Natural Literacy

She was tanned, slender, pretty. She was driving a navy blue Cherokee when she flagged me down in the field below Normandy Dam. I had been fishing in the shade under the bridge, but even there the 95deg. afternoon was distracting. I had just packed in my rod and started the Ram up the rut that leads from the hardtop to the shaded corner by the bridge. I could see her waving her hand just as she started in from the road. I stopped and she pulled up beside me.

"Is this Dematt Bridge?" she asked.

"No, I don't think so. What are you looking for," I asked.

"Dematt Bridge."

I stated as evenly as I could, "This is Normandy." As I began to sort out the possibilities I asked, "Are you looking for canoeists?"

"Yes."

"Where did you put in?"

"We put in at Cortner's Mill. I am supposed to meet them at Dematt Bridge."

"Cortner's Mill is downstream from here," I said. "Were they paddling upstream?" I still had not sorted it out and was trying to accredit any possibility. I have paddled upstream a few times myself. Growing up on the Rappahannock River in Virginia, we lived just above Fredericksburg where that river is continuously broken by falls and rapids all the way from the Blue Ridge. Our house was on the bluff, set back from the river about a half mile. I had a slender twelve-foot jonboat that my dad had had built for me at the local lumber yard. It had good bow and stern tapers and a cypress bottom. Even in 1958 I thought the $10 he paid the man at the lumberyard when we picked it up on Saturday morning was not much money for such a nice boat. I brought it home, painted it dark green, and filled it with water to let the seams swell. I did not exactly live in that boat the next three years, but it gave me a freedom of the river that I think kids today must feel with their four wheelers.

Next door to us lived Johnny Richards who had a Jeep pickup truck. He was one of those adults in my childhood who had a natural trust of young people, and he told me I could use the Jeep anytime I wanted to get my boat to and from the river. I could have left the boat on the river, but good boats had a way of disappearing even when chained to trees, so I carried the boat to and from the river each time I used it. Johnny made good his offer of the Jeep by placing the key under the front floor mat. Since he went to work in his car, the Jeep was at my disposal most days through the summer. I had a few friends in town who liked to mess about the river with me, but none of them had a car. That meant that it was hard to work out a shuttle for a long float trip down the river. The best day trip was the twelve or so miles from Eley's Ford on the Rapidan River just above its confluence with the Rappahannock down to Prettyman's Camp below our house on the Rappahannock. That trip took two cars. Most days we put in at Prettyman's Camp or at Mott's Run and poled and paddled upstream.

A jonboat, even if it is slender and tapered, is not easy to pole upstream on a fresh river. We managed it, though, and when we had gotten far enough upstream to enjoy the slow drift down, we put up the pole and got out the spinning rods. I knew this river was a premier smallmouth stream before I ever read that in a magazine. Back then, we just said that the fishing was good. I didn't really think of rivers and woods and fields and fence rows and lanes as "premier." The late fifties in that part of Virginia was still a time when we did not need special adjectives to identify the quality of the places we hunted and fished. We could still hunt most places just by asking, and the river belonged to the fishermen. The few canoeists we saw were usually boy scouts. Fishermen preferred the stability of boats and mine was as stable as they came. I could stand on the corner of the bow or stern and cast or pole and never worry about tipping it over or cutting the gunnel under the edge of the water. The current moved us along and we steered with a single paddle, fishing the edge of the grasses between the rocks in the fast water. The fishing was good.

She was still leaning out the window of her Cherokee. I suppose the image of paddling upstream and the instant flashback to days on the Rappahannock had made too long a pause. She spoke again, "I think I'm lost."

I stepped out of the Ram and walked toward her. I took down my maps from over the visor as I got out. She got out. Before I opened a map, I pointed to the dam and said, "The river starts right over there. It flows from there, around that ridge, down to here." We were standing a few yards from the path to the bank under the bridge. We could see the scudsing and leaves on the brown water drifting past us. I pointed to the river, "The water goes that way."

"Uh. I'm kind of new at this. Is 'downstream' the way the water flows?"

My mind flashed away again, to my students. She may be lost, I thought, but she is gutsy enough to say so and to ask for help. She had stated her situation and her need for information directly and without pride. It was a kind of spontaneity and innocence hard to evoke in the classroom. And she is willing enough to ask the most basic of all questions: "Is 'downstream' the way the water flows?" I had to smile. "Yes, it is. Here, I'll show you on the map." We found the dam, Cortner's Mill, and I pointed out the downstream bridges below the mill. We traced the roads along the river leading from the mill and I reminded her of her turns. The last I saw of her was her blue Cherokee raising dust at the corner of the field as she turned on to the blacktop and headed 'downstream'. I think she was going to be late.

