The Adventure of Stepping Outdoors
by Jim Ross
[Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the “Topical” series, with each piece solely submitted to and chosen by the Final Reader Pietra Dunmore.]
When COVID restrictions began to ease, the family agreed that we needed to rent a beach house at pre-Memorial Day, off-season rates within a three hour’s drive. After reservations were made, we heard that 90 percent of epidemiologists—people who professionally have been looking at when the easing of restrictions would be safe—said they planned to rent a summer beach house. So, the eleven of us—two grandparents, four parents, and five children between the ages of one and five—were in good company.
The best part of our week together wasn’t as much being by the beach as it was always having an excuse to step outdoors with each other, unmasked, fully vaccinated, without fear.
One night, after dinner, Ben, not quite 6, with three missing teeth already, kicked off a one-on-one conversation with one of his patented, probing questions.
“Papa, do you ever wish you could re-experience your childhood?”
“Yes,” I answered, “Every day. All the time.”
“What was it like? Tell me about it.”
“There was a creek. We lived every day around or in it.”
“Your family let you do that?” Ben asked.
“There wasn’t much way to say no. The creek was all we had. It was our life. We knew that across the creek we’d find adventure. In it too.”
“You didn’t have video games?”
“They hadn’t been invented yet.”
“Did you have the Internet?”
“Didn’t exist.
“But you had TV.”
“Ben, when I was your age, on school days, there were only three hours of TV a day.”
“That’s what your family let you watch, three hours’ worth a day?”
“No, that’s all that was on. It started around dinner time, went for three hours, and that was it. During the daytime, if you turned on the TV, there was nothing on.”
“Nothing?” Ben asked.
“Nothing.”
“Why were there only three hours?”
“TV was still an experiment then. They didn’t know whether it would work.”
“You mean it was an experiment like my idea to install magnets beneath your scalp and put magnets in a wig so we can cover your bald spot and make you young again?”
“Exactly. Even if you have a good idea, you have to convince people it’s worth the trouble. Everyone already had radio and there were lots of movie theaters. So, why did they need TV?”
“Why did you need TV?” Ben asked.
“We didn’t need it. Someone had to convince us we did. And that wasn’t easy. After all, we had the creek.”
“Papa, if you had no TV or computer games and no Internet, what did you do? Once, we stayed in a hotel and there was nothing to do. It was boring.”
“We went outside, every day, twelve months of the year, and played with other kids, usually around the creek. We made our own adventures, just us kids, no grownups.”
“Did your parents think playing outside with no grownups was dangerous?”
“Not as far as I know. When they were kids, they played outdoors. That’s what kids always did, unless they were at school or had to work.”
“And nothing bad ever happened to you?”
I think about it for a moment. “Once, I cut my foot on a piece of rusty metal in the creek. It bled like crazy. Someone carried me home.”
“Someone from your family came and got you?”
“Maybe, but more likely, one of the other kids’ Moms carried me home, whoever was closest.”
“One time I cut my finger,” Ben said, holding out his right index finger, “when I used adult scissors. My blood dripped onto the floor.”
“Did someone have to carry you?”
“No,” Ben laughed. “Did you ever make a raft?”
“I’m not sure. Come to think of it, we made lots of rafts.”
“How far did you go on them?”
“They always sank. Anyway, the creek wasn’t deep enough.”
“You needed an inflatable.”
“But there was a goat who guarded a place where we sometimes had to cross.”
“He wouldn’t let you?”
“We had to feed him something and then he did.”
“What was your biggest adventure?” Ben asked.
“One summer, we had almost no rain, and the creek dried up, except for a dribble that came from one spring.”
“What’s a spring?”
“It’s when water springs up from an underground river or lake, like a water fountain created by nature.”
“Can you drink from it?”
“When we were out, that’s where we went. We believed that water was special.”
“Magic?” Ben asked.
“It would be magic to drink from it again now.”
“Would drinking from the spring make you young again?”
“Maybe I could re-experience childhood.”
“What happened when the creek dried up?” Ben asked.
“Oh, we had this idea that, as long as we stayed in the dried-up creek, we could follow it wherever it went, even if usually we couldn’t go those places, and we wouldn’t get in trouble.”
“Did you go far?”
“Further than we ever imagined, in both directions, to places we’d never seen before.”
“Like, going to a number bigger than infinity?”
“We felt like we had, but we’d only gone further than we knew, not really so far.”
“What happened, Papa?”
“We saw a snake, a poisonous one, a copperhead.”
“You sure it wasn’t a milk snake? Because I’ve seen those.”
“We believed it was a copperhead.”
“What did you do?”
“Everyone threw rocks to kill it.”
“Papa, don’t you know, that when you throw rocks at a snake it becomes even more powerful?”
“I do now. Instead of throwing rocks, what do you recommend?”
Ben said, “Turn around and run.”
I asked, “Do you think you should run away from adventure?”
Ben said, “If it’s poisonous or too dangerous. Aren’t iPads safer?”
“Are they? You tell me.”
“Sometimes, I get stuck in an infinite loop.”
“We all do,” I said. “When that happens, it’s time to step outdoors and find an adventure.”
Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding career in public health research. With a graduate degree from Howard University, in the past six years he’s published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and photography in over 150 journals on four continents. Publications include Columbia Journal, Hippocampus, Ilanot Review, Kestrel, Litro, Manchester Review, The Atlantic, and Typehouse. Jim and his wife—parents of two health professionals and grandparents of five preschoolers—split their time between city and mountains.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “The Adventure of Stepping Outdoors”? My grandson Ben has been a source of inspiration almost since birth. I previously published a longer, diary-type piece about Ben and his twin, Bella, called “Ben’s Magic.” He’s always been remarkably well spoken and really asks questions like, “Do you ever wish you could re-experience your childhood?” And, he’s very inventive, always looking for new experiments to undertake. The pandemic cut off nearly all in-person contact between the grandparents and grandchildren. Virtual contact didn’t lend itself to prolonged conversations. Being together again, finally, let the good times roll. Ben provided the stimulus for this and other conversations. Later, I took notes. When it came time to turn it into a story, other fragments from the beach house came back. Lots of stories get to ten or more drafts. This one only had two. I view writing, especially about family, as legacy making and encouraging others to do likewise.
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