Every summer, when I was in junior high and high school, my
buddy Pete Sebring would disappear for a few weeks to a camp
in the mountains west of Colorado Springs. I resented it. For
me, those humid July weeks back in Kansas dragged, and then Pete
would come home telling tales of adventure — as if he had
been to some alpine Oz.
As it turns out, that camp shaped Pete in ways neither of us
realized at the time. He credits his summers in Colorado with
giving him a foundation for success and longevity — more
than three decades — as a teacher.
“The camp encouraged me to invent activities, such as
pioneering, survival hikes and overnights, and identifying native
plants of central Colorado,” he says. “Once while
picking ground plums, which tasted like raw green beans, we uncovered
an ancient hunting site full of arrowheads, charcoal, and flint
chips. I also encountered brown bears, coyotes, pumas, and wolves — one
white and one black. Only the kids with me believed me.”
I was one of those who didn't believe that Pete had encountered
wolves. This morning, I checked the history: The Colorado Department
of Resources reports that, while wolves were, by official measure,
eradicated in the 1930s, “there have been sporadic reports
of wolves in Colorado over the decades” — none confirmed.
They may have been wolf-hybrids or dogs or, just maybe, wolves. “Their
night howls were long, sonorous, and unnerving,” Pete
recalls.
One more reason I wished I could have gone to summer camp with
him.
Still, during those years, I had my own adventures — a
free-range childhood spent fishing and chasing snakes and building
forts in the woods. Those experiences shaped my life every bit
as much as Pete's time at camp shaped his.
Today, too few children and young people have either experience — free-range
or camp. In my book, Last
Child in the Woods, I describe how young people can likely
tell you about the Amazon rain forest, but they'll likely be
hard pressed to describe the last time they explored the woods
in solitude or lay in a field listening to the wind and watching
the clouds move. Nature is becoming an abstraction, something
to watch on the flip-down TV screen from the back seat of a minivan.
In 2005, "Generation M: Media in the Lives of Eight- to
Eighteen-Year-Olds," conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation,
revealed that children are plugged into some kind of electronic
medium an average of five-and-a-half hours a day, “the
equivalent of a full-time job, and more time than they spend
doing anything else besides sleeping.”
One reason kids aren't going outside as much is parental fear.
News and entertainment media have conditioned us to believe that
life outside the front door is far more dangerous than it actually
is, at least from stranger-danger. Nonetheless, this fear is
unlikely to go away, which is one of the reasons parents are
likely to value camps even more in the future than they do today.
Risk is always a part of life, but camps can offer parents the
reassurance that their children will be safe as they receive
the gifts of nature.
The physical benefits are obvious; others are more subtle but
no less important. For example, research shows that nature experiences
significantly reduce children's stress. Free play in natural
areas enhances children's cognitive flexibility, problem-solving
ability, creativity, self-esteem, and self-discipline. Effects
of Attention Deficit Disorder are reduced when children have
regular access to the out-of-doors. Studies of outdoor-education
programs geared toward troubled youth — especially those
diagnosed with mental-health problems — show a clear therapeutic
value.
Children are simply happier and healthier when they have frequent
and varied opportunities for experiences in the out-of-doors.
Nature-oriented camps also help care for the health of the earth;
many studies show that nature play in childhood is the chief
determining factor in the environmental consciousness of adults.
Clearly there's more to camp than s'mores. Pete could have told
us that. In fact, he did.
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