Nature Doesn’t Care What I Think

One of the coolest little things I own is a tippe top. I used to give them away as holiday gifts, small wooden ones so people could play with them, and my favorite is a steel one I have to be careful with because it will scratch up a nice surface. You spin it like any other top, round side down, stem in the air. After a second it starts to wobble, and then it climbs, and then it turns all the way over and ends up spinning on the stem with the heavy end on top. It looks like it’s spinning upside down. It’ll stay that way until it slows down and falls. Spinning, upside down is where it belongs. It looks wrong to me, but nature doesn’t care what I think. (Watch one do it.)

A toy is small enough to watch all the way through. Bigger things hide what they need, and we give them what we think they need instead. In 1910 a fire burned about three million acres across Idaho and Montana and killed dozens of people, and the Forest Service came out of it with a mission. By 1935 the rule was that every fire reported had to be out by ten o’clock the next morning, and it worked. For decades almost nothing burned, which is what everyone wanted. What the small fires had been doing was eating the fuel, so the needles and deadfall and young trees kept piling up until the understory was dense enough to carry a ground fire into the crowns. The agency gave up the ten o’clock rule in 1978, forty-three years after writing it. Everyone was sure that putting fires out faster would mean fewer fires, and being sure had nothing to do with it.

My son didn’t learn to walk, he learned to run. Right when he started moving we were in a kids store, and he went straight under the clothing racks, one rack to the next, with us chasing him to the back. A shoe store’s back room is enormous, far bigger than the part you see, because every shoe out front has every size of itself stacked up back there, which is why the salesman takes so long.

By the time he was old enough for the monkey bars he was doing silly things on them, trying to launch himself at the first rung from the edge of the platform instead of just reaching out. Another boy was watching him, and then the boy’s mother was talking the boy into trying it from farther back than my son ever had. I didn’t think he’d make it. He wasn’t going to get hurt, he was just going to drop into the wood chips short of the bar. She kept encouraging him. I asked her why she’d want her kid to be more crazy.

She said, “He doesn’t ever take risks, and I really want him to do that more.”

He jumped. Everything was fine, and I don’t remember if he made it. I can’t imagine that he did. My son romped around the playground all afternoon, jumping for the monkey bars, running up the stairs to the slide and sometimes up the slide itself, doing the things my kid always does. I was giving him what he needed, and she was giving hers what he needed, and before that moment, I was sure one of us was doing it wrong. There are still things I won’t let him do, and the list is shorter than it was, and it isn’t the same list she’d write.