June 27th, 2017
Readings from Last Child
quoting Gary Snyder discussing John Milton (8):
"Milton's usage of wilderness catches the very real condition of energy and richness that is so often found in wild systems. A 'wilderness of sweets' is like the billions of herring or mackerel babies in the ocean...but from the other side, wilderness has implied chaos, eros, the unknown, realms of taboo, the habitat of both the ecstatic and the demonic. In both senses it is a place of archetypal power, teaching, and challenge."
On climbing trees:
Now, my tree-climbing days long behind me, I often think about the lasting value of those early, deliciously idel days. I have come to appreciate the long view afforded by those treetops. The wood were my Ritalin. Nature calmed me, focused me, and yet excited my senses.
(this passage seems to be somehow in opposition to the Tedtalk about procrastination...)
Interviewing children
Then she described her special part of the woods.
"I had a place. There was a big waterfall and a creek on one side of it. I'd dug a big hole there, and sometimes I'd take a tent back there, or a blanket, and just lie down in the hole, and look up at the trees and sky. Sometimes I'd fall asleep back in there. I just felt free; it was like my place, and I could do what I wanted, with nobody to stop me. I used to go down there almost every day."
The young poet's face flushed. Her voice thickened.
'And then they just cut the woods down. It was like they cut down a part of me."
...I also learned this: Parents, educators, other adults, institutions, the culture itself--may say one thing to children about nature's gifts, but so many of our actions and messages--especially the ones we cannot hear ourselves deliver--are different.
And children hear very well.
Page 17: Notes about the historian Frederick Jackson Turner's "End of the Frontier" speech
Testing their mettle on the Frontier could be one way to describe this idea that the American (culture? spirit? character?) is defined by 200-300 years of recontinually interacting with the wilds of the frontier. Louv continues, defining the "second frontier" as largely the family farm, demarcating the generation born 1946--1964 as the last generation of that frontier, which means I was able to squeak in as an outlying 1973 straggler--confirming my own observations that at least in Hazelton and Eden, the second frontier didn't die out until the turn of the century or so, with me and my friends not returning to the farms of our fathers. Even now, a few remain...Doug and Khrista's boys seem to have a 'typical' farm-life, but not so much Brian and Jennifer's.
Notes on this picture
I remember this trip well. As much as I love the "woods," the woods for me growing up was the sagebrush and basalt desertscape of southern Idaho. Instead of trees, I climbed the lichen encrusted boulders that had been deposited willy-nilly by the Bonneville flood, or the walls of the Snake River canyon itself. When we took our boys to the Birds of Prey refuge for a camping trip, they instantly and instinctively did the same, repurposing the boulders into pirate islands or deep space planets. The discovered a mouse, huddled in a crack, that they name Whiskers or something. They heard the falcons cry by day and the owls croon at night. The younger boy, to this day, is certain he saw a rattlesnake almost strike him, conveniently and not incoincidentally at a point when the invisible parent leash had been stretched and maybe even broken; when he was asserting a tiny seed of independence, off by himself during a game of hide and seek.
How can we expect them to make good decisions when they are 18, hundreds or thousands of miles away, when we can't trust them when they are 4 to wander out of that invisible circle that represents a Rapid First Response Run of under thirty seconds?
June 26th, 2017
Random thoughts on pulling this together
- bring the June 20 manifesto together with evidence from Last Child. Make it a blend of my personal, local-centric micro observations and the research/writing from LC and the kinder in the woods articles.
- Ideally research wise, find an example of EXACTLY what I am proposing that has already been done.
- How is this different from what we have in parks
- How does this tie in to "natural" (herb/pesti-cide) free parks?
- Write Proposal Statement? Specific Action Plan...or SMART goal [cringes as typing]
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 from the fifties used to 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?
Karla's demo reminded me of this:
