Kay Wade
Wild, Wild Children
They spill from big yellow school buses with giggles and nervous anticipation, these wild children. For today, they leave behind indoor classrooms. Out here, in the Jocassee Gorges, they will enter their natural habitat, the one that has nourished and sustained humanity for thousands of years. There are no walls. Out here, their ceiling is the sky, and their floor is the living ground beneath their feet. Over these weeks of Spring 2025 these lucky children have left the dock on beautiful blue days, but also on days when they quickly disappear into fog. They will shriek with laughter on days when gusts of wind throw sprays of water across their laps, and they happily huddle together under towels on the misty rain days. Through direct experience, they learn about climate and weather and rainforests. They climb into the Otter Cave and climb to the top of Tahiti Beach and slide down Swallowtail Slide and jump off Family Rock, all the while learning lessons about Jocassee Gorges geology. They visit the Frog Pond to catch salamanders. They absorb lessons on amphibians and habitat as readily as the salamanders—one of the Gorges most abundant creatures— absorb oxygen through their skin. They marvel at trees, as if seeing them for the first time, and they marvel that the Common loon can spend five whole minutes underwater. Since our Wildest Child and Director, Kerry McKenzie, has been temporarily grounded by a new knee, Wild Child Adventures have been taken over by a gang of JLT guides who release their inner child right along with the kids. They encourage these children to explore, to express themselves, to ask questions, and to stretch just a little beyond the edge of their comfort zone.
When they return to the dock at the end of their adventure, these young people are making ancient music with drums and rattles; they are singing; they are wet, and they are dirty. And they are—every one–wildly happy.
School is almost over; this will be our last week of Jocassee Wild Child Adventures until the new school year. To date we have led 733 public school children into the Jocassee Gorges since March, with 250 more to come this week. Of these, 391 required supplemental funding to make their field trip happen. Jocassee Wild Outdoor Education was able to contribute an average of $25 per child for these 391 kids thanks to the generous support of our local community. THANK YOU, and please continue to support this important program! ~K