Remembering City Life

Wildness. . .It is perennially

within us, dormant as a hard

shelled seed, awaiting the fire

or food that awakes again

Gary Snyder

I grew up in Tacoma, Washington, not exactly a big city but hardly a small town either. We were just thirty miles south of Seattle, though before Interstate 5 was completed that drive took a full hour on “old 99” with its stoplights. I never felt deprived by city life. There was a large vacant lot directly across the street where my friend Patty and I spent our summer days climbing trees and jumping out from thick salal with sticks to battle imaginary foes. My brother is old enough to remember going huckleberry picking with my mother in north Tacoma and encountering a black bear as we picked. I was along for the ride but too young to remember that great adventure. Now north Tacoma is covered with homes and strip malls. There is a beautiful park, Point Defiance, where my grandmother would take us to visit the rose garden, and we would sit on the swinging bench and enjoy a picnic lunch of homemade bread and raspberry jam.

It was a pretty good life for city living, or any kind of living for that matter. I never felt deprived by a lack of wild spaces and trees. It was not the vacant lot nor the rose garden that enabled me to grow up with a sense of comfort whenever I was in the woods. As my readers know by now my family went on camping trips every summer. We were fortunate to be near Olympic National Park, where most of our camping trips took place, but also Mt. Rainier, the ocean coast, and of course Spirit Lake, which I have written about extensively.

I was surprised to learn recently that many of my friends who grew up here in remote northeastern Washington did not hike or camp as children. They tell me they did not need to. The forest was just outside their front door. The trails were a short walk across the horse pasture. There was a never ending supply of trees to climb, huckleberries to pick, and paths that made their way through the tall pine trees.

I do not in the least feel deprived because my forest was limited to a vacant lot. It had a dogwood tree in the middle of it. Large white blossoms were visible above the underbrush and from our kitchen window. It never seemed ordinary. It was not.

I have just a couple of words of advice to those of you who grew up without a dogwood tree across the street nor a horse pasture where friends played. “Get outside.” It is never too late, and a wild world is turning itself inside out to reveal itself to you. I promise you that you will not be disappointed even if means a city park with a rose garden. And by the way, leave your device behind.