Growing Up in Wyoming

I read an article about a book in the newspaper. Author Richard Louv wrote “Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder.” The article quoted the author “Physically, nature is not as available. The bulldozers took out the woods.” Apparently his solution to saving children is to send them to summer camp.

The article stated that the author felt exposing kids to nature can, among other things, reduce childhood obesity and attention deficit disorder, and nurture creativity and confidence instead of spending summer in air-conditioned houses watching TV, playing video games, or just going outside to play organized sports. Because American kids have lost their connection to the natural world there is an epidemic of obesity, learning disabilities and depression that could be remedied if kids just got outside more.

I read all of that and was just downright amazed. Our state is our children’s heritage, their playground, and their teacher. Yes, the boys play video games, watch television and grew up with air-conditioning. But our kids also explore their environment, much as I did, and my parents before me. Their friends are outside a lot, too. There are still youth in our town who are obese and who have learning disabilities and who are depressed. Being outside a lot doesn’t seem to be the answer to all problems.

We did family vacations around our great state with our boys, as I did, and my parents did growing up, to learn as much about our great state as possible. As parents, my husband and I were very thankful for technology and air conditioning. My family had to spend inside time to do that-time locked inside a car with each other driving to our destinations. We happily let our kids listen to first cassette tapes when they were small, then compact discs, and now MP3’s. We bought them hand held video players and games to while away the hours spent in the car in Wyoming-and traveling out of Wyoming. Yes, they read, we talked and we play car games, but those get old after six hours in a car to see Fossil Butte, to go climb at VeedaWoo, to see South Pass City, to see the Medicine Wheel and to Devil’s Overlook.

We have white water rafted outside of Cody, Thermopolis and Jackson and out of state. Our youngest son loves white water rafting and I really wish he would be a ski instructor in the winter and a rafting guide in the summer for at least a couple of years of his life, but he wants to be a Doctor. His dream is to be a family practitioner in Thermopolis, Wyoming.

We swim in the Worlds Largest Mineral Hot Springs in Thermopolis. We race across the swinging bridge and walk the terraces. We participated in the River Regalia once, floating the Shoshone River from the Wedding of the Waters headwater to the Hot Springs State park in our ragtag collection of tubes and rafts. It was hot that day and although we also floated a cooler with water-and high calorie, bad for you, obesity causing soda- we still were dehydrated by the end and ready to be done. We wore sunscreen and hats, but we still got sunburned. Melanoma is a huge concern these days, unlike in my foolish teenage days when I laid out coated with baby oil to get a tan whenever I wasn’t at work in the air-conditioned grocery store. My Mom didn’t have sunscreen as a preteen or teenager, but she worked outside in the summers, weeding gardens, washing clothes on a washboard, taking care of chickens in the 1930’s. I don’t have skin cancer-yet. Mom doesn’t either. My Dad did, though. I guess cancer is just one more thing to worry about, along with obesity, learning disabilities and depression.

My kids both have central auditory processing disorder, but is that really a learning disability? It certainly wasn’t caused-or cured- by them spending more time outside. They both do well in school. They have jobs. They both started contributing to social security when they were fourteen, the same as I did, the same as my siblings did, the same as my parents did. We believe in an honest days work for an honest days pay. If you want to attend the University of Wyoming and get at least a bachelor degree-as I did, and my four siblings, and my parents, you had better get good grades, get scholarships and have money in the bank.

Our kids can ride horses, but they don’t ride. If you’re from Wyoming, you probably know the difference. The oldest has ridden fence, and repaired fence, and doesn’t want to ever work with barbed wire again. Now seventeen, he works at Pizza Hut as a server, making good tips. Both boys have also assisted building a wooden privacy fence, too. One of the cool things about doing sweaty outside manual labor is that it teaches you what you don’t want to do for the rest of your life. The youngest son, aged fourteen, works at the Radio Station-inside, in the air conditioning, primarily in the evening. Both boys want a college education so they can work inside the rest of their born days and make a decent living doing so.

Our boys have hiked mountain trails and searched for arrowheads in our towns’ outlying hills, much the same as my parents did in Southwest Wyoming growing up exploring the sandstone bluffs around Kemmerer and Rock Springs. My Dad grew up fishing the Green. One of my sons loves to fish. He learned from his Grandpa. We fish Copper Creek up by Dead Swede in the Big Horns. We don’t do catch and release, either. We do catch and eat, preferably on the same day. It’s hard to be depressed when you’re reeling in fish from the middle of a cold mountain creek with the birds singing and the sun shining. Those are days when you’re glad to be alive and grateful to live in Wyoming.

