My late husband kept a quote about television taped to a file cabinet. I can't remember it word for word, but the idea was that the evil of television is not in its portrayals of sex and violence, but in its ability to convince us that life is elsewhere.
The smartphone is the most obvious inheritor of television's evil ability to distract us and take us out of our immediate surroundings, but our real daily lives are diminished just as much by our uncritical acceptance of a commonly peddled notion about the great outdoors: that it's elsewhere. Not true: It begins at your front door.
My steadfast walking partner is a great outdoorswoman. I can barely keep track of her trips. In the past year she's hiked all over Big Bend National Park, Glacier National Park, and Cumberland Island National Seashore. She slipped and fell at Victoria Falls. (She's fine.)
I have no desire to accompany her on these excursions, but walking around Little Rock, I'm always amazed by her ability to navigate. I can say, "I've only got about an hour," and without pencil, paper, compass, or smartphone, she can map out a route that will, in about an hour, take us by the greatest possible number of Queen Anne houses in downtown Little Rock.
How did she acquire this ability? Her mother made her ride her bike to school. Every day, from first grade through sixth, except in heavy rain, my friend pushed her bicycle up a steep hill on one of the suburban Little Rock streets overlooking the Arkansas River, then rode it to Forest Park Elementary School.
The trip is about a mile and a half. Even in the 1960s, it involved crossing four lanes of Cantrell traffic. (The first widening of Cantrell Road was completed in 1962. The average daily traffic count at the Lincoln Avenue Viaduct was 15,000 in 1954; by 1965, the count was 27,000. Double the width of the road, double the traffic. It's called induced demand.)
As my friend pushed and pedaled her bicycle to and from school every day, her young brain forged billions upon billions of neural connections. It pruned some, too; that's the "recreate" in "recreation."
Walking or riding a bicycle for daily transportation, in safe circumstances, requires a little passive attention but mainly grants our minds great freedom to absorb and sort information from our surroundings (consciously or unconsciously), to plot, to daydream, to learn, without trying very hard, the arts of self-direction and navigation.
There were other kids along on my friend's commute to school. Siblings, neighbors. They had a task: to get from point A to point B, but no adult supervision. As John Rosemond used to point out in a column that ran in this paper, that's when kids learn to cooperate and to govern themselves.
If you want to raise citizens capable of existing in and maintaining a free society, you've got to give them safe spaces. I mean literal safe spaces, not protection from hurt feelings. Young people need to be able to roam freely in space and to accomplish, day after day, on their own, the simple task of getting somewhere.
When you move about in open air, every day, in the place where you live, that place becomes a somewhere. There's nothing wrong with the great elsewheres; long live our state and national parks and national seashores and national rivers. But the place that matters, the place that you need to connect and reconnect to, physically, every single day, is the place where you live.
I would like to see an Arkansas where every town-dwelling child can ride his or her bicycle to school in safety, and where every little old lady can find a safe path from her county courthouse to the most far-flung Walmart. Until we are all able to recreate outdoors daily, in safety, all the world-class mountain bike trails in the world won't mean a thing.
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One of the greatest diagnostic essays of the 20th century is Joan Didion's "Slouching towards Bethlehem," which originally ran in 1967 in the Saturday Evening Post. Talking to the deracinated, dangerously misdirected kids in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury at the height of hippie culture, Didion wrote, "These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values."
When I came back to Arkansas after college, I came back to my web. In Arkansas, many of us share a web that is tight and intricate, yet extensive. We have people, whether they are close to us or not, we've known our whole lives. They tell us stories, they remind us who we are.
When someone drops out of the web--not by going out to California to join the rootless society, but by dying--we all feel a trembling in the fibers. I'm hesitant to make a list for fear of leaving someone out, but I need to mention some deaths from the past few weeks.
The editorial page of this paper noted, with sadness and appreciation, the deaths of civic leaders Buddy Villines and Bruce Moore. Little Rock orthodontist Gerald Kay Johnson died on Oct. 4. The dear surgeon and artist Steno Grimes died on Oct. 6 at age 94. Public school mother, caterer, and all-around great gal Ceile Faulkner died Oct. 18. After a long career in service to children with special needs, Suzy Benham died on Halloween.
Readers will have others to remember from their own web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors, to borrow Joan Didion's wonderful phrase. May we continue to remember them, and may they all rest in peace.