Chapter 26
We laid on our backs watching stars
To us, they did not seem so far
We’d close our eyes and we’d fly away
Lighter than air, lighter than air
“Reaching Down to Touch the Sky”
While a baby is still in the womb, its mother has near-total control over the care and comfort of her child, providing all the nourishment, warmth, and rambunctious room a kid could want, until they realize they want more. As soon as the baby makes its entrance into the world, the mother’s arms become the cradled observation deck and first point of contact with a world full of unending provocations.
As babies, we learn to be brave while safely ensconced. Learning to be courageous and plucky while vulnerable, well, that comes later in life for most of us, and never for some of the more pitiful among us.
Society has invested considerable resources in the protection of the unborn and the newborn. We have baby gates to confine us, audio and video monitors to capture any problems that may arise during paranoid parents’ attempts at sleep, and even the mighty baby leash to keep wanderlust-driven toddlers from running off. Plus, we can reel them back in like fish if they pull against us. Society places a high value on protecting the unborn, infants and toddlers, but much like the depreciation on a car as it’s being driven off the lot, society recognizes the worthiness of children less and less with every passing year.
“Mark,” my mother called to the back of my head as I ran out the door, “remember to watch for the streetlight.”
I had already transitioned from concrete to grass by the time her words caught up with me, but I knew what she meant. The world was mine until the streetlight turned on. As the distance between home and everything else widened, I heard her last vestiges of advice: “Be home for dinner, be nice to your friends, and be caref…”
That last bit about being careful never seemed to reach me intact. Her voice disappeared behind a sticky summer breeze, a limited attention span, and the competing sounds of my childhood.
The Sons of Starmount stood upright, all of four-feet-tall in an infinitely large world. We were green but hungry for life. We were like little eager missiles in search of the launch codes. Whether it was knees skinned by asphalt, fingers punctured by fishhooks and blackberry thorns, or even the occasional big toenail finding itself wedged between blacktop and bike pedal, until it wasn’t, we had early skin in the game. I didn’t know it then, but my parents were handing me the keys to what was quickly becoming a life of my own making. I was ten and taking the world out for a spin.
It was a gamble for my parents, for all our parents. For them, the tradeoff was giving up the comfort of short-term control over every aspect of our safety in exchange for the duty of making a positive lifelong impact on our self-confidence and ability to make wise decisions when it counted.
How do you protect your kids from harm? How do you instill them with the knowledge and experience to inoculate them against the threatening edges of a brand-new world? How can others see it as a mature adult practice to under-supervise a child? How do you explain your leniency to a doctor, a police officer, or worse, to the parent of the kid next-door? Our parents must have asked themselves these questions and worried about the answers. Or maybe not. Either way, I think it helped them, and us, to have had the culture of 1977 on their side.
Even still, Alligator Pond, a watery world of gators and snakes, seems like a preposterous landscape to let us navigate alone. The notion that our parents had raised what some might best describe as expensive bait seems ridiculous. Similarly, the tall pine trees might just as well have been spires from which we could break our necks and the densely wooded passages, perilous mazes to wither away in, lost forever. The adults in our world were either temporarily gifted enough to see through a child’s eyes or at least healthy enough to have their own lives to live parallel to ours. Or maybe they were just crazy as hell to parent us so freely.
We learned valuable life lessons thanks to our parents’ permissiveness. In communing with the animals that shared our space, especially the poisonous snakes and the big alligators, we learned to respect instead of fear. We learned to coexist instead of kill. Most importantly, we learned that we are not the center of the universe, as we had initially believed.
As it turned out, a precarious perch atop a fifty-foot-tall pine tree was not a place from which to fall, but a place from which to measure distances yet to travel. The kingdoms we previously thought were out of reach came into fine focus from the crown of those giant trees. If we could see it on the horizon, we’d find a way to get there.
Sure, climbing such trees was an exercise in bravado, but not the type born of go-it-alone arrogance. It was a lesson in the power of pulling one another up to the next branch, eventually reaching a place of shared vision and collective accomplishment. We didn’t speak of life in such terms, of course, let alone think in them. But we felt life in those terms.
