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.