Fearless Child of Mother Nature

I woke up in a canyon. By dawn I was shooting straight east and the sun had to jump to get out of my way. Colorado came with a steep ascent that rocketed me into the clouds. My bike complained loudly about the climb and when I arrived at my destination, I realized the engine had burnt up almost all of its oil. I gave Donatello a rest while I was in Lake City. Most of the roads there are hardly roads at all — I couldn’t have taken a motorcycle on them if I had wanted to.

My cousins Jody and Camille gave me a warm welcome in Lake City and introduced me to their adopted son Silas, who I took an immediate liking to. At the first chance I got, I took advantage of their hospitality to bathe and cleanse myself for the first time in three days.

Jody and Camille are field zoologists. They are both accustomed to going for months without bathing in Nepal, where no one bathes and everyone smells like yak dung. They had a good laugh about my hang-up on cleanliness. That night, we had dinner on the porch and caught up on family and stories. Before bed, I read “Are You My Mother?” to Silas about 350 times. I’m pretty sure the book did more for me than for him. I kept reading long after he had passed out. That night, I slept in my hammock next to the porch.

Morning came slow and gray. I awoke to a world of hummingbirds and grazing deer. By the time I had downed breakfast and taught Silas the principles of acoustics with a rubber band, the mountains had come out of the haze in dazzling hyper-reality. We packed up the 4x4 and went bouncing up to 12,000 feet. Silas kept up a constant “eee-aaa-eee-aaa” from his car seat in the back. Oh, I have to mention that Silas’ first and only word was the F-word. He said it crystal clear and seemed to have a full understanding of the word’s potency. Camille said she had to leave Mass once when he started swearing during the sermon.

Silas was not made for churches and sermons; he was made for mountains and wolves. While Jody and I went to work clearing dead logs and collecting firewood, Silas sat alone in the middle of the woods under a full-scale assault from swarms of mosquitoes. He didn’t complain or cry once.

At sunset we went to the round top for a better view; then it was back to camp and time to build a fire. I worked up the flames and settled in to recite for Jody the story of the shooting of Dan McGrew. This is a story by Robert Service, the great poet of the Alaskan wilderness. My great-grandfather used to tell it at every family gathering. Memorizing it from an old family recording, I took the story with me on my journey as an offering to the relatives I visited. Jody remembered quite a bit of the story and chimed in when he could.

When the embers died down, Jody gave me his extra sleeping bag — it was very thick and soft. The next day, we loaded up all the firewood we could and went bumping back to town accompanied by Silas’ chorus of “eee-aaa”s.

The people in Lake City were larger than life. I kept expecting to see Paul Bunyan chasing Babe through the valley. Once again, I was tempted to put up my spurs and stay. The carpentry jobs were everywhere. When I mentioned the possibility of staying, Jody told me I could stay in a yurt in their backyard until I could afford a place of my own.

But the road won out. I saddled up Donatello, said goodbye and wound my way down the mountains and out of Colorado.

I know I’m young, but as far as I can tell, good parenting requires more than love. It’s a high-stakes game — unconditional love is better than nothing, but there needs to be something more. A parent must teach their children to conquer happiness and defend against suffering. The right answers won’t come naturally to anyone. You have to think about it and no matter how much you do, you’ll still be in a gray area. You don’t have to plan 18 years of your daughter’s future with charts and schedules and ballet recitals. That’s too much. If you’re using graph paper, you took a wrong turn somewhere. Parenting starts and ends with fundamentals.

So how do you make a happy person? A happy, loving home does not necessarily prepare a child for bad luck. Ideally, happiness doesn’t have to be a precarious balancing act. When you look around, you see a lot of people running back and forth with whatever happiness they have balanced on the tip of their nose. When the wrong breeze catches them, it’s game over.

Take love, for example. Everyone probably agrees that romantic love is the best route to the heights of happiness. But the vulnerability is just as real. Maybe your daughter finds that perfect someone to cushion the world’s blows, bring her roses and protect her from all the ugly predators. So you dance at her wedding. Everything is bliss until that special someone dies or cheats on her with her best friend — same old story. I don’t need to convince anyone that there are a lot of sour grapes in the fruit basket of life.

There must be something a person can do to help their children. Watching Silas sitting cross-legged in the forest building a primitive lean-to and paying no attention whatsoever to the mosquito hordes, I realized the answer: fearlessness.

Make your child fearless. From there they can choose to join a Buddhist monastery or the SEALs or fall head-over-heels in love with the first person that tells them their eyes are like scrambled eggs. While for most of us it does, I don’t think love has to make you hopelessly vulnerable. Love is not, by definition, an inverted fear. Make your child fearless and he’ll make himself happy.

How do you teach fearlessness? It seems like fear starts out simple and gets more and more complicated as we grow up. You can always count on slobbering angry monsters to spark fear in small children.

It seems to me that the best way to teach your child to slay his inner demons is to teach him to slay real live demons. That means lots of time in the forest with wild animals. Throw them to the wolves; they’ll figure it out. It’s the Hansel and Gretel approach. You can bet that Hansel and Gretel had more pep in their step after stuffing that creepy old hag into the stove. Facing monsters, kids will recognize the illusion in every fear. Don’t forget to give your budding dragon-slayer a big hug every time he makes it home alive.

Desmond Rawls is a senior in the College and is taking a year off to work as a mechanic for an offshore oil company. He can be reached at rawls@thehoya.com. Wheelie appears every other Monday on www.thehoya.com.

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