By Kristi Atherton
A little boy stands in a field at the edge of the woods. He is not alone. From a distance his caregiver observes, and lets the little boy lead the way. Snow reaches halfway up his calves as he walks, and his little body, fully dressed in winter outdoor gear, is powdered white from his irresistible urge to understand the snow dangling from the hemlock branches within his reach. Each time he pulls a branch, he learns if he stands to the side he doesn’t get covered in snow, but if he wants to get covered in snow he stands under the branch.
The little boy arrives at a downward slope, and looks at his caregiver. “You choose the way,” she says and she keeps walking slowly from behind. The little boy thinks it looks fun to go down the hill. Giggling he runs down, moving fast and free. Falling a few times, he discovers how fun it is to slide down the hill on his belly. He repeats the activity; climb up the hill, slide down, climb up the hill, slide down, and each time he slides down the hill he goes faster. Each time he climbs up the hill, if he follows in his same tracks, it is much easier.
Climbing tires the little boy. He sits down in the snow to rest, and eats the fluffy white snow from his mitten. He hears a trickling sound, and gets up to see what it is. Along the side of the slope, he discovers water as it spills over small rocks and runs slowly down the hill, melting the snow in its path. He watches the water. He steps over the small brook to get a look from another direction. The little boy picks up a handful of snow and throws it in the water. Like magic the snow disappears. He is delighted with the outcome and continues, each time with a bigger handful of snow. Next, he throws a small stick in and it doesn’t disappear, but instead moves with the water down the hill.
As the little boy begins to gather more sticks, a small tree has fallen in his path. He chooses to climb over it. Straddled across the tree, the little boy, bearing his full weight on the branch, feels it sink toward the ground. He stands up and the branch rises with him. He tries it again. Up, down, up, down he bounces on the small tree. The harder he bounces down the higher he bounces back up. Forgetting about the stream and the sticks, the little boy continues to bounce, until he is interrupted by a high-pitched whistle from above.
He looks up. A large bird soars overhead. “It’s an eagle,” says his caregiver. “It’s looking for food.” The little boy points in the bird’s direction, and the caregiver says, “Yes, follow it if you like.” And he does. He climbs and climbs up several slopes and steep ridges. He is getting tired, and the eagle is not around to motivate his intentions. “This is a giant mountain you are climbing,” says his caregiver. “Do you think we can make it?” The little boy looks up to see where he has to go, he looks down to see how far he has come, he marches forward to the top of the ridge and his caregiver follows behind. At the top, he sits down with his caregiver and has a snack and drink from her pack. “You are a mountain climber today,” she says. He smiles as a black shadow ripples across the snow in front of them. Looking up, he sees the eagle again.
Without hesitation, he heads down the back side of the ridge in the direction of the eagle. As the land flattens out, young trees grow thick and dense: grey birch, white birch, and pine. So thick that the little boy cannot walk through them. He stops and contemplates. “Look,” says his caregiver, who had gotten down on her knees, “rabbit tracks.” The little boy gets down on his knees too and looks at the tracks that disappear into the thicket and he begins to follow the tracks. As best she can, because she is much bigger than the little boy, she crawls through the thicket, while the little boy on hands and knees hops along like a rabbit. As they reach the other side of the thicket, the little boy hops out into the clearing and the caregiver tumbles behind. “Today you get to see the world through somebody else’s eyes, you are a rabbit,” says the caregiver. The little boy hops a few more times, and smiles as the eagle’s high-pitched whistle is heard again from above.
The little boy and the caregiver head up the hill to go home for the day. He doesn’t have a coloring page or a pasted collage to hang on the refrigerator to talk about his day. However, inventoried in his brain, is the experience to make his own decisions and experiment with different outcomes, to see the world from a different view, find a solution to a problem, going down is easier than going up, gravity. As the trail packs he goes faster, less friction, someday he will understand Laws of Motion. Water makes noise when it falls downhill and moves things with it: stream-flow, water cycle, and erosion. Bouncing on a branch pushes him into the air, catapults. And soon he will understand the rabbit stays in the thicket so he doesn’t become the eagle’s lunch.
