Nature and Madness
Whoever has never danced on a mountaintop, never hiked all day in the cold and rain, never traveled by bus with thirty children while thirty phones played thirty different songs, never snacked on rose hips and hawthorn picked from the bushes on such days, never played ball and frisbee in the mud while soaked from head to toe, never climbed several more peaks just to reach the one summit — will never understand what a great pleasure it is to sit on the carpet at home in silence, enjoying hot tea and doing nothing. It has always surprised me: why would anyone leave their comfort and go wandering over mountains and gorges? What drives you to overcome pointless, aimless hardships, to deliberately go unwashed, get tired, freeze, and be blown about by wind and burned by the sun? These were just rhetorical questions. You don’t have to answer them. So who is teaching whom — the adults the children, or the children the adults? I have started to doubt. And who is in charge? In the end, after bouncing off the walls in an un-living state, the children — with some coordinating help from above, that is, from the universe — found a mountaineering group that was a perfect match for their nature-loving, rain-crazy, snow-hungry, mountain-mad souls. Why such heavy epithets? Because, apart from their love for dogs, cats and mice, they were also famous in our building for their walks in the rain. The heavier the downpour and the flood, the more irresistible their urge to go outside. And while all sensible, proper people shelter at home from the coming mudflow, ours have to run out and race around the yard, shouting with joy, even into the sloshing “mulberry puddle” under the mulberry tree stripped by wind and rain. So the new group was a rescue for these wild little cave-people growing up in the city without nature and in need of freedom from the captivity of mobile phones.
“Behave yourself, or you won’t go on the hike.” Phew — finally we have a way to tame them. And probably the cruelest one.
Author: Ashkhen Bakhchinyan, mother of club members Aram and Arpi
