"The rains came down, and the floods came up..."

I'm not a die-hard Charlotte Mason educator--though I think she was incredibly insightful about how to engage children and create a sustainable home education--but there is one particular quote from her annals that has really stuck with me;

"Never by within doors when you can rightly be without." 

 I am not naturally very outdoorsy, though I do enjoy outdoor things when the weather is nice and when I have the proper gear for the experience. With three energetic and curious littles and the beautiful setting for our home, I recognized that it would be remiss of me to not cultivate this mindset of heading outside. 

We go on walks most school days now on the various hiking trails around our house (I'm still not sold on it in bad weather, though) and the kids play outside in their little stomping grounds in our "hundred acre woods" most days. They know every rock, tree, and creature surrounding us, and I think it's lovely. We even name some of our constant companions (like our under-house dwelling Canyon Towhee, Harris Tweeter or our western screech owl, Augustus the Rodent Slayer.)

Being in the southwest, we have some unique and dangerous features to our topography and wildlife, and we spend a lot of time learning/practicing/experiencing how to safely navigate things like poisonous snakes and spiders, cliffs and canyons, and most recently, arroyos and quicksand. 

(Sidenote: did you grow up thinking that catching on fire and sinking in quicksand would be a much more frequent occurrence in adult life than it actually is? Based on the constant "Stop, drop, and roll" and featuring of quicksand in cartoons, I really thought it was, like, a constant issue. It is not.)

So since we had some rainy weather (for us) I thought it was a good opportunity to actually SEE and experience what I've warned them about the arroyo behind our house regarding flash floods and quicksand. 

For those of you not from this part of the country, when it rains anywhere above us, the water rushes down the gullies or arroyos (also called a wadi) and drains eventually into rivers. So it may be clear blue sky over us, and suddenly, rushing down the arroyo, a wall of water will come rushing down and sweep away everything in its path. I've seen a two-to-three foot wall of water come gushing through a very wide arroyo--probably 40-feet across--on a sunny day out of the clear blue sky. Apparently it was raining in the mountains!

At our arroyo, we saw the result of an extremely gentle sprinkle--I wasn't even sure if it had rained enough to drain anything--but it was perfect for the point I was trying to make. 

Later there was a torrential downpour. We didn't have time to go back to the arroyo, but we did go look at the waterfall where it drains near our overlook, and it was simply POURING out water. 

Since it was a very small flash flood this time, I also let them step in some of the miniature patches of quicksand (sand that looks like a small puddle or even dry sand but when you step in it, the water has soaked in beneath it and you can sink, sometimes to the point of being unable to get out--I’m told that people have died in quicksand in arroyos before!). These were only an inch or two deep--kind of like when you sink into sand at the beach--but the sucking sensation is a little off-putting.

The point of this lesson was that A.) Do not play in arroyos, because you don't always have any warning before the flash flood or quicksand; and B.) Move to higher ground.  

Valor now refuses to walk across the arroyo and demands to be carried in case of flash floods or quicksand. I think the safety lesson had the desired impact on her.