter, and gave her “a deep understanding of how the world works”:

A child who is allowed to run free in a place that is natural will very quickly begin to look around for a special shelter. The interior framework of bushes is inspected and judged for its suitability to act as a fort. Trees, especially mature ones, provide towering castles, and the best climbing branches are claimed as “rooms.” In contrast, the exposure a child feels running across a grassy, sunny slope or wide, open field allows her to feel the lack of shelter. It is only through experiencing both opposites that children begin to understand each part more deeply.

Nature also teaches kids about friendship, or can. Sure they can
learn that elsewhere, but there’s something different about friendship forged outdoors.

When I was my children’s age, after school or on weekends anyone who wanted to be with friends just headed down to the old oak that grew along the seasonal creek. It was a great climbing tree and someone had tied a heavy rope from one of the sturdier branches. We would run, jump, and grab onto the rope and swing wildly, clearing the creek bed filled with smooth boulders and rocks. I do not recall anyone getting hurt there and upon reflection I think it may be that even though we tested each other’s limits, we knew our own. Pecking order established itself in an unspoken manner. But we were friends and we accepted each other. It was enough just to be together. The wildness of our place bonded us and we felt a connection that went beyond verbal exchanges to a deeper knowing.

Stephens’s recollection brings to mind the fascinating, if skimpy, studies that suggest children who spend more time playing outdoors have more friends. Certainly the deepest friendships evolve out of shared experience, particularly in environments in which all the senses are enlivened. On one level, discovering—or rediscovering—nature through the senses is simply a way to learn, to pay attention. And paying attention is easier when you’re actually doing something, rather than only considering how it might be done.

John Rick, the middle-school teacher who educated me about the growing number of legal and regulatory restrictions on natural play, grew up in the 1960s. His family’s house backed up on vacant land. At that time there were only three local television stations, one of them in Spanish. Computers and Game Boys didn’t exist. He spent his free hours exploring the land, as countless children did at that time. Rick says:

I can remember how furious my dad used to get when he never had a shovel in the garage. That was because I had taken it to dig foxholes deep enough to crouch inside and put plywood over the top. We even
took the time to disguise the cover with plants and dirt. A lot of the time the roof caved in on us, but we learned. There were other adventures, too: swings from trees, kites on two thousand feet of string. My dad helped when he could, but most of the time he left us to try things: to experiment, test, fail, or succeed. We learned so much more than we ever would have with someone showing us the right way to do things every time. Our failures gave us a deep, intrinsic understanding of how things worked. We understood the laws of physics long before we took the class.

Nature can stimulate the eighth intelligence (and probably all the others) in countless ways. But I have a soft spot in my heart for tree houses, which have always imparted certain magic and practical knowledge.

Rick’s story reminded me of my early career as neighborhood tree-house architect, at nine or ten years old. I couldn’t catch a ground ball well, but I could climb a trunk and nail a board with style. One summer I directed a crew of five or six boys in the appropriation of “spare” lumber from nearby building projects. In the 1950s, we did not consider it stealing—though it certainly was. Mountains of lumber, some of it crusted with concrete, would rise next to basement holes that became small lakes after summer storms. Carpenters looked the other way as we carted off four-by-eight sheets of plywood and two-by-fours. Our pockets bulged with nails that we collected from the ground.

We picked the largest oak in the state, we figured: a tree that must have been two hundred years old. We erected a four-story tree house with a sealed bottom floor that we entered through a trap door on the floor of the second story. Each ascending level became more elaborate and larger as the branches of the tree opened out. The top floor was a crow’s nest that could only be reached by leaving the third story and crouch-walking out ten feet on a thick branch, transferring to a higher branch that dipped down close to the first one, and then traversing that branch to the crow’s nest—forty feet above the ground. The tree house
was serviced by ropes and pulleys and two baskets. This tree house became our galleon, our spaceship, our Fort Apache, and from it we could see out over the cornfields and north to the great, dark woods. To think of that tree house today, within the context of our litigious society, makes me shudder.

I returned years later and the old tree was doing just fine. The only sign of civilization within its branches were two or three gray two-by-fours. If you drive across the Midwest today, or for that matter across any of wooded America, you can see similar artifacts, the skeletons of tree houses past. But you won’t see many new tree houses. More often than not, adults build the ones that do exist, sometimes for themselves.

Adults have appropriated tree-house building, just as they have Halloween. (Perhaps the better word is reappropriated: the Medicis built a marble tree house during the Renaissance, and a town near Paris was famous in the mid-nineteenth century for its tree-house restaurants.) Elaborate books for adults advise tree-house builders to rest boards on major branches and close to the trunk; to brace boards to resist wind and twisting; to use natural-fiber manila rope, rather than nylon rope. They advise that the floor be tilted slightly to allow water runoff; that the ladder not be nailed to the trunk, but tied to the tree and self-supported. And so on.

As tree-house architect, I could have used such information but did fine without it. We built our tree house well enough for our needs. None of my fellow builders was injured, at least not seriously. Ours was a learning tree. Through it we learned to trust ourselves and our abilities.

Recently, I talked about the art and education of tree-house building with a friend, architect Alberto Lau, who is also the construction scheduler for several new schools in my city. Alberto grew up in Guatemala. “Only in this affluent society would kids be able to get construction materials free,” he said, shaking his head. But later, he sent me a list of what my young associates and I may well have learned while building that tree house:

• You learned the most common sizes of lumber, 4' × 8' sheets of plywood, and 2" × 4" studs; also, about the sizes of nails.

• You probably figured out that diagonal bracing stiffened the structure, whether the bracing was applied at a corner or to hold up the platform or floor of the tree house.

• You learned about hinges, if you used those to attach the trap door.

• You probably learned the difference between screws and nails.

• You learned about ladders, if that is how you got from one story to the next.

• You learned about pulleys.

• You learned that framing must strengthen openings such as windows or the trap doors.

• You probably learned to slope the roof in imitation of real homes, or because you were beginning to understand that a slope would shed rain.

• You probably learned to place the framing narrow side up; you were beginning to learn about “strength of materials,” a subject taught in engineering schools.

• You learned how to cut with a handsaw.

• You learned about measurement, and three-dimensional geometry.

• You learned how the size of your body relates to the world: your arms and legs to the diameter of the tree trunk; your height to the tree height; your legs to the spacing of the ladder rungs; your reach to the spacing of the tree branches; your girth to the size of the trap door; the height from which you could safely jump, etc.

“One more thing,” he added. “You probably learned from your failures more than from success. Perhaps a rope broke from too much weight; a board or 2 × 4 pulled off because you used nails that were too small. You also learned, by practicing, one of the essential principles of engineering: you can solve any large or complex problem by breaking it down into smaller, simpler problems. Perhaps you broke the tree-house-building problem down like this: which tree to choose; how to climb the tree; where on the tree to build the house; what materials
were needed; where to get the materials; what tools are needed; where to get the tools; how much time is needed; how many people are needed to do the job; how to get the materials up the tree; how to cut the materials; how to build the floor; how to build the walls; how to build windows; how to build the roof.”