Free Ranging With Kids and Dogs

Freedom arrives in stages. My first came in kindergarten, when I was allowed to walk home from school by myself, remembered mostly because I dawdled in the woods until my mother freaked out and came to find me, storm clouds of fear over her head. After that came learning to ride a bike. Then “just be home when the street lights come on.” Then, gloriously, getting a driver’s license.

Last summer, my son graduated from high school, yet another stage, and in August, during those precious last weeks before college, he asked me to recommend a camping spot—not too far from home, and somewhere with fresh water, big pine trees, no people, and plenty of room to drive, hike, and pitch a tent. For days we went back and forth. He wasn’t happy with any of my suggestions, and I grew to feel that he wanted something I couldn’t provide, or that maybe no one could. Finally, I said—you know, I think you’re just going to have to go see for yourself. Just go.

So, that’s what he did. He took his fourteen-year-old sister, two friends, a stack of maps and a pile of gear, and they headed into the mountains. Every night, they’d check in with texts via satellite messenger, but otherwise there was silence over the air and quiet in the house.

Over the last eight years, as Adventure Journal has come to life in the digital realm, I’ve made it a particular point to ask people how they define “adventure”—women who’ve been atop Everest, men who’ve skied to the poles, people who fit the mold, and people who break it. Not one has mentioned the widely traveled quip that adventure begins when things go wrong, and rarely do their definitions include material or tangible elements, such as skis or mountains or gravity. Instead, what I hear most frequently are concepts of personal imperative. Freedom. Exploration. Faith.

Our world and what we know about it have changed dramatically since I was five and flocking my socks with cheatgrass hitchhikers on the way home from school, but the hunger to see, learn, and do for ourselves remains one of our most powerful and vital impulses. Curiosity pushes, mystery pulls, and we find ourselves going places we shouldn’t go, doing things we shouldn’t do. But then, you know, we don’t get eaten. We don’t fall off the mountain. And we discover things out there, and about ourselves, that don’t just call us back, but make us who we are.

I still don’t know exactly what my son and daughter and their friends did during their three days in the mountains last summer. They tumbled through the door smelling of pine and earth and too full of blue sky to be constrained by questions, but they did tell us, in a rush, about a dog who befriended them by a small stream in a deep valley. The dog was a stray, they thought, but it had a collar and on the collar they found a tag. “I’m not lost,” it said. “I’m free to roam.”