Antiseptic Nature

I don't know how I would have turned out, if I'd been insulated from nature the way that kids are insulated today; or if nature had been insulated from me.

I was mountain-biking before mountain bikes were invented.  When I was about fourteen or fifteen, I would ride my Raleigh five speed from home in Esquimalt to Thetis Lake Regional Park.  Then I would muscle it along the trail around the lake, spinning the thin road tires on steep climbs and busting spokes on tree roots on the downhills.  No helmet, no pads, lots of scrapes, cuts and bruises.  Lots of fun.

I also built forts.  When I was nine, my best friend and I had a fort in a tree in his back yard.  On the wall inside, we sketched dials and switches.  Sometimes it was a German submarine, sometimes a spaceship.  We spent hours daydreaming in that shady space.

Later we moved into Navy married quarters on Campbell Street, down on the shore, just outside the base.  From our backyard, I could run and leap down the rocky shoreline to the tidal pools below the high water mark.  I spent hours poking into the ponds, chasing sculpins and crabs, and dropping bits of crushed limpets and muscles into the tentacles of sea anenomes.  When a high tide or a storm pushed the logs into the nearby cove, my friends and I would salvage bits of rope and tie them into rafts.  Or we would run the logs, bouncing from one to another before they could sink under our feet, sometimes crossing the width of the cove without getting our feet wet.

I spent my youth emersed in nature... literally, sometimes, as when my friend Doug and I disobeyed my mother and rode out to Thetis Lake for swim on the hottest day of summer; or when another buddy and I foolishly watched a lightning storm while swimming in Potowomut Pond in North Kingston, Rhode Island.  When I revisited Rhode Island 17 years ago, the pond had been posted "no swimming", and tree that once held our rope swing over the water lay behind a high, private fence.

Much of the time outside, I spent with one dog or another.  Dogs that roamed free, got dirty and smelly, that came into the house at the end of a day pleased with themselves, but so tired that they just climbed into the nearest bed to sleep.

I learned my love of the outdoors through active recreation, through physical activity, through contact, and dirt and bloody knees.

I thought back on those days recently, as my colleagues and I discussed the future of a woodlot.  It sits at the edge of a growning community, and is a very popular place for dogwalkers.  If it's anything like other suburban woodlots, the local kids have probably built a kind of mountain-bike park in the center, building jumps from logs and earth, wearing tracks into the dusty ground.  Over the next few years, houses and streets will spread and surround the woodlot.  It will become a small, green island in a sea of rooftops, tarmac and pocket backyards.

What to do with it?  Contemporary planning wisdom says that we should protect and restore the natural features of the woodlot, and promote passive recreation like birdwatching.  We should shoo away the dog walkers, confine them to some gravel pit somewhere, and chase away the mountain-bike hooligans.  All with the futile intent of promoting biodiversity and providing the community with place to experience nature.

Experience nature?  How?  By sterilizing the woodlot for the uses that draw people there now?  Contemplation of nature is a marvelous passtime -- one in which I indulge -- but it can't replace a dog-owners joy at the sight of a dog bounding along a trail, or kid's exhilaration at landing a jump.  We are promoting an antiseptic vision of nature, white and sanitized like a hospital ward.  We expect our children to experience a world behind glass, like a museum.

We promote this vision in vain.  This woodlot, and others like it, will never make any significant contribution to biodiversity.  Once isolated and surrounded, it will never support more than the usual community of common, urban wildlife.  At best, it will provide an impression of what the forest could and should be... but only if people are allowed to experience it.  No child will be inspired by a guided, school walk along an asphalt, or stonedust path, told not to leave the trail, not to touch.  But he or she might remember the smell of a tree fort in a stand of poplars, the well-earned scrape, the joy of "swinging a birch" (as Robert Frost once wrote).

March optimism

The temperature crept above zero yesterday afternoon.  The squirrels celebrated in the backyard, like grade-schoolers released at recess.  With an optimistic heart, I strolled around the canal and the market, looking for signs of Spring.

\I didn't find much, just a tease.  The sound of water dripping from eaves and awnings, pattering in downspouts, trickling down storm drains.  The first swellings of tree buds.  Enough warmth in the sun for me to eschew the direct, determined steps of winter for a meandering saunter and to bring a few hardy folk on to a patio.

I'm already planning the summer.