Born to Be Wild
I remember inhaling books, reading through the interstices of the day -- stitching the day together with story -- after school, on car rides, while people were talking. Greedily, I shopped the library shelves, picking out treasure and carrying home my stack of 10 (the limit set by a capricious authority). All those books to read! What happiness! Titles like Jack London’s White Fang mixed with Sue Barton, Student Nurse, sad books and silly books, books that entertained and books that comforted, books that entered my bones and formed the bones of who I am today.
It was the 1960s. My mother, sister, and I lived in apartment buildings in Phoenix, my nature a square of Bermuda grass and a highly chlorinated swimming pool. We never went camping. I was not athletic. And yet I could make a well-balanced spear, paddle a canoe long distances, and tame a wild dog -- just like Karana in Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins. I knew how to skin a slew of animals, eat their insides (the liver a special treat, all that vitamin C), and wear their outsides, proud of my leather shirt and rabbit-fur underwear. Born and raised in the desert, I was truly unfamiliar with trees, a beech as exotic as a baobab, but along with Sam Gribley from Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain, I lived in a giant hemlock for almost a year, through snow and ice and the greening of spring, befriending a falcon and cooking meals of cattail tubers and dogtooth violet bulbs smothered in acorn gravy. Living off the land was unexpectedly easy -- and richly satisfying.
Lately I’ve been rereading the children’s books that helped shape my relationship to nature, turning me toward the natural world and environmental concerns. The reunion has included some surprises.
One book in particular gave me goose bumps. Miss Hickory, by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, was a winner of the 1947 Newbery Medal, a prize given by the American Library Association to the most distinguished American children’s book of the year. Newbery winners tend to stay in libraries forever, read over and over, generation after generation. In this back-to-the-wild classic, a sharp-tongued doll with a body made of twigs and a hickory nut for a head is forced to leave her corncob house and live in a nearby forest and half-abandoned apple orchard. Eating berries and sewing clothes from leaves, Miss Hickory becomes a better person -- although not quite good enough. One spring, she thoughtlessly scolds her neighbor Squirrel, who nips off her head and eats it. Feeling strangely liberated, the headless body of twigs gropes its way out of Squirrel’s nest. (Poor Squirrel is horrified, and so was I. Having completely forgotten the book’s ending, I’d become attached to this spunky if flawed main character.)
"Headless, heedless, happy Miss Hickory" begins to climb an old apple tree. Near the top she finds herself a permanent home, for all along the slim waist and two legs and arms have been a scion, a graft or living plant part used to start a fruit tree blooming again. The twig doll finally becomes her true self. I have no doubt that Miss Hickory entered my psyche and took root. In that return to a more natural state, we are redeemed.
As a young adult, I got my undergraduate degree in conservation and natural resources. I spent a summer backpacking, alone and miserable, on the Pacific Coast Trail in Oregon. (How easily those children in books lived alone, competent in the woods, comfortable in solitude. That was a standard I could never meet.) In the 1980s, my husband and I moved to southwestern New Mexico as counterculture "back-to-the-landers." Raised in suburb and city, we wanted what we saw as a more direct and authentic connection to life. We wanted to grow our own food, build our own home, root into the earth.
Surprisingly, and rather wonderfully, we did just that, shaping adobe bricks into a house made literally of mud, irrigating a one-acre garden, raising goats and an assortment of turkeys, chickens, and ducks. We had two home births, a daughter and a son. We had too much goat cheese in the refrigerator. Our illusion that we could do all this without jobs or money did not last long. I began teaching writing at the university in Silver City, New Mexico, where my husband became the city planner. We moved from our original homestead, staying close to the mountains and trees of the Gila National Forest, and have now settled a mile from the national forest line.
A girl from the apartment buildings of Phoenix, I found my redemption in a landscape where I have lived for the past 30 years and where I expect to die. I blame Squirrel. My version of going headless includes long walks on country roads and dirt trails, the occasional bushwhack across wild country, up canyons, down creek beds, all the while trying to think less and see more. This is something I am not very good at. I want to merge as One with the natural world. But I keep remembering my human concerns: students and writing, laundry and family.
Like Sam Gribley in the Catskill Mountains, like Karana on her island, I find my redemption in the degree to which I have made this place my home, knowing these juniper and piñon pine, these grasslands dotted with yucca and prickly pear, knowing the sound of cicada, the rattle of snake, the beauty of jimsonweed, or sacred datura, also called thorn apple, also called moonflower. I stop to breathe in the smell of the large, creamy, trumpet-shaped blossoms (every leaf and petal poisonous, causing hallucinations and death). I know that the roots of yucca make a good soap. I know that juniper berries are high in vitamin C. For reasons going back to fourth grade, all this is deeply satisfying.
***
Throughout my adult life I have continued to read children’s books, largely because I love the genre. C. S. Lewis, author of the beloved Narnia series, said he wrote children’s fantasy because it was the right art form for what he wanted to say. He liked its brevity, emphasis on plot and action, and easy familiarity with talking beasts and other archetypes. Writing for a young audience also allowed him to "leave out things I wanted to leave out," such as sexual tension and romance. Moreover, a convention of all children’s literature -- even works dealing with the darkest of subjects -- is the "happy ending," a conclusion that is not falsely sentimental but a final turning toward hope. Surely today, even as we face the darkest of environmental fears, our moral choice still is to give our children hope. In that gift I am able to find some of my own.
Among authors whose stories introduce children to nature, few have been more influential or prolific or steadfast than Jean Craighead George. Her 1960 Newbery Honor book, My Side of the Mountain, was followed by four more novels, published between 1990 and 2007, on the relationship between the falcon Frightful and adolescent Sam Gribley. In his foreword to one of these later books, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. describes the letter he wrote at age 11 asking the author where he could find his own kestrel nest. (He went on to become an experienced falconer and environmental lawyer.)
In 1973, the Newbery Medal was given to George’s Julie of the Wolves, another story that mixes unsentimental science with a child’s connection to wild animals. In George’s work, predators eat and prey die. Ecology is part of the plot, and Julie, a resourceful Eskimo girl, finds her way out of the tundra by watching the migration flight of Arctic terns. Importantly, children in these stories do not merely survive: they are wakened to the beauty of the world. They learn the language of wolf and falcon. They step outside the circle of human civilization and are welcomed into a larger circle of life. It’s as if they belong there.
In six decades of writing and more than 100 published books, George has not only wakened children to the natural world but introduced them to environmental problems from clearcut logging to air pollution. Her books are used in classrooms across America, with The Missing 'Gator of Gumbo Limbo (1996) being many a fourth-grade teacher’s favorite. In this "ecological mystery," one of a series, the culprits include pentachlorophenol (PCP), something of a mouthful, but George doesn’t blink -- or underestimate her audience. Most recently, The Cats of Roxville Station (2009) explores the world of feral cats, with 14-year-old Mike discovering a wilderness of skunks, foxes, deer, owls, mice, butterflies, and mosquitoes in the dirt lot by the railroad station and the woods behind the housing project. George’s theme is relentlessly optimistic: if humans have the ability to damage the natural world, they also have the ability to be at home in it.
