Last week I wrote about my somewhat delayed exposure to the outdoors, a byproduct of growing up in Riverside, California, which, during my childhood, was a community rapidly changing from rural, agricultural to suburban-urban.
I lived on the west side of the city, in a community called La Sierra, which was incorporated into Riverside just a couple years before we moved there. There were still many small ranchettes in La Sierra where folks kept livestock, primarily horses, though not exclusively so. I still recall the day a small farmer on one side of my elementary school butchered a full-grown hog in full view of the playground.
Our home was in a new subdivision, carved out of orange groves and surrounded by hills with California quail, red-tailed hawks and coyotes. It wasn’t like I was living in a concrete jungle, but the natural world seemed an exotic destination — the other — rather than a place that is a part of you, the way it is in Montana.
It wasn’t my plan to have kids, but once that became our fate, I was determined to ensure my twin daughters connected with nature. Since they were born in Montana, that was almost as easily done as said.
We didn’t wait for them to become fully mobile. The summer before they turned a year old, their mother and I loaded them up in kiddie backpacks for a day trip up Blodgett Canyon (we lived in Hamilton). We went as far as the bridge that crosses the creek, about 2 miles from the trailhead.
We had a great place in those early years. There was a pond across our lane that held waterfowl, and we had a remarkable view of Blodgett Canyon from our front door. And it was a short walk to Super 1. That grocery store taught me never to underestimate the benefits of having a well-stocked, 24-hour grocery store nearby when you’re raising newborns.
I don’t know how much of those early years the twins remember, but as 3-year-olds they were familiar with the sound of a noisy flock of geese preparing to take flight, could identify an male cinnamon teal, and understood that no matter what the calendar said, it wasn’t really spring until we spotted one of those gaudy drakes on the pond.
We then moved to Flagstaff, Arizona, and that’s when our time outdoors really blossomed. We first lived in a rented condo that abutted a small patch of ponderosa pine forest. Most of it was second-growth, but right in the middle of that 10-acre dog-haired thicket was a dead ponderosa with a trunk five feet across. Old-growth ponderosa like that once covered that country from Flagstaff to New Mexico.
I picked them up from daycare every afternoon, just across the street from the condo, in a Radio Flyer red wagon to contain them because the road was busy and there wasn’t a crosswalk. Once they finished snacks, they’d beg for a walk out to the “Oldest, dead tree in the forest,” which they usually wanted to play around. Large fallen limbs and golden slabs of bark that gathered at the base of the tree warned against this, however.
We eventually bought a home on a mesa in the middle of town, surrounded by acres of open space that connected to the nearby national forest. There were herds of mule deer on the mesa plus a few diminutive Coues whitetails. The twins and I walked that mesa every day after school. It was carefree and meditative, until the day we stumbled on a mountain lion with a single cub in tow.
That was about 100 yards from our house. Our mesa walks were never again carefree.
The lion was also a harbinger of the end of our walking days. My daughters were growing up.
We eventually returned to Montana, replacing our walks with floats on the Flathead.