By Joe Murphy
When my wife and I adopted our son and daughter, it was not amusement parks that bonded us as a family in those fragile early days. It was wild, natural, free places. It was public land. It was parks, rivers, forests, preserves, trails and other places where we could camp, fish and watch nature.
Many of these places were purchased through land-conservation efforts such as the Florida Forever program. My loyalty to such programs comes in part from their loyalty to my family.
Our son and daughter were 8 and 10 years old when our adoption was finalized. They are biologically brother and sister, and our adoption was considered a high-risk adoption because of their age and being a sibling pair. That, coupled with the time they had spent in foster care and the trauma they had experienced, meant we had to find ways to bond right away and authentically to create a true family as quickly as we could.
Nature, love, extended family, friends, neighbors and our church were all essential in the process. Nature, as much as any other strand of our community, held us together in the rough times.
Public lands offered a safe, neutral place for us to build a family. We could learn about new places and each other at the same time. We could find the beauty and wonder of nature as we discovered the beauty and wonder of each other. The deep bonds of community, our faith and the natural world saved us.
Our family immersed ourselves in Florida’s public lands. We went swimming in Juniper Springs in the Ocala National Forest and at Manatee Springs State Park. We hiked Hillsborough River State Park. We paddled down the Withlacoochee River in the Nature Coast. We found secret fishing holes and shady places to sit and watch wildlife.
Public lands became a vast and accessible resource that we could use to define our new family and create our own, new, better memories.
When you start a new family out of whole cloth, with kids who have experienced trauma and are 8 and 10, you realize you have no stories as a family yet. You must build them as you experience them and retell them as often as you can.
As you weave together the layers of experience, you deepen the bonds that you rely on in the challenging times. Time in nature as a family provides those stories, those memories, those common touchstones.
The truly amazing thing about those memories is that the places where most of them occurred were public lands, and they are still open to us today. I can take my grandchildren there to form the deep and lasting memories that I formed with my parents and grandparents and with our son and daughter.
Those lands remain in conservation and recreational use. They were not sold, swapped, surplussed or banked for development or agriculture.
Public lands help us create a sense of place, helping us connect past, present and future. They define what it means to create connections. They are not land banks for developers or agriculture. They are not places to be casually lost to surplus or swaps. They are places that can build families. They helped build ours.
We would not have survived those early years without tipping over canoes and catching (or not catching) fish; without long and hot hikes, endless bugs, snakes, mud, biting crabs, jellyfish and more. We built memories, bonds and resilience by meeting and overcoming these challenges as a family.
Without nature and public lands, we would not have seen a nesting loggerhead sea turtle on a lonely, windswept beach in the dark of night, performing what we considered a miracle. That night is a key and foundational family memory and experience we still retell today.
Nature gives so much, yet asks so little. All nature requests is simply conservation and preservation. All it asks is that once we commit spirit and hope to protecting it, we stay faithful to that commitment. It asks us to stay faithful to the tremendous gift of creation.
At the end of the day, what we do and what we value matters. It is our contribution to eternity. It is our legacy.
Now I can give back to the places that helped build our family and seek their conservation. I can return the loving gift that public lands gave to our family by giving them voice. Nothing could matter more.
Joe Murphy is a native and lifelong Floridian who lives in Brooksville along the Nature Coast of Florida. His children are now both adults and he is a proud grandpa. You can follow Joe on Instagram @naturecoastjoe. Banner photo: A kayak navigating a creek in Florida (iStock image).
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