It’s an ongoing process, a bunch of little moments and things. This is the part about life that coming-of-age movies always get wrong: there is no one moment when you come of age. This is the way it still is in most of the rest of the world. But I swear, it was completely normal, even for kids with control freak moms like mine - easily, the most nervous parent on the block. If you’re an American who wasn’t alive back then, this all might seem unimaginable to you. Bill had been right about everything - thank God he was so smart. Because there were so many thick branches, I really did stay on top of the mud. My boots were trapped deep in the mud.īut I kept pulling - and with a loud squelching noise, my feet slipped out of my rubber boots, which stayed behind in the creek. I let myself fall forward in the mud, grabbed the branches, and I pulled - hard. I had to somehow crawl over all this mud on some stupid branches? What if I was already too deep in the mud to get out? What if the branches sank when I climbed on top of them?īut no! I couldn’t think about any of this now. The last thing we need is someone else getting stuck.” When it was done, Bill said to the others, “Hold onto the ends of the branches. Once Brent pulls himself out, he can crawl back on top of them.”Īnd I watched, still slowly sinking, while my friends quickly did just as Bill had directed, branch after branch, making a kind of bridge. We’ll lie them out across the mud and hold onto the ends. “Strip branches from the trees!” he commanded the others. They were just boys and girls - stupid kids like me. No one knew what to do in a situation like this. “You guys need to help me.”įor a minute, they all stared back at me, fear on their faces. What was happening here? Was I going to sink into this stuff and die? It was already up to my thighs! And now my boots were completely full of mud, which just weighed me down even more. There was something about the suction of the mud - I couldn’t lift it up again. It’ll be okay.”Īnd I did use the stick, but it quickly got stuck too. “Use your stick,” my friend, Bill said to me. It was like quicksand - and the cold mud had already breached my boots. “Okay, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. My friends gathered on the shore to watch, and I started out across the mud. I put on my rubber boots and fashioned myself a walking stick from an alder branch. Then one day when I was about twelve, I decided I was going to do it. My friends and I spent a lot of time mucking around this creek, catching fish and frogs, but no one had ever walked across Mud Island. There was one area where the creek slowed down and spread out, and there was a large mudflat in the middle of the water that we kids all very imaginatively called Mud Island. I spent a large percentage of my childhood in that forest - all out of view from or contact with parents or adults, since cellphones hadn’t been invented yet. I grew up in a developing suburb, and the area below our neighborhood was still a vast forest with a creek and a swamp. Well, that and smartphones and social media. Spoiler alert: as someone who was a kid more than thirty years ago, I think most of this anxiety is obviously the “helicopter parent” thing. Lately, psychologists have begun suggesting alternative theories to explain what’s happening in America - like the fact that thirty years ago, the “typical” childhood was radically reimagined to eliminate most “free time.” Now kids are constantly supervised and monitored in an effort to keep them “safe.”īut the counterintuitive result is that American kids are less likely to learn resilience and inner strength - methods for dealing with their own stress and anxiety.
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