Seeking Beauty in the Muck

September/October 2008 Issue | Posted by Elizabeth Foss in Features

By Elizabeth Foss

Crawdad Creek

By Scott Russell Sanders

Illustrated by Robert Hynes

(National Geographic Children’s Books)

$7.95 from Amazon.com

When my three oldest boys were little, we lived in a townhouse with a postage-stamp-sized yard.

But this little house was set on the edge of Pohick Valley Stream Park, acres and acres of wooded parkland with a meandering creek running down the middle of it.

In the spring, rains filled the creek to overflowing and the sound of rushing water drifted to my bedroom in the morning. In the summer, we watched deer drink from the creek and hoped they wouldn’t wander up to our garden. In the winter, the creek froze and snow blanketed the woodlands in pristine beauty. The fall was the favorite time for our little boys, though. The fall found us in the creek more often than not, scooping up crawdads and chasing salamanders.

It was like living in Eden, and I felt sorry for the folk in the bigger houses at the top of the street who had no woods and no creek.

It was these fond memories that came rushing back when I first read Scott Russell Sanders’s Crawdad Creek.

The book is a glorious celebration of a simple back-yard creek. Beautiful acrylic paintings done in watercolor style accompany the story of a girl named Lizzie and her little brother Michael, who head down to the creek to pan for gold and end up discovering the countless treasures of a freshwater stream.

As Lizzie tells us about “her” creek and the riches she finds there, all the joys of a simple childhood experience are brought to life to inspire a new generation of children to see beauty in the muck. Lizzie and Michael find fossils and ferns and mussels and worms and wonder about the earth long ago and how similar it is to this little corner of their world right now.

The book prompted Nicholas, my current creek-going enthusiast, to remind me that he found mussels in a nearby creek just last week. He nodded in recognition at Lizzie and Michael’s other discoveries.

There are frogs and salamanders and, of course, a crawfish, which their father calls a “crawdad,” thereby christening the creek with its new name.

The illustrations of the creatures are vivid and realistic, and each one is identified within the gentle, fictional text. The book is definitely a storybook, but it deftly weaves a nature lesson into it, as well. Eager readers will recognize and name snails, waterstriders, dragonflies, turtles, and snakes.

Children with previous experiences beside a wooded creek will delight in familiar friends. Stephen marveled at the crawdad painting, but reminded me that the best crayfish he’d ever seen was the blue one we found in West Virginia. Karoline kept trying to grab a turtle off the page to hold.

For Michael and Lizzie, out of doors doesn’t mean artificial turf, baseball diamonds, and plastic “gravel.” They learn to identify the tracks of the animals that live in the nearby woods. They wonder about deer and mice and rabbits and muskrats. And they learn to sit very still to get an up-close look at wild animals in their natural habitat.

Their experience out in the fresh air is more magnificent than any television show or online webcam viewing could have been, no matter how excellent the production. Nothing is as gloriously produced as those natural events that God himself produces, and nothing touches our souls in quite the same way.

When we read Crawdad Creek at our house, my children are always eager to translate the literary experience into a real-life one.

Now, we have three times the children and we live in a house more like the ones at the top of the hill. We have a big back yard, but it’s flat and rather boring. I have to put forth a little more effort to get to our nearby creek.

Ah, but it’s so well worth the effort!

I sit on a blanket at the edge of the water with the baby and listen to the children shout the news of their discoveries. I breathe in the goodness of God and give thanks for the time and space to appreciate it.

Elizabeth Foss chronicles her family's outings at EBeth.Typepad.com

Nature Deficit Disorder

In his award-winning book­, Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv asserts that modern American children are suffering from “Nature Deficit Disorder.” They don’t spend enough time outside in the natural world.

American parents tend to organize and orchestrate a child’s time from one structured activity to another. They are notorious for hovering about, micromanaging everything from playing time to who’s got the snack.

Instead of passing summer months hiking, swinging from tire swings, and telling stories around the campfire, modern children are more likely to attend resume-building camps, weight-loss camps, or sports camps.

Because they are so far removed from nature, Louv says, they’ve come to think of nature as more of an abstraction than a reality.

A 2002 British study reported that 8-year-olds could identify Pokémon characters far more easily than they could name “otter, beetle, and oak tree.” Louv asserts that most children would be well served by access to the woods and a creek and a laidback parent who lets them wander and climb and get dirty.

For parents who have spent little time in nature themselves, the idea of getting outside into the “wild” of a nearby stream or pond environment can be intimidating.

Parents who are used to being “in charge” might chafe a bit with the unpredictability of time outside in a natural environment. Parents fear strangers, Lyme Disease, West Nile virus, and all the potentially poisonous creatures of the woods. They also need to overcome more and more homework, crammed-to-overflowing extracurricular schedules, and lack of access to truly natural areas.

The truth is, though, taking an afternoon once a week to just hang out at a nearby creek might be more important than any of those carefully considered school and extracurricular activities.

Louv’s website, RichardLouv.com, has a helpful list of nature activities to get even novices eager for fresh air and dirt. There is also a lengthy list of books and field guides to inspire and to encourage even the most reluctant parents.

— Elizabeth Foss

Great Outdoors Storybooks

The Raft,by Jim LaMarche

Nicky is a city boy who goes to spend the summer with his grandmother in the woods of Wisconsin. He’s worried about a whole summer without anyone to play with or access to a TV.

Salamander Rain: A Lake and Pond Journal,

by Kristin Joy Pratt-Serafini

This is an illustrated field guide that takes the form of a child’s nature journal, packed with great information and written in an engaging style.

­Give Her the River,

by Michael Dennis Browne

This softly illustrated poem about a father’s gift never fails to make me grateful that we have rivers to give and never fails to inspire my daughter Katie to beg to go down to the water.

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