Reclaiming Wild
How even the seemingly mundane experiences we have in nature as children inform our ecological consciousness as adults.
Today is the eighteen-year anniversary of the day my husband Adam and I went on our first date as adults. We spent that entire day together, then he had basically moved in by the end of the week. Eighteen years later, and nearly six married, we are probably in the best space we have ever been as a couple. So much has happened and we have grown so much in almost two decades that it is hard to believe there was life before, “us.” We love each other so much that we would still choose to spend every free moment with each other, but there is never enough time for that. We see each other in passing, whether it’s twenty minutes in the early morning or the short time we get to exercise together between putting the children to bed and passing out ourselves (yes, we are workout buddies!). At this point in our lives, we know there is not going to be much downtime and we both love the life we are building together, but we definitely fall into the trap of just getting through each day to the next. It has been much too long since we had a day with nothing to do. It has been far too long since our entire family built a driftwood fort at the beach, or gone foraging for mushrooms, or climbed big trees.
When I was little, I loved building tree forts and pretending I had to survive in the wild. When I think back to the Art Farm, where I spent the first ten years of my life, I can still remember every tree and tangled place, although they are long gone. The eighteen-acre property was developed in the late 1990s, the antique orchard paved over, covered in two-story, single-family tract homes. In the weeks before we left, I plotted with my friend Elizabeth, the daughter of one of the landlords (the other her uncle), inside a dilapidated sheep shed. Armed with a ten-year-old’s grasp on property ownership and all things financial, and all while carefully avoiding spiders, we planned to save enough money to eventually buy the land back from the developers. We made some rough, sweeping guesstimates as to number of houses and relative cost of each one and felt haughtily confident in our assessment, which was that it would be considerable but nothing we couldn’t handle. It is funny to think about now, as each one of those homes is valued around a million dollars. Needless to say, that plan has fallen by the wayside but if ever the opportunity should present itself, I would not be opposed to the idea. I just need a quick $100 million.
Aria, sitting beneath the olive tree on the Art Farm, 1986
But even if that kind of wild deconstruction was possible, with all the houses suddenly gone and the pavement removed, though the location would remain unchanged, it would be a different place entirely. That slice of earth has been sterilized and monetized. The lilac tree that used to pour voluptuous amethyst wine blossoms over the fence for her intoxicated lovers, bee and human alike, sits forever in a slice of sunshine only in the corner of my mind. The enormous, gnarled olive tree I would climb, my dad’s pilfered Swiss Army knife in hand, until I found the perfect place to sit and whittle sticks into arrows is long gone. Once I remember gently scraping back the top layer of bark on the trunk of the tree itself, and discovering the most vibrant green underneath, like velvet or the feathers of a macaw. It felt all at once shockingly beautiful and violent, like I had wounded an ancient being. I never did that again. But even with my vow not to hurt it, that beautiful, twisting tree is gone now along with the sturdy, rust-colored long-horn who lived in the very back field and watched us intently when we rode by on our bikes, safely separated by the small ravine cut by the creek down below. A century before we lived there, that same creek used to be deep and wide enough for small boats to come all the way up from the San Francisco Bay. Now it is barely deep enough for frogs.
Lilacs
Watching that wild space paved over and changed into something completely different made me resentful for a long time. They quite literally paved my paradise and put up a parking lot. With houses so close together you could touch them and every driveway with two parking spots. It had a lasting impact on me. But over time, the sting of the move dulled and the loss of that open space began to fade. I remain intrigued by families who are so secure in their locational permanence that it lasts through multiple generations. I have never had that experience. There is no childhood home for me to show my children. I cannot watch them rediscover the secrets of that sacred wild space. But I had to let that go because truthfully the move itself did not have nearly the lasting impact that some of our time on the Art Farm did. And I can still share the stories with them. Like the unforgettable time my friends left me on the tiny island we’d canoed to in the middle of the pond on the property. After several seconds of huffy pouting, I had to suck it up and wade into the algae-filled, extremely slimy but surprisingly only waist-deep pondwater to reach the other side. I then made my way across a field to reach my house and noticeably dry friends. In their defense, I think I had thrown a worm at one of them in the first place, which was obviously quite insulting and overwhelmingly repulsive. I hope if either of you are reading this you have forgiven me. That being said, I appreciate that memory because more than anything, it has helped keep the Art Farm alive in my mind. Because that is really our only option with wild places that no longer exist in the tangible realm.
Which is one of the reasons I know it is so important for to spend time with my family in our own home and garden, and to make those spaces inviting and unforgettable. The relationships I formed with trees, plants, and flowers between birth and ten years old are not only memorable, they were foundational to my understanding of how I relate to and interact with the world around me. They have informed decisions I’ve made about landscaping and ecology. They have given me perspective in terms of land stewardship. Trees and plants have given me safe spaces, sanctuary, sensory reset. And I don’t even mean the grand adventures in parks and other protected wilderness. I mean de-programming outside, in your own space. Turning over the soil with shovel or digging fork. Smelling the damp earth and feeling the sunshine. Blowing dandelions and making wishes. Asking a flower if a someone has romantic feelings. Playing with sidewalk chalk. Making a daisy chain. Planting seeds. Making whistles out of grass. Transplanting seedlings. Jumping on the trampoline. Making a little house for a snail or a fairy. Because it is in those moments we tend to identify as boredom that the most miraculous creativity is born. I say it to my kids and I’ll say it again here: boredom is good for the brain! We process SO MUCH information every day. Every second of every day. Our brains benefit from downtime. Some people meditate. Some people pull weeds. Some drink wine. Some climb trees or build forts. Some sit and stare at the wind moving the trees. Some smoke a joint. Or three. Some prune the rose bushes. Some dig a hole. Some sit in the grass and find ladybugs crawling on them. Some people believe that signifies good luck. All I’m saying is, go outside and do that.