As she left, I began to feel confused and lost in my own way. "Is 'downstream' the way the water flows?" She had appeared to be about thirty-five. She was married and although she had not said so, I assumed she had children. It seemed to be a family outing where dad, probably, was taking the kids for a Sunday afternoon fishing float trip on the river. Married or not, mother or not, her life had intersected with someone else's life which had intersected with rivers and canoes. Her getting lost was not noteworthy. Anybody can get lost. But her getting lost had evidently derived from her lack of a primordial piece of information: downstream is the way rivers flow. How could she have not known that? Where were streams in this woman's childhood? Had she never played with sticks in the gutter? Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. Had she never sung that round in school? Or did she sing it without a clue? Was she a victim of the way her father treated her brothers, and had she been left to dresses and shopping and not taken fishing or boating?

I thought again of my students. Sometimes they will ask the basic, innocent question. I remember the one who asked in my Southern Religion class as plainly as if she were asking what page we were on in the text, "Do they still pick cotton by hand?" I had been talking about the effects of the invention of the Whitney gin on the South's commitment to cotton, stressing the reduction in hand labor made possible by the gin. It was a good question, too, needing to be asked. The stereotypes that separate us from the history of the South are as powerful as those that now separate us from farms. For this student, who drove several times each week past a cotton field, instruction was easy. I asked her if she had noticed the white, snow-like edging along that road and the big wagons with wire bins parked along the road. "That is cotton," I said. "The field you pass is a cotton field. The cotton is picked by machine and blown into those wagons. Some of it falls out as the wagons are pulled down the road. That's the white stuff on the shoulder of the road. We haven't picked cotton by hand down here for a long time."

My students are children of an urban world. Very few of them know farms. Fewer and fewer of them hunt and fish. And the world of natural lore they no longer have access to is not any more a matter of gender. In class the other day, I said that I kept a whittling stick in my truck to use when I was talking to a certain farmer I knew. I explained that many of the conversations I had that provided insights about land and people and the changes taking place had come when I would sit with them and whittle and pass the time of day. As I said this, I took out my pocket knife and held it out to the class to illustrate the point. I asked if any of them had pocket knives. I expected to find a few. I was stunned when there were none, not even a poor blade riveted into a money clip or nail clippers. There was not a sharp edge in the class. I chided the guys, "When I was growing up, no self respecting boy would have ever gone to school without his pocket knife." One of the girls spoke up, "Boys never have knives anymore. Our sorority had a party the other night and we needed to cut some ribbon. We asked the boys if anybody had a knife and no one had one then either."

I can understand, I suppose, why the habit of carrying pocket knives has disappeared. One student stated it, "The teachers wouldn't let us carry knives. They were afraid we would fight." I don't think that thought would ever have occurred to my teachers. Knives were a familiar tool--like a pencil sharpener or eraser or a pair of sissors. We did not carry knives to be armed. We carried knives because there were things that needed to be cut, scraped, pried, or whittled. I did not know a boy in my school who did not have a pocket knife. You carried a pocket knife to school--and every where else--as naturally as you carried your books or a pencil. No one even thought about it. Later that day, I asked another class the same question about pocket knives. This class produced one pocket knife--in the purse of a girl. Her father had given it to her, and it was a using knife, not an ornament. She was proud of it and proud to carry it with her. She was one out of fifty that day.

Another group of students came to mind. In an upper-level American literature class at Vanderbilt, the professor had asked a class of thirty-four students if any one of them had ever seen a live chicken. Not one of them had. I remember another young college woman. She had never seen a "shooting star". We were co-counselors at a summer camp. She was embarrassed in front of our campers. That night we took our whole campsite to the dock in the middle of the lake and lay on our backs looking at the sky. It was July, and the Aquarid meteor shower did not let us down. In a little while the kids were cheering for each white streak across the sky. It had been easy to turn that page of experience for the campers. The harder page to turn was in my own assumptions. Raised on the edge of town and going daily back and forth to my grandparent's farm, hunting, fishing, frog gigging, hiking, walking, sitting, in the woods I had acquired knowledge I carried as part of myself without having to think about it. Hunting and fishing were important then as they still are for one reason: if you are going to hunt or fish you have to pay attention to what is going on in the woods or in the water.

Not all my knowledge was self-acquired, however. What I can now look back and recall having learned myself was a second order of knowledge. The first order of knowledge had arisen in the instruction--often the silent instruction given only in a pause along the path in the woods or a turning of the head in the corn row--of my father, grandfathers and great-grandfather, uncles I didn't know they were teaching me anything. They were the most important people in my child's world and I wanted to be like them. I walked behind them on the paths. I held the crossbeam of the plow handles and walked in the furrow behind the mule with my grandfather. When they stopped talking, I stopped talking. When they began to search the sky or trees ahead, I did too. At four or five years old, I did not know what they had heard or seen, but already they had taught me to look and listen. Soon I was doing it for myself. Scoutmasters and science teachers years later only built on what was already there.

