June 22, 2017
What
Children need more readily accessible opportunities to interact with the natural environment.
Why
A whole host of reasons: Obesity, ADD, depression, etc. My argument will be centered on the concepts brought up in the Emerald Mile, as espoused by the likes of Stegner, Abbey, Carson, etc. (I see a connection to Year of the Flood and the Saints.) Essentially, that the American character is eponified by the interaction with nature, seeing nature as a partner, an opportunity--a way to challenge ourselves, inspire imagination, demand that we observe problems, questions, and opportunities and are allowed to create solutions independent of any unseen experts beyond...
How
Every park and neighborhood, starting with the ones furthest from the foothills, should have an acre of wild space--What is wild space? Anything that is not a plastic, engineered, mowed, watered, manicured space. It could be entirely specifically naturalistic in regards to the local environment, a la xeriscaped or riparian. Including big rocks of the local geology would be cool, or rocks from Idaho geology. Basalt in one park, Batholith granite in another, Tablerock sandstone in another. Sagebrush here, Ponderosa pines in another. Lots of sticks and deadwood, pine cones and rocks.
Okay, but How? ACTION PLAN!
Letter to city council that distills the notions embodied in Last Child and Emerald that also includes a concrete plan of action. No problem.
Resources
example of sort of what I am talking about
June 21, 2017
Potential Pushback, or
Seven Blind Mice
Frightened Parent
This is a terrible idea. I've seen that rock at quarry view and I never let my child near it. My tax dollars should not be funding traumatic brain injuries. Further, any sort of wilderness will become a mecca for homeless drug addicts, and I wouldn't let my child near a park that had wild woods. Not to mention what that would do to my property values. And also, rabid raccoons. I just read about a toddler in Seattle that got parasitic intestinal worms from raccoon feces. And mountain lions. Wouldn't woods just be an invitation for lions, wolves, and ticks to infest our cities?
Uneasy Parent
I'm not so sure. I might let my kid climb that tree a Camel's Back, but I never let my kid's friend. If somebody else's kid got hurt while on my watch, I'm not sure what my liability would be. Besides, even if it was wilderness, wouldn't it need to be maintained? Who knows how to maintain wilderness?
Dog Owner
I like to be able to take my dog to the park and let him run without having to worry that he is going to get dirty, or covered in ticks, or get quills in his nose because he chased a porcupine. On the other hand, I'm wondering if I would have to worry about cleaning up his poop if he shat in the woods...hmm
City Lawn Care Contractor
This would be bad for the local economy in so many ways. Reducing the acreage that my mowers, blowers, and sprayers work would have a negative impact on my, and my workers bottom lines.
Soccer Afficionados
What? Parks are for sports, not outdoor recreation. Idaho has more public wildlands than any state except Alaska, but we have yet to produce an Olympic level soccer player. Reducing not only the footprint of our soccer fields, but providing an alternative to running around following rules would be disastrous. When children learn they could be hiding in the rocks and trees from their overbearing helicopter parents, rather than getting yelled at to "Make better choices, Briley!" there would be a mass exodus from our programs.
Video Game Manufacturers
If children know they can step right outside their door and find natural areas that simulate the simulated natural areas we've worked so hard to virtually create in games like Minecraft, or that they could actually play games like Call of Duty by taking their dart guns into the woods, we'd see an enormous downtick in both video game sales and sales of branded items embedded in our games. Plus, just see what my buddy has to say--
Army Recruiter
We need to be creating both virtual warriors, as well as cultivating a crop of kids who have no idea what it is like to get dirty, or find out what it feels like to get hit in the shin with a stick or pegged with an accuarately thrown pine cone right upside the head. We currently control that narrative. Obedient squads of order followers, indoctrinated on the soccer and football fields and fed a steady diet of video games that only shows the glamour side of warfare is the prescription for National Security. You believe in a strong military, don't you?
June 20, 2017
Take your kids to any park in Boise and carefully observe what they do. Sure they will play on the anesthesized plastic slides and equipment, and admittedly, that playground equipment has come a long ways. Still, a five year old will quickly ascertain that those structures are not authentic, and will soon gravitate to more natural structures.
At Camel's Back, observe the pine trees--there is one just to the northeast of the playground, and another along the southwest corner of the park, alongside the road. Both of them have perfectly placed climbing branches. On any given day, children will wait in line for the opportunity to climb in and play around these tree.
