Wild Instructors

When I heard that Kodachrome film went the way of the dinosaur, I thought of the Paul Simon song of the same name.

When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It’s a wonder
I can think at all
And though my lack of edu-ca-tion
Hasn’t hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall…
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

In school, I was the bored kid staring out the classroom window. It may sound cliché, but my classroom has always been the outdoors—through college and beyond.

When I wasn’t being a champion underachiever in school I was outside of four walls roaming the woods and waters every chance I got. My parents put up with a lot of wildlife sharing our home and yard. My brothers and I raised countless caterpillars in glass jars through the pupa stage until they emerged as butterflies. We would rescue any small birds that fell out of their nests and feed them worms by hand and keep them in boxes on our shelf until they could fly away. At one time I had a turtle farm that consisted of snapping turtles, box turtles, spotted turtles, painted turtles, musk turtles, and wood turtles. There was always an injured hawk or a baby raccoon and even baby skunks being rehabilitated in a rabbit hutch out back.

We were fortunate to live down the street from an Audubon sanctuary which had a series of ponds connected by spillways. A neighborhood friend and I were paid 25 cents apiece for any water snakes and snapping turtles we could catch. Back in those days, the director felt these predators were harming the duck population. Trust me, catching a four-foot-long water snake by hand or hoisting a 50-pound snapping turtle into a small rocking rowboat was exciting, to say the least.

To this day I always gravitate to and seek out the wild places and the animals within, wherever I happen to be. Those untamed spaces don’t have to be in the middle of nowhere, but can be microcosms found anywhere if you look hard enough.

On the few occasions my wife persuaded me to go to Florida on vacation to my in-laws’ condo, I spent most of my time catching little lizards with the kids and patrolling the requisite drainage canals looking for gators and bass in the culvert pools. If we were at a beach, I stayed with the kids again, combing the sand and surf and surrounding dunes looking for any natural wonder ignored by the sun worshippers.

Many areas of this country have spectacular outdoor classrooms and Sedona, Arizona, comes immediately to mind. When we vacationed in Sedona, the motel was smack-dab in the middle of a golf course. Golfing is not my cup of tea so, in between hiking the desert and red rock country, I sought out small areas on the fringes of the course to explore.

There was a rambling creek that ran behind the motel complex and each day I would walk its edges exploring all the nooks and crannies at the base of the cliffs—to the sound of golf balls being whacked. One morning I saw small cloven tracks in the red sand and followed them until I discovered a band of collared peccaries, better known as javelinas. These are stout pig-like creatures that run anywhere from 35 to 50 pounds. These small beasts have good hearing but poor eyesight—which I found out that morning when I managed to mistakenly corner a small group of them along the creek. I smelled their musky alarm scent before I saw them and, before I knew it, I was face to face with some angry critters popping their rather formidable tusks at me. This outdoor classroom had taught me these creatures didn’t like to be crowded. I backed out slowly.

Books are great—as are computers, schools, and teachers—but Mother Nature has always been my favorite instructor and her classroom my institute of higher learning. No matter where I find myself, even under the din of humanity, I always go searching for what she has to show and teach me in the most unlikely of places. So, Mama, don’t ever take my wild places away.