Dear Cub kids: time in the woods

This is my May, 2010 letter to kids in the Indian bimonthly magazine, Cub.

Dear Cub kids,

Across the street from the girl’s house, there was a small patch of woods. It was a great place to live, out here at the edge of the city. Just a few streets away, beyond the suburban homes, black-and-white cows dotted green pastures. The girl could hear occasional mooing from the steps of her house. In this place where she lived for just 3 ½ years of her childhood, city, suburb, forest, and cow pasture mingled in one exciting, mixed-up landscape. But to the girl, by far the most exciting part of this patchwork quilt was the woods.

The woods felt like primeval forest. Exploring their depths, even stepping over the threshold from neighbor’s lawn to drifts of rustling brown leaves, was an adventure. No one knew where she was. Well, her mother knew she was out exploring. But really, she was on her own, except for the rare times when she would lead her two younger siblings on an expedition into the shadowy recesses. When she had her brother and sister with her, she was the leader, in charge, the one with the knowledge and wits to see them through whatever might happen.

Mostly though, she liked to go alone. When she was alone, there was much more of a chance that she could get that feeling – that feeling of being one with the forest around her. Those were the magic times, when the tall, dark trees, the curly, green ferns, and the water rushing over smooth, grey stones in the stream made her feel part of something big, mysterious, infinitely dignified -- welcoming and at the same time awesome. Here, she sought to lose that feeling of human-ness, even wishing she could shed her clothes, with their labels and colors and artificiality, and be more like an animal.

The girl’s uncle came to visit, and showed her a small pebble of gold that he had found in a stream near his home in California. The pebble was lumpy and a funny sort of mottled, darkish-gold color, and she loved to hold it, move it around between her fingers, feels its weight on her palm. After her uncle left, she took a small plastic sieve from the sandbox in her yard, and “panned” for gold in the stream in the woods. She was quite certain that if she were persistent enough, she would find a pebble of gold.

But as much fun as it was to pan for gold, the girl just spent most of her time exploring among the trees. One day, at the bottom of a small, sandy cliff, she found the remains of an ancient car. It was rusted, its windows long gone, but the front part of it, with its cracked, fogged-up headlights, still had the quality of a face that the fronts of cars often do. If she climbed down carefully, she could sit on the worn-out leather of the front seats. The contrast between the unspoiled woods and this relic of human life from another time deepened the mystery of the woods and her times alone there.

In the stream, there were little crawdad creatures; in the leafy understory above her head, nightingales sometimes sang. Time had a different quality in the woods. It was deeply personal, infinite, irrelevant, all at once. Each moment was all that mattered, and knowing that when school was done, or she’d helped with family chores, the forest was waiting for her. Somewhere, among the trunks of the trees, she would sink again into the secret feelings this wilderness evoked in her.

* * * *

I loved that forest. It was a crucial part of my childhood. I know how lucky I was to be alone there, to have a little bit of nature where I could get away from the chaos of family life, the demands and anxieties of parents, the persistent push-and-pull of sibling struggle. Although sometimes the woods were a place to do, like hunt for gold, or climb around in the dilapidated car, or lead my siblings among the ferns, more often they were a place to simply be. It was in those times that I became aware of myself, and nature around me, as a form of consciousness, a form of intelligence that was somehow “above” the stream of thoughts in my head.

Nowadays, I read about new studies that show how important nature is to children’s physical, mental, emotional, and psychological health. I know it’s true. That childhood forest is in my bones, it’s in my heart, it’s in my soul. I hope you have a place in nature where you can go, and watch the clouds, smell the rain, hear the leaves in the wind.

Your friend,

Jen