“Mum, my friends and I want to cook meat in the forest,” said my son one night. “Is that OK?”
Now what you have to understand is that near my house, we have a fabulous ravine. Great unofficial trails that my kids and I have walked along with Maggie the dog for years – since my youngest could toddle along without falling over tree roots. We scramble down ravine banks, throw sticks for Maggie to chase, look for wildlife (scat searching was a big hit when the boys were young!) and generally have a great time in this special piece of nature that makes us forget we were in a big built up urban area.
There’s one particular spot, high above the creek where there is essentially no ground cover. With tree branches high overhead, it’s perfectly flat. Years and years ago, someone dug a fire pit right in the middle and has put logs around it for seating. When the SEA creatures – so named for the initials of their given names – were young, we’d have serious conversations about the naughty teenagers (such bad boys and girls) who had fires unsupervised and who drank – gasp – beer in the forest. Why would they do such a terrible thing?
Back to the present. My teenager, on behalf of his friends, was now asking to be essentially “those” teenagers.
Fortunately, this is a good bunch of kids. They’re level headed and proud to be just a little nerdy. At least one of them has wilderness leadership experience and they know how to be safe with a fire. If you have to have a fire in the forest, this is the place to have it. So, in the perhaps naïve hopes of being a parent my kids will talk to about these things, instead of being secretive, I reluctantly agreed to the plan, once we talked it through. At least I thought I knew what I was agreeing to.
The day arrived. I had stocked up on hotdogs, pop and the makings of s’mores. No problem, right? The forest adventure began before I got home from work. As the sun set and it got darker, they teens all flocked back to our house, full of excitement from their adventure. None were inebriated (mark one in their favour!). They returned the bucket they had used to fully extinguish the fire (mark two in their favour!). Garbage and recycling was put away (mark three). And that’s when I noticed the blackened frying pans. Frying pans?
“Oh,” says the boy. “We used them to cook the bacon.”
Bacon?
Apparently, I was supposed to have understood that by “Mum, my friends and I want to cook meat in the forest,” that meant bacon. And bacon, of course, demanded frying pans!
But over a fire? Teen logic reigned again. We have a gas cooktop, so those frying pans are used over fire all the time, aren’t they?
By this point, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh hysterically, or yell loudly. Laughter won out, because after all, these kids had responsibly shopped for and cooked a meal, built a fire and made sure it was stone cold and had even come home sober. Most of the forest fire blackness was scrubbed off the frying pans with a little elbow grease.
Should I have endorsed this adventure? Maybe not, but important things were learned. My son and his friends were reminded that I trust them enough to do slightly screwy and slightly risky things –and that they can talk to me about them in advance so we can discuss safety and possible outcomes – rather than going behind my back, doing them secretly and risking the consequences. Because realistically, as teenagers, they will do those things, whether I know about them or not.
As we approach this Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, I’m thankful for that mutual respect and trust. For me, it’s huge, blackened frying pans or not.
