Children, Youth and Environments

Children, Youth and Environments 15(2), 2005 Encountering the Other Peter H. Kahn, Jr. University of Washington Citation: Kahn, Peter H., Jr. (2005). “Encountering the Other.” Children, Youth and Environments 15(2): 392-397. The editor, Willem van Vliet-, asked me to set a context for this essay. I remember in the early 1990s speaking with Holmes Rolston. He had recently written Philosophy Gone Wild. Most of the book comprises eloquent formal theorizing, including the argument that a valid environmental ethic needs to be grounded in experience of the wild. He ends with several chapters on some of his own walkabouts in the mountains. I asked him whether he believed that formal theorizing and direct experience could be integrated more substantively in written discourse. In his quiet way, he said that that project might lie with others. It’s now some 15 years after that conversation, and I think again about the importance of grounding writing on wildness and ethics deeply in experience, and yet moving at least at times beyond the personal voice, to ideas and commitments of potentially universal claim, substantiated at least at times by scientific evidence. It’s a genre with a modest history: E. O. Wilson’s (1984) Biophilia, for example, or Richard Nelson’s (1989) The Island Within, David Abram’s (1996) The Spell of the Sensuous, and Jack Turner’s (1996) The Abstract Wild. But as Holmes Rolston intimated, it’s also a genre with a future. This essay, and a recent one (“Death in the Hills,” Children, Youth and Environments 15(1), 354-357), can be read as my own movement in this direction. 1. It started simply—a four-day jaunt into the nearby mountains with my 12-year daughter, Zoe. We planned a route that would be lively but not too adventurous, and by the afternoon of the second day we had followed trails to a spot on a river that we hoped to could navigate down. We first try to skirt the edges, but the canyon walls are too steep. Then we try in the water itself, but in too many places it’s waist-high or higher. I tell Zoe, it sure looked easier on a map. We retrace miles on the trail we had just come down, top out on a ridge, and then take a different angle to the same river, some three miles below where we had been. On the third day, we bushwhack down the river. It’s a day to savor. Sometimes we clamber down rocks and boulders. Other times we traverse the slopes above. A Encountering the Other 393 few times it’s steep enough that we slide our packs down ahead of us and follow on our bottoms. We discover lovely pools for swimming. We read aloud, lunch in hand. By the afternoon we find a nice place to camp. The hard part of the trip is behind us. We swim some more. I’m relaxed. I’m too relaxed. I’m barefoot. I jump across to the ledge of another rock, and my right foot slips off and I’m plunged down. I know right off that my foot is in bad shape. I’m waist-deep in fast water. I bend over the rock and try to let the initial pain subside. I pull out of the water. Zoe sees my foot first, and I can tell by her reaction that it’s bad. She wants to throw up. When I look, I see that the ball of my foot has hunks of flesh dangling out, jagged cut, bleeding. I start feeling faint and worry about shock. Blood is pouring out on the rocks. Zoe’s scared. I tie my bandana tight around the wound. I’m feeling faint and curl up on the ground. I tell Zoe it’s going to be okay, that the thing she absolutely has to do is stay strong and keep it together, and that I can’t take care of her right now. My initial wooziness subsides. I realize I’m lying in the direct hot sun, with current rushing on both sides of me. Zoe helps me get back to shore...