Twenty-six thousand years ago, an eight-year-old boy and a brawny wolf-dog walked together along the wet clay floor of a dank, labyrinthine cave.
Their tracks, which hardened and froze in time, appear out of oblivion, continue for forty-five meters, then vanish back into the eternally fertile haze of our imaginations. You can see where the boy, who was walking and not running, slipped in the clay, righted himself, and continued on before they disappeared. He carried a torch, which he stopped to rub against the rock wall, an ancient technique that prodded the flame to burn brighter against the darkness.
A child and his long-toothed friend, venturing together into the darkness in search of adventure, or food, or meaning.
That is all we know. In the spaces between those facts, our minds flourish. In those spaces lives the very nature of our humanity.
I spent the last week thinking about this pair of explorers, wondering what those moments were like. Despite the passage of so many thousands of years, they were real. I wonder what they smelled like, what they thought, what they saw and what they felt as they made their way through Pleistocene lives. Their world was inhabited by a menagerie of exotic, hungry beasts; giant European bears, hyenas and lions. On the walls of that same cave prior generations, nearly as ancient to the boy and the wolf-dog as the boy and the wolf-dog are to us, painted the animals they killed and ate, and the animals that killed and ate them.
Parents in the year 2018 like to bicker about how best to raise children. Since about ninety-nine percent of internet chatter is moral peacocking, and every single internet user’s caps lock got stuck in the “on” position a few years ago, there’s no shortage of finger pointing, moralizing and heavy-fingered shaming.
The “free range” parent and the “helicopter” parent are the ones most frequently at odds. The first believes children need freedom — and even danger — to grow and thrive. The second believes, probably due to astute observation, that little kids are morons in need of eternal help. Help from someone who can use a stove without burning down a house, or use toilet paper without just making the situation worse.
Utah recently approved a law that protects “free range” parents from being charged with child endangerment or neglect. This means, when a parent gets hauled into court for not paying attention while their child climbed into the hippo pool at the zoo, they can employ the legal defense: “Yes, but I meant to not pay attention.”
I’ve been accused of being both kinds of dad. Some people ask where my child is, see me ponder the question as if it were a vague philosophical inquiry, and assume I’m a raising my four-year-old free range.
“Where are any of us, really?” I might reply with a pensive look at the heavens.
Yet I often abandon this methodology, especially when I read about things like the kid who fell into a vat of crackling oil and was fried to death at a fast food restaurant last year. Faced with those types of stories, I quickly putter over and hover for bit, just to make sure the fruit of my loins doesn’t put our primarily theoretical health insurance to the test.
The truth is, I have no idea how to raise someone who is both tough and gentle, both wise and trusting. I really don’t.
People who say they do know are probably trying to sell you something, most likely a book about parenting, or perhaps the resplendent tail feather of a noisy moral peacock.
In the back of the Chauvet cave in France, those two ghosts walk eternally. Who knows what kind of parents that little prehistoric boy had. We know their brains were just as big as ours, but we have no idea how differently they saw and interpreted the world they inhabited. If modern humans today can’t see through each other’s eyes — imagine how differently a New York liberal and a rural Arkansas conservative see things — just think how differently those ancient people experienced life. Scientists suspect it was a place pervaded by magic, by nature and by an intense fluidity between animal and human, male and female, alive and dead.
Yet I suspect parenting has always been parenting. We mammals, after all, are all defined by the way we raise our young. We’re defined by our nagging doubts — I can almost hear Arg and Grr asking each other, “Do you think eight is too young to give a kid fire and let him explore a bear cave with his pet wolf?” — but also by our dreams. We are defined by our courage, our willingness to grab a torch and a long-toothed beast and venture out into the darkest corners of the world in search of adventure. And by the courage to let our children go out in search of adventure, at whatever age we finally decide to let them.
The way I see it, it’s not a matter of which style of parenting is correct: helicopter or free range. It’s not really a matter of whether or not our kids can muster the intestinal fortitude to head out into the unknown.
Parenting, from the very moment you first lay eyes on your child, in a cave pervaded by the odor of bear dung, or in a hut, or in a hospital that smells of bleach, is merely a gradual summoning of faith — a slow stockpiling of bravery. You see and hold something small and fragile in your arms, and you can’t imagine a world that will not shatter it. But somehow, most of the time, they do not break. They grow, which is remarkable considering how much and how often they urinate and defecate, and the world does not break them. Then they grab a torch and head off into the endless caverns of this massive and glorious planet.
Eventually, if they don’t get eaten by a cave hyena right away, you realize it’s not their death you need to worry about. It’s your own.
Then you understand you had it all backward. You finally recognize that you, too, are leaving footprints in the clay of this earth. And soon enough you will disappear, your torch flickering in the haze as you walk away, into the eternal haze of someone else’s imagination.
Matt Geiger’s debut book, The Geiger Counter: Raised by Wolves & Other Stories, was published in 2016 by HenschelHaus. It won First Prize in the Midwest Book Awards (Autobiography/Memoir) and was named as a Finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards and the Best Book Awards. “The Cave” will appear in his forthcoming second book. Matt lives in Mount Horeb with his wife Greta and their daughter Hadley.
Photo by Ron Lutz II at Cave of the Mounds.