Our kids learned about the geology of Wyoming by studying the rock formations of Wind River Canyon. They know the difference between petroglyphs and pictographs and stalactites and stalagmites-and they didn’t learn about them in a book. They hiked, sometimes for a few hundred yards and sometimes for miles, to see them up close and personal at various locations around the state. (The caves we saw out of state.) My kids are very active, and they aren’t obese or even overweight.

They learned about dinosaurs by studying tracks at the Red Gulch track site outside of Shell and by seeing actual dinosaur bones embedded in the rocks on the lower Nowood, outside of Thermopolis, and on the way to Meteetsee from Thermopolis. They know that dark rocks mean bones. Bones mean oil, sweet crude, the dollar sign of our boom bust cycle.

They studied bats at the Nature Conservancy outside of Ten Sleep-and in town at Newell Sargent Park and at the Outdoor Learning Classroom. The boys can identify some birds and flowers in the Big Horn Mountains-that is more their Aunt’s thing, but they try.

They’ve shot guns, too, but neither shoots. Deer and antelope are just nuisances to watch out for when driving. Shooting or hunting just isn’t something my boys are interested in, but they’ve been exposed to it, just like they’ve fed bum lambs and cleaned out horse stalls. It’s part of growing up in Wyoming.

Wildlife can be a cause for depression. Deer as a hood ornament is risky business. You can be depressed all the way to the bank, the insurance agency and the hospital if you are unfortunate enough to hit one. Or try babying a garden through drought and hailstorms only to have deer jump your fence and feast, decimating a summers worth of labor. That is definitely a reason to be depressed, or angry. Getting up close and personal with nature in Wyoming isn’t always fun.

When out of state relatives-my husband’s side of the family-come to visit they often want to go to Yellowstone Park. My boys don’t. They’ve been there, done that, bought the t-shirt. Those out of state relatives can go see the museum in Cody and go to Yellowstone all by themselves. Lots of hikes, lots of gorgeous scenery, ho-hum a Moose, a buffalo, an elk. If you’re lucky, a bear. We see bald eagles between here and Ten Sleep frequently. We do get excited about seeing wolves-but we usually see them over Towgatee in the dead of winter at dusk either coming or going to Jackson to ski.

When the boys were much younger and we were a single income family because I stayed home with them, we tent camped as we journeyed our way around the state, exploring. Neither of the boys want to tent camp anymore. To them, camping is work and hotels are play. I don’t tent camp either, after spending a week backpacking in the Wind River Mountains. It was a wonderful experience, I saw gorgeous vista, beautiful scenery, froze my ass off and I’m forever thankful that I did it. But now my idea of camping is a motel without an indoor swimming pool. My Dad never saw the joy of camping. He did enough of that in Europe as a member of the 5th Army Corps of Engineers during World War Two.

That article said summer camp was the answer to nature deficiency. What about winter? Winter is our favorite time to play outside. We ski, sled, ice skate, throw snowballs, build snow forts. My Dad didn’t see the fun of cross country skiing or snow shoeing either. He did enough of that surveying in Yellowstone Park as a member of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930’s. But my family and I feel that there is nothing like a perfect cold crisp winter day with the sky azure blue and the air so biting that your sunglasses fog over. The mountains are breathtaking in their grandeur and we long for the work/school week to end so we can be up in them, and bundle up to play outside in nature.

Are there winter camps for nature-deprived kids too? Would that solve even more problems than obesity, learning disorders and depression? It’s real hard to be depressed when you’re glad to be alive and swooshing down a mountain on two skinny boards. Terrified, maybe, but not depressed. We cross country skied and sledded on the mountain and ice-skated in town when the boys were younger. Now the oldest snow boards, the youngest downhill ski’s. My husband and I cross country ski and downhill. We were all Special Olympics ski coaches for several years to share our love of the sport with others. We’re good skiers, we ski in control, and we are usually only scared of other skiers.

Maybe the answer to the summer camp thing is to encourage everyone move to Wyoming, but I don’t really want that. I like Wyoming unpopulated. Instead, parents and kids can come here for vacations, spend tourist dollars and leave. A University of Wyoming professor can write a book about how childhood illnesses are lessened by kids spending quality time in the car with their parents, seeing nature in Wyoming and summer camps can go out of business. And perhaps my grandchildren, when I finally have them, will be able to be the 4th generation of my family to enjoy the magnificent outdoors in the great state of Wyoming.