Essential Lessons are Learned in Nature
After 30
hikes and blogs about our time on the Bruce Trail, which took us along the
Niagara Parkway Trail and from Queenston Heights to Owen Sound, it is time to
share the final push from Owen Sound to Tobermory! Ironically however, the last segment of the
BTC that we will share was in fact the first section that we hiked. In fact, it was also our first major long
distance trek – undertaken so many years ago in 2014.
In order
to keep things as straight forward as possible, these blogs (as we have
mentioned before) have been presented in geographic order from south to north,
rather than in the chronologic order we hiked the segments. Regardless, owing to other obligations, work,
and the usual distractions which life brings about, it took us from 2014 until
2022 to complete every section of the Bruce Trail from the southern terminus in
Queenston Heights to the northern cairn in Tobermory.
As such,
our final entries for our Bruce Trail
blog are from many years ago, and from a time when we knew far less (actually
nothing) about hiking and backpacking.
We were also very much younger, and we were struggling with a number of
family issues. During this first trek,
our attitudes were different, our goals were different, and of course our abilities
and sense of hiking were different. On
that first thru-hike we made every possible mistake we could – from our choice
of gear, to what we carried, to setting unreasonable goals each day. Yet despite the setbacks and challenges,
those seven to ten days on the Bruce Trail in 2014 put our feet and lives on a
different pathway forward.
Revisiting
our journals almost a decade after the fact, it is stunning to see the arc of
growth that we have undertaken since. We
have gone from carrying huge backpacks filled with so many things we never used
or needed, to leading a Royal Canadian Geographical Society expedition and
trekking across four countries. Our
experiences on the Bruce Trail stand as proof that the lessons we learn, and
the time we spend outdoors, can be essential later in life.
Disconnected from the World
Admittedly,
we did not simply decide one afternoon to begin hiking the Bruce Trail. In fact, it took a crisis to push us out the
door.
For years
we had spent a great deal of time trying to help raise a younger relative. Unfortunately, by his mid-teens he was facing
a tough situation. He was struggling in
school, had few friends that he spent time with, and was encouraged by other
family members to spend his time online, playing video games, and avoiding any
type of physical activity. They believed
that if he lived behind a screen he would never get lost, never get hurt, never be in
danger, and never be made fun of by others.
While these may have seemed like laudable goals, the results transformed
a smart and handsome young man with boundless potential into someone who was
lonely, failing at school, and who could not be pried away from video games.
By the
time he should have been deciding what he wanted to do after school, whether
that was work, college, university, or travel, our young relative could not
print, write, or type. He regularly
failed to complete assignments or participate in school. Was lying and stealing to buy more video games. Despite having no physical challenges, he was
routinely signed out of physical education so that he could sit on the bench
and stay on his electronic devices.
Notes were sent to the school by other family members to get him out of
homework because “the internet would be there his whole life to give him
answers. So he didn’t need to do all
this stuff.”
Unfortunately for him, too
many teachers allowed this situation to go on too long, and the consequences of
this lifestyle were catching up. By
Grade 11, concerned educators finally began to stop accepting the excuses and
to worry about how he would navigate the world.
Despite
these mounting problems, his family still maintained that the best thing would
be for him to stay at home, play games for the summer, and think about his
actions. Assurances were given for the
11th year in a row that next year would be better, next semester
homework would be completed, and all that was needed was some personal time during which he could "store up his energy".
In our
opinion, it was time to get back to basics, to get him offline, and to get back
out into nature. More time doing the
same things that had led to these challenges would do little to change the
status quo. If he was going to find his
own way, he needed help - to learn about himself and his own abilities. For two people
who grew up outside, playing in parks with friends, cycling around the
neighbourhood until it was dark, and going on regular camping and skiing trips,
the idea of living in front of a TV or a video game console all the time was
unimaginable.
Children need Nature
The
situation our younger relative was experiencing, and which so many today strive
to navigate, has always made me wonder.
How did we get to the point where we now strive to limit children’s
experiences of the world? When did we
stop letting them explore and experiment with nature, allowing them to figure
out themselves, find their own strengths, and learn to accept their own limitations?
