Back in the not so good world of the fifties when we feared polio and practiced hiding under desks to keep us safe from nuclear war, connecting with the world wasn’t optional. There is a good chance you walked to school. It was likely played dodge ball or kick ball on the playground in the morning. After getting home, many of us headed to the woods to maintain our forts and dams. Then there was mowing yards and even some garden work at times. Digging worms certainly connected me to Mother Earth and to the wrath of my mother if I got too close to some of her flowers.
Weekends were often devoted to Boy Scouts and camping on a nearby by farm. Our water came from an old hand pump. We pitched tents and cooked over open fires. We usually had an adult with us but in the early days when there only half a dozen of us, we often camped without one. No one feared the dark or worried about crazies with guns. When we weren’t in the woods with other Scouts, we were sometimes chasing squirrels with rifles and shotguns.
Fishing was a much more successful endeavor. It was not unusual for my mother to drop my best friend, Mike, and me at my some fishing ponds in the next county. She wasn’t an irresponsible mother, we were responsible kids who knew out to swim and take care of ourselves. I cannot even count the number of days we spent fishing without seeing another person before we were old enough to drive. We did catch fish and we ate them.
We still lived in a world where there were more country stores than supermarkets. People had big gardens. When the weather got cold in the fall, some relative would always bring some fresh country sausage. In the summer mother would can tomatoes and beans and freeze corn.
As we got older I went away to military school and then to college. I did not come back to stay for sixty years, but the connections to the natural world had already been made.
By the time I got to college, I was desperate to get back to the woods. Even spending the summers camping and traveling to Alaska wasn’t enough.
So Maine it was during college and then Nova Scotia and eventually Newfoundland. There were float plane trips into the bush, rides on an ice breaker that got stuck in the ice, and wandering the woods where it was nearly impossible to know where you were without a map and compass.
While my love of the outdoors almost got derailed by the toxic work environment at Apple, I eventually escaped to North Carolina’s Crystal Coast which my oldest son claimed was barely clinging to civilization because we had no Chipotle.
There might have been a shortage of chain fast-food, but it was a place where a kayak or a skiff could take you to natural worlds that stretched your imagination. Over time those placed healed my soul and helped me to reconnect with the world beyond our houses.
By 2017, I was walking 10,000 steps a day for a whole year which is equivalent to 69 marathons a year. I had piloted our skiff over 500 hours, paddled and biked endless miles. We managed to compost all our household waste and grow far more vegetables than we could eat.
All that helped me recover from Apple and get the strength to complete the circle and move back home. It has been a successful trip home. We’re back to gardening and I still hike some.
However, I worry about the generations after us that never forged the link with the outside world. They never camped and fished their way through childhood and even if they did, the screens and phones seduced them. We were immune. There is no meaning to be gained from screens. There might be important words on the screen but if the words just lead you to another screen you have gained nothing but more screen time.
Yet if your hands have ever worked in dirt, even it they have been clean for a long time, the dirt will welcome them back and it won’t be long before the long suppressed memories guide the hands back to growing things. Those growing plants will remind you that you are just one of many living things that are all interconnected. If you can get to that point, you are on the right track to a worthwhile relationship with yourself and the world.
Our technological infirmity 