Saturday was the game—the Big game: Iowa State University versus the University of Iowa in Ames. And one couldn’t wish for a better day for football—clear and sunny, the sun like a dollop of incandescent butter the color of sweet corn; low 80s; light wind. Hold a laptop up so the sky backdrops the Windows-blue screen and the blues would have blended almost seamlessly like the setting and painting in René Magritte’s 1933 “La Condition Humaine” at the National Gallery of Art. One honestly couldn’t wish for a more perfect day.
That’s why I racked my mountain bike on the car and left Ames. I couldn’t care less about football. Once, years ago, a classmate worked for the University of Texas at El Paso football team, The Miners. He got friends and me tickets for the fifty yard line in Sun Bowl Stadium. It’s the only football game I’ve ever attended—and I missed it even though I was there. During the pre-game tailgating, I drank so much I passed out on top of the pole vault pads stacked beneath the bleachers and snored through the entire game.
I wasn’t the only one not at this Saturday’s big game. Emma celebrated her birthday on the High Trestle Trail. I didn’t know or meet Emma. But while biking the central Iowa trail, I passed handwritten signs that announced “Emma’s Birthday” before I saw her and her parents and friends. They were perhaps a mile east of the last access point before the trail crossed over the Des Moines River valley. As I biked west toward Woodward, pink and green helium-filled balloons hovered above a wood post beside the concrete trail. On the right, under an aluminum-roofed shelter, two or three green-slatted picnic tables, benches attached. Two women sat and chatted as I pedaled past while other balloons twisted on the ends of their tethers tied to the shelter’s posts and picnic tables.
Emma, meanwhile, wore a white summer dress and held a pink balloon; she and three or four other, shorter girls, stood with their backs pressed against the overlook’s railing while a woman (Emma’s mother?) snapped photos with a small digital camera. The girls’ backdrop? The vibrantly green Des Moines River valley and recently completed 13-story tall, half-mile long High Trestle Trail Bridge.
Emma’s wasn’t the only family I passed. The 25-mile-long trail is normally busy, with 3,000 or more walkers, bikers, and rollerbladers enjoying it each Saturday and Sunday. But with the state’s major football rivalry playing out not too many miles north, the trail was relatively desolate. Even so, I passed several families out biking together—in one case, parents and five or six boys and girls ranging from the middle teens to 10 or 11. I could tell this wasn’t a one-time family outing like Emma’s party. Several of the kids, including the youngest, wore riding jerseys and black padded cycling shorts. Clearly, this was routine. Even Emma’s party suggested she, too, was familiar with the trail and so outside often enough to know and consider the place sufficiently special to want—and I presume it was her choice—to celebrate her birthday at the overlook.
Such choices might not be as common as one thinks. Two years ago, in 2009, I participated in a BioBlitz at Hitchcock Nature Center immediately north of Council Bluffs, Iowa. The 1,000-acre preserve had been destined to be a landfill for garbage railroaded in from the East Coast until local residents fought the plan. They acquired and then donated the land to Pottawattamie County Conservation in 1991. When I joined the preserve’s first BioBlitz, the preserve’s natural resource specialist, Chad Graeve, explained he wanted to engage area residents in identifying the birds, plants, insects, and other creatures that lived on or used the land. What counted more than the results, he elaborated, was building camaraderie among the participating biologists and ecologists from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and Creighton University, the volunteers, and the local residents, especially the kids.
After the BioBlitz, Graeve described how he watched a couple of biologists from a distance as they walked around one of the ponds. They looked like kids themselves, he said, excited to be playing in the water, excited, he added, to be exploring once again. The environmental educator then pointed to the one father who’d brought his two young sons. They walked off along one of the ridge trails toward the west and the soon-to-be-setting sun. “That,” she said, “is the real story here.” I have to agree. I grew up playing outdoors and taking it for granted. But, as Michael Chabon notes in his “Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood” excerpt in The New York Review of Books, too few kids seem to play outdoors. It worries me.
The competition for kids’ attention is enormous, especially on days like Saturday—days when adults might even have said, “No, not today.” But when I pass families riding the trails or, like Emma’s, celebrating important moments in places such as the Des Moines River valley’s High Trestle Trail overlook, I feel there’s reason to hope. These are the kids for whom such spaces may become memorable places, places worth conserving and preserving not only now but in the future as well.
Fred MacVaugh, Staff Blogger