I don’t really understand why older adults are always complaining about how ‘young people’ have no interest in nature anymore. It’s disconcerting, disheartening and just plain disagreeable when family members start to whine about The Great and Terrible Death of Nature-Lovers, as though a rare and much beloved species has just been mercilessly hunted to extinction by the likes of computer giants and video game producers. While I understand the current fascination with technology has most people mesmerized by their computer screens and flat screen TV’s, that doesn’t exactly spell out doom for the natural world. It just simply means there are a lot of young millennials dreaming of robot butlers, self-driving cars, rocket trips to the moon, and houses that will tie their shoes for them. Which is totally fine; hey, if we didn’t have people lying on their couches, staring into space, and thinking of how great it would be to have a machine that burns bread, we would never have toasters. However, sometimes dreamers need to be pulled out of their heads and onto a trail to get those creative juices flowing, and even though our families and their friends may complain about our unorthodox sleeping patterns, gadget-attachments, and sheltered lives in air-conditioned rooms, we don’t let the haters get to us. This is simply an ‘ode to nature’ that I hope those intrepid adventurers can connect with and get some of the ‘indoor people’ out and about in the wild (with a buddy, please!).
For months, you’ve been waiting for this. Winter had its charms, but come now, who wants to go for a walk in snow four feet deep and temperatures below 0℉arenheight? Caught in blizzards so cold and wild that you dared not even look out the window, you were busy sifting through hiking manuals, the internet, and old copies of National Geographic ( ‘cause, why not?). After agreeing with yourself that climbing Mount Katahdin would be pure insanity, that the change in that old coffee can would definitely not be enough to get you to Brazil, and that by spring you should be able to convince your friends to come with you on a hike, you settle on a trail. A nice, simple trail that your guidebook has marked ‘moderate’ and promises lakes and ponds and otters and daisies.
Today, my friend, you have arrived.
Your best friend is with you, you got a new backpack for Christmas and you’ve filled it with a whole bunch of granola-products: granola bars, granola cereal, those little granola balls that are, like, granola snacks. Granola, feast of adventurers. Your friend, who’s been doing this for a little longer than you, has, luckily, brought ham sandwiches, Reese’s peanut butter cups, pretzels, and a couple of apples. You’ve told her about the trail you guys will be walking on and she smiles sweetly at you as though you’re some simpleton who’s in for a hard lesson. You two walk into the woods, chattering on about something that you’ll laugh about later in the car, until about a mile later, you’ve gone quiet. Are you tired? Yes. Is the trail harder than you thought? Heck, yeah! But it isn’t just fatigue that’s made you silent. This far into the trail, the sound of traffic has disappeared and you feel as though you’ve entered new territory.
It’s peaceful, the quiet interrupted only by the occasional chicka-dee-dee-dee of a chickadee (see, you know your birds, little genius you). The light here is a beautiful green, the spring-tone of stained glass, and the small rivers and brooks you pass are lit with an almost iridescent glow. You’ve seen turtles, toads, even a single tiny frog and your friend has sighted a deer, a fox and a slightly lost turkey. The going is hard, but the views are amazing and you take picture after picture on your phone with overzealous zest. Red-winged blackbirds sit on cattails in marshes filled with dipping swallows and the gulp-gulp of bullfrogs. A pond contains a single white egret that gracefully prowls its depths for food. You'll remember this trip for a while, not just because your legs burn with the pain of a thousand suns, but because it was amazing, beautiful, a true experience, the sort that keeps you coming back for more.
Though many may see us sitting on the bus engrossed by our phones or the music pouring out of our headphones, millennials don't shut out the world so completely that they miss its wonders entirely. We shut it out just enough to get lost in our own worlds, just as most young people before us have done before, the only difference is the way in which we lose ourselves. This still includes being outside, running, hiking, biking, walking, and even though technology still has its draws, it doesn't mean that all of us will be so completely enraptured by it that we forget what's out there.
To be honest, there is a different problem to the nature-epidemic that it appears many people talk about, but no one wants to listen. Both older and newer generations alike are encased in cities and suburbs that eat up forests, lakes, deserts and other wild spaces home to a myriad of plant and animal species. There appears to be a disregard for the wellbeing of such places and the creatures that live in them. Bottles litter the sides of roads, old tires are thrown into the woods and plastic beach buckets along with flip-flops and wrappers are left on beaches to be pulled away by the sea. There does appear to be a lessening interest in the natural world, but only because we make it seem that way. If more people were willing to step outside and appreciate what the earth has to offer, treated the land we call home with more respect, and stopped blaming it all on one specific generation, then maybe there wouldn't be this discussion of a 'lazy' generation. And all this article would be is an ode to nature.
