No matter how old I live to
be, there will never be a place so full of mystery and adventure as
a place of my childhood called The Woods. The stories that grew out
of those trees still kindle powerful feelings, even after all these
years. My friends and I knew the place was haunted. It had no
boundaries, and in our 10-year-old minds, it went on forever.
Jump ahead a few decades to a familiar topic: the
commercialization of wilderness. What created the demand for such a
cornucopia of sporting gear and planned “adventure activities”?
There was a time when all a guy needed to go for a hike was a
reasonably comfortable pair of shoes and an army surplus canteen.
Now it requires a wardrobe and a gear checklist, just to walk to
the corner. I recently stopped at a sporting goods store, looking
for a canteen; the sales clerk looked at me blankly.
“You
know,” I said. “A canteen. A water bottle.”
“Oh,” he
replied. “You mean a portable hydration system.” Portable
hydration system?
How did this happen? When the
plethora of guidebooks flooded the recreation market and introduced
eco-tourism 15 or so years ago, I was puzzled by the need of so
many adults to be told how to have fun outdoors. When I first
looked at a canyoneering Web site, I noticed that the photographs
of every tour and its paid participants revealed healthy young men
and women who should have been able to walk the mile and a half
required without adult supervision.
And then it occurred
to me: These people had never done anything without adult
supervision.
I thought about my niece and nephews, who,
even 15 years ago, weren’t allowed to go out and play in the
neighborhood because the world was apparently a dangerous place. We
were all at my parents’ farm one winter, just after Christmas; it
was a perfect 160-acre spread in Kentucky, with hay barns and
spring-fed lakes and forests full of poison ivy and grape vines to
swing from and limestone ledges loaded with fossils. It was a kids’
paradise.
But my nephews and niece came to me and said,
“We’re BORED, Unca Jim,” so I proposed that we go outside and
explore. They thought that was a pretty dumb idea, but I made them
go. I took them to the barn and taught them how to build forts out
of hay bales. We walked to the pond and punched holes in the ice
with big rocks. They thought all this was fun, but it had never
occurred to them. And it occurred to me that it was late to
discover random recreation. The poor kids, I thought. They have no
idea what they’ve missed.
But I hadn’t noticed, not being
a parent myself, that almost all kids were like my little
relatives. Now those kids are young adults and about to have
families of their own, and they have no hope of passing along any
of those free-spirited adventures that I was so blessed with as a
child. To them, such stories are hearsay.
True to the
American way, someone has been able to attach an affliction to this
condition. It’s in the title of a book by Richard Louv:
Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from
Nature-Deficit Disorder. As writer Bradford McKee
described the disorder in the New York Times,
“The days of free-range childhood seem to be over. Parents can add
a new worry to the list of things that make them feel inept:
increasingly their children, as Woody Allen might say, are at two
with nature.”
Children who are obsessed with computer
games or driven from sport to sport, Louv maintains, miss the
restorative effects that come with the nimbler bodies and sharper
senses that are developed during random running-around in wild
places. Modern science will no doubt spend millions on research and
development to produce a medication to cure this ailment, when all
the afflicted really need is a walk in the woods. But the farther
these “de-natured children” stray from a spontaneous natural
experience, the less likely they are to ever discover a world that
seems to me, impossible to live without.
With an
ever-growing billion-dollar industry dependent on these dependent
souls, it is in every sense of the word, a co-dependent
relationship. A fool parting with his money is a necessary
component of the amenities economy, and one likely to grow ever
more foolish and expensive with every passing sunset — an
experience that may someday arrive arranged and conducted by the
“Sunset Adventure Tour Company.”
Jim Stiles is
a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He is the publisher of the
Canyon Country Zephyr in Moab,
Utah.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
