I was in the car driving my daughter to school. I looked up at the hills on the east side of the Bay. The thought occurred that the mountains didn’t look too dissimilar to the mountains along the Madison in Montana. Of course, there was all this development and a few million people down at the base of these hills/mountains while in Montana there is none of that and a great river running through the valley.
I thought about all the wildlife in MT and the lack of it here and I asked my daughter if she had ever seen a bear in the wild. She had not. This was a bit of a shock to me. I grew up seeing a few bears every year. They were along the Klamath, they were along the highway, they were in neighbors’ and friends’ back yards. I grew up in the mountains of Northern California and while we didn’t have the elk and pronghorn of MT, we did have a fair bit of wilderness around.
My daughter has seen sharks in the wild, and barracuda and crocodiles, things I didn’t see until I was much older, but it I couldn’t’ help but think I needed to get her outside more, and my son as well (although he is only 5 months).
No one else is going to take your kids out to see nature.
I’ve got some trips to plan.
The girl and her shark.
