tional Forest, and have now settled a mile from the national forest line. and cooking meals of cattail tubers and dogtooth violet bulbs smothA girl from the apartment buildings of Phoenix, I found my redempered in acorn gravy. Living off the land was unexpectedly easy—and tion in a landscape where I have lived for the past 30 years and where I richly satisfying. expect to die. I blame Squirrel. My version of going headless includes Lately I’ve been rereading the children’s books that helped shape long walks on country roads and dirt trails, the occasional bushwhack my relationship to nature, turning me toward the natural world and across wild country, up canyons, down creek beds, all the while trying environmental concerns. The reunion has included some surprises. to think less and see more. This is something I am not very good at. I One book in particular gave me goose bumps. Miss Hickory, by want to merge as One with the natural world. Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, was a winner of the 1947 But I keep remembering my human concerns: Newbery Medal, a prize given by the American students and writing, laundry and family. Library Association to the most distinguished Like Sam Gribley in the Catskill Mountains, American children’s book of the year. Newbery like Karana on her island, I find my redemption winners tend to stay in libraries forever, read in the degree to which I have made this place over and over, generation after generation. In my home, knowing these juniper and piñon this back-to-the-wild classic, a sharp-tongued pine, these grasslands dotted with yucca and doll with a body made of twigs and a hickory nut prickly pear, knowing the sound of cicada, the for a head is forced to leave her corncob house rattle of snake, the beauty of jimsonweed, or and live in a nearby forest and half-abandoned sacred datura, also called thorn apple, also called apple orchard. Eating berries and sewing clothes moonflower. I stop to breathe in the smell of the from leaves, Miss Hickory becomes a better large, creamy, trumpet-shaped blossoms (every person—although not quite good enough. One leaf and petal poisonous, causing hallucinations spring, she thoughtlessly scolds her neighbor and death). I know that the roots of yucca make Squirrel, who nips off her head and eats it. Feela good soap. I know that juniper berries are high ing strangely liberated, the headless body of in vitamin C. For reasons going back to fourth twigs gropes its way out of Squirrel’s nest. (Poor grade, all this is deeply satisfying. Squirrel is horrified, and so was I. Having completely forgotten the book’s ending, I’d become my daughter’s thirdattached to this spunky if flawed main character.) hroughout my adult “Headless, heedless, happy Miss Hickory” grade students will be drawn life I have continued to read begins to climb an old apple tree. Near the top children’s books, largely beto characters who are beshe finds herself a permanent home, for all cause I love the genre. C. S. friended by animals and along the slim waist and two legs and arms Lewis, author of the beloved have been a scion, a graft or living plant part become independent Narnia series, said he wrote used to start a fruit tree blooming again. The children’s fantasy because it was the right art and competent and wise. twig doll finally becomes her true self. I have form for what he wanted to say. He liked its Our true self is not separate brevity, emphasis on plot and action, and easy no doubt that Miss Hickory entered my psyche and took root. In that return to a more natural from nature. That this trans- familiarity with talking beasts and other archestate, we are redeemed. formation happens in forest types. Writing for a young audience also allowed As a young adult, I got my undergraduate him to “leave out things I wanted to leave out,” and field, mountain and such as sexual tension and romance. Moreover, degree in conservation and natural resources. I spent a summer backpacking, alone and mismeadow is the larger point. a convention of all children’s literature—even erable, on the Pacific Coast Trail in Oregon. works dealing with the darkest of subjects—is (How easily those children in books lived alone, the “happy ending,” a conclusion that is not competent in the woods, comfortable in solitude. That was a standard falsely sentimental but a final turning toward hope. Surely today, even I could never meet.) In the 1980s, my husband and I moved to south- as we face the darkest of environmental fears, our moral choice still is western New Mexico as counterculture “back-to-the-landers.” Raised in to give our children hope. In that gift I am able to find some of my own. suburb and city, we wanted what we saw as a more direct and authentic Among authors whose stories introduce children to nature, few connection to life. We wanted to grow our own food, build our own have been more influential or prolific or steadfast than Jean Craighead home, root into the earth. Surprisingly, and rather wonderfully, we George. Her 1960 Newbery Honor book, My Side of the Mountain, was did just that, shaping adobe bricks into a house made literally of mud, followed by four more novels, published between 1990 and 2007, on the irrigating a one-acre garden, raising goats and an assortment of turkeys, relationship between the falcon Frightful and adolescent Sam Gribley. chickens, and ducks. We had two home births, a daughter and a son. In his foreword to one of these later books, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. We had too much goat cheese in the refrigerator. Our illusion that describes the letter he wrote at age 11 asking the author where he we could do all this without jobs or money did not last long. I began could find his own kestrel nest. (He went on to become an experienced teaching writing at the university in Silver City, New Mexico, where falconer and environmental lawyer.) my husband became the city planner. We moved from our original In 1973, the Newbery Medal was given to George’s Julie of the Wolves, homestead, staying close to the mountains and trees of the Gila Na- another story that mixes unsentimental science with a child’s connection
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