Eugenious

It sounds like a Billy Collins poem, but today, it’s an observation about abstract concepts.

When Sylvan and I go for walks, I like to point out the objects along the way and talk about them. Usually, the objects we see are mundane and straightforward, at least to Sylvan: truck, dog, tree, bird, light. Sylvan understands these objects. He even has words for them and will point them out to me, repeatedly and unprompted.

The other day we passed a parking meter, and Sylvan was giving it a look, so I tried to explain. “That’s a parking meter. When you’re driving your car and you want to park, you put money into the meter, and you get to park for an amount of time based on the amount of money that you put into the meter.” That’s when I realized that a parking meter is a much different class of object from a truck or a dog. Especially a dog.

While a parking meter appears to be an ordinary inanimate object, certainly less complicated than a truck or a dog, just the opposite is true. Understanding a parking meter requires understanding, at minimum, two abstract concepts that many adults don’t even grasp: money and time. A parking meter’s function is to turn money, an abstract concept whose true meaning and value eludes most people, into time, an even more abstract concept that eludes even more of us.

These are the things you learn when you walk with a one-year-old child.

Chris’s summary of camping last weekend with Sylvan: “Camping was great. Sylvan loved the tent, and the water, and the trees, and the trucks, and the squirrels, and the birds, and the hollow tree trunks, and the watermelon, and the big fish, and the dirt, and the snuggling in sleeping bags. He was quite pleased.”

Due to commitments at 5 p.m. Friday and 5 p.m. Sunday, along with the reality of travel with a one-year-old, we needed to camp and hike somewhere nearby; but we wanted to visit someplace new. Chandra recommended Clear Lake, which is considered to be the headwaters of the McKenzie River, although Ikenick Creek, Fish Lake Creek, and the Great Springs all flow into it. The lake, which owes its clarity to 38 degree water that supports little life, was created when a lava flow dammed a river 3000 years ago. Some trunks of the trees submerged when the river backed up still stand upright in the lake, preserved by the cold, lifeless water. The water appears turquoise in some places because the bottom is covered with the silicate bodies of diatoms, a type of algae. The pale sediment reflects sunlight back through the water, giving the lake its Caribbean color. As Chandra had promised, the vine maples were also losing their summer chlorophyll, turning red and orange and yellow, depending on how deeply they were buried in the shady forest.

Sylvan has been a super camper since he was eight weeks old and snuggled in the tent on the way to Monterey, but he truly enjoyed this camping trip. He toddled into the tent as soon as it was up, recognizing that he’d found a soft, forgiving playroom; he tumbled around, flopping to the ground and burying himself in sleeping bags. Sylvan and Chris read a bedtime story by headlamp. Sylvan’s riveted expression is typical of storytime; if we offer to read Sylvan a book, he says “book” and sits down, patting his legs with his hands in anticipation.

And the big fish Chris referred to were spawning chinook salmon. Chandra told us about an artificial channel created for salmon habitat just downstream of the Trail Bridge Reservoir. The quarter-mile section of gravel stream (effectively a cul-de-sac, although fed by McKenzie water) held 40-50 salmon, holding position in the cold water and occasionally swimming splashily up over the artificial log steps. Chris says the fish weren’t over two feet, but I’m convinced they were closer to three. I just kept imagining them next to my 27-inch-tall son; they were bigger.

This is the first in a series of photos I’m trying to take of Sylvan in the clothes of his forebears. The process isn’t proving easy or simple, since he’s growing pretty quickly and being messed with (e.g. having his clothes changed) falls pretty low on his list of favorites. This romper was my Dad’s, and his Mom kept it beautiful for years and years. It has a label that says “Handmade” with the initials BLM. The stitching on the collar and on the front is pretty intricate. Sylvan pulls off the 60 year-old romper quite well, I’d say (remember that you can always click on a photo to see a larger version).

Sylvan’s language acquisition continues to astound us. He frequently uses words that I don’t even know he understands, much less that he can actually say. Tonight, for instance, he told me “dock” when I was putting on my sock after a shower. Now, I know, that sounds a lot like his word for truck, dog, and duck. The difference in pronunciation is slight, but he uses those words discriminately, when he sees a truck, dog or other four-legged mammal, or duck. He also has a word for “potty,” we think, as well as one for “light.” Those words sound nothing like the English words for them, but he uses his words in only those specific situations.

Even more amazing is that almost every child goes through just this language development! Miraculous. Really, it’s like a miracle. I can’t believe we all don’t go through life grunting.

