When children roamed the earth

By Steve Smith

Steve Smith is a Hamilton County assistant district attorney. He is the father of four children: Emma (8), Clara (6), and twins Willa and Duncan (4). He lives on Signal Mountain.

I remember how big the world seemed at 8. The Earth was 20 acres, and I roamed it with the neighborhood kids. A patch of woods in the back concealed wolves and bears, ogres and giants. At times you could hear Panzer tanks and anti-aircraft barrages; we held them off with BBs, slingshots, and David Brown’s magic staff. David was the oldest. Even a simple stick is the coolest if you’re the oldest.

Sometimes it was nearly silent. Trees creaked as their tops swayed. Down by the pond, dragonflies zig-zagged between cattails. We fished for brim with bamboo poles, plastic bobbers and rusty hooks. David used treble hooks. They looked mean. Mean was cool. Sometimes, to be cool, I would sneak biscuit dough from the fridge and let the can pop in my hands. The dough was sticky, and one can was enough bait for every fish in the pond to steal a little.

After feeding the fish, we would run to our two-story tree house. It had wall-to-wall carpeting, a car battery, and lights. We built it on land we didn’t own with wood we didn’t buy. You see, there was a great deal of construction in the surrounding neighborhoods, and with it a great deal of surplus lumber. At least, I believed it was surplus lumber; it’s what they left outside for us to take after dark. One day the foreman paid my mom a visit. Then my dad paid me a visit.

I’ve wondered why my mother allowed me so much freedom. I was out of earshot most days. If she had needed to, she couldn’t have quickly found me. I wasn’t safe. I didn’t have a cell phone. I didn’t even wear a helmet. Maybe me being out of her hair freed her to do the things that mothers used to do. She crocheted, she sewed, and she stayed home until I was big enough to wear a key on a shoelace around my neck. But best of all, she cooked without instant boxes and mixes.

We ate gourmet—Greenlife-like—except the produce came from the curb market. It wasn’t artisan or organic. They actually gave you paper bags but held onto their wooden bushels.

In the winter we had green beans I had broken the past summer. We had tomato-vegetable soup. We had corn that we all shucked on the back porch. We had potatoes taken from a box my dad built up off the cement floor in the garage. He filled it with powdered lime so the potatoes would keep longer.

We had fried chicken every week—you know, chicken with actual bones in it. We even ate the livers: chicken nuggets before chicken nuggets. My own kids bristle at the thought of eating anything off a bone, and we don’t even mention the L-word.

How is any of this relevant to being a father now, you might ask? Well, I know that kids still have an imagination. Our childhood wars in the woods were better than any X-Box game.

As a kid, I learned that wildlife is something you chase and catch with your hat or with a rusty hook, not something on the Discovery Channel narrated by Oprah or Bindi the Jungle Girl. Now, as a father, I know there isn’t a Sasquatch or some child predator behind every tree. There might be a bad influence that pops up occasionally. But like my dad and the construction foreman, I can come home from work early and set things straight without resorting to the police or Juvenile Court.

Finally, with childhood obesity now considered an epidemic, I know what real food is. I learned from an early age how to grow it, cook it, can it—and how to eat it, even when I didn’t like it. I learned to have treats between meals, not meals between treats.

So why did my dad allow my mom to cast me out, unsupervised, into the 20-acre world at such an early age? I know now it’s because there comes a time when the world gets bigger than 20 acres. Lessons learned on cul-de-sacs, beside retention ponds and within a small greenway carry over into the classroom, the breakroom and the courtroom. To me, fatherhood means allowing my children the independence to discover and master the world…20 acres and a couple of mistakes at a time.