Wild Child Wednesdays: The river speaks to us, so in turn, we speak for the river.

Part 1: The river speaks to us.

E.P.'s school year kicked off with some spontaneous and incredible travel opportunities - so it wasn't until the first Wednesday of October that we had a chance to settle into the "home" part of our schooling.  We've traded backyards this year, rather than Moran State Park on Orcas Island we are spending the third grade exploring The Deschutes National Forest just outside of Bend, Oregon.  It was time for us to go wild and in search of our third grade outdoor classroom.

Knowing that proximity promises consistency when it comes to visiting one's sit spot and/or nature classroom we limited our exploring to just a volcanic stone's throw away from our small home.  Down the dusty feeder trail we stopped where our hillside meets The Deschutes River Trail.  E.P. found  a "perfect perch" for observation positioned close to a broad fallen Douglas Fir that needed no more carving than what nature had already provided to serve as his desk. 

We sat in the noon day sun with The Tree That Time Built and read about the importance of being a curious and diligent collector in one's youth like Darwin.  We explored how poets and scientists are alike.  E.P. listened while looking about and I could see when his directed attention was strained.  Class dismissed.  He grabbed a stick and headed for the land bridge to Lava Island while I sketched.  I marveled at how many different birds I could hear and how long E.P. was silent.

"Mom this is REALLY worth trying, you must come over here and do it."  

He was leaning over the mouth of a steel drainage pipe observing the current of an otherwise sedated area of the river as it suddenly quickened to escape.  Dry, light, green plant granuales had clumped together in varying sizes and he was "exploding them" with his stick tip as they sped toward him.  We were both under a spell of entrainment.  E.P. was hypervigilant (not one green clump skated past his stick) yet simultaneously he was totally relaxed.  I was in awe of what I was witnessing; Galaga, the old 80's arcade game, being played outside of the box.  The river was the screen, the green clusters were the alien ships and the branch was his avatar.

Galaga is one of the few video games we've allowed E.P. to play occasionally.  On Orcas Island he would beg for quarters and a quick stop at the White Horse Pub to play whenever I pulled through town.  Quarters helped me keep an easy limit for him.  "Here's a dollar, go get change, I'll pick you up in 10 minutes."  

Homeschooling has helped us stave off the full brunt of media saturated boy culture and still our weeks are full of questions from E.P. about screen time, media and our family rules and values.  I am officially the worst mother ever because he is the only kid he knows (besides his sister) who hasn't seen Star Wars.  The most challenging topic for us as a family is video games.

I've looked for help in all directions when it comes to video games and ADHD.  I've found some articles that claim they are actually helpful and some that says they are outright dangerous for the ADHD brain.  All I really know about video games is what I've observed with my own child.  They are POWERFUL.  Some of the greatest emotional disregulation I've seen with E.P. has come from playing video games.  Some of his greatest experiences of absorption has come from video games and therefore, some of his greatest experiences of desire have too.  Having worked for a decade in the field of addiction recovery my senses seem ever piqued to pick up on unhealthy relationships with both substances and processes.  The first time we allowed E.P. to try a modern video game on a smartphone, one loaded with the ability to purchase more power and position for faster ascension through the level system, was a truly sad and scary experience.  One that had to be ended in a fast intervention followed by cold turkey.  It only took about three days from him trying the game once to it becoming an obsession that was fast on its way to destroying balance, happiness, peace, and many other aspects of our family life that we value so much.

What was really hard was watching him grapple with the fact that strawberries might not be his only allergy.  He was heartbroken to hear that even though other kids might play this game he was having an adverse reaction to it. I always thought what we had to worry about were the games that normalize death and destruction and violence - this was just a car racing game.

The more I observed, however, the more I wondered if "just a car racing game", one with built in consumption of power and position, wasn't itself a training ground for destruction and violence.  E.P. tends to be the canary in a coal mine when it comes to what is toxic in our culture and aiding the destruction of his home.  It seems that his ADHD differences provide him with a certain set of imperative skills that the will need to have in tact for the environmental crisis that he is inheriting.  Florence Williams covers the wonderful adventure based gifts that the ADHD child brings to the world in her article "ADHD is Fuel for Adventure".  E.P. has the qualities that she heralds in spades and the one that tends to surprise me the most is his allergy-like sensitivity for activities that contribute to the destruction of our planet.

