[Woods] are good for kids

[Woods] are good for kids

http://www.rep-am.com/story.php?id=10444

Sunday, July 30, 2006

The other night I was telling my son a story about my tree fort.

I hadn't thought about the place in years. But every time I give my son
P.J. a bath, I'm flooded with the memory of the place. The scent of
Johnson & Johnson shampoo sends me back to my childhood, when my mother
used to bathe us in Tide.

Yes, Tide, the abrasive laundry detergent with the little aqua grains.
It sounds punishing, but the truth is, my mother had little choice. By
the time my brothers and I dragged ourselves out of the woods and back
into our home at twilight, we were embedded with dirt. Muck clung to
us. We were studded with burrs. We reeked of skunk cabbage. The Tide
was astringent. But it worked. It was handy. And my mother was anything
if not resourceful.

My mother certainly worried about filth, but what's peculiar to me now
in retrospect, is that she never worried about us. She certainly didn't
worry about us in the woods, which had a kind of halo effect for her.
The woods, that tangle of poison ivy, skunk cabbage, streams, tadpoles,
birch and burrs, was our babysitter.

Not any more.

In "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature -- Deficit
Disorder," Richard Louv claims today's children are spending less time
in the woods, instead risking depression, attention deficit disorder
and a host of other disorders by being plugged into entertainment
media.

It's a tough claim to make. Few rigorous studies have examined the
amount of time kids spend outdoors. But it seems anecdotally true. Our
kids are no longer "The Little Rascals." They're "The Jetsons."

The woods were where my brothers and I spent most of our time. The
woods had the advantage of (we thought) belonging to no one, and
therefore were unfettered by niggling parental rules. The nearby park,
with its swing sets, ball fields and aluminum slide, was attractive
enough. But its classic attractions were, by comparison, stultifying.
You knew what you were supposed to do in a park. In the woods, you were
left to your imagination and nature's caprice. There was always the
possibility that you would tumble into a stream, be impaled by a thorn
bush or (my fear) bitten by a snake. All of this and more happened to
me, of course, but none of it proved fatal.

What was particularly attractive about the woods, though, was the
certainty that my mother would never venture into it. She would shout
our names madly and with spine-tingling inflection out the back door,
but there was simply no way my mother was going to machete her way
through the thicket to find our secret hideout. My mother was tough.
But she did not like bugs.

And so, in the feudal society that was the suburban forest, my
playmates and I carved up dominions and claimed them for ourselves. We
trawled through the local landfill and slunk around Dumpsters looking
for scrap wood from which to construct our tree forts. We used pieces
of bureaus. Highway signs. The ends of crates. Little by little, the
mosaic form came into place and we had our own tree fort, complete with
lookout tower and scheming room.

I told my son all of this, but I left out the part about the air
rifles. The slingshots, too. I didn't mention them. Or the saplings
whose ends we would whittle into a needle-sharp point and use for sword
fights. Oh, and the time I fell out of the tree fort and on to my head.
I left that out, too.

The more I told my son about the tree house, the more dangerous it
seemed. The more interested he became in building a tree house, the
more resolute I grew that I would never let him have one. The more
animated he turned about wandering through the woods, the more of an
idiot I felt for ever bringing this up in the first place.

Who knows what kind of sociopath could be out skulking around out
there? And the woods are choked with poison ivy. To say nothing of the
ticks. Lyme disease festers in the woods. Then there are the mosquitos.
They might have been infected with West Nile. And what kind of a mother
would let her child run around unsupervised in such a perilous pit?

Ah, but P.J. What wonders you will miss. Let's grab a hammer. I'll
come, too.

Reach Tracey O'Shaughnessy at Toshrep-am.com