Early on in Sonoita, I developed the habit each year of allowing the grasses around the headquarters to grow during the wet summer without much grazing. Now and then I’d turn the horses loose in the tall grass or pasture a cow with a short age calf to raise. The lightly grazed rangeland gave me a ruler I could gauge my other pastures by.
As autumn approached, grasshoppers of many shapes, colors and sizes swarmed through the grass. Some were coal black with scarlet wings that crackled when they flew. Sargent Majors had black epaulet stripes down their hind legs. Flightless horse lubbers the size of small mice creeped along the ground, unable fly or jump.
On the days when my grandson Liam came for a visit, we always went to the barn to feed the horses. As we walked, the grasshoppers exploded like shrapnel around our feet. Because he was not yet two years old and built close to the ground, Liam saw more different kinds than I did, the small cone heads and katydids with long whiskers that took short hops and were easier to catch.
At the corrals, we brushed Frosty the mare, due to drop her foal soon. We had been watching her belly grow week by week and Diane and I told Liam that she had a baby inside. We looked under at the swollen udder to see if her nipples had waxed over. “That’s where the baby horse will get its milk,” Diane explained. Liam was still on the nipple himself, and that detail satisfied his curiosity. After we tossed hay to the mare, he scampered back to the grass, chasing the grasshoppers that were more his size and speed.
Psychologists claim that we humans form our first thoughts as sounds. Before children have words, they respond to their surroundings by instinct and touch; warmth, cold, hunger, pain, thirst, loud noises, Mother’s comforting hugs, holding onto Dad’s finger for security when taking those tentative first steps.
Because Liam lives on a ranch, his first words after Mom and Dad were the animals he sees every day and the noises they make. Back then, if I said cow, he said “Mooo;” if I said horse, he whinnied. Even though the burro looked like a small horse, he knew that it said “Hee-Haw,” because he had heard and seen it make that sound. When he heard a blue jay squawk, he waved his hand to imitate their swooping flight. The black and orange butterflies on Diane’s flower garden had different patterns of flight than birds, and Liam mimicked their wing movements by holding his thumbs together and flapping his hands. Once, on the way to the barn, we saw a tarantula creeping across our path with its articulated, octave tread, unbothered by our towering presence above it. Liam watched for the length of a held breath, then looked up at me with a quizzical expression as if to ask: “What does this creature say?”
Writer Richard Louv has coined the phrase, “Nature Deficit Disorder,” to link the absence of substantive contact with nature in today’s internet wired, TV addicted, video-gamed children to disturbing trends of childhood obesity, attention deficit disorders, depression and diminished curiosity about the world around them. Liam’s age group are part of a vast and troubling reality—children raised without real contact with the natural world. How, I wonder, will they know what the horse says? Even worse, how will they know a real horse if they are lucky enough to see one? This trend does not bode well for our watersheds and the wild because we humans are motivated to save only what we know. Liam is fortunate because his parents are raising him out-of-doors in a constant dialogue with the real world that surrounds and nurtures us all.