Pining for the Mountains
My First Camping Book; 100 Things to do in the Forest; Mountains and Volcanoes; Call Me Floy
We often go camping in July, usually in the Sierras. Gonna take an abrupt pit-stop right here at the phrase “the Sierras,” into grammar territory that might seem a little obscure for a project aimed at children’s nonfiction – or maybe not. There’s some disagreement whether it’s appropriate or sacrilege to use an “s” at the end of the placename “Sierra.” Freda Moon did a great job writing about this for SFGate last July. Superficially, this is a question about whether a collective noun from Spanish (“Sierra” ≈ “mountain range”) may be pluralized when used colloquially by English speakers (“Sierras”). But it’s a short dig to strike harder stuff – this is actually a conversation about tolerance for change and assertion of ownership. Moon corresponded with an angry reader from “the Sierra” who stringently asserted usage of a final “s” was for careless tourists. My spouse and I both grew up immediately adjacent to the southern end of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, and we say “Sierras.” “Sierra Nevada” was a name foisted by a Spanish conquistador (or was he Portuguese? better to say Iberian? in any case he sure as hell wasn’t from here) upon a place that had already been broadly inhabited for thousands of years. No one among us is right; we all have a name for a place we know; we all know that place in our own way [yes, this is a HUGE gloss]; we all need to recognize that none of us are gods of it; we all have a responsibility for taking care of it. So, in my view, the plural “s” at the end of “Sierra” is both appropriate and appropriative for its blending of languages AND sacrilege inasmuch as the name betrays a very long history of taking something that does not belong to the taker.
OK, back on the road now. Summer, camping, the mountains. It’s an experience I look forward to every year, and it’s an experience that has taken different shapes across my lifetime, from RVing with cousins when I was a kid, to backpacking with my partner and friends as an adult, and more recently driving into campsites with little kids in tow. It’s not easy because I do not live in the mountains. In spite of the scant handful of years when I did live in the mountains as a small child, I am cityfolk. The mountains, specifically the Sierras, are far and hot (and cold) and high, which is tough on us cityflakes. And yet, each time we arrive in the mountains, the scents of the mountains immediately light up my limbic system, and remind me that all the work to plan and pack was worth the trouble. The pine sap, the sage brush, the pennyroyal (aka: Tickweed, Hedeoma pulegioides and sometimes Monardella odoratissima, Poléo Chino, and maybe Hukume, among others) – all of it, no matter what we call it, is glorious. Here’s a small collection of books I’m reading with the kids to help span the gap between “how do we outdoors again??” and “visiting the mountains is amazing!!”
My First Camping Book is a planning and doing guide that speaks directly to kids with simple, illustrated instructions covering all the major aspects of camping: packing, pitching a tent, preparing meals, plus several suggestions for activities to enjoy while outdoors. It does a great job setting expectations, reminding older kids all that’s involved, and empowering kids to take responsibility for (or at least help with) many of the fundamental camping tasks.
My First Camping Book. 2015, Dominic Bliss. Target age: Gr2-5 [libraries, book stores]
100 Things to do in a Forest isn’t written specifically for kids, but it’s accessible enough to kids who’ve been reading for a couple of years. Each activity gets a page, so it’s easy to leaf through for inspiration. Adult family members should be aware that the book takes an overall attitude that people are too much dissuaded from partaking of nature, overly warned to leave no trace, and excessively frightened from foraging. I like the sentiment, but I definitely lean toward a more cautionary/conservationist approach to the wild. Still a delightful invitation.
100 Things to do in a Forest. 2020, Jennifer Davis, Eleanor Taylor, John Calmann and King Ltd. Target age: general [flip through coming to IG soon, libraries, book stores]
Mountains and Volcanoes is a short, very simple picture book that describes how mountains are formed. I love it for its watercolor images mixed with cross-section diagrams. The littlest kids will need a little help from grownups to understand that mountains are in fact changing all the time, as the book points out, but that often those changes are not immediately apparent.
Mountains and Volcanoes. 1985, Eileen Curran, James Watling. Target age: PreK [read aloud on IG soon, libraries, AbeBooks - seems out of print]
Call Me Floy is a fictionalized first-person account about the first white kid to be born in Yosemite and her dream to climb Half Dome. PR for the book heavily emphasizes its challenge to gender expectations and its portrayal of the tourification of Yosemite, but you’ll also want to engage with its themes of racial disparity and displacement. It’s fraught, and it’ll invite you to wrestle with your own pining for or claim-staking of or casual touring in the wild. And along the way you’ll be deeply immersed in an evocative imagination of the Yosemite of the 1870s, written by an educator who lived and worked (including as a ranger) in Yosemite for 8 years. A seven page author’s note at the back gives a detailed summary of the historical figures and facts represented in the book, as well as an explanation of where she deviated from fact to facilitate storytelling.
Call Me Floy. 2020, Joanna Cooke. Target age: Gr4-6 [sample chapter coming to IG soon, libraries, book stores]
Further reading: The California Indian History Curriculum Coalition; American Indians in Children's Literature