March Madness

“It’s springtime!  Trees are stretching and yawning.  Buds are peeking.  Birds are gathering materials and building nests.  Seeds are seeking sunshine and sprouting.  Awaken a new sense of wonder for your children by discovering the offerings of spring.” – Jennifer Ward, i love dirt

 

The vernal equinox is not normally a cause for much celebration in our nature-challenged household.  In the blur of duties and demands of work and raising children, the transition from winter to spring has meant little more than lower heating bills, longer laps in the swimming pool, and a time change that takes about six months to get used to.  But now that we are on a seemingly permanent war-footing with the indoor world, our perspective is starting to change a little, and we now know, for example, what the vernal equinox actually is. 

Celebrating the vernal equinox.

This one, thanks to the long run of cold and cloudy weather all winter, couldn’t come soon enough, and on March 20^th we drove out to Goochland to celebrate its arrival.  There we sacralized the first day of spring a with a hastily organized (and probably illegal) campfire cookout, sacrificing hot dogs, marshmallows and our digestive tracts over an open fire.  “Dad, this is the best dinner I’ve ever had,” one of our children said soberly – in case you were wondering who regularly does the cooking here at GORP headquarters.

But apparently Mother Nature did not accept our offering.  If anything, the weather that’s followed has been worse.  By the weekend our collective mood was deteriorating in lockstep with the forecast, a condition only worsened by VCU’s lopsided loss in the NCAA basketball tournament.  (Losing by 25 points to Michigan was depressing enough; must we also have Michigan’s weather?)  Tricycle Gardens, our post-basketball destination, was highly inspiring on a theoretical level, but to a horticulturally-illiterate family like this one it provided the psychic lift of a poetry reading.




Into the urban jungle on the North Bank Trail.

Enthusiasm for Sunday’s outing along the James River was not high, and after changing the start time to avoid the coming storm of slush and snow we did not expect any help raising our spirits.  So it was a pleasant surprise to find three other families ready to set out with us from Oregon Hill.  The children immediately fell into an extended game of tag, or chase, or something that involved a great deal of continuous running.  The precipitation held off.  Our mood quickly lifted.



High water at Texas Beach.

A walk in the woods is the most reliable cure for any low-grade depression, and on this gray and dreary Sunday morning the North Bank Trail did the trick.  It was nice to have the place mostly to ourselves, an urban wilderness with the emphasis on the natural, not the urban, wild.  That going for a walk in the woods requires such heroic feats of parental engineering is a source of great consternation in our household.  The fantasy of stepping out our back door into a backcountry world of woods and walking trails – while still having a coffee shop or a restaurant, not to mention a few friends, out our front – has a tight grip on our imagination.  We struggle to reconcile ourselves to the facts on the ground: the poorly integrated urban parks, the want of greenways, the unsightly sprawl and scarcity of public land further afield, that out our back door there exists just a small alley.  And then we wonder, if we had such a space, whether our kids would even use it.  Whether the pathological busyness of modern life – the screens, the schedules, the suffocating supervision and structure – has rendered that space unavailable.


Well, it has been a long winter.  These are the idle speculations of a mind in the grip of cabin fever.  Obviously we need some warmth and sunshine.  Our next GORP outing is April 6, a week from Saturday, when we will continue our exploration of the north bank of the James River – come rain or come snow or come shine.  Hope you can join us.

 

“We belong out there.  There’s a rich, multifarious, lush green world outside that we are part of.  And it’s healthy.  Good for the body, and yes, good for the soul.  ‘Outside lies magic,’ says John Stilgoe.  Outside lies a world of marvels, a thousand dormant associations to be tucked away and recalled later in life.  Outside lie stories to unfold, miracles to witness, hardships to overcome, fears to stare down, people and animals to meet – life in its full range of experience.  We can sense much of this inside too, but it is recalled more deeply, felt more intensely, when we get out.” – Rick Van Noy, A Natural Sense of Wonder




GORP at Texas Beach.

At Tricycle Gardens, proof of spring.

 

G.O.R.P.

Earlier Start

Friends,

On account of the weather, and in the hopes of avoiding the worst of it, we are moving the start time for today's outing on the North Bank Trail up to 10:30 a.m.

