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Getting Real
Children, nature and cow pies are recipe for a worthwhile day
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Published: September 14, 2008
ROCKY KNOB, Va. - "Help us. Can you help us?"
The plaintive cry wafted down the trail behind us.
We turned away from the remains of large flowers on the forest floor that we'd been trying to identify. We'd finally spotted the trees they had fallen from, and had taken some digital photos in hopes of figuring out what they were when we were back home with the field guides and a computer.
Running toward us down the slope we'd just negotiated, arms waving, were a girl of maybe 7 and a slightly smaller boy. "Help us! HELP US!" cried the girl. Behind the children, we could see a man and a woman.
It was the people who had started out just behind us when we had set off on the 3 ½ mile trail behind the visitors center at the Rocky Knob picnic area on the Blue Ridge Parkway. They'd stayed fairly close behind us at first, but then we lost sight and sound of them. We figured they had turned back or veered off onto a shorter trail.
In fact, as we had hiked up a fairly steep part of the trail through the woods, with its rocky footing, we had remarked that it must have seemed a bit challenging for the young ones.
Then, after we'd stopped several times to take photos or examine some interesting flora, we'd begun hearing high-pitched voices again. Vaguely, we had realized the little girl was yelling, but if we thought about it at all, we assumed that she was playing.
Now we realized that she'd been directing cries for help to us. We turned and hurried back up the trail toward the children and the adults who were trailing behind them.
"Does this trail loop back, or does it just keep going?" the little girl asked urgently.
We laughed. "It makes a loop," I assured her, "and you're past the hardest part."
"Oh, thank God!" she yelled, fervently.
By then the adults had arrived, laughing with us, and we showed them the trail map we'd picked up at the visitors center. We told them that the trail was headed downhill now, and that soon it would cross the parkway and wander through a grassy pasture with excellent mountain views before winding back to the trailhead.
They told us that they lived not too far away in Virginia, and that the little girl was their granddaughter and the little boy her friend. They had thought it would be good to get them out into the woods this Labor Day. Reassured that they weren't lost in the wilds forever, the children got their second wind and raced ahead up the trail, stopping from time to time to jump across big rocks or climb on gnarled trees.
My husband and I took our time behind them, enjoying the sight of children playing and exploring much as we had when we were children, and much as our own children had in turn. Frequent readers of this column will know that I worry that today's children have too little connection with nature. That's bad for them, and it bodes ill for the environment as well, if tomorrow's leaders and voters think of nature mostly as something to fear -- or don't think of it at all.
We'd thrown together a picnic and driven to Rocky Knob on a whim, after deciding that we really ought not to have to spend the entire three-day weekend on our neglected chores at home. It was refreshing to see a good number of youngsters getting up close and personal with the mountain terrain.
We climbed a stile over the rail fence and into the pasture. After stopping for a while to snap pictures of a butterfly on a thistle, we hiked on. There were no cows in the pasture that Labor Day, but there obviously had been quite a few recently. There were big old cow pies everywhere.
When we were almost to the stile that would take us back out of the pasture, we encountered a young couple with a boy of 4 or 5 walking toward us. We exchanged greetings, and the young man asked whether people ride horses on that trail. We told him that horses aren't allowed on that trail, although there might be some other trails in the area where people can ride.
"I saw all these piles of manure, and I thought it must be horses," he said. Then, his eyes growing wider, he looked at his wife. "I guess that was bear manure after all," he said.
We quickly assured him that we know manure, and those piles were cow manure.
After we got out of earshot, we nearly died laughing. If all that manure had come from a herd of bears, we'd all be in a lot of trouble!
But that young couple was out there on a sunny September day, amid the thistles and the asters and the trees and the birds and the squirrels and the butterflies and the manure in the Blue Ridge having fun with their child. And I do believe they learned at least a little something about nature that day.
n Linda Brinson is the Journal's editorial-page editor. She can be reached at lbrinson@wsjournal.com.
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