Last spring was especially wet along the Colorado Front Range. Ponds appeared along my local walking area that had never been there before. By mid June these ponds were full of tiny tadpoles. They provided abundant food for the local wading birds. Not many of the tadpoles made it to frogs, as a month latter most of the ponds began drying up.
One evening as I walked I noticed a group of young kids next to one of the ponds. They were wading through the water, paper cups in hands, focused on catching a few of the tadpoles. I sat and watched for a few moments. The kids were enthralled with sloshing through the water up above their ankles. I could hear them chatter in delight every time they captured a tadpole. The sun slipped down behind them as I watched, silhouetting the children all bent over searching the muddy water for tadpoles. Gnats buzzed above them in the heavy warm air.
I thought back to my youth - I remembered myself doing things like that, always exploring the wild areas at the edges of my neighborhood, catching snakes, turtles, and tadpoles. I could remember the pleasure of it all - the free time outside with few constraints on where I could go and when I had to be back. Perhaps having a youth like that affected me more than I know, and shaped what I am as an adult.
The writer Robert Michael Pyle had a similar childhood. He describes it in his book 'The Thunder Tree.'
'I grew up in a landscape lavishly scatter with unoffical countryside -- vacant lots aplenty, a neglected so-called park where weeds had their way, yesterday's farms, and the endless open ground of the High Line Canal looping off east and west. These were leftovers of the early suburban leap. They were rich with possibility. I could catch a bug, grab a crawdad, run screaming from a giant garden spider; intimacy abounded.'
'. . . children . . . need free places for pottering, netting, catching, and watching. Insects, crawdads, and tadpoles can stand to be nabbed a good deal.
'Likewise, we all need spots near home where we can wander off a trail, lift a stone, poke about, and merely wonder: places where no interpretative signs intrude their message to rob our spontaneous response.'
'The total immersion in nature that I found in my special spots baptized me in a faith that never wavered, but it was a matter of happenstance too. It was the place that made me. . . How many people grow up with such windows on the world?'