The older I get, the more sentimental I become. And, I realize now that the best gifts, be it Christmas, birthday or anniversary, are ones that come from the heart, and not the wallet.
Hunters love bucks:Ohio hunters love their big bucks, but is doe population getting out of hand?
With that said, once again I urge everyone to give the gift of the outdoors this Christmas. No, not a new fishing pole, hunting jacket or shotgun, but the true joy of the outdoors: days in the woods, on the water, in the mountains, on the beach — or simply in the town, city, county, state or national park.
Let me tell you a story.
Growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, my parents felt it was important to at least give me, and my three older brothers, a taste of the outdoors.
We all were in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, we camped when we went on vacations in the family station wagon, and we even had a small patch of woods on our town lot, which, when I was 8 years old, seemed big and wonderful, but now 60 years later, not so much.
My dad even recruited (no, required) us boys to go along with him on weekends to dig up tree species that we didn’t have in the woods and transplant them so we would have more varieties. He was even involved in an elm study planting new strains in an effort to combat Dutch elm disease.
Growing up, we didn’t think we were different than anyone else in town. Every mom taught their children the sounds of a chickadee and pee wee, and every dad made skunk cabbage flower bouquets in the spring and cherished their transplanted jack-in-the-pulpit, right?
We knew the difference between a red oak and a white oak, learned about edible plants, and more importantly, garnered a work ethic with hours spent weeding the garden the old-fashioned way on hands and knees. If it wasn’t done by the time dad got home from work, there would be consequences.
Through it all, though, the part of growing up that sticks with me the most are the stories my parents told of their childhoods, where they learned to love nature. Of course, the 1920s and ’30s was certainly a different time than now, so folks got outdoors more back then.
Shared outdoor memories make the magic
As I noted, my mom was fond of bird watching, although she was certainly not of the caliber of today’s aficionados of the sport. One of her favorites was the belted kingfisher, and it’s one of the reasons I have an old Audubon framed print of one on the walls in my living room, along with a collage of nine other bird prints.
As the story goes, she and her mother would drop my grandfather off at a small New Hampshire stream, and as he worked his way up the brook in search of trout, she and my grandmother would walk through the woods, looking for birds (often seeing the belted kingfisher as her father pushed it up the stream), searching out wildflowers and identifying trees.
They would wait for my grandfather at an old wooden bridge, where my mother would drop a line between the cracks in the wooden deck of the bridge in hopes of catching trout. She thought that made her a fisherman.
I am often reminded of that story, you see, because I have my grandfather’s old Horton Mfg. Co. Rainbow steel fly rod, circa 1910.
I hate to admit it, but I haven’t taken very good care of it, as its home is a spot on the shelf over my workbench in the basement. It’s covered in sawdust and pitted from the moisture in the basement of our old farmhouse, and the cloth case shows the scars of the fly rod’s rust.
I’m sure I can still make it work, and someday I might take it fishing, but the true value of it, at least in my mind, are the memories it conjures up each time I see it. And, therein lies the magic of the gift of the outdoors.
That gift is something we all should be willing to share. You see, we can’t have it all to ourselves. It’s meant to be shared and enjoyed by others. And when you do that, you’ll find that your success in the woods and on the waters isn’t all that important.
What counts is helping someone else have that success, those experiences, those memories, that joy, and the opportunities to learn the importance of conservation. That’s a true gift, and one that we should all learn to recognize, appreciate and most importantly, share.
Merry Christmas!
Outdoor correspondent Art Holden can be reached at letsplabal@yahoo.com
Credit: Source link
