May 9, 2006 - Monday
In the interest of taking a few pictures for the town website, I took the boys on a couple of brief nature walks, including to this spot in the woods. I hadn't planned on much more than driving around and taking a couple of pictures from the car, but the boys were (pleasantly) surprisingly interested in the walking part and that worked out just fine. Although an interesting thing occured here on this path...

There's lovely ravine near this spot, but on the other side of a small hill and, in the interest of expediency (we needed to get home to eat and make it to Harry's TBall practice), I suggested that the boys wait on this trial for a moment. It was a short distance away, but up and then down a rather steep incline toward the river. There was also some poison ivy and we all had only sandles on and I figured it would probably take about four times as long if the boys came along over that little hill. I worried a little about leaving them alone even for a couple of minutes, but it was hard to imagine much going wrong in the middle of a large conservation land forest.

It did end up taking me a little longer than I thought, although no more than 2-4 minutes. But as I came back into view I saw Harry kind of squattng down and Jeremy standing near, almost over him, and heard him saying something like, "don't worry, he'll come back." As I got closer I could see that Harry had been a little bit shaken, perhaps had even cried, although I don't really know. He did concede that he had been worried and we went on to have a long talk on the way home about fear, bears, wolves, and the fact that most fear comes from things we don't know or don't understand. We talked again about how fear is healthy, because it's our body's first method of defense, but that we have to let our brains decide whether our body's are scared about the right things. I asked Harry what he should have done, for example, if he was worried about seeing a bear. He should have talked loudly, because the only kind of bears that live around anywhere near us don't want to have anything to do with people. If they hear him first, I said, they'll stay away. It's only when they get scared because they're too close that there might be a problem. (Interesting, as I was trying to explain this I told Harry that there was slight chance that he might see a black bear some day in a rural part of the region and that's what he'd have to remember about bears. But clever Harry caught me and noted that he knew why I didn't say "Vermont"... so he wouldn't get scared. I told him I've seen one small bear in the 43 years I"ve been going to the cabin.)

However, that's all just extra detail. The most interesting part of this is that it was Jeremy, the younger brother, who was trying to reassure Harry. That's not really out of character for either one of the boys and there's nothing about it that really surprises me in hindsight. But it's still fascinating.

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