Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder by Louv, Richard (the two towers ebook .txt) 📕

great climbing tree and someone had tied a heavy rope from one of the sturdier branches. We would run, jump, and grab onto the rope and swing wildly, clearing the creek bed filled with smooth boulders and rocks. I do not recall anyone getting hurt there and upon reflection I think it may be that even though we tested each other’s limits, we knew our own. Pecking order established itself in an unspoken manner. But we were friends and we accepted each other. It was enough just to be together. The wildness of our place bonded us and we felt a connection that went beyond verbal exchanges to a deeper knowing.

Stephens’s recollection brings to mind the fascinating, if skimpy, studies that suggest children who spend more time playing outdoors have more friends. Certainly the deepest friendships evolve out of shared experience, particularly in environments in which all the senses are enlivened. On one level, discovering—or rediscovering—nature through the senses is simply a way to learn, to pay attention. And paying attention is easier when you’re actually doing something, rather than only considering how it might be done.

John Rick, the middle-school teacher who educated me about the growing number of legal and regulatory restrictions on natural play, grew up in the 1960s. His family’s house backed up on vacant land. At that time there were only three local television stations, one of them in Spanish. Computers and Game Boys didn’t exist. He spent his free hours exploring the land, as countless children did at that time. Rick says:

I can remember how furious my dad used to get when he never had a shovel in the garage. That was because I had taken it to dig foxholes deep enough to crouch inside and put plywood over the top. We even took the time to disguise the cover with plants and dirt. A lot of the time the roof caved in on us, but we learned. There were other adventures, too: swings from trees, kites on two thousand feet of string. My dad helped when he could, but most of the time he left us to try things: to experiment, test, fail, or succeed. We learned so much more than we ever would have with someone showing us the right way to do things every time. Our failures gave us a deep, intrinsic understanding of how things worked. We understood the laws of physics long before we took the class.

Schoolhouse in a Tree

Nature can stimulate the eighth intelligence (and probably all the others) in countless ways. But I have a soft spot in my heart for tree houses, which have always imparted certain magic and practical knowledge.

Rick’s story reminded me of my early career as neighborhood tree-house architect, at nine or ten years old. I couldn’t catch a ground ball well, but I could climb a trunk and nail a board with style. One summer I directed a crew of five or six boys in the appropriation of “spare” lumber from nearby building projects. In the 1950s, we did not consider it stealing—though it certainly was. Mountains of lumber, some of it crusted with concrete, would rise next to basement holes that became small lakes after summer storms. Carpenters looked the other way as we carted off four-by-eight sheets of plywood and two-by-fours. Our pockets bulged with nails that we collected from the ground.

We picked the largest oak in the state, we figured: a tree that must have been two hundred years old. We erected a four-story tree house with a sealed bottom floor that we entered through a trap door on the floor of the second story. Each ascending level became more elaborate and larger as the branches of the tree opened out. The top floor was a crow’s nest that could only be reached by leaving the third story and crouch-walking out ten feet on a thick branch, transferring to a higher branch that dipped down close to the first one, and then traversing that branch to the crow’s nest—forty feet above the ground. The tree house was serviced by ropes and pulleys and two baskets. This tree house became our galleon, our spaceship, our Fort Apache, and from it we could see out over the cornfields and north to the great, dark woods. To think of that tree house today, within the context of our litigious society, makes me shudder.

I returned years later and the old tree was doing just fine. The only sign of civilization within its branches were two or three gray two-by-fours. If you drive across the Midwest today, or for that matter across any of wooded America, you can see similar artifacts, the skeletons of tree houses past. But you won’t see many new tree houses. More often than not, adults build the ones that do exist, sometimes for themselves.

Adults have appropriated tree-house building, just as they have Halloween. (Perhaps the better word is reappropriated: the Medicis built a marble tree house during the Renaissance, and a town near Paris was famous in the mid-nineteenth century for its tree-house restaurants.) Elaborate books for adults advise tree-house builders to rest boards on major branches and close to the trunk; to brace boards to resist wind and twisting; to use natural-fiber manila rope, rather than nylon rope. They advise that the floor be tilted slightly to allow water runoff; that the ladder not be nailed to the trunk, but tied to the tree and self-supported. And so on.

As tree-house architect, I could have used such information but did fine without it. We built our tree house well enough for our needs. None of my fellow builders was injured, at least not seriously. Ours was a learning tree. Through it we learned to trust ourselves and our abilities.

Recently, I talked about the art and education of tree-house building with a friend, architect Alberto Lau, who is also the construction scheduler for several new schools in my city. Alberto grew up in Guatemala. “Only in this