Bat Caves, Culverts and a Whole Lotta Mud
How a childhood getting dirty has influenced my parenting style
When I reflect on my childhood, I have a hard time imagining how I can replicate similar experiences for my daughter. I had an unusual childhood sure, but the world has changed too, and lives seem so much more structured and controlled than they were 30 years ago.
When we lived in Paris, Ontario, we spent a lot of time outside as a family. Maybe it was due to my parents' conscious effort to avoid consumerism & mall culture and their love of adventure — my mother grew up on a sheep farm in Namibia and was used to hiking up the Brandberg, horseback riding and life outdoors. Or my grandfather’s legacy — he would rather take his three sons hiking along the Niagara Escarpment than spend a beautiful Sunday in a stuffy church.
We often went on a weekend hike, either at Apps Mill or “Hob-goblin Trail” — a secondary planted spruce and pine wood where the trees grew close to the path and loomed overhead, and my brother and I imagined all kinds of fairies, goblins, and other creatures lurking just out of sight. Mom would always point out the wildflowers, and Dad would explain the geologic formations and collect rocks.
My grandparents lived on a large property out in the country, so even if we didn’t go on a scheduled hike, we were often in the woods, finding puffballs, chasing the dogs (a series of never very smart golden retrievers), collecting sticks, fishing frogs out of the pond. In winter, we skated on the pond and built huge snow forts. Grandpa was always out cutting wood for winter or clearing trails; Grandma often caught poison ivy from doing his laundry.
On summer nights, Grandpa and I would stand out at the top of the driveway, and he taught me the constellations — The Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, Pleiades, and how to find the North Star. I dreamed of that house for many years, even after they downsized and moved back into town. The unconditional love of my grandparents probably had something to do with it.
In July 1998, we put our belongings in a sea freight container and emigrated from Canada to Papua New Guinea, a literal world away. Prior to that point, Dad had been working fly-in fly-out out of a mine in Guyana; this would give him a chance to be home every day. But it also meant moving to a mining town in a very isolated part of New Guinea, on a map only a few miles from Indonesia. In reality, it was separated from the world by mountains, jungle, cloud and 11 meters of rain a year. Yes, meters.
Things got wilder, weekend activities even more off the beaten path. Most weekends were spent loading up the “Black Beast”, a black Toyota pick-up that ran on diesel and you could hear coming a mile away, with picnic food, backpacks, bathing suits and inner tubes, and heading south on the gravel road from Tabubil to Kiunga, stopping at any one of hundreds of crystal clear streams that crossed the road. Then we hiked upstream to a point where the stream widened enough to create either a gravel beach or deep pools for swimming. We rode our inner tubes down on the rapids, then carried them back upstream and repeat for hours.
One particularly memorable location was a huge culvert directly under the road. You could climb up alongside it and then launch yourself off into the fast-flowing river some 10 or 15 feet below if you dared. I still have a 4-inch scar on my right thigh from when I fell climbing up and cut my leg on a part of exposed metal.
Mostly, we went with other expat families, or occasionally on longer hikes with a group from the Hash Club, but as we lived there for a few years and got to know the streams and trails, we went on our own as a family unit. We’d spend hours out there, fossil hunting, swimming, hiking. It’s crazy to think of now; my dad didn’t have a GPS or satellite phone or even a map (at least not one I ever saw), just verbal directions from a local or another wantok at work. Not sure what we would have done if something serious ever happened. Miraculously, no-one ever broke or sprained anything.
Every once in a while, a large group would be organized with local guides to go to the “Bat Caves”. We’d drive down the dirt road to an unmarked location, and start hiking down a trail that was more mud than anything else; having to grab onto branches as we went to prevent slipping and sliding down the near-vertical decline. Once at valley level, the trail continued alongside the river to a point where the river emerged from the rock face. We would straddle the entranceway, one foot on either side, inching forward and fighting the river current through the narrowest part, before the cave opened up inside.
Then we traversed with flashlights a while further (no hard hats, boots or other safety equipment!) to a spot where the cave opened up into a canyon, the river entering from high overhead and cascading in a waterfall. Thousands of bats circled overhead. Sounds stunning, right? It was.
And it was a far cry from what my peers were up to back home. A year later, we were back in Ontario for summer vacation. I ran into a former classmate at the mall and was disturbed to see her face covered in mascara, lipgloss and eyeshadow. We would have been eleven. I was spending my most of my time hundreds of miles from the nearest mall. We didn’t have much to say to one another.
After one trip to the Bat Caves, on leaving the trailhead to get back to the main road, the Black Beast got stuck in the mud up to the wheel wells. It’s a good thing we were in a group that time, as it took a concentrated effort of multiple vehicles towing each other, getting re-stuck, everybody pushing, digging, putting down cardboard or wooden boards, swearing, cursing and generally getting covered head to toe in mud to get out of that one. I don’t remember my mom’s reaction when we came home. She probably hosed us down outside before allowing us in the house.
When we weren’t out hiking, we had more unstructured activities. Dad made us butterfly nets, and we’d walk along the escarpment and catch butterflies, stick insects, beetles and other oddities, all the while avoiding the ominous webs of the orb spiders — spiders themselves the size of dinner plates and the webs spanning power cables. We spent endless hours in the pool at the Hash Club under bare minimum supervision and occasionally, the Golf Club for a change of scene. We never golfed; we just swam, played pool, and made concoctions of melted ice cream and ketchup while the adults did who knows what. They were nearby, but out of my periphery.
Monday nights were Hash Nights, a shorter group run through town followed by dinner, singing “down-downs” and other nonsense. If you came back from R&R in Cairns or elsewhere with new shoes (which you invariably did, since the semi-annual trips to Australia were the only chance to stock up on clothing, shoes and other non-locally available essentials), you’d have to stand up in front of the whole club and take a down-down by chugging a beer poured into your shoe that you had just been running through the mud in for the last hour, while the rest of the club serenaded you with bawdy lyrics.
Various other infractions of the Hash House Rules were also corrected with down-downs. We kids drank coke or water and thought it was all absolutely hilarious, but it was not a good example to set if you were an impressionable teen or in any way pre-inclined to alcoholism.
For my daughter, it would be impossible to replicate that childhood. The natural setting is one thing, but the isolation, lack of family support networks, and medical infrastructure are another. Malaria pills? No, thank you.
My spouse and I are fairly conscious about limiting activities to provide unstructured time; mostly because I get overwhelmed having to take a three-year-old to multiple organized things in a week. I’m not cut out to be a soccer mom, that’s for sure. Still, we live in an urban area and I find it hard to get out in nature as much as I would like to.
I try to encourage her to make messes — mud pies in the wheelbarrow in the backyard. I also taught her the “Mud Song”, that Dad sang my whole childhood. Well, the chorus anyway. Apparently, there are whole verses that I never knew about!
This summer I took her exploring in the creek in the park in our subdivision. She loved it, and often asks “If we can go in the creek”. If it’s a warm day and she has her rainboots on, I let her. I try to be present and not think about broken glass and microplastics.
Last week, I read DNV’s annual Energy Transition Outlook, an independent model of renewables, energy demand, and end-use. They forecast a global population of 9.7 billion by 2050, and our current pathway to meet 2.2 degrees Celcius by the end of the century. Not 2 degrees or even 1.5. Depressing. It’s hard to think of how different the world was thirty years ago, and how different again it will be by the time my daughter is the age I am now. Hotter, more crowded, more politically volatile.
I just hope we have the sense to save the green spaces, the wilderness, and take the time to visit them.
