My Dad Tried to Kill Me with an Alligator
outsideonline.com
outsideonline.com
at the top we could see that it ended in a sheer cliff about 15 feet tall. I knew that at the top of the cliff was a beautiful wild flower meadow because I had been up there via another route earlier in the year.
We thought we saw a crack in the cliff that would allow us to shimmy up and make the top so even though it was getting very steep (about 50-60 degree slope) we pushed on.
The crack was too narrow though and when we turned around to go back down I saw how crazy we were to have gone that far. I had the two oldest grab my shoulders, sat the 5 year old behind me straddling my waist and put the youngest between my legs and slid down on my butt.
the slide down was exhilarating and we vowed to return when everyone was a little older and more capable.
I was genuinely scared for a brief moment when we turned around at the top but I couldn't let my children know that and we all learned something about our physical limits that day.
I think often about what to let my kids experience and what to protect them from. I would rather let them explore their boundaries and get hurt when they are young and I'm around to take care of them than for them to grow up afraid of everything or even worse, not afraid of anything.
edit: found a map of the area[0]
Some big mountain walls for example:
http://images.summitpost.org/original/482664.jpg
http://www.mtnmouse.com/california/20060624yosemite/map_yose...
Your parent comment's map looks like 500+ feet of vertical, so I'm fairly impressed by the 5 year old :)
If it's a standard USGS topo map, his track should be about 150 meters or 500 feet, putting them right at 45 degrees (shallower at the start, steeper at the end)
I'm shocked you managed to even get that high up with two kids younger than 6
I could fill a journal with stories about the 3 year old.
His description of how he'd be safe from the alligator following his father's command to enter the water was hilarious:
Immediately, I formulated a plan, which involved surrounding myself with a
protective cloud of urine.
"If one of you gets eaten, we will name the boat after you," I said.
"He'd started calling me "Fat-Tart" because he thought I was fat, which I was, owing to a glandular disorder that made me eat Pop-Tarts until I stopped feeling sad."
The protective cloud of pee is just a joke. It's funny because pee is useless to protect you from alligators. It's also funny because peeing yourself is funny.
The idea of having kids is terrifying, because there would be part of me that wants to give them expanding and amazing experiences like this and part of me that wants to protect them from anything terrible happening. I feel like the only winning move is not to play.
People sometimes don't understand why I say I am glad my daughter snapped her collarbone. It is not that I want my children to ever get hurt. It is that, as a parent, I've now been through it. I've had a child break. And she healed. So now I take my kids out every weekend into the wilderness, knowing that we might not come back unscathed, but we will come back, and their lives (and mine) are better for it.
(Not trying to criticize your decision; just trying to understand it).
1) I am actually very safety-conscious. I have been solo hiking in the mountains and deserts for over 20 years. I know how to be safe, and how to keep my kids safe.
2) I guess in all honesty, I don't know we will be safe. But you cannot let fear drive your life, or else you will not live it.
My own childhood experiences shaped my paranoia: riding on the rooftops of 4WDs speeding along unpopulated beaches or through hilly scrub. Swimming in water shared by sharks, sea snakes, crocodiles and box jellyfish. Poking scorpions and giant centipedes with sticks - trapping them in jars, cooking them alive with a magnifying glass. Making things go bang or set on fire, e.g. wasp nests, based on what we could find in the shed after my chemistry sets were depleted of useful materials. Many close calls, several burns, bites and stitches. Thankfully no broken bones or hospital visits.
Not the same story for several of my friends and relatives unfortunately. It comes down to luck and the wits of the people around you. That said it's not an all-or-nothing decision to let your kids explore the world.
[1] http://www.recsports.ufl.edu/lake-wauburg
[2] http://www.gainesville.com/article/20070614/SUNFRONT/7061403...
They also liked to sunbathe on the asphalt road surface in the summertime, especially down near Boiling Spring Lakes. I was a 911 dispatcher for a while, and we got more than a few calls reporting a gator lying in the road, blocking Highway 133 near BSL. Good times...
At night you can take a flash light, shine it towards a lake, and you'll see all the eyes reflecting back at you.
My dad tried to kill me with recoil of double barrel 12 gauge shotgun when I was 5. He had to hold my whole body not to fall from the kick ...
Kids back then: http://i.imgur.com/ZYDIKGK.png
I had to check out for the writer : Harrison Scott Key http://www.amazon.com/Harrison-Scott-Key/e/B00NKZI2QG
Surely on my reading list.
I refer you to Crocodile attack in Australia: an analysis of its incidence and review of the pathology and management of crocodilian attacks in general. [1]
IMHO, within that envelope there's plenty of room to find a tribute to living life, rather than letting fears govern our fate.
Yeah, it was another time, when you were overprotectivily cuddled 24/7, and people had fun and adventures in nature even when they were kids.
In the world I grew up in, I had to be home before the street lights came on. I had to "check in" periodically, but otherwise, lived an unfettered lifestyle. I was free to roam, and roam I did. My friends and I had a tree fort we'd built in the woods, pieced together from scrap wood we'd found, complete with a tire swing.
We swam in the streams, we biked full speed through wooded trails fraught with potholes, tree roots, fallen branches.
