insight
Now 14 and 12, Nate and Alex are still enthusiastic explorers. See Lanza’s tips (next page) for raising kids with a lifelong love of the outdoors.
after it. It never occurred to us until that moment that you could ride your bike across the entire United States.
Does that mean an outdoor trip has to go to extremes to be valuable? It’s about context. I hope what people can draw from read- ing my stories is that your experience in the outdoors is about your own path and your own abilities and limits. I remember years ago I met a very accomplished climber,
Jeff Lowe. He’s a guy who’s done things that I look at and just think, oh, that’s terrifying. But the comment he made to me was that he actually envied 5.7 climbers—5.7 being a fairly easy rating in rock climbing—because every time they go out, they get scared. And what he meant by that was that every time a novice climber goes out, they have the experience of being on the biggest adventure of their life. The point is, you can have the same emotional experi-
ence without going miles and miles into the wilderness— you could be on a day hike in the Middlesex Fells outside Boston, any little park or any state forest. All that matters is your own frame of reference.
28 · LAND&PEOPLE · SPRING/SUMMER 2015
That’s useful to keep in mind when introducing a child to the outdoors. Absolutely. I’ve been doing this stuff for years, so I don’t feel all the time the way I did on that first bike trip at Mount Greylock. But it happens for my kids a lot, and I get to live that feeling vicariously, through them. The first time I backpacked with my son he was five. We hiked about a mile. We pitched our tent near a tiny creek—I could step across it, it’s that small. But he thought we were in the middle of nowhere. The wonderful thing about being a child is in climbing
to the top of the hill or a cliff where there’s nobody around and believing you’re the first person who’s ever been up there. As adults we know that’s probably not true, but as a child you can still believe it. That’s what you make possible when you take a child into nature. You can give them an emotional experience that’s real magic.
Are there also practical aspects to encouraging kids to get out into nature? There are great lessons that kids can derive from the outdoors. Take the social pressure on girls. My
michael lanza
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