Between babies nine and ten, I had the opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream: I hiked the length of Isle Royale National Park. Isle Royale is one of the few National Parks in the Midwest, so it is our favorite, although, because of its inaccessibility, it has fewer visitors than Denali in Alaska, where you can only enter by bus on a gravel road! It is an archipelago in Lake Superior – the eye of the wolf if you look at a map. At the ranger station, I purchased a book entitled Last Child in the Woods by Robert Louv. While it was secular and was mostly concerned with the limits placed on children due to a litigious society, it was very exciting to me. You see, I hiked the island with my father, who was 68, my 18-year-old son, Mick and my 12-year-old daughter, Abri. I had trained for the hike carrying my 1-year-old son, Noah, on my back on our country roads and at the many state parks in our vicinity. I came to see the tremendous gift that God gives us in the earth and the difference a connection with it makes in a child's life.
What is nature? Very simply – all of Creation!
Louv's main concern is all the children growing up in controlled environments. While in Genesis 1:26 God gives us dominion over all the earth, the earth has massive forces and is not really controllable. Knowing this, for a child, means he understands God's greatness – that He can make such a gift for us – and God's love – that He would.
Do you have to live in wilds of Wyoming to show your children the amazing gift of nature? Absolutely not. But the remarkable thing is that, while adults try to control a child's environment, there are very few children who do not prefer a wild encounter. Granted, a child may need to go through a media detox to enjoy the wild. But, when children have their screen time limited and are nudged outdoors enough, they eventually delight in the wilderness. I grew up in an apartment building with a park on the third floor; you can't get much more controlled than that. And yet, our favorite activities were climbing behind the manmade waterfall and around the wall behind the artificial forest, and watching the duck family that, of its own accord, decided to nest next to the concrete pond. That is what a child gravitates to: the wild spaces. However, it is still up to you, the parent, to expose your child to nature. What you value is what he will value.
I have had the unique experience of having grown up in the city and having raised kids in the suburbs and the country. My family history with nature begins with my grandfather, Jerry Kackley. He was extremely overweight, but he loved nature. His flower and vegetable garden in his little backyard in a steel mill town were famous. He loved driving back roads through the country, vacations in cabins in the woods, and nature photography. When he and my grandmother moved to Hammond, Indiana (the historical location of Jean Shephard's A Christmas Story,) they started going to the Indiana Dunes on Lake Michigan. We have pictures of my dad, Jim, there at age 1, in 1943. I hiked there regularly from the age of three (1968) through college. My kids went to a Fathers' Day reunion picnic there as preschoolers (1997) and we camped there on a family vacation out east (2010). My grandfather's ashes were scattered by his children at the end of trail 10. By the way, that's illegal without a permit, so please don't tell anybody. Returning to those woods has been a family tradition that has bonded generations together, all because my grandfather loved wildness.
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