At the Tablerock park, there is a giant chunk of sandstone from the quarry that has been plopped down near the playground. At my son's recent kindergarten graduation celebration, that rock was crawling with kids scaling its sides and assertively strutting on its flattened summit.
At Manitou, the creek draws my kids to a bridge to observe water skippers, and the canal (gulp) beckons from above. Children climb up and run down that hill over and over, scuffing their knees and getting dirty, in the way kids do.
At Ivywild, there are a couple of trees next to the bathroom that are magnets for five year olds; a hidden Rivendell where they can get away from the hovering, watchful eyes of their Sauron-like adult guardians, and play with out conscience, reenacting...who knows what? I didn't dare interrupt.
All of these things have in common that element of authentic wildness, and the inherent, almost genetic way in which children interact with these spaces is impossible not to notice. Which is in stark contrast to the flattened, manicured acres of grass and goosepoop that constitute at majority of our park space. The places are odes to organized sports; the habitat of the soccer mom, not the racoon, the volunteer coach dad, not the deer. They are great places for kids to learn the rules and regulations and discipline of sports, which in turn will prepare them nicely for places in the organizational superstructure of the British Empire.
Wilderness, on the other hand, is the lair of the American. A place for unconventional, out-of-the plastic box thinkers. Risk-takers and dreamers. The place where a child can imagine a stick is a sword, a rock a castle, and a tree the Forbidden Tower. Those schema, forged in the play of our youth, are crucial to have in place later in life, when that same child must imagine the solution to the problem of deep space travel, economic collapse, or how to fix that hole created by the leaky bathtub in their house.
Boise is renowned for its parks. The river, foothills, and Tablerock provide opportunities for quick access to Wild Things. But I propose that we need more, and we need it closer. We need to push back on the encroachment of the nanny state. We need to pop the bubble of the plastic playground the and cone-constructed soccer complex, and we need to create spaces for our children where they can incubate that uniquely American trait of grappling with wilderness--that same trait the settlers at Jamestown exhibited, and was borne out by our revered heroes like Lewis and Clark, John Wesley Powell, Kit Carson, and countless anonymous "pioneers."
We see "extreme sports" athletes as some sort of bizarre subculture, but in reality they are drawn the the authentic challenges that true nature provide because it is in their genes: Americans have largely self-selected from populations around the world--people who are risk-takers, and are curious to find out what is up that tree, see if they can climb that rock without falling, giggle with wonder at the antics of a water-skipper.
June 19, 2017
Advocacy Writing
Can I write something "new" that will help advocate for wilderness? Can it be scientific? The angle I like may not be scientifically proveable, i.e. that the essential American characteristic is defined by the interaction with wild nature, the curiosity (use of scientific principals) that inherent and perhaps the defining characteristic of American cultures.. Or, in other words, advocate for inquiry by highlighting the American heroes that have changed the course of history through use of inquiry--Lewis and Clark, Powell, and the hundreds of thousands of more anonymous Americans who struck out for the wilderness with the common purpose of finding something new.
Statement of purpose: The preservation of wilderness should be a universal American ideal. What I would advocate specifically is the creation of true wild spaces at schools and in our parks--not manicured playgrounds or even really cool gardens with drip irrigation and greenhouses, but real, unfettered wilderness. The "Woods" of my childhood:
(Fine example of children doing science in the woods.)
Thoughts from Courtney's Demo:
Amber talked about using patterns in ELA and we talked about how students need to understand the patterns so they can both repeat them but also rupture them with authority in interesting ways. This also led to the observation that patterns in math can lead to recognition to ruptures in the pattern; number sense is basically having a concrete understanding of a fundamental pattern, and that it is imperative to be able to recognize ruptures in that pattern--oftentimes "wrong" answers, but maybe not always?
This kind of just reinforces the my notion that
Draft of Genre Writing, from April, 2016
Working Title
Joel Huettig
Chapter I
Spring
had come to the city, but you couldn’t tell.
Gus only knew because it was his birthday. April 12.
His twelfth He’d been told every year on his birthday how the flowers
and all been in bloom. The tulips at the
hospital had been a riot of color. His
Dad always reminded him how the cherry tree before the bridge had looked like a
snow globe.
Now,
as they approached where it had bee on their way across the campus to the
footbridge over the river, the cherry tree was nothing but a stump. Once, it had been a center piece of
ornamental design—it had been planted with plenty of bare ground, not grass, so
that it had adequate ground area from which to soak up water and nutrients in
its roots. As he looked at the stump
now, Gus wondered if its roots had stretched deep enough to reach the river,
and whether it might have been able to survive on its own, without humans to
water and prune and add mulch it.
