Your childhood escape

[alces]

I was listening to a podcast this morning on biophilia. One of the arguments supporting the existence of biophilia was the fact that almost all people has a special, natural place they loved as a child. A place where they explored, played and imagined, whether it was a forest or some bushes in an abandoned lot.

Where was your natural place?

I grew up on a street that only had houses on one side, the other was natural bushland , leading down into a creek. Directly opposite my house was the start of a firetrail, leading down into the gully. I would go down there and play most days when I was young. The creek was polluted; foamy and orange most of the time. But there were lizards to watch, spider webs to run away from and a big rock that was hollowed out underneath. My friends and I used to pretend it was the home of a dragon, but none of us were ever game to go inside and check it out (spiders, again... :P)

Comments

[sid]

It was just my back yard. We didn't plant anything, it was all there when we moved in. Grapevine, rose bushes, violets, lilies of the valley, rhubarb, pussywillow tree, elderberry bushes, a couple of strawberry plants, and a bunch of stuff I never identified. Playing and imagining, definitely. Exploring? After dark, when the familiar becomes mysterious... *g*

[arkady]

The small burbling river that ran through the fields at the end of the street I grew up on. It was rural Hertfordshire in SE England. If you went down the hill from our house, at the end our street intersected another that ran above farmers' fields. Follow a small track down through 2 fields, and at the bottom of the hill was a little old stone bridge over a tributary of the river Ver. Cows and sometimes horses grazed in the field on the other side of the river, and the bridge was sheltered by overhanging willow and oak trees. I spent many happy hours in the shade of the bridge, feet dangling in the cool water in summer's heat. I've not been back since I had children myself, but sometimes I dream about it.

[weaverbird]

What an interesting question! I've had this post open in a tab for more than a week as I ponder what to write in reply.

I grew up on a small family farm in New England and in a sense the whole thing was my natural place. I knew every corner of it – the woods, the orchards, the fields, the ponds and swamps, the brook – it was all of it my playground. I poked and pried into everything, knew where all the good stuff was to be found – the wild strawberries, the moccasin flowers, trout lilies, bloodroot and trillium, the mica mine, the bullhead and bluegill nests, the newts and pill clams, where the deer grazed and the woodchucks burrowed. So I tried to narrow it down to one particular favorite spot, and I couldn't do it; I couldn’t name just one. But in the course of this bittersweet exercise, these hours of remembering the idylls of childhood, I stumbled on the realization that the spots that stand out mostly have to do with rock or water or both. Outcrops of ledge drew me – from the small ones in the pasture that were full of nooks and crannies just right for hiding things, to the giant rock bigger than the henhouse that stood in the middle of the brook in the barnyard, to the granite bluff 30 feet tall way back in the woods with beech trees growing at its foot. And water – the two farm ponds, ten acres in extent, that my great uncle made more than a century ago by damming the stream and flooding a swampy hollow; the old spring that supplied three households and never failed, even in the terrible drought in the 60's; and the brook that ran from the ponds down through the woods and the barnyard and then tumbled down a series of little falls in the tiny rocky glen below my bedroom window. These are the places I remember as being the most magical, the ones where I felt most keenly the connection with the land and the life it sustained.

Thanks for that link. The biophilia hypothesis is new to me, and intriguing!