That film captured my and my brother’s imagination, so after a long year at school, when we were once again home for the summer, we decided to make a human kite and try it out, flying from the ash tree in the front yard.  We had both thought about it all year, I want to make that clear.  We both had good ideas about how it could be accomplished.

Now, where our parents were during all this I cannot exactly remember, but somehow, I made the thing out of some wood I found in the garage and some old curtains that we had to brush spiders off first ... I clearly remember the spiders.  Then we slowly carried the thing up in the tree and I asked the fateful question of my younger brother:

“Now, I can try it first, or you can ... which would you prefer?”

Well, naturally, he wanted to try it first, and so he did, leaping from our ten-foot perch, and dropping like a stone.  He hit his head on the ground and blew out an eardrum, but was otherwise unhurt.  THEN one of the parents ... or maybe Elena ... showed up.

Because we had a Pact, we never groused on each other, not even to get out of punishment ourselves.  In reality, there never really was much of a punishment, anyway.  We mostly got a lecture about responsibility, or something.  And then because nobody was really hurt, we got a kiss, an admonition not to Do Such A Thing Again, and off we went to the next adventure.

One of the next adventures, I remember, was making maple soup.  Not with maple sugar or syrup or anything actually good, but with those helicopter things.  I snagged a camping pot that could be hung over a fire ... you know the kind ... and a bucket of water and our camp mess kits and off we went to the spot in the woods near our house where you couldn’t SEE the fire from the house.  We were careful ... we always were with fire, anyway.  We were boy scouts and girl scouts, and knew how to build and put out a camp fire safely.  So I picked a bunch of helicopters and shelled them, and cooked them over an open fire with water.  I flavored them with dandelion greens and something that smelled like mint, and asked my brother if he wanted the first taste.  Of course, he did, and promptly got sick.

Luckily, I didn’t flavor them with poisonous toadstools.

Somehow, we didn’t die, even though this stuff happened all summer long, for years.  We were the children in the woods, the ones the book, “Last Child in the Woods” by Richard Louv was talking about in theory.  We did not have nature deficiency disorder; we had all kinds of other disorders, though, including the gastronomic variety and various broken bones and stitches.  But we learned, for what it was worth, experientially, not by passively reading a book or worse, playing a video game about being in the woods.

When my son and heir was that age, my feelings about the relative benefits of being turned loose in a wilderness at a tender age changed somewhat.  But I was at least aware enough of my concerns not to project them onto him.  I bit my tongue and didn’t say what I was really thinking, which was something like “I know what idiots kids your age can be like.  I was one of them.  Stay home and play Nintendo.”  So he grew up with at least some sense of the wonder of nature.  But most of his friends’ families didn’t let their kids run loose, and I got at least funny looks from his friends’ mothers.

A whole generation of too-precious children ended up learning about nature only in prescribed doses, in summer day camps and in carefully manicured city parks under the watchful eyes of counselors, parents, and nannies.  Their children ... the current generation ... would learn about nature virtually, through websites and video games.

We have wonderful natural playgrounds for our children today, thanks to the land trusts and conservancies.  But we have to take a deep breath and let them play there.  We have to be willing to wash mud out of sneakers four times a week, to pick ticks off their backs, to let them get lost and use their innate knowledge to find their way back to the parking lot, where we wait with a bottle of water in some trepidation.  Otherwise, these beautiful wilderness areas, set aside for our enjoyment, will go unenjoyed by their generation and the next.