It
didn’t matter. Like so many other trees
in what had once been called “The City of Trees,” it had been hacked down and
burned.
The man and his son pedaled past the bone-white stump of the cherry tree. As he did every time, the boy asked to stop and search for cherry pits. He was convinced that the tree was a direct analogy of the tree in Minas Tirith in the book Lord of the Rings. If he could just find a seed and replant, things would change. Despite the fact his father had assured him the tree had been produced from a graft, and was sterile, the boy had long believed the words he heard by Dr. (Goldblum) on Jurassic Park--"life finds a way."
Though realistically pragmatic, the father also harbored a similar hope. Why not? If life could find a way after the ultimate cataclysm, the big bang, in the harsh environment of the pre-Earth, then why couldn't one of those cherry pits, if his son could find one, harbor a genetic anomaly that would allow it to grow, despite the best efforts of the tree engineers who had sought to protect the investment they'd made in creating the perfect ornamental cherry tree. And maybe, the reborn tree would in fact be the perfect tree. Maybe that was the point of this current cataclysm, to find the survivors; to test the seeds of man and find out which ones could evolve closer towards perfection. In that, he shared his sons optimism.
However, pragmatic realism won this day. The man told his son no. There was not time. They needed water, and so continued towards the river.
As
they approached the narrow footbridge across the river, his Dad put up his
hand. Gus stopped in his crouch and
instinctively crouched down. He could
hear the river softly slipping by. A
lone bird chirped in the predawn light.
Three gently descending
whir-whir-whirs. Then silence.
His
Dad motioned for him towards the bridge.
It was an arch-bridge, wide enough for three people, or two bikes. Gus was pushing his bike, but his Dad
hadn’t. A working bicycle with two tires
that held air was more valuable now than any car had been when Gus was
six. His Dad’s bike was back at their
house, a mile up from the river, locked to a piece of exposed rebar in the
crawlspace of their house, it’s front tire removed and further hidden in a
different location for good measure. You
couldn’t be too careful.
Instead
of a bike, his Dad carried a plastic five gallon jug that had once been an
iridescent blue, like the blue of the ocean at the Great Barrier Reef that Gus
had only seen in pictures. Now the jug
had paled. Gus wondered how many times
they’d carried it to the river in the last six years. Wally probably would have said something like
“A thousand hundred.” He smiled to think
of his brother, and stole a glance at the quickly fading last stars in the dawn
sky, wondering.
Halfway
across the bridge, at the top of its curve, his Dad stopped.
“I’ve got a
fever.” His Dad spoke the words almost
as a question, yet they still seemed loud to Gus. He glanced downriver nervously.
The willows on the
far side rustled, and then an answering voice rang out, unabashed and loud:
“And the only
prescription, is more cowbell. Huettig
you old bastard!”
A large shape
emerged out of the willows on the far side of the bridge and scrambled up the
bank and on to the bridge. It was
wearing an old green military fatigue jacket, and incongruously, a yellow
sarong with floral motif. A banjo was strapped across its
back, and a cowbell, not making any noise at all, was slung from a piece of
orange baling twine around its neck.
The giant grizzly
of a man came striding across the bridge.
Gus’ Dad put down his water jug, unslung the battered yellow
backpack he was carrying, and turned his
back. He crossed his arms across his
chest as if he was praying, and took a deep breath.
The big man picked
up his father from behind and shook him gently.
His father
smiled. Gus couldn’t hear it, but he knew
the routine. The man, Chewy, had been
stretching his father’s back like that since the old days, the days when they
had guided river trips together. The
days when they had been paid to carry around heavy jugs of water and other camp
equipment, because it had been something people did for fun. Though he’d heard the stories a million
times, Gus still couldn’t imagine how people had considered camping a vacation. They had to carry water a mile just to survive
now.
“Where you been,
Huettig,” Chewy questioned his father.
“The rain farming
has been good this spring. Haven’t
needed river water, thank god. Might
even get a bit of a garden, if we’re lucky.
You like kale?”
“That a
vegetable? One of those things food
eats? No thanks.”
