Woods, campfires and dogs

I feel fortunate to have grown up in a rural environment. Behind our hilltop home in Southwestern Michigan my father owned twenty acres of rolling farmland where each spring he would plant fields of corn or wheat until the Feds offered to pay him NOT to plant fields of corn or wheat (it was a government thing, naturally). And just beyond those farmlands to the south was a vast expanse of virgin forest.

When not otherwise engaged, my younger brother and I and, oftentimes, our neighborhood friends, all accompanied by any number of family dogs, would spend countless hours entertaining ourselves in those woods. In fact, it was not uncommon for us to spend all day out there: picking wildflowers for Mom, playing hide and seek, building forts, chopping down trees, killing small animals, you name it.

Later, we became Boy Scouts and were taught how to survive in the woods without destroying it. We learned how to stay dry, start a fire without a match, pitch a tent and leave a campground in such condition that if one were to come upon it following our departure, it would hardly be known we had been there.

I retained my love of the forest into my adult years. My wife and my adolescent daughter and I would spend many a vacation night cooking over an open fire and sleeping in a tent in state and national parks from Florida to North Carolina. And banging the bottoms of pots with spoons in the evening to scare off the black bears, although I have a suspicion those bears considered that banging to be a dinner bell. It didn’t matter though, since at some point after dinner and before retiring for the night, my daughter would usually throw up somewhere in the perimeter of our tent apparently due purely to adolescent stress (my best guess). That worked better than the pots.

Some other members of my extended family up there in Michigan possess this same love of the outdoors. Hunting and camping and blowing up abandoned outhouses with black powder just for the fun of it. These activities are included among those that one can enjoy when spending time with these people outside the realm of most law enforcement agencies (seriously – I have the video).

I have reached the age when the mere thought of sleeping on the ground gives me a crick in my back. But I still love to get out there and get dirty once in awhile. Importantly, I have found that my penchant for the great outdoors is shared by my son, Jay. He and his friend, Jason, have gone on numerous hiking/camping trips to Cohutta Wilderness in Georgia, where one is still allowed to have a ground campfire. They are accompanied by Jay’s adopted canine, Wrigley (named for the friendly confines of the home park of the Chicago Cubs). And the three of them go up there to Cohutta and get, well, dirty””and tired.

 I think it’s a shame for kids to grow up without having had the opportunity to learn to appreciate where we all came from: the woods. You never know when we might be thrust back into that environment.