Moving to the seclusion of the small farm that my dad had purchased and built a house on for his family, at the age of eight, was the beginning of a whole new world of learning, but nothing so important as developing an understanding of nature and my place in that world that suddenly was very big for such a young boy. While our farm was just under 50 acres, when you added the land of my aunts, uncles, and grandparents, it was about 200 acres. But, that was just the beginning. The range of our exploration and play was more like about a thousand acres, and 70% or more of it was wooded.
On that thousand or so acres was the west fork of Twelve Mile Creek, about two miles of it in total, plus several feeder streams. The dropoff to the creek was rather pronounced with twenty to fifty feet of steep inclines. The bottom land bordering the creek was flat and rather wide in places for such a small creek. On the hillsides were old gold mines filled in with rock. The quartz rock that I have always heard signaled the likely presence of gold was plentiful.
Nature provided many edible fruits and plants, including creasy greens, wild strawberries, wild plums, blackberries, huckleberries, black walnuts, muscadines, and of course the honey of bees that was often found in a rotten out tree. For young boys, the water of the creek was fit to drink, so, we learned to live off the land, in a manner of speaking. We certainly collected and ate most of the foods that I listed above.
In addition to the fruits, barries, nuts, plants, and honey, there were also animals that were very edible. Fish were the principle ones. Twelve Mile Creek had planty of catfish in that day, and a couple of local pounds had brim, bass, and couters. On the land, there were lots of rabbits. We learned to catch the fish with hook and bait, and also by seining with a large net that we had. The rabbits we caught in rabbit boxes that we learned early-on how to build.
My dad owned one shotgun that almost never came out of the closet. Hunting was not a part of our life, a condition that probably led to none of use owning guns today. It is interesting that the only brother that I have who does own a gun came along much later and grew up mostly in the town of Matthews after we had left home.
Of all the foods available to us from the wild, only blackberries and catfish were what you would call staples in our diet. We picked enough blackberries every summer to put up a couple of hundred pints of jam and jelly, and during the summer, catching fish to eat was a regular part of our routine. I tell people that I am not a fisherman today because when we fished, it was catch the fish or not have any fish for Friday night supper. Thus we often employed the seine or the old crank telephone. But, mostly we dug up worms and set several lines along the bank that we kept a close watch on. Fishing for me was for sustenance , not fun, and as an adult I simply do not need the sustenance.
I watch children growing up today with their hand held games, their planned lives, their programmed activities, and I want to cry for them. God gave us the most magnificent world and yet people grow to adulthood never realizing the width, breath, and depth of that world nor what it can mean to them. I heard some man on the radio last week talk about what he called "nature deficit syndrome." That is one way of saying it. I am not sure what species we become when we move ourselves from the world of nature into being casual observers of it. When you see the damage many are willing to do to nature for their own profit, it is obvious that we have lost respect for that which first gave us life.
There are so many small and insignificant things that we learned in those days on that land that add together to an education in the ways of nature. How does the doodlebug dig those little conical shaped holes that they hide in, waiting on an ant to enter to be quickly gobbled up? Can you really charm them out of those holes with little couplets like we sang to them? "Doodlebug, Doodlebug, where have have you been? Doodlebug, Doodlebug come back again?"
Where do you find running cedar that can be used around Christmas to decorate a mantle or from which you can build a wreath? Why is almost always near ferns in totally shaded areas during the summer? Can you really smell a snake before you encounter them? If you are cutting firewood with a crosscut saw and splitting it with an ax, what type of tree do you try to find to make the job as easy as possible but still have wood that will burn long and hot? Where do you go to find the ideal trees?
When you are playing in a stream, how long can you let the leech stay on your skin before it is too late to just pull him off? How do you find the most illusive of creek creatures, the crayfish? Can snakes bite you underwater and where around creeks do they like to hang out? When the creek dries up, where do you look to find water and all the creatures that live in it except the fish?
These questions and a million other tidbits of knowledge about the crops and gardens that we raised, the animals that we kept, and often ate, the fruit trees and grape arbors that we benefited so much from having, and how to schedule time to take care of it all, constituted a great part of my education. But, the farming aside, it was just getting to know mother nature so up close and personal without parents always there to direct our explorations that I now realize was so absolutely wonderful.
I have spent a lot of time in churches over the years, listening to preachers and others tell me about God and his ways, his love, his will, his gifts, and his demands on us. But, to this day, I have not heard a single preacher say anything that would compare to the silence of the forest as a teaching tool. I do not need a moralizer to tell me what a great gift life is and how much someone must have loved me to make me a part of all of this wonderful world.
There is no aspect of my education that means as much to me as what I learned playing and exploring with my two older brothers on that land that was available to me as a child and teenager. It set me on a trek that has taken me across this land to places like Glacier National Park, Mount St. Helens, the high desert of southern Wyoming, Yellowstone Park, The Great Smokies National Park, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia and New Burnswick, the Wichata Mountains of Oklahoma, up and down the wonderful sea coast of Maine, the redwood forests of northern California, the swamps of southern Georgia, the beauty of the Great Plains, and I am not finished yet.
I thank God every day that my children are as smitten with the nature bug as I have been. They all prefer a walk through a deep forest more than they enjoy the sandy beaches when the crowds are there. Hardly a month goes by that one of them is not exploring some new discovery. Already, my oldest grandchild, who was named for a pass in Glacier National Park, shows a real interest in the great outdoors and its endless ability to amaze and inspire.
On acreage here in Union County, I found my love for the great outdoors and the learning experiences that are offered by nature if I would but ask the questions. There is no end to what can be learned there, and I have more wonders to discover than my brief lifespan could possibly absorb.
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