New Frontiers

Over the weekend my husband and I took our daughter to PA for one last out-of-state trip before our second is born. Ayla's eyes took in endless stretches of pavement, buildings plain and flat, bulldozers and diggers carving out new ground for more construction, streams of fastfood joints and Walmarts, and an occasional tree in bloom. When I was a child and teenager, the view from my car window brought in row upon row of corn and soybean, suburb upon suburb, and small town after small town. Granted I was traveling in the midwest and Ayla is traveling on the east coast, but both trips lack the same thing: a natural landscape stretching to the horizon.

I've experienced this type of view from a car window three times in my life: (1) while living in Costa Rica and traveling by bus into the rainforest, (2) on my honeymoon in remote areas of New Zealand, and (3) driving across British Columbia and Montana and the Dakotas to move from the Pacific northwest to the east coast. There have been other times in my life when I've also backpacked into the backcountry to see a 360 degree view of natural landscapes reaching to the horizon, but it's difficult to find this while driving.

Will our children lose this view entirely during their lifetime? I imagine so.

One of the essential needs of human nature, however, is wilderness and the expanse of frontiers wide open to the mind. How will the absence of such frontiers affect future minds? I want to give my daughter the visions I've had from car windows and more, but I may only get to achieve this through writing.

Due to a background in biology and nature, I tend to write on that subject for children and young adults. But what will the children of our future write about when nature to them occurs in pockets between city sprawl, in sidewalk cracks, in fenced-in backyards, in books published before their time?

Perhaps literature and writing can offer new frontiers for them to explore and fulfill the need of human nature for the wildness inside wilderness...