In an attempt to give Chris some time to work on his thesis (he napped for four hours instead!) and to raise my heartrate enough to shove off this horrific cold, Sylvan and I drove down I-5 to Roseburg on Saturday to the North Bank Deer Preserve, which overlooks the North Umqua River, a wide, gravelly fly-fisher’s dream. The BLM-managed area was created to provide habitat for the federally endangered Columbia white-tailed deer. Thanks to my need to study a sketched map, we stopped early in the hike and actually saw three deer as we sat quietly by the gravel road. Sylvan watched and pointed as the deer stotted through the September-dead grass and Oregon white oaks.

Neither Sylvan nor I saw the “fainter track/old roadbed” mentioned in the hiking guide, so we set off cross-country, following deer and horse trails through the thigh-high, crispy grass. Soon, Sylvan asked to get out and explore, so we sat in the shade of some enormous oaks, eating Cheerios. We heard a raven, not a bird I’ve ever heard at 600 feet in Eugene, and one of my favorites, because it reminds me of being in the mountains.

When we started hiking again, I walked uphill, dodging the frighteningly prevalent poison oak (Really, it was frightening. Some of my former students, the ones I’ve urged on as they scrambled on all fours up rock ledges while whining that they were going to die, would have enjoyed watching me dance around the poison oak. I’ll let you know in a few days if I avoided it enough and used enough Tecnu in the shower hours later.). We bushwhacked along a ridge strung with large oaks. Sylvan fell asleep. I wasn’t sure where we were, but I could basically see from where we’d come. Eventually, we hit a gravel road that wasn’t on the guidebook’s sketched map.

I turned away from the direction of the car, hoping to get in a little more of a hike. Now that I was on a road and didn’t have to think about navigating anymore, I noticed how many different trees forested the darker valleys: madrone, Douglas fir, big-leaf maple, oak, and a conifer too far away to identify. After some uphill walking, I headed back downhill. Walking down the road, through the oak woodland and oak savanna, I was surprised by how much the light and color looked like the mountains of the southwest in the fall; everything was yellow and brown, dry and crunchy. The speckled light under the trees made this place look like just what it had once been – cattle pastures. As lovely as the Deer Preserve was, the cattle pasture feeling reminded me that I really need deep, green forests for my outdoor rejuvenation. Maybe next weekend?

Sylvan and I, at Chris’s suggestion, decided that we would institute a new tradition on the day before Sylvan’s birthday: hiking to the summit of Mount Pisgah every September 11. Last year, in a fit of get-this-baby-out-of-me, Chris, Aunt Jenny, and I hiked up with Sylvan in utero from the east side, which is longer but not quite as steep as the well-traveled, west-side summit route. In 2005, the hike worked like a charm; I went into labor the next day at 5 a.m.

So, this year, Sylvan and I slowly climbed to the top from the west, hopping off the busy summit route by taking trail 17, which Chris helped build. We stopped to smell the pennyroyal, feel the lichen on the oak branch that crossed the trail just over our heads, and, with our eyes and pointed fingers, follow the bald eagle as it soared to the west, over the Coast Fork of the Willamette. At the top, Sylvan found that he appreciated the summit sculpture, which, along the outside, depicts flora and fauna through the eons; Sylvan slid his fingers along brachiopods and ferns. The sculpture is broken up by two fissures running through it, which, it turns out, are great peek-a-boo slots, as you can see from the photo.

Oral hygiene starts early in this family. Gramma Maria gave Sylvan a toothbrush nine months before he had any teeth, then, when Gramma Diana was here last month, she picked up another toothbrush (the downstairs toothbrush) and taught Sylvan to spit in the sink (or at least make a cute spitting sound) when he was done brushing. Sylvan’s new predilection for imitation means that brushing is great fun.

And Sylvan’s love of everything spherical has led to a new phenomenon: feeding himself! So apparently, if he can call it a ball, he wants to try to put it in his mouth. He only calls spherical objects balls if they’re larger than plums, which is convenient, since he has no interest in feeding himself grapes or cherries or any other manner of small choking hazards. Apple-balls are his new love. As I was unpacking our CSA share yesterday, Sylvan added his little bite-marks to three of the five apples.

For those of you not aware of our son’s fixations, here is Sylvan worshipping his own personal fetish, an exit sign that his Daddy gave him for his first birthday. Exit signs seem to exert magical or spiritual powers over the poor, hapless child, as you can plainly see in this photo. We first discovered the power of the exit sign at a nature center in Lewes, Delaware last May. The fish and the turtles didn’t even place a close second in holding Sylvan’s interest. Green exit signs seem just as powerful as red ones, too; when the boys were visiting me in Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center in early August, Sylvan pointed to every green exit sign as Chris walked the hallways.

Now Chris just has to figure out how to electrify the thing.