The beauty of flyover places

We often take our nature hikes, such as they are, at a small holding of private land near Astoria, heavily (re)forested, not commercially developed or managed in any way. There are no trails except for abandoned logging roads and game paths. To go anywhere means thwacking through undergrowth. Every time we come here — which we do in all seasons — we always see lots of interesting nature stuff, way more than in formal parks or wildernesses or such.

We stomp through the bogs and splash in the creeks and turn over logs and handle the flora and fauna.

There’s a lot to be said for becoming familiar with driveby places near to home, which you can explore freely. Ada had just been on a school trip to a fancy state park with an education program, where the kids were continually forbidden to actually touch the nature. The contrast with our own experience in “our” forest was not lost on her.

My kids know and learn and love more about nature — about the world, about reality — in our scrappy little neighborhood forest because they can touch it physically. We also have a sense of responsibility for it, because we help maintain it, for example by planting trees or removing invasive plants.

Is it feasible for everyone to do this on the nature trail in a state park? Probably not…it would quickly trash the nature there. We can pick up frogs and slugs in our off-brand forest because it sees a few dozen visitors a year (ie. us, multiple times). It has time to recover.

But maybe the kids who experience top-shelf Nature™ in a hermetically-sealed can at the Nature Park™, can’t really appreciate it as much. It’s just another virtual experience, really, but with much higher resolution.

And maybe Oregon needs a lot more nature trails, so then maybe more kids can actually pick up the frogs sometimes. My family is lucky — privileged, even — to know a place like our off-brand forest, and the friendly connections that make it possible to visit here. Such places are findable (and free), but you need to have those connections in the first place. In my perfect world, there would be so many such places, distributed so widely, that anyone could go there sometimes to touch nature.

I’m talking here about “nature” but I really just mean “places.” One of the reasons I keep going back to the same place over and over again is because familiarity makes it intimate. I cannot know all the places in the world in my lifetime but I can pour my lifetime into one place.