My daughter just handed me an ant. “I’M STILL ALIVE!” screams the ant. She treats it like a pet.
Around my house, the ants are mild cousins to those I grew up tormenting in West Texas. We did have these cute little black beetles that I’d pick up and then flick off their heads. But that’s another story.
Where?
It’s easy for me to assume that everyone has access to a wild or semi-wild spot of nature. But I know that folks living in dense cities don’t have it as easy. Hopefully there’s a good park or empty lot nearby.
The best places to explore are chaotic. It’s too easy to ignore stuff when everything appears orderly and clean. Plus, clean places don’t have any interesting objects to find.
My wife and I once took care of a friend’s children while they were passing through town. They stayed at a residential hotel in a still developing commercial area. Behind the hotel was 10 acres of empty land that had been torn up a few times. Slabs of concrete, grass and weeds, ant hills - a great place to explore. Our son was probably 2 years old, the other kids 6 and 11. We had a much better time wandering the wasteland than watching TV in the hotel room.
If you don’t have a “messed up” place to explore, you can still use playgrounds and manicured parks - you just have to look more closely to see the chaos.
How?
“How?” may sound like a stupid question - just wander around, right? If you just wander around, you’ll miss most of what your child sees. They’re much closer to the ground than you and have a different viewpoint. Everyone loses that viewpoint as they grow taller. As you wander the wilderness, shift your viewpoint to your kid’s level and see the diversity and interestingness of the ground, the plants, the rocks, the bugs.
What?
I was lucky as a child growing up to a large expanse of desert. In fact, the several hundred acres across the street were once a U.S. Army artillery firing range, cleared of live ordnance. We’d still find rocket fins and nose cones, grenade clips, shell casings, 50mm bullets (yes, 2-inch diameter iron bullets that weighed about 1 or 2 pounds each - still don’t know what weapon or ordnance used those), regular rifle bullets and casings. Somehow we managed to stay away from anything unexploded although every year, it seemed, we’d hear about a kid getting injured by live ammunition found in the desert around the city.
This was a huge playground for the neighborhood. Being the desert, we had lots of bushes and no trees. Since it was also a firing range, there were many craters which served as “foxholes”. They weren’t really deep enough to hide people but they certainly aided our imaginations.
An occasional rainstorm is fascinating if you’ve never lived in the desert. Dry gulches come alive as small trickles and quickly evolve into raging torrents. You can’t keep kids away - building dams, throwing rocks, following the short-lived streams to the larger flood-control ditches. A few days after the rain, the once-dormant frogs crawl out of the mud, lay eggs, and then comes an explosion of tadpoles and new frogs.
Artifacts
Any man-made object is an artifact. Often, you’ll wonder how the stuff got there. Ask your kids to speculate before offering an explanation. If there’s trash, come prepared with a bag to pick things up (unless you’re exploring the community dump). I almost think artifacts in the wild make for a more interesting outing than a purely natural setting.
Natural objects
Water is so integral to our souls that we are drawn to it no matter where we live. A simple puddle calls to achild to jump in it. Help your kids observe the constant change happening in the water and along the edges. There’s not a lot of advice to offer here - it all comes naturally.
Of course, large trees and rocks are made for climbing. But don’t ignore the stuff close to the ground. Turning over rocks and logs is an easy way to see deeper into nature. Kids love finding interesting objects to collect and take home. Even uninteresting rocks can be collected and painted later.
I think my dad taught me how to collect magnetite (”iron filings”) from the desert sand with a magnet. Repeating that lesson with my own kids recently, I took them to a local dry gulch and we collected about quarter-pound of it to play with at home.
A way to discover new places to explore is to think about edges and boundaries. The beach, the stream, the empty lot and the street. These are the places that are more active because they are more diverse naturally and unnaturally (because of man-made stuff).
Wildlife
Another thing that would come out after the desert rain were the desert tortoises. They weren’t abundant but we came across them a few times. Snakes were also few unless you counted the dead ones in the road. Rabbits, quail, and roadrunners were pretty common. We’d rarely see any of these in our yard.
We’d collect tadpoles and release them in the yard after their tails disappeared. I spent hours watching and tormenting ants - I was “The Ant Bully” in real life. Digging the mound with a stick (even better when I found a short piece of rebar), whacking alarmed inhabitants to death, and performing live burials with a recently tossed beer can.
Outside of our natural hostility towards insects, kids love to observe and collect wildlife. It seems so easy these days to buy a butterfly kit - how many kids do you know now have seen and can identify a chrysalis in the wild? Get your kids out to see the real diversity of plants and wildlife no matter where you go.
Solo Exploration
Either alone or with my buddies, I’m amazed at how far from home we wandered as kids. 40 years ago, we didn’t worry as much about strangers, predators, and safety. Still, I encourage my son and his friends to explore down by the creek. As a parent, I worry about this but I can’t imagine a childhood without discovery and exploration.
Start exploring places close to home with your kids. This will allay fears for both you and your kids. Then encourage them to return there on their own or with their friends. Ask them to bring things back from their expeditions. Make maps. Tell stories.