E.P. finding flow state in nature's version of Galaga validated what I've decided (for now) about video games and our son - it isn't the process that I need to be wary of but rather the purpose.  And in fact, the process of gamifying daily life, what Eric Barker outlines as WNGF in his book Barking Up The Wrong Tree, is one of the most helpful discoveries I've made regarding our homeschooling.  When applied, this four step process of "gamifying" our adventures in education has not once failed me.  We charm E.P's most challenging tasks with the magic of being Winnable while containing Novel challenges, Goals and Feedback.  My hair stays on my head rather than in clenched fists on those days.  More importantly E.P. finishes the day delightfully sated both intellectually and emotionally.

Boiled down to a one line spell the essence of game magic is, "Last one back to the house is a rotten egg!"  Most exasperated parents have had the experience of invoking those words, or something similar, in a moment of kid chaos.  Distracted unruly children are suddenly on task and giving their best for a simple, if not silly, goal.  Turns out it is as super natural as it seems.  It's how we humans are programmed to thrive and succeed, especially the ADHD version of our software.  The trick is getting and staying ahead of the game.  Quite literally.  A feat that is not easy when you are keeping up, full time, with a child that runs on "fuel for adventure." Thankfully our time in nature each day provides me with brief moments of rest and reflection.

As I sat watching E.P. play primitive Galaga that first Wednesday of October the river spoke a few pieces to me about gaming that I was yet to glean from my research and reading.  The river taught me about what I find to be the most challenging aspect of games  - competition. The river provided E.P. with an endless parade of targets yet had no agenda.  I watched E.P. fill in the lack of programming by self-imposing his own goals.  Once the feeling of flow and gratification flooded him he enlisted opponents (me) with an intention of sharing something "super cool" rather than having someone to beat.  There was a "leaderboard" in his mind but it felt like he was experiencing the power of dominion rather than the power of domination. He had the attitude of, "This is SO much fun, let me show you how to get some of this enjoyment for yourself." rather than, "This is so much fun because I am crushing you."  From the power of dominion our experience became naturally collaborative and even cooperative at points.  "Let's band together and get as many as we can in the next 10 seconds."  "You go for the biggest and I'll go for the fastest."  It wasn't a one pointed mission of, "Be the one who destroys the most."   It was a much richer experience that had the power to keep us "in the flow" much longer.   I took home from the river that day what I couldn't have understood from a book.  And so did E.P. in his own way.

Part 2: So, in turn, we speak for the river.

When we returned to our outdoor classroom the following week for our "Wild Child Wednesday" we stopped cold in our tracks.

The river was gone.

We were silent.  We were in disbelief.  E.P. ventured out first to explore the newly exposed rocks and silt.  It smelled minerally and felt wrong.  We saw a woman squatting over tiny puddles left between rocks.

I broke our silence with "Are we imagining it, or did the river just vanish?"

"Yes. Yes, it did.  They turned it off."

It took us a minute to get past the mechanical, clinical language attached to such a shocking act.

"Turned it off?" E.P. echoed.

"Yep, they do it this time every year."  She was serious and heavy with the explanation.  "They lower the water flow from Wickiup Dam to 100 cfs every October and this part of the river by Lava Island dries up.  The fish that are left here by the suddenly flow change are stranded and will die."

E.P. was horrified, as was I, if not for varying reasons.  I saw his eyes wide with the thoughts of gasping fish while I was processing that a teacher that we had only just met had been decapitated according to a calendar date.

She immediately invited us to return the next day with a bucket to help.
"We do an annual fish salvage.  You have to just grab them, get them in buckets and we will get them back to the river."

E.P. was on fire.  "Oh Mom, we HAVE to."

It was a game.  It was novel.  It had a SUPER important goal.  It's feedback registered on the scales of life and death.  He was IN.

Funny to think that for a moment the mother in me overpowered the teacher as I first pondered if it was too graphic for him.  I imagined the gasping fish and E.P. faced with the reality that they couldn't all be saved no matter how hard we worked.  It wasn't going to be winnable.  "It's not a long term solution," our new teacher shared, "we don't save them all but the rest of the year we work in other ways to try to raise awareness to the problem and help regulate the flow for the future."  She handed us her card.  She was the co-founder of the Coalition for the Deschutes and her card read, "We speak for the river."

With the voice of the river gone so suddenly, that statement was comfort even if it was cold, dry comfort.

As we walked back up the feeder trail home E.P. was non-stop chatter with thoughts and questions.  I mumbled enough in response for him to keep going.  He had a mission.  He was going home to get a good nights sleep because he had to be a hero come next daybreak.

I stayed back processing.

"I was right," I thought to myself, "they aren't 'just car racing games' - not the way they are designed these days."

The river had told me just before she lost her position on the leader board and faded, if not for a season, into obscurity.


Update: We returned for the fish salvage the following October. This story continues here.