On Going to the Woods and Learning

 On Going to the Woods and Learning

 Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) August 13/14, 2022

Recently for a solid week my wife Nancy and I fought -  no, let’s just say we dealt with – ants, bugs, spider webs, pesky though beautiful deer, armies of crickets, and the smell of horse manure. It was glorious.

            Why the word “fought” even came to my mind is a mystery to me. We knew what we were getting into when we signed up for the cabin in the woods with two barns on one side and a gigantic lake on the other. Such sights, sounds, and smells we grew up in and they all grew in us. They also grew us up. That’s why we chose the humble wooded cabin near Lake Hartwell a few miles east of Hartwell, Georgia.

            We were not in Hart County primarily to re-live our growing up or to enjoy the woods and the huge farm, though Nancy was able to do much of the latter. I was there for work.        The work that took me back to the countryside literally and nostalgically was a week of intensive teaching at Whitworth Women’s Prison near Hartwell. Oh, how we allow words and ideas to lodge in our heads, ruling out all other possible ways to accomplish a goal. Words like “semester,” when it comes to formal learning. Tradition says we must have at least a semester of this, that, or the other to truly learn anything. But not if the learners have time on their hands and are so totally dedicated to their studies that they are willing to face six-hour classes for five straight days. Such an arrangement would never work for a knowledge-based subject such as history, but for skills-based subjects like writing, it certainly does. 

 Tradition says sit down, take notes, do homework, and make a certain score on a test. Reality says education is Aristotle or Abe Lincoln on one end of a log and anybody else on the other end, if but for an hour. Tradition says, “Tell.” Reality pleads, “Don’t just tell me; show me.”

But how do you show someone how to write? We can watch plumbers plumb, watch doctors doctor, and watch engineers draw or build, but we never watch writers write. So what does the teacher of writing do? Mark Twain’s suggestion was to get the learner’s mind off of learning to write and “throw their minds to where they grew up, to what they enjoy, to what they find despicable, or to what they consider beautiful, then entice them to tell about it and to use the right word and not its second cousin.” Perhaps a fair summary of Mark Twain’s suggestion is to think about something that makes you mad, sad, or glad.

Fortunately, though because of misfortune, all of the women in the Composition class at Whitworth had plenty to say and write about madness (anger), sadness, and gladness as well. Brenda (not her real name) had made big money as a teenager selling drugs. Lacy, a Registered nurse, was the only one in the class who had not come from a large town or city. The city slickers in the class insisted daily that Lacy and I tell them more about the woods, cows, baling hay, tending fields, and gathering cotton and corn. I kept wishing that Nancy, who began milking cows as a child, could have been with me for them to hear a female describe the rural life.

In 1845 the New England essayist Henry David Thoreau, having graduated from Harvard, moved to the woods where he wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essentials of   life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach. I wanted to live sturdily, to drive life into a corner and reduce life to its lowest terms.”

From our cabin each day, across delightful Hartwell, on to the prison, Thoreau and my and Nancy’s background messed with my head. Why are so many of us afraid of silence? Do we need a screen at the gas pump? Are we willing victims of wonderful technology? Do we ever think of where groceries actually come from? Why in so many places has worship gone from at least some silence to obligatory noise? What are we sacrificing when we forsake the outdoors entirely?

We know the answers to these questions: impatience, capitulation to the surrounding culture, and the sheer fear of being still or alone. The woods are a perfect sanctuary.  Check them out next time the city or the suburbs get you down.

 

Roger Hines

August 11, 2022