When I was younger, the answer from my
parents for almost every situation was to send me outside to play. As children
and teenagers, we have an abundance of energy that needs to be burnt off, and
nature is a great place for that.
Outdoors, I learned what my body could and could not do, I learned that
you scraped your knee when you fell, and that you could get hurt when you fall
out of a tree. In short, I learned by
doing, not by Googling and watching a YouTube video on it. Accomplishments in life where our achievements, not digital rewards for moving across a screen and hitting buttons.
Why do we
now insist on children staying inside rather than going out, while at the same
time lamenting the rising rates of obesity, their failure to achieve goals, and
the inability of teenagers to manage their own emotions as well as the
challenges of life? Our young relative’s
teachers continually suggested that the best thing for his inattentiveness was
to watch videos on “staying focused” or sitting down and “thinking about his
refusal to do class assignments.” What
happened to laps around the track? What
happened to wood and auto shop? What happened to learning through experiences? While I don’t pretend to know much about the
proper psychology, philosophy, and pedagogy of the education of high school
students, I can honestly attest that making them sit down and reflect is about
the last thing that should be done to them.
From what I have seen, they have an abundance of energy which needs to
be channeled and focused, not stored up for some future date. For both children and adults, sitting
endlessly at desks is not a natural or healthy act.
Disconnect to Reconnect
It would
take two months of concerted effort for us to finally convince his family that
time outdoors was a way to get things back on track, and to foster a connection
with the world. Even then, the belief
that “time in nature is unnatural” and fears that “walking is stressful and
wastes back and knee energy” pervaded.
While neither of these reactions was unexpected, what was not
anticipated was the degree of fanaticism with which they were presented. In particular, the concept of being off-line
and without a cell phone, and missing TV shows and game updates seemed akin to
subjecting this young man to ritual abuse.
Interestingly however, none of these “concerns” were leveled at the
practical issues we were still to face on the trail. Questions such as where would we get clean
water each day? Where would we refill
our food supplies? What if any of us was
injured on the trail? How were we to get back to our car from Tobermory? Instead, the “concerns about hiking” all
revolved around unplugging from the online world. Ultimately it was their own desire to spend uninterrupted time watching movies and texting that allowed him to come walk with us.
Unsurprisingly,
the inspiration in 2014 for setting out onto the Bruce Trail – trekking from
Owen Sound to Tobermory – was to encourage our younger relative to disconnect
from his electronic devices and reconnect to nature. Hopefully, in the process of doing so, he
would gain a sense of himself, a sense of what he could achieve, and find an
interest beyond the online world he presently lived in.
With
understandings reached and plans made, we only had one challenge. The fact that, at that time, we had never
thru hiked this sort of distance before.
Outdoors Experience before the Bruce Trail
To be
clear, the fact that we had not gone on a thru hike together is not to suggest
that we had no experience in the outdoors.
Sean grew up attending the Scouts and going to summer camp in Algonquin Provincial Park, while I participated in annul week-long
backcountry hiking, canoeing, and camping trips at school, and later spent
several years working as part of scientific research teams in forests across
Ontario. In addition, we had spent many
weekends and months front country camping, as well as going on day hikes with
our relative in parks across the province.
Happily,
despite the challenges we invariably faced en route, this hike would give way
to a love of nature in a younger relative who at the time was struggling with
the digital world. Our family walk from
Owen Sound to Tobermory would lead him to enjoy time in the outdoors, and give
way to an opportunity for him to go to the Boundless School summer camp and later to their school to complete his High School
requirements. In the end, this hike was
a transformative undertaking that began on the Bruce Trail.
A Brief Aside
As a side
note – keen observers will notice that the extensive photography that
accompanies our blogs for the European Caminos, East Coast Trail, and Trans
Canada Trail adventures does not exist for this stretch. During our first hike on the Bruce Trail from
Owen Sound to Tobermory, Sean carried a camera with only five rolls of actual
film – so the pictures taken were far fewer.
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