Our now famous, but covert, midnight rambles that began at the unzipped doors of our backyard pup tents set us on a course past the conformity of streetlights and into hidden moonlit fields and shadow-laden backroads. Surely the thing of nightmares for any parent, those spirited walkabouts were in themselves fostering of a wandering heart and a critical eye. We did not blindly bumble our way through the darkness, as our vulnerable ages might suggest. We carefully and deliberately followed familiar paths to the outer edges of even our daylight wanderings. Those outings, along with nearly everything we did together, nourished our sense of wonder and adventure. Climbing, scaling, crawling, swimming, running, and every other mode of wilderness transport available to us proved a couple of important life lessons early on: effort begets reward and the struggle is worth it.
Along with unfettered access to the world around us and seemingly unlimited decision-making opportunities, we also had the freedom to fight with one another. We fractured alliances, made up, broke up, and made up again. We could earn and lose each other’s trust, and even leverage our friendship for personal gain, if we wanted to. All of that defined the purest form of freedom, and it was unquestionably encouraged. Through our childlike simulations of society, we learned the lessons that would enlighten our budding characters. We lied to each other and then caught one another other doing so. We positioned ourselves, selfishly at times, to win, only to discover how lonely it felt when everyone else lost. We trifled with arrogance and self-importance, only to find that healthy self-esteem came inextricably tied to the kid next to you and the ones standing next to him.
Through space, so liberally given to us by our parents, we learned to stand up for ourselves and to draw a line in the sand. Even more importantly, we learned how to step over it, and even redraw it when life and a clearer head demanded it. We learned to offer apologies as well as forgiveness, and in the process, stumbled upon a core principle of civilization: you need to practice making peace. Get good at it, or risk becoming an expert in making war. Staying angry with people that were important to you, especially over circumstances less important than friendship, just plain sucked. We took to heart the fact that laughter, joy, and companionship outweighed dominance, intimidation, and even personal triumph. Our teenage years and young adulthood would provide more than enough opportunities for a gluttonous ego; there was no need to hurry that along. The serious leveraging of friendship seemed more perilous than the more natural poisons and hazards we so often encountered.
My life on Starmount is still my best evidence that to be a truly protective and nurturing parent, you must be able to let go, and to do so beyond the high walls and latched doors. I don’t know whether the Sons of Starmount made that task easier or harder for our parents. We certainly gave them ample opportunity to acquire the skill of remote parenting. We were miniature agitators of the status quo, instigating insurrection at every turn. We were not yet familiar with Mark Twain’s two Hannibal Hellions, but we embodied their ability to look cute and smile through the day’s deceptions.
To be fair to our parents, they did set limits. It’s not as if we were feral babies toddling the streets with a compass pinned to our diapers and a best-of-luck bindle tied to a pussy-willow branch across our doughy shoulders.
What inspired our parents to give us such room to roam? How were they able to let go of a significant measure of control long before society’s norms demanded it? Maybe it was the freedom of the times or just their exhaustive sense of the inevitable. Maybe it was something far more progressive in them. We wouldn’t have recognized it then, much less credit them with it, but I can see it now.
To nurture a child’s need to wander, to invent, and to learn, especially from self-inflicted missteps, a parent must have a deep respect for what it means to be a child. They must be able to see beyond the fragile bones and vulnerable skin, above the short statures and wispy voices. Adults must have the courage to see the world as a child sees it: a big front door regularly left open, even if only a crack. Some adults aren’t strong enough to do that. Luckily for us, our parents were.
After having found my footing on Starmount, my life has been a virtual longitudinal research study on the insulating properties of childhood freedom. Allowing kids an infinite world of self-discovery and providing them quarter for finding their own character seems a parent’s best shot at instilling the character traits they most want to pass down. Sanctioning our autonomy at such a tender age proved to be more nurturing than even our mothers’ wombs. Our independence was an incredibly selfless gift, one with far more impact than any incubator, baby monitor, leash, or fenced effort could have ever been.