Details about today's outing on the North Bank Trail can be found here. Again, we will meet on Oregon Hill at the end of Lauren Street at 10:30 a.m.

We apologize for the last-minute change of plans and any inconvenience this causes.

Best wishes,

Ben and Mo 

 

G.O.R.P.

OUTING #4: North Bank Trail & Texas Beach

“Perhaps, most importantly, if the kids are to get out, I will have to find time.  We are usually in a rush to go somewhere, from one organized activity to another.  I’ve heard many people describe their sense that time has picked up pace.  Children used to have whole stretches of time to think and wander or pick through clover.  ‘I used to spend hours in the backyard,’ writes Annie Dillard, ‘thinking God knows what, and peeling the mottled bark of a sycamore, idly, littering the grass with dried lappets and strips.’  Letting them off the achievement treadmill, ironically, leads to more creative, resilient kids.” – Rick Van Noy, A Natural Sense of Wonder

 

UP NEXT: The North Bank Trail...

Whether GORP is just another organized activity taking us in the wrong direction remains to be seen. Raising children, like climate change, is an unfolding natural disaster in which most of the consequences are revealed long after the damage has been done.  The man-made destruction of healthy child development that is occurring in much of this country – GORP headquarters being a coal-fired power plant of parent-spewing pollution – is well-documented but hopelessly complex and distressing and thus largely ignored.

In education the implications are especially tangled and fraught, reflecting the challenge of trying to reconcile a billion different ideas with a billion different kids and a billion other variables.  One idea, for example, is to embrace technology, fingers crossed that our child’s attention span and capacity for deep thought won’tbe wiped out in the process.  Another, one beautifully alluded to here by Sabot at Stony Point kindergarten teacher Mary Driebe, is to embrace Mother Nature.  These aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive propositions of course, though, crucially, there is a zero-sum component to our allocation of time and resources: time spent in front of a screen is time that is not spent outside or otherwise engaged with the actual world. 

... and Texas Beach.

Not that we know the best answer ourselves – our venture, it often seems, is one of experimenting with, and then ruling out, some of the worst – and any suggestion that there is some one-size-fits-all solution to begin with is just adding to the problem.  But here at GORP headquarters we’re grateful our youngest guinea pig will be attending Sabot next year (by the grace of God!) and not ECPI.     

In any case, we are doubling down on the logic of GORP this weekend, with excursions scheduled for both Saturday and Sunday.  First up is the Down on theFarm Party at Tricycle Gardens , Saturday afternoon from 2-5 p.m. at 9th and Bainbridge Streets in Manchester.  (GORP preview here.) 

Then on Sunday afternoon – start time is 1:30 p.m. – we will hit the North Bank Trail for an out-and-back adventure to Texas Beach (2-3 miles total), a game of “Manhunt” being the featured halftime activity.  Itinerary and other details can be found below.

If you’d like to further increase this weekend’s degree of difficulty, join us Saturday morning at the Carpenter Theatre for the Richmond Symphony’s final Lollipops concert of the season.  Performance begins at 11:00 a.m., with a pre-concert festival starting an hour earlier.

Hope you can join us at some point this weekend.  Anyone is welcome, so please don’t hesitate to spread the word. -Ben

 

G.O.R.P. outing #4

Date: Sunday, March 24, 2013

Location: North Bank Trail and Texas Beach, James River Park System

Meeting time & location: 1:30 p.m. at the southern end of Laurel Street, in Oregon Hill, overlooking Belle Isle (at the intersection of S. Laurel St. and Oregon Hill Parkway).

Directions:  From anywhere in the Fan, take Cary Street to S. Laurel St. (a block or two past VCU’s Cary Street Gym, just past the Sweet Frog frozen yogurt shop at 815 W. Cary St.).  Take a right on Laurel and follow Laurel until it ends (see map).

Rough itinerary (which no one is obligated to follow):   Meet at the end of Laurel St. in Oregon Hill, overlooking Belle Isle, at 1:30 p.m.  At 1:45, we’ll drop down to the North Bank Trail and head west, upriver, a mile or so to Texas Beach.  Once there we’ll break for “Manhunt”, Stone Pictures (anyone especially inspired can contribute to the World Beach Project), Stone Tower Challenge, and Rock Skipping – in addition to general exploring and messing about.  Then, whenever we feel like it, we’ll hike back to the cars.  Those so inclined can join us for a post-GORP treat at Sweet Frog (815 West Cary St.) on the way home.

