My Favorite Childhood Reads
Around ten years ago, when some people I work with got
involved in the Children & Nature Network, I
started thinking of this novel that I read and loved in elementary school. A
book about three girls who spent a summer camping out alone. They slept in a
tent, explored field and stream, and faced an invading horde of daddy longlegs
(hence the title).
Having just read Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, I found myself wondering if I’d made the whole thing up. Three pre-adolescents in a tent by themselves? That book was in my grade-school library. Would it even be allowed today?
Curiosity aroused, I got online and tracked down a copy of Tent Under the Spider Tree. It really is as good as I remembered. Short chapters written for kids, characters with distinct personalities, plenty of action.
My recollection was a little fuzzy. The girls camped out for a week, not a whole season. They weren’t entirely unsupervised: there was a farmhouse nearby, and a daily check-in with the family that lived there. But still. The girls slept every night in their tent by a stream. They couldn’t see the house from their camp. They prepared their own meals and survived mosquitoes, gnats and leeches. They had disagreements, but worked things out without adult intervention. At week’s end, they knew they’d had an experience they would never forget.
What a contrast with the kids described in Richard Louv’s book, who have lost touch with the natural world. The Children & Nature movement, working to reverse this trend, is finding out we also need to pry Mom and Dad away from their desks and computers and cars, because parents don’t let kids run free any more. Even if they want to, society tends not to let them. Two years ago, a single mom was arrested for letting her 9-year-old play at a park while she was at work. In the daytime, with a cell phone. And that wasn’t an isolated case.
The girls in Spider Tree didn’t have cell phones. That book was published in 1959. I found it in the early ‘60s. To my fourth-grade self, it read like a marvelous adventure, but not especially far-fetched. Today, it seems like a fairy tale: nearly as fantastic as the Harry Potter series. As dated, in its way, as those Betsy-Tacy stories that took place over a century ago.
Having just read Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, I found myself wondering if I’d made the whole thing up. Three pre-adolescents in a tent by themselves? That book was in my grade-school library. Would it even be allowed today?
Curiosity aroused, I got online and tracked down a copy of Tent Under the Spider Tree. It really is as good as I remembered. Short chapters written for kids, characters with distinct personalities, plenty of action.
My recollection was a little fuzzy. The girls camped out for a week, not a whole season. They weren’t entirely unsupervised: there was a farmhouse nearby, and a daily check-in with the family that lived there. But still. The girls slept every night in their tent by a stream. They couldn’t see the house from their camp. They prepared their own meals and survived mosquitoes, gnats and leeches. They had disagreements, but worked things out without adult intervention. At week’s end, they knew they’d had an experience they would never forget.
What a contrast with the kids described in Richard Louv’s book, who have lost touch with the natural world. The Children & Nature movement, working to reverse this trend, is finding out we also need to pry Mom and Dad away from their desks and computers and cars, because parents don’t let kids run free any more. Even if they want to, society tends not to let them. Two years ago, a single mom was arrested for letting her 9-year-old play at a park while she was at work. In the daytime, with a cell phone. And that wasn’t an isolated case.
The girls in Spider Tree didn’t have cell phones. That book was published in 1959. I found it in the early ‘60s. To my fourth-grade self, it read like a marvelous adventure, but not especially far-fetched. Today, it seems like a fairy tale: nearly as fantastic as the Harry Potter series. As dated, in its way, as those Betsy-Tacy stories that took place over a century ago.
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