This is the place for connecting kids, nature
At a time when the country worries about nature-deficit disorder, we have a cure at the water's edge.
Joe Mabel/via Wikimedia Commons
The tide is out, revealing a great seaweed-matted mud flat. Gulls are scattered on it like huge, mobile, white-feathered clamshells. They strut at the water’s edge, looking for stragglers and snacks the receding tide has left behind. A few come too close to a great blue heron, which flaps its wings, driving them off as if sweeping dust from the front porch.
It’s a weekday on Puget Sound. Most people are at work, but here moms and their pre-school kids are taking advantage of the best kind of daycare you can get. Out there with the seagulls are toddlers wielding plastic shovels, digging for the pure pleasure of making holes that fill with water and ooze.
We’re lucky our kids can still do this. Puget Sound is suffering from air and water pollution, and it sometimes fools us with its image of rosy health. But for all its problems, we can count our blessings and enjoy an abundance of nature still without the tragic consequences they’re experiencing along the Gulf of Mexico. At least we can for now.
On this day, the kids are happy, running in small packs, wading in the chilly waters without complaint. Supervision is remote, parked up near the driftwood at the high-tide line. Moms are sitting on logs and chatting, their kids on invisible leashes. While the grownups relax, the little ones explore the world, barefoot and free.
Some, including me, have lamented “nature deficit disorder,” a social malady identified as today’s kids not getting enough “Tom Sawyer” time. It’s a worry. Most Americans live in urban areas now, traditional summer camps have struggled, the demographics of backpackers have been graying. Xboxes and fat camps have replaced building homemade rafts and exploring vacant lots. Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, a book that documents the trend, writes, “For a new generation, nature is more abstraction than reality.”
The Obama administration is responding to the trend with its America’s Great Outdoors initiative, launched earlier this year to “reconnect Americans, especially children, to America’s rivers and waterways, landscapes of national significance, ranches, farms and forests, great parks, and coasts and beaches.” The president recognizes that such connections are critical to cultivating a conservation ethic that will preserve our natural heritage.
The cure is simpler in Seattle than in some cities. Here you can see two mountain ranges, an inland sea, an archipelago of islands, and three national parks from the top of the Space Needle. Getting out can be as simple as a short trip to a city, county or state park. You can take a Metro bus — inside the city limits — and hop out within walking distance of old-growth forest.
America might be losing its connection to the woods and overprotecting its once free-range kids. But, I look at the little ones on the shore. It’s good to see the sights and smells of nature being passed on, how the Salish Sea is soaking into their blood, how the scents of salt and seaweed are being internalized. That will shape their sense of place. These kids might grow up taking it as a given that eagles should soar overhead, that low tide reveals fascinating critters and new worlds.
Longtime local journalist Frank Wetzel wrote a memoir a couple of years ago about his family’s multigenerational connection to the Sound, and Wetzel’s own special connection to Dabob Bay on Hood Canal. In Celebrating Puget Sound, Wetzel says his family has a ritual of dipping their new members into the surf as a kind of baptism. “We start them early at about one year,” he writes of the dip in the water, “and give them a nodding introduction to oysters, which, by the time they are 4 or 5, they happily devour.”
I love that idea. New generations anointed in the sea, taking communion from oyster shells, brined for life in the Pacific Northwest.
We’ll need those generations to keep us safe, to protect us from oil spills lapping at our feet, to fend off a world in which people are ignorant of or uncaring about our natural heritage. We’ll need a new generation that knows what this place means deep in their bones.
I look at those toddlers on the beach and I feel hope.
This article originally appeared in the September issue of Seattle Magazine.
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Comments:
Posted Fri, Oct 29, 7:45 a.m. Inappropriate
There is nothing like the water's edge! This is one place where sentiment really should lead to policy. We know that when we want a vacation, 80% of us head to some sort shoreline. But most of us don't own a shoreline, and count on public access to be able to enjoy the water. No future generation will ever fault us for preserving public shorelines and for caring for the water.
Posted Fri, Oct 29, 8:46 a.m. Inappropriate
Too bad Washington sold most of the tide lands! And get this, because the land is "unbuildable" it's not counted for property tax!
Only two states have done this, Washington and Massachusetts. Everywhere else, when the tide is out, you can legally walk the shore. Here, you have to be in the water. That's ok, because now you come under the Federally Navigated waters act, which is run by the Coast Guard.
Tide lands held in common for the people is an old a land owning concept as given to us by the Romans. And sold out from under us by the state.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm all for commercial growers of oysters, clams, mussels having prohibited access to their beach so that us casual strollers don't wreck their crop. And homeowners don't want to have to clean up the trash left by party goers. But the current state of affairs is ridiculous.
Posted Fri, Oct 29, 8:54 a.m. Inappropriate
Anyone interested in the Washington state shoreline might like this aerial view map.
http://apps.ecy.wa.gov/shorephotos/
Posted Sat, Oct 30, 9:37 a.m. Inappropriate
On a recent backpacking trip I took with two friends, we walked from Snoqualmie Pass to B.C and then back to Mazama. It was your typical PCT hike. The average age of our party was fifty-seven (57). The average age of the hikers we met along the way was also mid-fifties.
The average age of the trail crews we met was about twenty (20). The only hikers younger than our party were the children or grandchildren of old-timers...and very few at that.
We need more than Obama's America’s Great Outdoors initiative (Disneyland Outdoors) to resurrect a fondness for nature. We need leaders who visibly utilize the wilderness and natural areas. Not since Theodore Roosevelt has a President actively pursued a personal passion for the "great outdoors."
One of the biggest obstacles to getting more young people into the outdoors is the lack of professional opportunities to make a career working in natural areas. Forest and Park Service budgets have been cut so severely that many jobs are either volunteer, low-paid or non-existent. Most of the aforementioned trail crews will leave the woods and never return because they move on to better paying jobs. And, these are the very individuals who could be the best promoters of wilderness - after all they chose to work there instead of at a fast food joint for the summer.
And now my rant...why the hell can't the Obama Administration (USDA actually) get it together to maintain the trails in our National Forests. There are enough miles of trails and down trees in the Cascades alone to employ thousands of young people each sumer. Improving access to wilderness will increase its use and take the pressure off overused areas. Duh!
Posted Sat, Oct 30, 5:30 p.m. Inappropriate
"A beach is a place where a man can feel /
He's the only soul in the world that's real"
— Pete Townshend, "Bell Boy," 1973
Gary, thank you for that Web site. And yes, lack of public access to the shoreline is a disgrace. Since it's largely unbuildable, I wonder how much it would cost to buy it back. Not that now is the best time to do so, but…
Posted Sun, Oct 31, 1:10 a.m. Inappropriate
Not too many years ago one could with just a tiny bit of surrepetition enjoy almost all of the wonderful coastline between Seattle and Everett thanks to the RR having kept houses off most of it. But a few people who wanted to end it all but still let their survivors collect ruined it, and BNSF cops now infest much of it. As in police, private police, not mere security guards, a not so quaint echo from an earlier iteration of robber baron days.
It's not hard to avoid being hit by trains, after all, they follow a highly predictable path. Sadly, Warren Buffett's lawyers aren't taking any chances.
Posted Mon, Nov 1, 10:35 a.m. Inappropriate
It is truly unfortunate that the BNSF mainline is the only one that can carry such traffic. I am glad it is there — otherwise the shoreline north of Golden Gardens would be like it is in Magnolia — but wouldn't it make a magnificent rail trail? Speaking of which, imagine if the passenger rail bypass of Point Defiance included freight as well: http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/projects/rail/pnwrc_ptdefiance/
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