We scoured the neighborhood in larger and larger radii, exploring til we found danger, excitement, or boredom.
My daughter doesn't live in this world, and may never know it. My daughter lives in a world where Child Protective Services can pick her up for being seen without a parent. My daughter lives in a world where she can be detained for walking to her grandmother's house alone. My daughter lives in a world where building a tree fort could be construed as cause for arrest.
Maybe it's for the better. Maybe we should place safety above all else in our children's lives. Maybe our parents should all have been removed, and each of us would have been better cared for as wards of the state. I honestly don't know, but I know that in exploration, curiosity was fostered. I know that in roaming, I learned how to be self-sustaining; or at least as self-sustaining as a child can be expected to be.
I have kids now and while they aren't as old as I was when I started roaming the neighborhood it saddens me that I'm frightened to let them. Not because I'm worried someone will harm them and/or kidnap them, but because I'm worried someone will call the cops and CPS will come. That I will have a blip on a piece of paper(or electronic file these days) and that it could lead to court orders and in an extreme my kid taken away if only for a little while.
I know that the police have to do their job and if someone reports a kid wonder around they should respond. I just wish that they weren't forced to call CPS in every instance(they are required any time a minor is involved here), like they aren't capable of assessing a situation.
We live in a different world, but I don't believe it is any less safe than it was 20 years ago.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/14/t...
The question, of course, is whether or not that safety is attributable to our collective paranoia, or in spite of it.
The incidents in the story, really, aren't much different from a parent pushing their kids off on their first bike ride with no training wheels. Are they going to fall? Maybe. Are they going to die? Definitely not.
Kids often have overblown senses of danger. Did the river have alligators? Maybe, maybe not (I checked though, it does), but kids are often imagining dangers that aren't there. Old Lady Crenshaw isn't really a witch, and her house isn't really haunted, and Old Man Cratchett isn't likely to shoot trespassing children on sight.
My family frequently goes to Hawaii, and while it literally took weeks to convince my child that yeah, there are sharks in the ocean, but it's still safer than the car ride TO the beach. I don't feel even slightly guilty for trading out her fear of sharks for the wonderment that is the ocean. We discussed how to deal with sharks, what to do if we encounter one, blah blah blah, but at least to me, "avoiding the whole ocean forever" was not a valid way to deal with that fear.
Do you think alligators can't kill you?
Regardless, even though you quoted out of context, it's perhaps worth backpeddling a bit, because even though I stated that they're definitely not going to die while riding a bike, even that is an overstatement. It's clearly not impossible to die on one's maiden bike ride, though it is still very, very unlikely.
Pushing a kid on a bike without training wheels for the first time could very easily be interpreted as attempted murder by a precocious child. That doesn't mean that their fears are rational. Swimming in a river has a non-zero chance of alligator attack, statistically, alligator attacks are very, very rare, and you're far more likely to die of regular old drowning than by alligator.
Crossing a road or taking a car ride is likely more dangerous.
Please be careful to not fall into the fear trap. Safety-nuts are afraid about rare "worst case" scenarios where a child is harmed. And then safety-nut-critics get themselves scared about rare cases where CPS or police are called a child playing alone.
Just go ahead and let your kid be a kid.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_alligator_attacks...
There had been a grand total of 4 fatal alligator attacks in the USA in the 1980's. It seems to me that the father probably realized that there wasn't actually much danger involved for his boys.
And I think your proposed scenario
> Would it be equally character-building to make them run across a freeway to find a dropped pair of sunglasses?
is a little disproportionate, risk-wise: http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/809-456.pdf "Pedestrian fatalities from all crashes reached a low of 4,763 fatalities in 2000"
You're absolutely right. But what is "close?" An alligator swimming right alongside the boat? Sure, that's definitely too close. But what about an alligator on the riverbank, 100 yards away? Is that still too close? How about half a mile downstream? Again, I've never lived near gators, so I don't have an intuition on what is and is not a dangerous situation.
Additionally, I feel like you're forgetting that oft-repeated (and generally true!) maxim: "They're more afraid of you than you are of them."
Maybe the father in the story was being outrageously irresponsible. My gut tells me (and the story seems to intimate) that he knew what he was doing. That is, he probably intuited that the situation was low-risk.
To use a different dangerous animal, people have been killed by grizzly bears, yet tens of hundreds of thousands of folks annually camp out in the backcountry. Are they being irresponsible, just because their is a risk involved?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qn-JNkpG89U
I have been to the Okefenokee, and canoed and camped there. The gators are intimidating, but they really never did seem aggressive at all. They're literally all over, and at the visitor center area they can be quite close to the tourists, with no barriers. I was a lot more worried about snakes, really.
Having said all that, I wouldn't put a kid in the water near one I could see. Why risk it? Rumored giant catfish, though, sure, why not? ;-)
I also think we as a society have become too protective of children. The ones that are protected from everything that could possibly hurt them usually grow up not having the curiosity and gall to put themselves in uncomfortable and potentially dangerous situations.
Most of them won't let their kids out of the house alone because of "stranger danger", but put them in charge of giant crude oil or passenger trains and they are sure to fuck up spectacularly on a regular basis.