Intoday's age of fear, I can't help but reflect back on my own childhood and wonder if that kind of freedom will ever return to America and especially to American children. In the name of fear and safety, children get expelled from school for pointing their fingers in a way that a teacher might think looks like a pistol. We allow ourselves to be viewed and groped and searched in the most private ways just for the purpose of travelling. Our government can and does read our personal communications with impunity. Children are never let out of site and if they are, their parents are accused of child neglect. Where is the America we once knew?
There was a time not long ago when people lived with less fear. The realities were probably not different, but the amplified propagation of fear was less and that freedom from fear encourage youth to do more and dream more and be more.
My brother and I went on our first camping trip alone when I was twelve and he was even younger than that. Our house was surrounded by what seemed to be endless forests, prairie, and hills as far as the eye could see and we would walk many miles of it and never find its limits. I remember on our first journey carrying a cotton sleeping bag in my arms and the rest of the gear must have been in some crude rucksack. I think we only went five or six miles from home, but it was enough to be inconveniently distant. That trip was when I realized that I did not know how to build a campfire by myself. It was humbling.
By 15 years old, my 16 year old friend and young brother spent three weeks alone exploring the Boundary Waters Canoe Area/Quetico Provincial Park in the USA and Canada.
At seventeen, my teenage friend and I hiked a long portion of the Continental Divide. We planned the trip ourselves. We bought our own plane tickets with money we earned ourselves. We calculated calories and planned meals. We planned our route and mountaineered with a compass and maps. We got lost in the mountains and found our way back.
We did all of this before we were even eighteen years old. It was more wilderness travel than some of our peers and less than others, but it was there for the doing and we did it. We were inspired by young explorers like teens Eric Ryback and Robin Lee Graham who Backpacked America and sailed around the world and wrote books that many of us read.
I am not sure why our parents let us do those kinds of adventures then, but I am sure few, if any, parents today would allow their children to do anything like that. I asked my mother recently if she felt nervous letting us do those kinds of trips. She said, "you boys knew what you were doing and I knew you were safer in the woods than you were in town". She was right. While we were on our many camping trips, we lost several friends to automobile accidents in town.
So, how about you? How old were you when you went camping without parents or adult supervision?
There was a time not long ago when people lived with less fear. The realities were probably not different, but the amplified propagation of fear was less and that freedom from fear encourage youth to do more and dream more and be more.
My brother and I went on our first camping trip alone when I was twelve and he was even younger than that. Our house was surrounded by what seemed to be endless forests, prairie, and hills as far as the eye could see and we would walk many miles of it and never find its limits. I remember on our first journey carrying a cotton sleeping bag in my arms and the rest of the gear must have been in some crude rucksack. I think we only went five or six miles from home, but it was enough to be inconveniently distant. That trip was when I realized that I did not know how to build a campfire by myself. It was humbling.
By 15 years old, my 16 year old friend and young brother spent three weeks alone exploring the Boundary Waters Canoe Area/Quetico Provincial Park in the USA and Canada.
At seventeen, my teenage friend and I hiked a long portion of the Continental Divide. We planned the trip ourselves. We bought our own plane tickets with money we earned ourselves. We calculated calories and planned meals. We planned our route and mountaineered with a compass and maps. We got lost in the mountains and found our way back.
We did all of this before we were even eighteen years old. It was more wilderness travel than some of our peers and less than others, but it was there for the doing and we did it. We were inspired by young explorers like teens Eric Ryback and Robin Lee Graham who Backpacked America and sailed around the world and wrote books that many of us read.
I am not sure why our parents let us do those kinds of adventures then, but I am sure few, if any, parents today would allow their children to do anything like that. I asked my mother recently if she felt nervous letting us do those kinds of trips. She said, "you boys knew what you were doing and I knew you were safer in the woods than you were in town". She was right. While we were on our many camping trips, we lost several friends to automobile accidents in town.
So, how about you? How old were you when you went camping without parents or adult supervision?
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