Thoughts on Dad
Rebecca Martin’s father, Andrew Champ Martin III, was a game warden, and his love of all things nature rubbed off on his daughter.
“I will say that I have always been surprised at the surprise I see on faces when I can pick a Roseate Spoonbill out from the birds in the aviary,” Martin said. “Being rather bookish, it’s natural to assume my experience of the outdoors was theoretical, garnered more from the poetry of Robert Frost than any real world knowledge.
“Certainly, my career path would not seem to be grounded in the great outdoors. But this is to misunderstand the journey for which my father equipped me.”
Martin said her father’s love of nature helped her make sense of the ideas she was reading in books.
“Books are one thing, but Mother Nature is something else entirely and when your dad is one of her stewards, you get up close and personal with the world’s raw, unforgiving, painfully beautiful majesty.”
Martin remembers a time when her father convinced her to put her hand in a display case filled with non-poisonous snakes. Instead of the slimy venomous monsters she expected, she discovered they were not interested in her at all, preferring to curl beneath their mossy rocks.
“On that day, my father taught me that judgment without fact is false, that fear without knowledge prevents experience, and that I am more disruptively terrifying to the world than it should be to me,” she said.
A handful of snakes from her dad offered Martin an essential lesson, she said.
“Plunge through the fear. The easiest way through the unknown is through it. There is seldom much to fear once you understand what is on the other side, and there is joy in the embrace of choosing the less traveled by road.
“And while there may not be a greeting card for such sentiments, I celebrate Father’s Day knowing my father taught me to move happily along the paths of unknown forests … and that has made all the difference.”
Eagle staff writers contributing to Thoughts on Dad vignettes were Jared Stonesifer, Paula Grubbs and Bob Schultz.
