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.