Last+Child+in+the+Woods+questions


 * On page 7, Louv remarks that "... nature does not steal time; it amplifies it." What is your first memory being IN nature? Where was your 'separate peace'?**

My separate peace was an apple tree I shared with my sister. Because it was in a neighbor's yard, it seemed if I was quite far from home. We each had our own branch and since I was the younger I always wanted her branch. I could sit there and daydream plus enjoy being hidden from the world. We would eat the sour green apples which never turned red and tried to avoid the worms. It was a magical place for me and I sometimes would like to see it again but yet I know it will be smaller than I remember or long gone.

Anne Herman

I was a city kid and grew up with front and backyards smaller than you can imagine. Our wildest place was the field that ran alongside the railroad tracks. Here the grass was taller than we were and so we were able to run through it and beat down paths that created a wonderful maze secreted from the eyes of others. An earlier memory, from the time before we could leave the confines of our block, is of the hidden world created by the hanging branches of the weeping willow in another yard. I remember lining the grass with blankets and playing house. When we escaped the neighborhood for holiday picnics, we took off for a beach on Lake Michigan or a nearby state park that seemed like a large, dark, Hansel and Gretel forest to me - who knows what it was really like.

Kathy P.

As the daughter of a large animal veterinarian in a small town in the corner of rural southwest Georgia, my exposure to the larger natural world was surprisingly limited. Coming along 14 and 16 years after my older siblings who traveled often into the countryside with my father, I somehow was less often included in such excursions and found myself very much "a town girl." I envied the knowledge of the "country children" who attended my consolidated county school and often brought in hognosed snakes and other critters. A client of my father's always promised me "a baby fox squirrel," but it never came, and I never saw one until I was an adult camping at the Isle of Palms where our campsite was plagued by the attentions of the rodents I'd so long desired! I remember hearing my brother and father talk about the hazards of the gopher holes on our farm; cows were likely to injure themselves stepping into the holes. Until adulthood, I always thought these were prairie dog cousins like I saw in cartoons in the Saturday movies. Not so! They were large land turtles, prime members of the wiregrass ecological community! I never saw one of these "gophers!" Insulated as I was from the rich biological life "out there in the country," my personal natural spaces were tame, but nonetheless magical for me. Our front yard facing Broad Street (also highway 19 taking traffic from the North down to Florida) was bounded on one side by a fence where red spider lilies popped up to surprise us some years and lay low on other years, and beyond the fence a Sinclair Service Station, source of loud clanging noises as Mr. Collins changed tires for large trucks passing through on 19. A man's leg was broken one night when a tire popped off and landed on his leg. My brother splinted the leg with a picket from our fence. The other side of the yard was bounded by a bamboo thicket, inside which I could be Victor Mature (sp?), hacking his way through some jungle of unknkown geographic locus. Fronting the street was a Buckminster Fuller-esque geodesic dome formed by the evergreen branches of what I now know was Winter Jasemine. I could crawl inside it and quietly utter "commands," directing the destinations of hapless passersby on the sidewalk en route to "up town" Camilla. These commands, I fear, were prompted by remote control scenarios introduced by the Saturday early scifi serials that preceeded the Western movies that we saw for 9 cents each Saturday, while eating boiled peanuts sold by Lavinia West and her several hungry, barefoot younger siblings (country children). Another special spot was a large composite rock situated beneath a downspout at the foot of the screened porch stairs. This rock contained shells and fossils of earlier times: what I now recognize as brachiopods and other early bivalves. As it was beneath the downspout, it was often decorated with a patina of moss and algae. My father often brought home "curiosities," and one memorable one was a soccer ball sized burle, polished silvery and satiny by time, and full of holes and crevaces. Atop the fossil stone, this burle became a play place for fairies, and hours were spent there, decorating fairy "dining tables" with moss, creating fairy beds inside the little caves. Ten years ago, I went to Camilla intent on getting the rock! I was surprised to find it not much smaller than it was held in my memory. The present owner of the house had incorporated the rock into a little landscaped path around the house and was not interested in turning it over to me. I may yet liberate it in the cloak of darkness with the help of some muscle men. DEANNA

