Last year on Thanksgiving morning we took our then almost 4 year old daughter to a local Seattle park. It was something we had never done before, neither of us in our 25 years together. Located near the Puget Sound, this park boasts one of the last active salmon spawning streams in urban proximity. We were not disappointed. We spent the entire morning, along with many other families, watching these powerful fish swim upstream, wait in the shallows, and then explode into the air leaping over small waterfalls, again and again. They were looking for the right spot to lay their eggs and eventually, die.
Later, we returned home and shared a Thanksgiving meal with friends. While we were not out helping others, such as serving dinner to homeless people, we were discovering other reasons to be thankful, and ways to protect and help other creatures. It is becoming rare that one can still find wildness this close to an urban setting. And even more rare that one gets to see how one’s food lives before it is served to us on a plate. Ok, it’s not a turkey, but we thoroughly enjoy salmon and eat it most of the year. It was this contact with an ancient marine life ritual that we have returned to again and again in conversation.
We use it to remind ourselves not to waste water. “The Salmon fish need it,” our daughter now tells us. We use it as a spur to get us all out of the house to “see what else is happening” in the woods and waters around us. We talk about life and death. We are lucky to live so close to so many natural areas.
Not all kids are so lucky. Even my daughter is much more restricted in her movements to explore these areas than I was as a kid growing up in the suburbs of St. Louis. And some will claim, as Richard Louv does in his book Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, that we are seeing the results of this disconnection in our kids’ spiritual, physical and emotional growth. I am not suggesting that we throw out the baby with the bathwater, abandon all technology and return to the earth. Except I am advocating a return to the dirt; to discover, witness and interact with, the nitty gritty processes of the natural world, of which we are all a part. I am advocating unstructured time in an urban woods, on a beach, or just digging in the dirt of a back yard or garden. It may be the cockroaches that will take over the planet after we’re gone, but the earthworms will save us, now. Who else can turn our waste into gold?
This Thanksgiving we returned to our local park hoping to see the salmon make their return journey at the same time. Though we missed them this year, at my ripe age of 50, I am still in awe of the world and I am thankful to my child for prompting me to find new ways of celebrating life and for a chance to give back to the world by learning more deeply, how it works and how to protect it for future generations.
Posted on December 12th, 2005 by Suzanne
Filed under: Ways to Play
The importance of our children being connected to the earth has always been one of the most important things to our family. I even deal with the fact that my daughter likes to pick up rolly polly bugs and let them crawl on her and that my son every catepillar season comes home with them in his hair. We like to pick one time of year–this time it’s New Years–to go to our favorite place, Lake Quinault. There is a lodge there that lives inside Washington States rain forest and quite literally all we do is walk and hike in the rain. There’s something totally exhilerating about it and even the kids don’t comlain (except for on the super long hike–and then I don’t blame them:)
Nice post! And that really sounds like a wonderful Thanksgiving tradition.