The more I think of it, the knowledge and experience I carry is more a generational thing than a matter of gender. My grandmothers killed the chickens and taught me about blood and viscera. I watched the entrails coil about their wrists like yellow-gray snakes. I can still see the sheen of fat on their knuckles as they worked chickens into frying pieces or reduced the tubs of hog parts to useful food. Grandmother Emma's eye was a sharp as any man's for the hawk or fox around her chicken yard, and the .32 break action Smith & Wesson she carried in her apron pocket when she was in the garden or on the wood path was not carried for sentiment. She was more efficient with a hoe on copperheads around the porch than my grandfather was. I always had the sense with her that, in a way I never thought about then, she always seemed to know that something was not quite right outside and would put down her biscuits or cloth and go outside. I learned to listen for the high kree of hawks from her. How she knew the snakes were on the well deck, I never fathomed. She just seemed to know. Perhaps what she paid attention to was the silence of the other animals or a change in the bark of the dog. My aunts, her daughters, could shoot as well as their brothers, and they never had to ask a man to check a gun to see if it were loaded. They checked for themselves. Farms were more egalitarian than we recall, and the division of labor between the house and the fields was practical and far less ideological than we can now admit.

Between that world of my childhood and that of my college students a lot has changed. The Vanderbilt students are not unusual anymore. When I asked the same question of my own class, several had seen live chickens because some of them had come to college from rural areas. But when I broadened my questions beyond the farm yard to the open fields and woods, their experience thinned. At Sewanee, we still attract many students who hunt and fish and these, young women and men alike, represent as continuing tradition of natural education. Many of these students, however, like college students across the country, come from exclusively urbanized experience and have little knowledge of anything off the edge of the pavement. Our campus is infested with deer, but many of them will still say they have never seen a deer. Many have never walked the wooded ravine path that bisects the middle of the campus. Few can identify the trees or shrubs around them. Some days as we walk the campus to "have class outside" I think I am a camp counselor again headed for the lake at midnight.

What kind of world is it we have made when our educated citizens have not seen live chickens, think cotton is still picked by hand, and have to ask "Is 'downstream' the way the water flows?" How can we expect an enlightened electorate to make good decisions about environmental issues if they have no native sense of what the parts are and how they fit together in the natural world? The more I find myself explaining in class about land, water, trees, animals, farms and forests and the general processes that link these into communities of dependency the more I think that there is not only a problem of cultural literacy confronting American education but a problem of natural literacy as well.

I learned as director of our outing program that guided wilderness hiking, canoeing and kyaking are not enough to produce natural literacy. The linear, channelized, experience of a trail or whitewater stream is not an experience of wilderness or nature. Improved, park department trails and now whitewater rivers, are intrustions into wilderness from the paved world. As often as not, the trail or river experience keeps the person from seeing things instead of allowing them to see them. Wilderness experience is powerfully distorted in the array and cost of the equipment that both makes possible access to remote areas and at the same time insulates our minds from the experience of the area. I have seen students in full catalog gear that would serve to protect them in any wilderness on earth stand on a mountain top to watch a sunrise and be unable to point to south when I told them which way we would be hiking.

This kind of natural illiteracy is dangerous both in the wilderness and in society. Of course, if they stay on the trail and follow the person ahead of them, they won't get lost. Most trails eventually go somewhere. That is not the problem. The problem is the mental cocoon that insulates their mind better than their polyfill does their bodies from the experience of what is around them. That cocoon keeps them from knowing that they are already part of the world that they stare at externally as observers. It is not just that they lack the information or lore. Knowledge can always be supplied by precept, instruction, manual, and carefully constructed experience. What they lack is the sense of already given unity with something that they do not have to deduce an external relation to. The knowledge our culture has stolen from them in the lie of the streets and houses and malls is that the world I talk about is already their world; it was their world as birthright before they ever had to see it as something to be learned about or recovered.

American culture kidnaps its children and steals them away from their home in the natural order of things. It supplants their natural literacy as birthright with an artificial, synthetic, alien awareness that curses most of them for the rest of their lives. Sometimes I feel a great sadness for my students. The know so much and so little at the same time. I hunt and fish. I see snakes and hawks, herons and loons. I smell spoor and finger the slime on the water. And I am not the alien here. I am not the stranger in this land. The strangers are the sad children and their parents and teachers and public guardians who do not walk the land as birthsoil and who, in great delusion, think now their's is the real world. It is not. It is, of necessity, an artificial world, but it is dangerous for any culture, any society, to think that it lives to itself and apart from the blowing of the wind, the rotting of leaves, the heat of the sun, the falling of rain, or the drumming of the grouse. And it can be a dangerous thing not to know which way the water flows.