I grew up here in Winston-Salem, first on Summit Street (in an apt. building just down the street from Summit School's first site) and then on Carolina Circle in the Buena Vista area. There we had a large yard as well as a wooded vacant lot next door. My mother was an avid gardener who gave us each a garden spot to plant; she mostly grew flowers and so encouraged us to do the same. Friends who lived on Runnymede Road, near Wiley School, also had a vacant lot next door as well as the park in front of their home with its creek. We were free in the 1950s to run and play all over those areas; we especially loved to explore and play in "the woods." My grandparents lived in Old Salem, in the Star Maker's house on Church Street, long since demolished. The nearby cemetery, God's Acre, was a rather unusual play space, as was Salem Cemetery next door, with its hills and curving roads and monuments. We ran and rode bikes down the paved road alongside God's Acre which linked their home to Home Moravian Church. My grandfather had a large garden behind their home, built in 1859, where he grew tomatoes which won prizes at the Dixie Classic Fair, as well as lots of flowers laid out in rectangular beds centered on a large bird bath. Special memories also include time spent at my great-grandmother's farm in Stokes County, riding horses and collecting eggs, playing with large dogs, and imitating animal sounds. There was an area at Wiley School's playground of tall shrubs which had been pruned so that we could stand up inside and play there. My family camped at Doughton Park and my grandparents often included me in theri summer trips to spots along the Blue Ridge Parkway and to the Great Smoky Mountains. I was blessed to know lots of outdoor spaces and I had the time and freedom to explore them, as well as loving adults to introduce me to the pleasures of gardens and woods and the beauty of the outdoors. Brooke Suiter

From Jason McEnaney...As many of you know, we do a "Gift Essay" project in the 6th grade each year. I wrote the essay below for my students last year. Before we began reading Last Child in the Woods, I had apparently been channeling Richard Louv. You will see the connection in the final paragraph of the essay. (The formatting function on this page has taken away my ability to indent the paragraphs below...)
 * **

I remember that it was a school night and I was about twelve years old. Mom and Aunt Ginny began to cry when their brother, my Uncle Bob, delivered the news he had just learned from his doctor. It was bitterly cold and almost black outside even though it was only the early evening. That suddenness of how the sky went black around four-thirty or five o’clock during winter on Long Island often left me feeling vulnerable as a kid. The images of my mother running out the side door and disappearing around the corner of our garage were forever seared into my emotional memory. At that point, I stopped recording and just shut down. I don’t remember another thing from that evening except that Uncle Bob had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, a disease that attacks the nervous system. I learned later that the news was particularly shocking because it appeared that he had a severe form of MS called “rapid degenerative” which aggressively attacks one’s nervous system and causes its victims to lose their ability to function normally. Uncle Bob had always been a huge part of my life. He took an interest in my brother and me from the time we were very small. Uncle Bob kept his boat, The Undaunted, at a marina on the north shore of Long Island in a town called Cold Spring Harbor. Some of my earliest memories include being picked up by Uncle Bob at five in the morning, sliding across the slick front seat of his Ford pickup truck and heading to the marina for a day of flounder and snapper fishing. We would beach the boat and find our own worms and clams for bait at low tide. He was playful, yet demanded that we follow directions. He was an excellent teacher. My brother and I loved being around Uncle Bob. From the time he was a very young child, Uncle Bob was fascinated with the ocean and anything that had to do with boating, fishing and the like. My grandmother took him to a pier and let him fish all day when he was a little boy. He worked as a teen and young adult to be able to afford his own boat. There was a peacefulness about Uncle Bob when he was out on the water. He was in his element behind the wheel of his own boat and at the end of a rod and reel. I feel so lucky to have had the opportunity, albeit a brief one, to spend some of the happiest moments of my childhood with my uncle on his boat and on the water that so vividly defined who he was and gave him the freedom to be that person. Uncle Bob lives on the north shore of Long Island today. He lives there in a nursing home. He has not been on a boat in close to a decade and a half. He had to give up his own boat and sell it in his mid-thirties because could no longer walk. He basically can’t move from the neck down any longer. It has been twenty years since he was initially diagnosed with MS. My mother, father and sister live on Long Island and see him on a regular basis. My dad picks him up in a van that has a lift for his motorized wheelchair. This enables Uncle Bob to get away from the monotony of his small room at the nursing home. My parents take him to see family, movies and sometimes they even drive him out to the pier at Jones Beach so he can be near the ocean. The devastating effects of Multiple Sclerosis have dramatically altered my uncle’s life. I have been thinking about Uncle Bob a great deal lately because my daughter is the age his youngest son was when he was diagnosed and I am almost exactly the same age now that he was when he learned that he had MS. Although the story you’ve just read is very specific and personal, it is the inspiration for some broad, simple, yet often overlooked notions that I’d like to offer the world as a gift from my Uncle Bob….

Adults, let the young people in your life know you love them. Show them that you do every day. Take them fishing. Take them along with you as you pursue your hobbies. Don’t leave them with baby-sitters. Teach them about you passions. Pick them up early in the morning and dig worms with them. Make the most of the time you have on this earth by sharing that which is unique about you with the little people who will do the same for the little people who come after them. - Jason McEnaney, February 2008