Old School Forest Bathing

Reflections from the Publisher: Old-School Forest Bathing

James Fox-Smith

Eleven or twelve years ago, when our kids were small and school let out for summer, we working parents tried to limit the number of days they spent bundled off to summer camp programs by arranging to each take a day off every week to simply let them stay at home. From late May until early August, once a week Ashley or I would replace our regular fare of staff and client meetings, editorial and production scheduling, and that ubiquitous commute, with a day spent surrounded by finger painting, Legos, cookie baking, tree I.D., pond-swimming, or whatever other child-friendly diversions we could conjure up that didn’t involve leaving the property. Thinking back on that period, I’m struck by how challenging it seemed to reconcile a weekly stay-at-home day with the realities of running a small business. How antiquated that seems, now that working from home has become the rule rather than the exception for so many of us. For some reason my stay-at-home day was usually Wednesday when, instead of hustling those two surprisingly compliant little humans out of bed and into the car at 6 am, I would instead apply myself to eight hours of child’s play that usually involved a trip to the creek— Thompson Creek, that is—the western fork of which winds its way through hardwood forest a mile or so’s walk from our house. If the weather looked good the kids and I would pack sandwiches, drinks, bug spray and buckets, fishing nets, frisbees, and other timeless tools of impromptu game-making (just add water and sand), and set out for the thirty-minute walk. Once there we’d bivouac on a sandbar, making forays to explore the creek’s many rills and rivulets, wallow like hippos in deep holes, build wet clay masterpieces, and construct worlds of make-believe that became increasingly elaborate as one summer followed another. For half a dozen years, off and on from the time the kids were perhaps four and six, our summertime Wednesdays followed some version of this ritual. It was a long time before they tired of it. I’m not sure I ever did.

The branch of Thompson Creek that passes near our house isn’t grand by any means. Most of the time barring the few hours following a thunderstorm it’s little more than a ribbon of clear water cutting across a wide swath of white sand, which meanders through tracts of oak and beech forest on its way to join the Mississippi. Remote and unkempt, the creek is a primordial place—a largely undisturbed sliver of the old Tunica Hills landscape miles from any meaningful road. A place of shifting sandbars, crumbling clay banks, sparkling rapids, and lazy pools filled with darting redeye bass, where the competition for loudest sound is between the chatter of water over creek gravel and the call of a kingfisher annoyed by our trespass into his domain. Walking along the water’s edge or wading its shallows, a visitor’s footprints intermingle with the tracks of many others: deer, raccoons, coyotes, bobcats, wild turkeys, herons, and wild hogs all come down to drink. Walk with your eyes on the ground and you’ll spot a round, flat pebble perfect for skimming. Or if you’re really lucky, maybe a knapped flint arrowhead—material evidence that humans have been leaving footprints here for hundreds, actually thousands, of years. I’ve never found an arrowhead at the creek, but my mother-in-law has a shoebox-full collected over her lifetime that keeps me looking.

Something about a visit to the creek produces a palpable sense of calm. Since we live in an old house out in the country—in a region prone to bouts of wild weather, no less—there is an inexhaustible list of to-do items to greet us each and every time we step out of the door. So, I find being surrounded by ragged, overgrown, perfectly natural habitat that no one has any obligation to prune, mow, or otherwise maintain, to be profoundly relaxing. I suppose that this is what the concept of “forest bathing” is all about. I’m pretty sure that the wild gardeners are onto something, too.

Now that our kids are grown, the creek seems more special than ever. Last August, the weekend before our daughter left to start her college life twelve hundred miles away, the last thing she wanted to do was to go to the creek. The four of us set out just like old times. Now, any time she makes it home she always finds her way back there, to bake on hot sand, loll in the shallows, and gaze up at the dappled play of light and shadow through the canopy of leaves. Just like her mother, grandmother, and great grandfather did before her. In a stressful, speed-of-light world, where kids grow up in an instant and the to-do list extends toward infinity, we all benefit from taking time to stop, sit, listen to the water, skim a pebble, and remember where we came from. It’s what grounds us; it’s the only thing that ever has.