Editor’s Notebook: Summertime’s when kids should work and play hard

Published 11:04 am Monday, July 18, 2022

When it comes to lawn maintenance this year, “no-mow May” melded into “monsoon June” into “why-try July.” First it was too wet and now it’s too high. Nevertheless, on Sunday I did start scalping the yard with my noisy gasoline-powered Husqvarna weed whacker from Bailey’s Saw Shop, at last clearing a path for our new puppy to go out and do everything puppies like to do. Last evening — taking a break from raising Cain with our peaceable old cat — I noticed him examining a bee on foxglove blossom, completely enthralled by simply being young and alive.

My parents had an acre of grass when I was a boy and it became my job to mow it starting at age 9. Nowadays that might get you turned in for child abuse, but in our high mountain valley kids started running power equipment and driving tractor as soon as we could lift a chainsaw and reach the peddles. Anything else was unimaginable.

Gathering firewood for winter is the state sport in Wyoming. Lodgepole pine is the dominant species in the Wind River Mountains where I grew up, but we often also cut whitebark pine, which burned long and hot but was full of knots that made it a bastard to split. Manhandling pitch-oozing logs into the backs of pickups was filthy, finger-pinching work. My brothers and I were so proud to work beside our wiry little grandpa, who set an example every day of his long life. His only vice, if you can call it that, was half a bottle of ice-cold Miller High Life after a grueling day’s labor.

There was still plenty of time for goofing off. July never fails to set me thinking about hot, dry afternoons spent drifting down irrigation ditches out in the hay fields. These ditches were hardly wider than the old, patched inner tubes we floated on. We’d keep our eyes peeled for lazy old rattlers and couldn’t help but feel a little guilty about startling grasshoppers, who sometimes leapt from alfalfa stems to their deaths in the glacial water. We’d return home at dusk, nearly parboiled by the sun in front but with hypothermic behinds.

Play is an essential part of a child’s job, though not without risk. It is, for me, one of the sadnesses of modern life that I hardly ever encounter gangs of children while out walking on our world-class system of nature trails that wind through awesome state parks and national wildlife refuges. The absence of happy squabbling voices is disconcerting, as if all the birds and frogs quit singing. We’ve removed far too much of the wild from childhood.

School’s out for summer and so, too, should be our kids. Do them some big favors: Have them do meaningful jobs every day; tougher the better. And insist they get out with their friends and play. Our neighborhoods and the future will be better for it.

This is a slightly modified version of this week’s “From the Editor’s Desk” newsletter that I send out each Monday morning to whoever wants it, subscriber or not. Aside from saying whatever’s on my mind, I usually provide a small review of what we have planned for the forthcoming edition of the Observer. Sign up at tinyurl.com/Chinook-Observer-Newsletter. This is also where you sign up for breaking news alerts.