Steven Rinella - Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Out of the House and Radically Engaged with Nature

I found the answer I was seeking under a rock.

The question had been burning in my mind since 2010, when my oldest son, James, was just a few months oldbrand-new enough to seem terrifyingly fragile but old enough to have exhausted my and my wifes appetite for sitting on the sofa and staring at him.

How the hell are we ever going to get everyone out of the house?

For parents, its a question that never dies. It doesnt matter which town or city you live in. It doesnt matter if youve got four kids or one. It doesnt matter how old they are. If youre a parent or caregiver whos drawn to the title of this book, you most likely live with the knowledge that nature is important to kids. Just as likely, you feel strained and anxious about how to create impactful experiences for them in the outdoors. Every day, it seems, theres some new obstacle. At first its the annoyance of changing diapers and feeding a baby while away from the helpful tools of home. Then its working around nap times and coordinating the needs of children of different ages. The five-year-old is raring to go, but if her baby brother misses another nap, hes going to be a nightmare for the rest of the day. The complications evolve over time, until you eventually land where my wife, Katie, and I find ourselves today as we raise three kids between the ages of seven and eleven: locked in a series of clashes with the kids over our insistence that outdoor time is more important than screen time.

No matter what phase were in, or how temporarily frustrated I get, I always return to that rock and the lessons it offered. The possibilities it revealed are always nearby, no matter where I am. But that first discovery took place on the coast of a remote island in southeast Alaska.

Years ago, I pitched in with my brothers Matt and Danny for a rundown cabin wed chanced into on a piece of land a twenty-minute floatplane ride from the town of Ketchikan. We bought it sight unseen, each of us paying about what youd pay for a decent used car. At the time, the three of us were unmarried. I had no immediate plans to have children, and certainly no long-term strategy about how Id raise them if I did. All I wanted was a good place for fishing with my brothers that was out in the middle of nowhere, and my brothers felt the same way. We wanted a place that we could call our own, where we could trade our time in exchange for knowledge of the natural world. My life had always been based on the value of that transaction. Ever since I was a kid growing up in rural Michigan, I had taken strength and inspiration from my interactions with nature. The lessons I learned there had guided me toward success as a family member, a student, and a professional. I knew that going deeper toward nature would only bring more rewards.

The fact that the cabin was home to a population of mice and a lone female mink only made it more appealing. At least these animals werent coated in either mold or rust, which is more than you could say for any man-made objects inside the cabin. My wife, Katie, would later observe that it wasnt really fair to describe the structure as a cabin at all. That was overselling it, she said.

Gradually it became known as the Fish Shack.

The main question we get from friends who visit the Fish Shack is, How did you guys find out about this place? My brother Danny has been a professional ecologist in Alaska for about twenty years. Hes based out of Anchorage. In a broad sense, as an ecologist, he studies the relationship of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings. In particular, he focuses on salmon. Salmon are an anadromous fish, meaning that they live in the sea but migrate into rivers to spawn. While many people might regard salmon as a saltwater species, because thats where they spend the bulk of their lives, Danny argues that its better to think of them as a freshwater fish. Their lives begin in freshwater and, since they die after spawning, their lives end in freshwater. Dannys work with salmon is focused on their freshwater habitats. He studies the gravelly stream bottoms where they lay their eggs. He studies the little streamside brush piles and overhanging vegetation where the juvenile salmon go to find food and avoid predation as they migrate toward the sea. And he studies what happens when all of those dead salmon carcasses rot away on the banks of the rivers (or in the bellies of bears and eagles) and enrich the surrounding environments with the ocean-based nutrients that were transported inland inside of their bodies as fat, bone, muscle, and gut.

It was this type of research that led Danny to the general location of the Fish Shack. He was working on a project gathering baseline biodiversity data about populations of freshwater aquatic invertebratesinsects, molluscs, crustaceansalong randomly selected salmon stream segments in southeast Alaska. In ecology, gathering baseline data is an operational term for taking measurements in an environment at a fixed moment. Youre asking, What lives here right now, at this moment in time? You do this without making assumptions about how things used to look or what they are supposed to look like now. In doing that work, Danny became friends with a local man whos a member of the Tsimshian tribe. One day, a couple of years later, that friend called to let him know about an old shack that was up for sale nearby. We bought the place, then chartered a floatplane so that we could fly out and have a look at what we now owned.

At first, we discovered that we now owned a lot of garbage. Of the two-acre parcel, about half was covered in decades worth of refuse: rusted-out oil drums, rotted lumber, head-high piles of wet fiberglass insulation, jumbles of twisted logging cable, junked-out outboard engines, paint and tar cans, irreparable boats, hundreds of yards of kinked polyethylene pipe, and all manner of other junk. The refuse was so overwhelming that you almost didnt notice the astounding specimens of old-growth hemlock and cedar that towered over the land and shack. The building itself was set on pilings, with half of the shack jutting out to the tideline. The structure was maybe forty feet long and twelve feet deep. Not a straight line or right angle could be found on the place. It looked as wavy as the surrounding ocean. There was no electricity. Water was drawn from the creek and run through PVC pipes that were fastened to the inside walls with brackets and rusty screws. Heat came from a smoky stove powered by a dripline of fuel oil.