The Great Outdoors

I guess it's no surprise that I rarely see kids outside playing anymore. Many of today's children seem to have lost the drive and/or ability to make their own fun. For example; we have had a lot of snow over the last month, or so, and you would expect to see giant snow forts and snowmen adorning the yards of every house with elementary school children. I see a grand total of two as I walk the dog around our neighborhood. The same holds true all summer when the park is virtually empty unless there is an organized league baseball practice or game. Where are all the kids? Oh, yeah...they're inside playing video games or participating in some other time-wasting, often mindless activity. 

That wasn't allowed when I was growing up. 

Moms in the sixties had a very different view of The Great Outdoors than many parents seem to have today. In fact, my mom had the "Twenty Minute Rule." When you went through the door between the house and The Great Outdoors you were not allowed to come through it again for twenty minutes.  If you came inside, you were stuck inside for twenty minutes (cruel and inhumane punishment!). If you went out, you couldn't come back in for twenty minutes. Not that we cared, mind you. In fact, more often than not we crossed the threshold to The Great Outdoors as quickly as we could and refused to come back in until we were called for dinner. (All except my sister Kim, that is. Kim seemed to think of The Great Outdoors as merely someplace that caused you to get dirty.)

The Great Outdoors was our playground. It wasn't viewed as someplace dangerous; rather as the source of adventure. We skated on frozen ponds and waded in the flooded creek behind the house. We jumped off Ron's roof into giant snow piles. We climbed on the rocks along the river and jumped off the "cliffs" at Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park into the river below. We shot things with our BB guns and slingshots; and were even known to have BB gun wars on occasion. All things that involved The Great Outdoors. 

We got a spanking when we needed one and the worst words you could possibly hear were, "Just wait until your Father gets home!" 

Amazingly, we all survived. How can that be? Sometimes I look back on those days and think how much more I would have stretched them out if I had realized that the day would come when The Great Outdoors would no longer be my everyday playground; when I would dream all year of the one weekend each November when I could sit in the woods all day long waiting for a deer to pass by my stand; when I would sit in my office wishing I was in my boat pretending to care if I actually caught a fish or not. 

Wouldn't it be great if we could, just for a short time, return to those carefree days in The Great Outdoors.