What to bring:

n  Water

n  Hat and Gloves, plus layered clothes appropriate for the weather

n  Waterproof jacket/shell

n  Backpack, with snacks.

n  Kids will probably get dirty and possibly wet, so you might also consider packing a change of clothes in your car.

SAFETY:  We ask that parents be responsible for the safety of their own children. 

Stroller friendly?  No.

Pets:  Pets are permitted but must be on a leash.

Weather forecast: Overcast, 50% chance of rain, high of 43 degrees.

PLAN “B” for Bowling:  If the weather is too wet or too cold we will instead go bowling at Sunset Lanes on West Broad (6540 West Broad Street), meeting there at 1:30 p.m.  Rates are $17 per person (shoes included) for two hours of bowling (2-3 games).  Sunset Lanes is kid-friendly: anyone old enough to walk is old enough to bowl.

 If Plan “B” is necessary, I will alert everyone by e-mail  and post an update on this blog by no later than 11 a.m. on Sunday morning.

 

G.O.R.P.



How Green is Your Garden?

The Land of Misfit Plants

Here at GORP headquarters our dysfunctional relationship with the natural world begins just a few steps out the front door.  Anyone who has been here has seen the results: the overgrown tangle of English ivy that now comprises the bulk of our front garden, the odd mix of flora and shrubbery and fallen leaves it partially conceals, the curious collection of dead potted plants.  All about is the debris of childhood and winter.  A storm-damaged dogwood tree clings to life in the midst of it all, held together by a child’s affection and an improvised duct-tape splint.  Somewhere a member of the Fan District Association is compiling a secret record of black-listed property owners, and our name is near the top.

In this domain, as in so many others, we need help, and on March 23^rd we invite you to join us looking for it at Tricycle Gardens, Richmond’s first urban, year-round, highly productive farm.  From 2-6 pm Tricycle Gardens is hosting a (free) Down on the Farm Party at its urban farm location in Manchester, “celebrating the season of planting while enjoying healthy, local food that comes from our urban agricultural endeavors.”

Tricycle Gardens is also offering a number of workshops this spring designed for the novice urban gardener:  Seed Starting (March 16), Urban Container Gardening (April 6, May 18), Learn How to Compost (April 13, June 1).  Costs range from $30-$60 per person.

Our own past endeavors to green GORP headquarters, grand and noble ambitions to the contrary, have had a mostly browning effect, the sort of result one might expect from an easily distracted and highly preoccupied primary caregiver – or a blind chimpanzee with a credit line at Lowe’s.  Undaunted, we have talked this winter of constructing a vertical garden, and perhaps a rooftop garden, though the former would require knowledge we do not posses and the latter a great windfall of funds.  Lowering our sights a bit, we are now hoping to plant something at home this spring that will survive until June.

Contemplating the dismal harvest of dead and misfit plants that constitutes our gardening efforts to date, I am reminded of the likelihood that GORP itself will wither on the vine if it remains a solo venture.  So if you have ideas for future GORP outings – favorite hikes or outdoor places, favorite family adventures, any thoughts on ways we can get our kids (and ourselves) more engaged with the world outside – please don’t hesitate to pass them on to me.  If you have ideas regarding how GORP could be improved in general, those would be very welcome here as well.  Though we’ve said it before, it bears repeating: We have no idea what we are doing.

“Our ties to the green world are often subtle and unexpected.  It is not merely that hemoglobin and chlorophyll bear a striking similarity in structure, or that plants provide the pleasure of food and flowers.  When people who garden find new friendships with neighbors, when a walk in the woods brings relief from pent-up tension, or when a potted begonia restores vitality to a geriatric patient, we can begin to sense the power of these connections and their importance to physical and psychological well-being...

“There are deep reasons for our love affair with nature.  We are creatures who evolved in an environment already green.  Within our cells live memories of the role vegetation played in fostering our survival as a species.  Plants reconnect that distant past, calling forth feelings of tranquility and harmony, restoring mental and physical health in a contemporary, technological world.  Whether in pots, gardens, fields, or forests, living plants remind us of that ancient connection.” – Charles Lewis, Green Nature/Human Nature: The Meaning of Plants in Our Lives

G.O.R.P.

