Wo*od Lake Nature Center is still a favorite place to go for our family. Look at that cottonwood!
Wo*od Lake is now even better, because there's a Children's Natural Play Area where kids can break all the rules: go off trail, climb the trees, move rocks and logs around, and just generally explore like I remember doing as a kid. The boys are very content there.
When I was eight, we lived in a woodsy suburb of New York City, our house backing up to acres of woods. It was the early eighties—kids still had a lot more free reign than they do now—and I spent a fair bit of time by myself or with my brother in those woods. I remember a spring day, the first flush of green shooting up through the fragrant leaf mould. Wearing rain boots and a red down vest over the play clothes I’d probably hastily pulled on after throwing my parochial school uniform on my bedroom floor, I lay on the plank that served as a bridge over the brook, the sun warming my back as I trailed a stick through a deeper section of water.
At first, I was lost in the rippling patterns the stick made on the surface, the sound of the shallower parts of the brook moving fast full of snow melt, spring birdsong, and flying squirrels disturbing the tree canopy. I startled and almost withdrew the stick as I saw the dark green shell of a turtle moving under the water. It latched onto the stick, and we both froze there for a moment before I gently pulled up, pulling the turtle part way out of the water before it let go and swam to the water’s edge. There it sat looking at me, basking in the same sun that warmed my own back. I was so still and silent that a deer ran close by minutes—or an eternity—later. I thought then that the whole forest would show itself, come to life, if I just sat quietly for long enough.
I didn’t always sit still; I caught frogs in those woods, pulled seed pods apart, looked under rocks and inside logs, and made shapes out of the clay my brother and I dug from the brook’s banks. I read Beverly Cleary books on my favorite rock formation, made obstacle courses out of rocks and logs with neighbor kids, waded barefoot in the brook while looking out for crayfish, and picked blackberries by the side of the dirt road on the other side of the woods. There were untold epiphanies for me there—that the clay might be why the water didn’t all just drain onto the ground, that some seeds are designed to travel with the wind and others by sticking to my shoelaces as burrs, that each creature probably has some type of defense if you think about it hard enough, that a “dead” tree is full of life, that many, many of those seeds must scatter to become even a single mature tree. I remember not only learning these things, but how it felt to learn them through my own free exploration of the natural world, with few rules beyond common sense, and no parental hovering. My mother wisely dressed us in bright red vests that were easily seen from her kitchen window, and shared our interest in what we found there, but beyond that, she mostly let us be.
My own children may never have quite the type of freedom I did (though they might come close at "the Barn" in upstate New York and on camping trips), but I am grateful to at least know what it is I’m looking for when I try to share the natural world with them. When we go to a playground for the second time in as many days and I notice that the boys are spending as much time collecting acorns and small sticks as they are on the monkey bars, its my reminder that it’s time to get in the woods and explore.
