I find the smell of roasting pork a great and powerful magnet. A neighbor and his family were recently roasting half a hog for a graduation party, and I was pulled forcefully toward it. The hog was cooking on a remarkable machine, surely the finest barbeque I’ve seen. It was made one winter by the grandfather of the lucky child and bespeaks a commitment to craftsmanship.

It’s extremely lucky to grow up in an environment where such quality is the normal dimension of daily life. Further, the parents live on a ranch in-holding quite near the loving grandparents. All clearly love the outdoors and spend much of their time there, usually with their preschooler.

The child, Cole by name, was usually present when I visited. He walked with his parents or grandparents and rode on lawn tractors and four wheelers while being safely held. This spring he was seated on horses, each of which he remembered by name.

I wondered; what decade is this? It seems like one gone by, but I witnessed it last week. Cole is exceptionally lucky. The impact and implications of this didn’t hit until the next day when a friend sent me a book by Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder. Its theme is in the title; essentially it’s that most American children are deprived of outdoor experiences. This is a great loss.

“I like to play indoors ’cause that’s where all electrical outlets are,” indicates the problem. It’s one of the saddest, most poignant, statements I’ve read and it took me back to my own childhood when I spent my free time in the woods.

Like Cole today, I had the immense good fortune of growing up on a farm with a creek and sheep pasture by the house and woods nearby. Until I was ten years old and permitted to drive tractors, my first was a Farmall Super C, I spent summers in the woods, usually with a friend. As pre-teens we often carried axes and 22s, and other things deemed impossibly dangerous for most kids today. Cole will escape such over-protection.

Like most kids, I assumed my experiences represented normal living. I now recognize that my circumstances were quite privileged, but not terribly far from the norm. Alas, the book argues, such a life is long past. For Cole, it’s not. He is unlikely to have the treat of learning to drive on a Super C, unless of course his grandfather decides to restore one some winter (which he surely could), instead he’ll learn on a more modern machine, one with the advantages of a live PTO and the safety of a roll bar. I hope, however, it doesn’t have a cab for they insulate one from nature.

If Last Child in the Woods is even remotely accurate, very few children today will have experiences similar to Cole’s or mine decades ago. Most miss direct contact with nature. E. O. Wilson’s “biophilia,” human’s innate affinity with the natural world, is abstract or alien. They will certainly be deprived—and some argue more likely to become depraved.

In terms of experiencing nature or agriculture, children in the Gallatin Valley are far more fortunate than the vast majority of their cohort elsewhere in America, 80 percent of whom live in a metro area. Not only is the outdoors easily accessible, few adults are here by accident. Many, perhaps most, hike, bike, fish, hunt, climb, and otherwise directly experience the outdoors in some self-propelled manner. Also, we have the Montana Outdoor Science School and probably as many former NOLS instructors as we do orthopods.

The Last Child in the Woods ends with this: “We have such a brief opportunity to pass on to our children our love for the Earth, and to tell our stories. These are the moments when the world is made whole.” I agree.