Bridging the Nature Gap: Getting our Children Back Outside

One day, a knock on our door brought us the visitor pictured here, curled up in a green bucket. (I'll confess, it gives me an odd pleasure to be the kind of neighbor to whom folks bring amazing creatures in plastic pails.) I'd seen this other-worldly beast before, but it they are not common.

This unlikely creature is the Hickory Horned Devil--a hideously beautiful being that might have as readily come direct from the lot of a B-grade science fiction movie as from a modern-day real-life forest floor. This is the unlikely preparatory stage required to build the elegant Regal Walnut Moth, a Beast and Beauty story if ever there was one. (Notice the different tree names involved in this sinister to royal metamorphosis?)

The Horned Devil is remarkable for size alone. It has the heft of a roll of quarters, and is as fleshy and chunky as a hotdog-gargantuan by land-invertebrate standards, and indeed, it is the largest caterpillar in North America by most reckonings.

But would you reach into the bucket to lift such a thing up into the light of day? If you agitate this creature by poking it, the thrashing and rolling will remind you of an Nile Crocodile in a feeding-frenzy. That makes you think twice about touching! But it is all just bluster: those spiny horns are harmless; there are no teeth in the terror for those who would merely hold and admire.

However, to an actual predator hoping to make a meal of him (I read that waiting snakes have a strong taste for them) it's my guess that the Devil's thorny, bright orange warning antlers are there for a reason. Bad taste, bad smell or bad digestion probably lurks within-nature's fair warning to look but not touch if it's a meal you're thinking about.

Unfortunately, these defenses (and pretensions) are not enough to protect this wonderfully-horrific animal from going the way of the dodo bird. They are disappearing from our woods, and this may be the only view you get of them before they are gone entirely from green plastic pails or the neighborhood forest or park. Isn't it a shame we miss the water only as it goes dry.

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Prompts and questions like this will appear on the facing pages along with the image (with some variation on that graphic theme.)

* Do you think the Hickory Horned Devil here "wants" to be hidden, or to stand out? Hmmm.
Wonder what's the opposite of camouflage?

* Fantasy: One of these the size of a railroad car comes inch-worming down your street. Now there's a B Movie with foreign subtitles!

* Metamorphosis is the process that transforms caterpillar to moth. Can you imagine it?

* These wild-looking things might soon disappear, the species become extinct. So what? Does a creature you're unlikely ever to see matter? Why? What's lost when a species is gone forever?

While you're waiting on the nature gap to be bridged with the future book, you might find it useful to hear the author's voice and learn about the setting that the images and stories in Book #2 come from.

Go to SlowRoadHome.com and make yourself at home!

See what readers have to say about the book, find excerpts from the book, and then order it by check or PayPal.

Your support is most appreciated, and I'm fairly certain you'll enjoy the book--a "slow" read of pleasant and easy vignettes from a beautiful place and time.

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Author's Note from Slow Road Home

I know this from my photographer's experience: any image I take is one of a kind. Each composition in light or in words is unique. The light will never be that color from that angle on that exact configuration of barn, tree or wildflower ever again.

And this: that we too often take for granted the extraordinary senses of vision and hearing, touch and smell that are our gifts-opportunities given us by which we could know the familiar beauties too often missed or dismissed in our hurried lives.

We have so little time in the present and there is so very much to take in and share. There are wonders all around. From our everyday lives, these familiar things may seem unremarkable to us. But in these precious instants in time, if we keep our eyes open and our hearts ready to know it, there is nothing ordinary.

By all means, first visit the Note Cards Page.

There are now THREE SETS available: Blue Ridge Back Roads, Blue Ridge Parkway, and Blue Ridge Autumn.

Cards are 4.25 x 6.5 inches, with image edge to edge on the front, notes about the image and contact information on the back, and blank inside the fold for your greetings and messages to those with whom you want to share the landscapes of the southern mountains. Each set includes five envelopes.

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If you have a PayPal account, you can simply transfer the price of card sets plus shipping to me.

On PayPal, go to SEND MONEY and enter fred1st@gmail as recipient and send correct amount for cards and/or books plus shipping and handling. Your order will be sent within 48 hours of receipt of the transfer. Be sure and give an email address for contact in the event I need to contact you about your order.

More info on the link above if you'd simply like to send a check or cash by mail.

I'll create a Flickr gallery soon with just the fifteen images used to create the cards. They really are nice!

Email Me with questions or comments.

My friend Bobby and I were deposited one Alabama summer afternoon at his Aint Tink's and told to "go play." Though neither of us really knew how to go about it, we decided to fish in a small creek nearby. We figured it out as we went along and made do with what we could find close by--a crooked stick, a few feet of sewing thread and a safety pin scrounged from a bedroom dresser drawer. For bait, wild blackberries. Surely fish liked fruit.

We had expected nothing more than small fish to live in a stream like this, so when a big green crawdad motored out from behind a rock like a tiny robot and carried our hook and berry upstream into the dark shadow of a submerged log, we were horrified (and delighted) and ran all the way back to the house to breathlessly tell what we'd just seen.

I remembered this distant fragment of boyhood play while watching our granddaughter Abby create her own excitement and amusement on Goose Creek one afternoon of her summer visit. Her creatures were not as unexpected as the one Bobby and I witnessed, but I feel certain that fifty years down the road, she'll remember her special afternoon of improvised fishing.

A couple of buckets, a few plastic cups and a tiny minnow net: we could not have outfitted her any better for hours of play than with the tools we gathered from around the house for free. We watched from the porch, far enough away that she was in her own private realm.

We could imagine her thoughts, and some she spoke aloud to the dog. She was actor, director, narrator and audience as she made up the story about which fish (and crayfish) and how many went in each bucket and why. She decided when they had served her secret purpose and could be released-- only to be caught from the same sandy pool again several more times before dinner.

Hours pass, she is oblivious. Wet to the knees? She neither notices nor cares. Her plan for the afternoon, to do whatever comes next to mind; and the dog's: to stand ready in the cold water for as long as she might need him.

A place near home. A simple game, she makes the rules. The easy flow of mind and hands. So little space to be for her a wilderness, so little time to be a young girl's eternal present, an afternoon lost in play.