CSotD: Going up the country
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Monty and his pal Moondog are lost in the woods this week.
I don't often enjoy camping arcs, because I grew up in the woods and don't have the right point of view, I suppose, but I'm a sucker for silly and so far, so good.
A lot of the humor in most "out in the country" stories depends on seeing the country as a strange and somewhat threatening place. That's not a mindshift I can readily make.
It was only after I moved back to the country after two decades of more urban living that I started to see that world as people from the city see it, and then only because I started paying more attention to what city people were saying about it.
For instance, there were reports of clashes between freshmen roommates at Plattsburgh State when a rural kid was paired with an urban kid. The urban kid was freaked out by how quiet it was at night and couldn't sleep. But the cure caused conflict, because the rural kid couldn't sleep with Nine Inch Nails playing in their dorm room. I am not making this up.
But that one was, admittedly, reported and not witnessed. I got more first-hand accounts from a firm in Saranac Lake that conducted management retreats and often found their clients seriously disoriented not just by the quiet but by the darkness.
This was confirmed when I did a workshop at the Sagamore resort near Lake George for the NY Bar Association's annual "Law Youth and Citizenship" conference, and a teacher from Tito Puente School in Manhattan admitted with a laugh that she had requested a change to a room facing the parking lot because being on the unlit forest side had freaked her out the first night.
This puzzled me a bit. I mean, you turn the lights out when you go to bed, right? Aren't "dark" and "quiet" good things when you're trying to sleep?
Apparently not. My son reports that, when he was in boot camp, he was talking to a kid from some tough New York neighborhood and asked him if he wasn't scared growing up in a place with such violence and crime all around. But the guy told him, no, because it was light. "I was in the country once. It was dark, and there were spiders!" he said.
It seems he served a short term as a Fresh Air Child, taken from the chaos of urban life up to the pastoral wonderfulness of the country. They took him camping and, when he had to pee at night, he got out of his tent into the black velvet darkness of a night in the woods and blundered smack into a spider web. This apparently produced an immediate resolution to the "having to pee" issue. He scurried back to the city, where you could at least see what you were walking into.
On a more profound level, I once wrote a curriculum for students about the constellations, combining mythology and astronomy, with my guides for the latter part CSOTD regular visitors Sherwood Harrington and Brian Fies. One of the installments was about a Chinese constellation whose myth involved the Milky Way, and they each emailed me back with the caution that most kids have never seen the Milky Way.
I was as gob-smacked as the time I saw Headstart kids in the Lincoln Park Zoo timidly checking out their first cow. How could you not know about these things?
Later, reading an entry in Chris Clarke's blog — which he wrote in response to a comment from Sherwood and in which his readers told of their first experience seeing the Milky Way — I found this to be the case, and it made me deeply sad. I was glad that people liked it so much, but sad that it was such a rare thing in their world.
Heck, the Milky Way was a street light when I was walking home at night as a kid. It was beautiful and I knew that, and there were certainly nights when the sky was so crisp and full of stars that it took my breath away, but I also grew up accepting it as part of the landscape, just something that was there.
If you've never seen it, trust me: It's worth walking into a few spider webs.
(Oh, and Moondog? If you can't find any wintergreen leaves on the ground, try peeling the bark from the twig ends of a black cherry or beech tree.)
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