My parents never hiked the Appalachian Trail. They never climbed one the the Seven Summits. They never even ventured away from their home continent. To say that my parents possessed the true qualities of hardened adventurers would be overstating in the extreme.
What they did possess was a deep fondness for nature and a sense of awe for the wonders of the world that lived out our back door, and I followed them, grudgingly at first, into that wondrous place. There were the summertime Saturday rise-at-dawn fishing excursions to Canadarago Lake with my dad (and how I loved waking at 5:00 am on my summer vacation). There were the car camping trips (three or four every summer) to the Thousand Islands or Westcott Beach, where I was introduced, after many long moments tiptoeing along the water's edge, to the wonders of the underwater Lake Ontario shore. There was the day trip one warm fall day when I was nine to Rogers Environmental Center, home to a few miles of nature trails that wound through various forest and wetland ecosystems. Rogers was where I discovered the trail, and by the middle of the afternoon both of my parents were slumped on the lawn outside of the interpretive center munching on a long awaited lunch as I hopped around excitedly asking if we could walk just one more trail. And of course, like so many other families, there were the endless afternoon drives to eagerly awaited destinations only to discover that no, the Adirondack Museum was not open after Columbus Day and Howe Caverns sent the last elevator into the depths no later than 4:00pm. As I grew older, the destination faded into the background on those drives as I became lost in the journey.
Some would say that it wasn't until I went off to college that my real outdoor adventures began. It was there that I kayaked the northern Adirondack rivers and lakes, spent countless days tramping all over the mountains, and ventured to far flung destinations in Canada and Mexico. But as my love for these outdoor adventures grew, I began to realize that my parents' outdoor legacy was one of sharing in the discovery of nature and a love for sharing the wonders of the outside world, however big or small, with others. Their enthusiasm for sharing and discovery clearly rubbed off on me, as a few years after college I took a part-time position teaching backpacking and wilderness skills at a local university. And it was there, with my students, as they looked in awe across the Hudson Valley from some high perch in the Catskills or watched twinkling stars from the comfort of their sleeping bags on a minty fresh fall night in the Adirondacks that I began to attain some small measure of the love that my parents had for sharing the outdoors with me.
My dad passed away in March 1999. Mom still gets out for snowshoeing and the occassional summer hike, but her adventures are more limited now.
My son, Gabriel, was born December 27, 2009.
For me, the sharing continues.
-Matt
