Jessica Story
ENG 311.07
Dr. J. Halden-Sullivan
2/21/2002
Draft #1 of Assignment #1

One of the greatest gifts my parents ever gave to me was my appreciation of nature. Actually, to say that it is mere appreciation I feel for the environment would be an understatement. I crave the outdoors. And to be honest, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

My outlook on life has, at times, been a great puzzle to some of my friends, or so I’ve been told. They have wondered just how is it that I have grown up looking at the world from such a different perspective than what they are used to. In reality, I owe my rather different outlook on life to my parents and their enthusiasm for teaching about nature.

How did my parents instill this love for the environment in me? It began before I was born, apparently. My parents have regaled my brother and I with stories about their own experiences with nature. I’ve been told, for instance, that my mother’s mother was an avid bird watcher and animal lover. When my mother was growing up, my grandmother allowed her to keep various birds and lizards as pets. At one point, my grandmother even rescued a crow chick and allowed my mother to raise it. I’ve heard many tales about the antics of Poe-the-crow from my mother. At the end of the season, the crow was released in order to let it migrate. After enjoying experiences such as those, It’s no wonder, really, that my mother learned to love nature.

My father, too, learned to appreciate the natural world, although I think that he did this pretty much on his own, especially considering that most of his siblings adopted careers concerning law enforcement and corrections. Instead of following that path, my father went so far as to become a geologist. Today, he works for the Bureau of Groundwater Pollution Abatement for the state of New Jersey, helping to make that area a better place environmentally.

While growing up, my parents took every opportunity to teach my brother and I about the outdoors. My memories of our lessons begin when I was about four years old (or perhaps younger). We lived in a rural area of Ohio called Claysville (called this because the ground wasn’t so much soil as it was clay, making it difficult to grow many things). We had two acres of land with hardly a tree in sight. Our backyard backed up to our neighbor’s cow pasture, and once in a while my brother and I were taken out there to feed the cows bits of wild grass. My parents also tried their hands at gardening, and they would often take us on walks around the tomato plants, corn stalks, and sunflowers (none of which ever grew much taller than my parents’ knees).

Some of my fondest memories of that house involve the walks we used to take around the yard. A staple exhibit of the backyard was the bluebird house, hung from a post between our two, lonely blue spruce trees which my parents planted when we moved there. My mother would lift each of us to peer inside the wooden box to see if the bluebird eggs had hatched yet. In one of the neighboring spruce trees there was also a robin’s nest with its pale blue, speckled eggs.

It may come as some surprise that by this age, I could tell a cardinal from a robin, a robin from a meadowlark, and a meadowlark from a junco. Truthfully, I would never have considered that strange had I not encountered people my own age today who don’t know the difference between these very distinct and striking birds. I find it rather sad, really, that they may not have been given the opportunity to learn these things as I did.

My parents also did something which I think few parents do for their kids. In an old, ten-gallon aquarium, they placed the eggs of monarch butterflies and the leaves on which they were found. In a short time, the eggs hatched to reveal the tiny, black and white striped caterpillars. My parents would place fresh leaves of the milkweed plant of which monarchs are specifically adapted to feed on as often as was necessary. I remember being amused for long periods of time just watching the caterpillars devour their food. Those caterpillars grew up fast and before long had pupated. At that point, my brother and I would only check in on the chrysalises periodically, watching them get darker as the days wore on. The most exciting bit, of course, was when the butterflies hatched. When they were able to split their way out of their cocoons, the butterflies would rest while slowly flexing the fluid out of their wings. It was one the most amazing sights I had ever seen in my young life. It was even exhilarating to watch them fly away when it became time to let them go.

I wasn’t quite five when we had to move again, but I’ll never forget the things which I learned about while living in that house. And no matter where we moved to, every summer my parents would set up a fish tank for the monarch butterflies to hatch in.

Small projects were not the only things which we did that had to do with the outdoors. Rather than go to church on Sundays, for many years my parents would take us out hiking in the woods. I remember my mother telling me that she felt that it was more appropriate to enjoy what God or Mother Nature had provided for us by spending time outdoors instead of inside a building. On our hikes through the forest, my parents taught us how to look for deer and raccoon tracks, search for crayfish in shallow creeks, and call for barred owls. We were shown how, when touched, the overripe seed pods of jewel weed would explode. Most of all, we were taught how to look and listen to that which was around us.

Those skills have come in handy on many occasions. When we could barely afford to travel anywhere, my parents would take us on camping trips. Our most spectacular trips were to Acadia National Park in Maine, the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, and our three-week long trip via pop-up camper out to Wyoming, South Dakota, and Montana. I suppose that a part of what we learned was a sort of discipline when it comes to observing nature. Our patience in waiting served us well on some of these occasions; one memorable encounter was during a five mile hike to the top of a glacier in Montana. On the way up, I recall spotting what looked like a large marmoset (a groundhog-like mammal) in the distance. When my mother saw where I was pointing, she gasped. It wasn’t a marmoset at all - it was a grizzly bear, lumbering (rather quickly, in my opinion) in our direction. Of course, I lost all thoughts of discipline at that point; I ran right up the mountain. I’ve never quite trusted my depth perception ever since, either.

From a cultural perspective, I think that the ways in which my brother and I were taught to view life are fairly different than the ways others have been taught. In a society where progress and materialism are the norm, I think that it’s fairly common to have people who are totally unconcerned with the landscape and all it contains around them. And yet, I find that it was the upbringing which my parents provided me that has inspired me to try to use what I have learned to become a biology teacher. I think one of the greatest joys in life is to show someone a different perspective than what they are used to and have them utilize it in a positive way. If I could get a handful of students to acknowledge the awareness and observation skills that they have and get them to use it to really see what’s around them, I think that I would be very happy.

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