June 6, 2017
The man and his son pedaled past the bone-white stump of the cherry tree. As he did every time, the boy asked to stop and search for cherry pits. He was convinced that the tree was a direct analogy of the tree in Minas Tirith in the book Lord of the Rings. If he could just find a seed and replant, things would change. (June 13) Despite the fact his father had assured him the tree had been produced from a graft, and was sterile, the boy had long believed the words he heard by Dr. (Goldblum) on Jurassic Park--"life finds a way."
Though realistically pragmatic, the father also harbored a similar hope. Why not? If life could find a way after the ultimate cataclysm, the big bang, in the harsh environment of the pre-Earth, then why couldn't one of those cherry pits, if his son could find one, harbor a genetic anomaly that would allow it to grow, despite the best efforts of the tree engineers who had sought to protect the investment they'd made in creating the perfect ornamental cherry tree. And maybe, the reborn tree would in fact be the perfect tree. Maybe that was the point of this current cataclysm, to find the survivors; to test the seeds of man and find out which ones could evolve closer towards perfection. In that, he shared his sons optimism.
However, pragmatic realism won this day. The man told his son no. There was not time. They needed water, and so continued towards the river.
June 7, 2017
Water conservation and it's corollary of resource (namely energy) conservation fires me up and always has. The American Gothic farmers I grew up around seemed to almost believe that it was God that built those dams that delivered the water to the fields they tended so fastidiously in their bib overalls; their armpits still sweaty from the Church jackets they'd just hastily removed. They didn't, and still don't, account for the enormous amount of wealth and political will and military might that all those "elitist easterners" brought to bare in the construction of those dams, and the cheap immigrant slave labor that channeled the water to their crops, first the Chinese who literally dug those canals by hand, and then the Hispanics who moved the pipes by hand, and once again, the Asians, probably Chinese, who construct the automated systems they now use.
They don't properly account for the shoulders upon shoulders upon shoulders the scientists and engineers stood on in order to build those behemoths, and they don't realize that if the earth were in fact created in seven days, the geologic bedrock, literal and metaphorical, that those dams are build on would not be understood.
"Any drop of water going down that river is being wasted," declared my grandfather. Why then did all those ultra wealthy financiers pay good money to float with me as a guide, on that flowing water? Why is there water in the Boise Zoo but not in Lucky Peak?
Scientists built the corkscrews that drew water from the Nile river in ancient Egypt. Scientists built the Roman Aqueducts. Wallace Stegner chronicled the scientists and engineers who solved the problem of settling the American West, seemingly impossible due to the lack of water first observed by Lewis and Clark and later chronicled more in depth by John Wesley Powell...again, scientists.
You can't have your cake and eat it--science doesn't stop when we feel it is convenient to our culture or way of life. If you are willing to concede that
June 8, 2017
I wonder if you can get from Idaho to Arizona using a parasail. How much scientific observation would it take, without prior institutional (?) knowledge--i.e. maps and charts of wind patterns. (Or is a map/chart a good idea that should be included--have to find it first.) Raptor biology--wait for the hawks to migrate south...it's in that book Oma and Pappi just sent...
I wonder how hard it would be to get a raft from Boise to Green River using a horse or bicycle and trailer. How much energy would it take? Is it scientifically possible to carry enough TNT to blow up all the dams on the Colorado? Is it even possible?
I wonder if I can tie in Koyaniisquati--life out of balance...Acupuncture---opening the Earth's meridians...This veers away from traditional science writing into meta-physics...I wonder about metaphysics--is there such a thing as meta-science? Is that what Mother Earth idealogy hints at?
June 14, 2017
"River's up." The man spoke to Chewy. It was as much a question as a statement.
"No shit. Beck says it's going over the top this time."
"Can't anyone figure out how to work that damn dam? Cheese and rice," he said, borrowing one of his friend's favored phrases. "Never enough water, and now it's going to be too much. What are you going to do?"
"I'm not leaving the river. Where would I go? If it busts, fuckit. I'll grab a log and ride to the sea. Go big and go home. You?"
"I have no idea. Maybe the house is high enough. Shoot, maybe that would mean we wouldn't have to come so far for water."
"What about the canal?" Gus interjected. "If the dam broke, wouldn't part of the flood funnel through the diversion? It would be like a tsunami." He said the last with a hint of pride; he'd researched tsunamis for an inquiry project when he'd been in first grade. Which had been his last grade.
"I hadn't considered that," his dad spoke. "I guess it would depend on where it broke over, if it did. We're a ways downstream from the diversion dam. It's a risk."