Escape from Belle Isle

“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement.  It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.  If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later  years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.” – Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder

I’m not sure what Rachel Carson’s fairy would make of Escape from Belle Isle, but I doubt her assessment would include the words “beautiful” or “awe-inspiring.”  There was some excitement though, and some wonder, if only that of a few parents wondering if any of the children would, in their excitement, run straight off the edge of a cliff. 

Nine families braved the beer bottles and cold breezes that greeted us Sunday on the north bank of the James River.  I was, as has been my custom over these last few miserable weeks,  dressed in about fifteen layers of fleece and polypropylene, with extra layers in my backpack just in case; but despite these precautions I was eager, like everyone else, to get moving down off Oregon Hill when the wind picked up and the sun disappeared behind the clouds. 

“Nature Around Me,” our proposed exercise in nature exploration and discovery, was thus doomed from the start, though I’m not sure anyone but Carson’s fairy would have found much wonder in it.  When I collared one of my own children, interrupting a highly stimulating competition of throw-the-backpack-down-the-hill-and-then-roll-down-after-it, and asked him to help me get the “nature game” going, he rolled his eyes and said, “But daaad.  No one wants to do that.” 

Such insubordination still arouses in me strong feelings of incredulity and indignation – a sure sign of the great distance along this parenting path I have yet to travel – but on this occasion I was not entirely unsympathetic to the sentiment of squirmy, bored impatience behind it.  I know it well myself.  It’s a feeling of where-is-the-fun-in-this tedium that I experience whenever I’m compelled to read an owner’s manual, for example, or examine a child’s work of art.  Childcare in particular inspires this kind of reaction, this sense of agitated restlessness, this feeling that nothing’s happening. 

Which would earn me low marks from the gurus of mindfulness and stoicism – Jon Kabat-Zinn, Eckhart Tolle, Thich Nhat Hanh, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, the Buddha, Jesus, Jack Daniels – to whom I have turned, at one time or another, in the (apparently impossible) hope of bringing some attention and awareness and peace of mind to the process of raising children. 

Anyway, I had little interest in engaging in any nature study myself. 

“Fair enough,” I said.  “Go play.”  And the race across the Belle Isle footbridge and to First Break Rapids was on.

“If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.  Parents often have a sense of inadequacy when confronted on the one hand with the eager, sensitive mind of a child and on the other with a world of complex physical nature, inhabited by a life so various and unfamiliar that it seems hopeless to reduce it to order and knowledge.  In a mood of self-defeat, they exclaim, 'How can I possibly teach my child about nature – why, I don’t even know one bird from another!'"

Yes, a sense of inadequacy and hopelessness, a mood of self-defeat: this is the wonder of parenting that I know.  Rachel Carson herself was childless, but years of conflict with the chemical industry taught her a thing or two about fighting an uphill battle.

GORP was conceived, in part, as a way to make the battle of getting kids outside in nature slightly less one-sided, and to teach them something about nature along the way.  Two months into this and my own children are no closer to being able to distinguish a Truffula Tree from an Oak, but we’re getting less resistance going out the door.

Another hope was that GORP might have a bonding effect within families (or this one at least), that it might help strengthen the attachment between parent and child.  Children in an unfamiliar setting, goes the theory, are more receptive to adult guidance, are more likely to draw near.  And I’m sure this holds true in the upper regions of the Himalayas, or on a crossing of the Southern Ocean, where the adults in charge would presumably have some particular kind of expertise that is essential for survival.  But here on the Serengeti of Central Virginia there is not much to inspire such dependency – the most dangerous thing we do is get in the car – and this adult wouldn’t know what to do if it were otherwise.

So perhaps it’s best to let the children lead.  In the opinion of most of them I suspect a weekly game of Escape from Belle Isle would be more than satisfactory.

“That was so much fun,” one of them said, shortly after reaching safety at First Break.  “Can we play again?”

A flock of Ivory-billed Woodpeckers could have swooped past without attracting notice, and for all I know a flock of them did.

But it could be worse.

 

G.O.R.P.