There’s lots to do in Pacific Northwest

David W. Kuhns Sr./Northwest Guardian

It’s hard to believe that figuring out how to fill a summer could ever be a problem. But every year I here children complain their is nothing to do.

To borrow a cliche, youth is wasted on the young.

That children need to be guided to activities might be the greatest failing we — the parents — have foisted upon them. Doesn’t anyone just play anymore?

I look back on the summers of my memory and I can remember endless activity, most of it outdoors. I don’t remember much of it having been planned by anyone but me and my buddies.

It was hard to find any sort of baseball field that didn’t have a group of young players throwing a ball around. I don’t mean organized leagues, with bleachers full of yelling parents, I mean a group of guys — and girls, too — riding their bikes over to the school and picking sides. We figured out ways to play games with four or five on a side. We played all sorts of variations (no walks, two strikes and you’re out, and on and on). The important thing was that the games went on for hours.

We climbed trees to examine the eggs in birds’ nests. We took target practice with sling shots, firing rocks at hornets’ nests — prepared to sprint to safety if we got lucky.

We built “forts” for days (usually more like foxholes, but imagination filled in the necessary battlements), then attacked those fortifications in long wars, armed with pine cones and cap guns.

We rode bikes just to feel the wind in our faces — often with a baseball card clothes-pinned to the frame so it flapped on the spokes and made a great sound as we accelerated down the street.

Walking to the store to buy candy was always a favorite pastime, but that took money. Earning a little ready cash was a frequent obsession.

We had lemonade stands, of course, but there was too little adventure in that. It was more fun to take an empty coffee can to the woods to pick blackberries. We’d return to the neighborhood eventually with a can full of ripe berries, arms scratched from the thorns and hands stained purple. We would run door-to-door to offer our pickings to whomever was at home; a quart of fresh, warm, aromatic heaven for a handful of loose change.

There was one great summer when a university student told my dad he would pay my big brother and me for snakes: 25 cents a foot. That might have been the best vacation ever. We spent days poking through the underbrush looking for slithering reptiles. Inevitably, some of our captures escaped in the house — a shoe box wasn’t the most secure cage for a lively snake intent on freedom. I will never forget reading a book on the floor in the living room, only to spot a garter snake staring back at me from under a chair. Then there is the image of my dad trying to coax a hissing gopher snake out from behind the oil tank in the garage ...

Did any of you ever spend a hot afternoon catching grasshoppers in a field? Remember the acrid smell and the brown stain of their “tobacco juice” on your hands?

Of course there are a lot of wonderful, organized activities, available for children now. They are often educational, they ease parental worries and they fill the time until school starts again. But I wonder what sort of memories today’s children will have when they look back in 40 or 50 years.

Youth is wasted on the young — and maybe it’s our fault.