#82 Building Outdoor Memories
Environmental educators are pushing legislation called “No Child Left Inisde” to promote outdoor, experiential time in nature to help combat what is now being called “Nature Deficit Disorder.” But it does not take just special programs in school to help get kids outside and enjoying the wonders of nature: simply inviting a young friend to the woods or the stream will yield great rewards for both of you.
This show originally aired on April 3, 2008 on “The Rivanna Rambler,” a weekly public affairs show airing every Thursday at 11:55 a.m. on WTJU 91.1 FM or wtju.net.
I have promised my six-year old friend that our time together this afternoon will involve “water,” so Aibek arrives at my house with boots that reach almost to his knees, a change of clothes, drinking water, and a snack. We are ready!
We walk through the neighborhood, where many of the backyards lean down towards small creeks that are headed, like us, towards Greenleaf Park. Upon arrival, the swings beckon – and we spend a good 15 minutes in our special game that consists of shouting real and made-up words when our faces meet at the height of the swing’s trajectory.
Afterwards, we walk down towards the wooded section of the park, past the rain garden, installed a couple of years ago, where vegetation is just starting to fill in a bit. I explain that most of the pollution that gets collected in the rain garden is OK, because the plants are able to turn it into food for themselves or bacteria that lives in the soil. It’s a subtle point, and the stream below us, the one that’s being protected by this rain garden, beckons. We cross a small wooden footbridge into the woods and hop into the stream.
Aibek grabs a stick and starts scraping the rocks, seeking a satisfying splash. But it’s only a couple of inches deep, and the best tools are our hands. So we walk the creek, overturning cobble and rocks to see what we can find.
We are in luck! There’s a crayfish scudding away from his eager fingers, its claws arching up at the young giant that has backed it into a rocky corner.
“You pick it up,” he commends, suddenly still, my clue that he’s had some experience with the sharp pinchers of this miniature freshwater lobster. With fingers that feel way too big, I pick up the inch and half long crayfish, trying to be both firm but gentle.
“Do you want to hold him?”
“No! You!” he yells, jumping with a thrill, as fear and excitement course through his small body.
I return the stunned creature to the stream, and we continue to walk and look. There are very few aquatic bugs, which doesn’t surprise me, this being an urban stream and one that’s been disturbed for many years. But once again, Aibek sees something. This time, he reaches for it himself, and proudly offers up a crane fly larvae, whose white, grub-like body is a chubby, alluring inch long torpedo. He holds it for awhile, considering.
It seems that it needs a proper home – so Aibek spends the next fifteen minutes building a small rock wall enclosing the platform on which he has placed the crane fly. He caps the house with a flat rock for a roof. I watch him at work, crouching in the stream, totally absorbed in selecting just the right rocks based on size or shape, or texture or heft. Or maybe factors that only a six year old can understand.
It is unlikely that he will remember this exact day, the water cool between his own small fingers, the slick soft pressure of the crane fly’s wormlike body, the early spring sun warming his back. I don’t know if he will, when he is grown, remember our word game on the swings, or making a house for the crane fly, or perhaps the picture that I show him later of the adult cranefly that the larvae will become in a few short weeks.
But as sure as the warm breeze on this early spring afternoon pulls me back to my own unspecific childhood memories of playing in the woods, I know that this kind of time is something that I wish for all children— simple time, unplanned, with no expectations except to see what we can see, outdoors, discovering with our hands and bodies something of the ways of the natural world. As Earth Day approaches, and you’re thinking of some way to honor it, you can’t do better than taking a child’s hand and leading her to a stream, a grove of trees, a pasture, or a park – and spend an hour or two being guided by the imagination and curiosity of a child.