07.16.09
All in the family
Our week-long kids camp at Innsbrook just concluded and word on the street is that it was much enjoyed by all.
Kids from ages 6 to 13 spend five hours a day at Innsbrook’s farmhouse area in the shade of our giant Mulberry trees learning about everything from Tibetan prayer flags to printing to drama to how to build a cardboard boat.
Here I am trying to keep my cardboard boat afloat!
My favorite part of the week though is the nature hike. I take two groups of 25 kids on a walk along Innsbrook’s Tyrolean Trail where we identify leaves, trees, berries, etcetera. And then we plunge into the forest to follow and old horse trail that crosses the creek two or three times.
It’s a wonderful circular hike and the kids enjoy splashing through the creek and mucking through the mud on the horse trail. It’s amazing to me to see how some kids just love being in the woods — mud, water, bugs — not much phases them.
With this particular group of kids, I think that’s partially a function of being Innsbrook kids and living in A-frames where their playgrounds are a couple acres of woods. By the way, there is a great book about the benefits of raising kids that are woods savy — it’s called the “The Last Child in the Woods” by Richard Louv. Click here to learn more.
This year the hike through the woods was particularly muddy which most of the kids delighted in but a couple found troublesome because their crocs were being sucked off their feet into the mire. Here’s a side note — crocs are not the best choice for hikes.
One little girl — about kindergarten age — lost her pink crocs in the muck and then into the slop and pretty much lost it refusing to go on.
I helped her up and offered to carry her through the rest of the mud. She immediately agreed and when I picked her up she buried her head in my chest and cried. The counselor that was with us dug up her shoes and we all walked down the slope to the creek where the rest of the group had stopped.
The creek in this spot is beautiful — shallow riffles a couple of inches deep about 12 feet wide. The water sparkles with the sunlight that filters through the Sycamores that form a canopy 70 or so feet above. The edges of the creek are lined with wildflowers, bladder nut and lush vegetation.
We all washed the mud off and the other campers helped my young charge restore the pink to her crocs. It was kind of a special Innsbrook moment – 25 kids standing in a creek dappled with sunlight in the middle of the woods helping each other scape the mud off and doing quite a bit of creek play in the process. By the time we left the creek, we were smiling, clean and ready for more hiking.
My passenger was not to be pried of my hip — she preferred being carried. But she was done crying and by the end of the hike, was pointing out the dragonflies that danced along the trail.
We came out of the woods together, clean, smiling and one big family. It seems like that moment in the creek was a little bit of a metaphor of what Innsbrook and frankly, any escape into the wild should be. It’s an opportunity to scrape off the muck of everyday life, to regain our balance, to play a little and leave our tragedies behind — and when we return “from the creek”, we are again ourselves.