Getting outdoors...

I was listening to NPR the other day (there are no good radio stations in North Carolina at all), and they were discussing something about kids not having a sense of the great outdoors anymore. I couldn’t possibly agree more with this statement. These days, kids are locked up in their houses, placed in front of their video games and computers and TVs, and left to rot there. Is it any wonder that right now we have a huge problem with obesity with children and the general population? Not to me it’s not. I see it every single day that I go to work with the majority of people that I work with. I see it in the food that they eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I mean, we have a cafeteria here at work, and when I try to get something to eat there, I can’t. I can’t because everything is either fried or covered in butter and or cheese, or a combination of all of the above, so I end up having to bring my own food to work, because I feel like there is nothing that I can possibly eat that they serve without getting sick from it. I digress though, because once, they tried to serve some healthy food, and myself and maybe 2 or 3 other people were the only ones who bought it, so they had to revert back to the deep fat fryer. I did hear something else this morning that warmed my heart. Over summer break this year in a lot of different public schools in NC, they are removing their deep fryers, and are going to replace bad food with good. So maybe we have a chance? We’ll see.

Going back to kids and the outdoors though. Granted, I grew up in small town Maine, which is smaller than most small towns, and it’s a place where everyone knows everyone else for the most part. I seem to remember getting until about 8AM on a Saturday morning, and then getting tossed out of the house by my mother, and was basically told not to come back until lunch at around noon or 11:30. Then after lunch was served and eaten, we got thrown back out the door and was told not to come back until supper (as my Dad says, rich people eat dinner, workingmen eat supper) which was at 5 or so. This was repeated on Sunday as well, except for the small excursion at 11:15AM for going to church, this was of course unless we went to mass at St. Theresea’s at 8AM instead, which sometimes we did, because then we could have the rest of the day for ourselves. I’m not saying that I didn’t spend my fair share of time watching TV as a kid, or playing video games (we had a Colecovision www.classicgaming.com/vcoleco/ and the first edition Nintendo later on), but my parents wouldn’t put up with it for the most part. We did get to do that, but there were limits, and once my Mom reached her limit with us, we were cast out of the house, not to return until we were hungry or until we were called or when the 9 o’clock whistle was blown at the fire station (at 9AM and 9PM every single day of the year the fire signal was blown 1 blast indicating it was, well, 9AM or PM. It sounded like a foghorn and was used by the local volunteer fire department to notify them if there was a fire somewhere, and they had to report to it or the fire station). You’d be surprised how far you could actually hear your mother’s voice carry around the neighborhood when she was yelling for you to come home. Then just repeat this process throughout the year for the most part. Winter didn’t stop her from throwing us out of the house either. There were snow forts to be built, snowball fights to have, and of course we could always convince her to drop us off at Black Mountain of Maine for an all day skiing adventure. Black Mountain would open at 8AM, we’d get dropped off with a bag lunch, and a dollar for a drink, and either my Dad would come up and ski with us later, or we’d get picked up in the parking lot at 4 when the mountain closed down for the day. There were some weekends where we’d ski all day during the day, go home for supper (remember the terminology), and then go back for night skiing from 6-9. Then in the winter also, there was the hockey rink in town. Yes, I was one of the rink rats in town. Same kind of deal. We’d show up there in the early AM to get the fresh ice (because the rink crew would have flooded the rink the previous night – meaning they resurfaced it). If you got there before the rink shack opened, you could play hockey the full length of the ice. We’d gather up the troops, go down there in the early morning (before 8 most weekends), and play hockey outside in the freezing weather with our friends until the shack opened up around 9 or so. By the time the rink crew got there, we were mostly frozen, couldn’t feel our toes or hands or bodies for the most part, but we got to play hockey for a couple of hours.

Summer brought out the bikes. Ride around town all day hanging out with friends, going to the arcade to play a dollar’s worth of games, riding around some more, making jumps, crashing, breaking bike parts (and sometimes body parts), and repeating day after day in the summer and the Fall, and the Spring. Summer also brought out the ability to go into the woods and explore. Since we had a big stand of trees in the back yard, it was easy to get lost out back as we called it. We could round up some scrap wood from the barn, build cabins, chop down smaller trees, and generally walk around. There was also the Swift River in the hometown. This was THE place to go swimming during the summer. The water was semi-fast flowing, but not dangerous for the most part. Just enough to make swimming in it interesting sometimes. It was always cool, even when the summer was really hot. You could jump in, feel refreshed, and explore the river. You could swim in the small rapids that dotted it. You could jump off the rocks that surrounded it. You could jump off the bridges that crossed it (well some of them you could). And this was all accessible to me a mere mile or less from my parent’s house for the most part.

The problem today is that most adults think that if they let their kids leave the sanctity and safety of their homes, they’re going to get snatched up at the corner before they even make it out of their neighborhood. Nothing could be further from the truth. Abductions of children are at an all time low for the United States right now since 1972. The numbers have been steadily decreasing since that year actually. Yet, parents are more afraid now than ever. Why? Media coverage. Sure, we get tons of news almost instantly these days, but is that a good thing? It’s good that we’re informed like that, but it’s bad because we’re informed like that. With 24 hour news networks, and the internet, any little news story gets put up there. There is no limit to what you can find out these days. None. So anytime a poor kid gets kidnapped, it’s high drama on the news networks. They get a lot of airtime for such things, because we as a nation, and the world in general, are suckers for stories about kids. Kid gets trapped in a well, there is a huge outpouring of support, and people get all weepy about it. Kid gets abducted, same thing. These are just singular cases, but you’d think that these bad things were happening with so much frequency that your children would never be safe in the big mean world out there, so the parents shelter them. Buy them satellite TV, computers, high speed internet, and X-Box’s and Playstations, and they keep them in their houses. Kids aren’t allowed to explore anymore, or make adventures for themselves. Sure, they can look stuff up on the internet, but then they don’t see and experience the real thing. They can look at pictures of mountains on the internet and TV, but wouldn’t it extract another measure of wonderment and excitement if you actually took your kids to a mountain and walked up it with them? How about just walking around your neighborhood (if that’s possible, because sometimes it’s not)?

I had to make my own fun sometimes, and a lot of times I complained that I was bored and that there wasn’t anything to do. Amazingly enough, I found things to do, and created things for myself to do. This lead me to experience things I don’t think I would have otherwise. I also think this lead me to be more of an individual. It lead me to be more of an independent person and thinker really. I now find myself not having to rely on anyone else to “create” fun for me, to NOT make me bored, I can do that myself. I think it also has created greater confidence in myself. I don’t have a problem going to eat at a restaurant by myself, or go to see a movie by myself, or basically to do anything by myself. I prefer to have company most of the time, but if none is available, that’s OK, I can make it on my own without too much trouble. There are a lot of people I know that can’t, and won’t do this. Is it because of upbringing and what they experienced as a child? Don’t know for sure, but I think that it has something to do with it for certain. How can this change? That’s a question for the people that do have children, not for me.