The parents received the kindergarten supply list in an email, which many of their accounts flagged as spam. Rain boots (1 pair). Rain pants (2). Raincoat, marbles, slingshot. Pocket guides to birds, knots, edible mushrooms. Hammocks, zipline tethers, tools for building gliders. Nap mats, backpacks, and stainless steel bento boxes. Nylon knives.
Though the supply list suggested borrowing whenever possible, the parents ordered every item online, even the bamboo archery set with waterproof quiver bag (optional), not once tallying the cost. It was impossible to quantify the peace of mind offered by a new outdoor school, one whose sponsored content in an influencer’s feed had promised a fresh approach to children’s safety amid a local surge in cases of the latest airborne pathogen.
The list’s accompanying welcome letter encouraged organic sunscreen, vegan hand sanitizer, compostable wipes, and DEET-free bug spray. It advised that the campus—a woodsy urban tract once slated for affordable housing, until some of the parents fought to classify it as a forest preserve—was nut-free, though it claimed ground acorn paste easily doubled for peanut butter, if soaked and roasted before blending.
The letter was signed simply: Crescent Nest Forest School. The parents responded with thank-yous and requested the acorn paste recipe, which they could not find online, but received bounce-back replies. They called the phone number from the email signature. Busy. They stopped following up, not wanting to seem pushy, to be known before school even began as That Parent. Better to ask in person.
The tours had all been virtual, so they didn’t know much about the school’s director, a man who’d seemed competent from the shoulders up, despite his puka-shell necklace and mysterious name displayed under his face on their screens: The Founder (he/him). He spoke of recently receiving his masters from somewhere impressive, with dual concentrations in nature education and pandemic pedagogy, though he hadn’t yet hired any teachers. There were so few who understood his vision, he explained, for a different kind of forest school, an alternative to the alternative. He was still searching for kindred spirits he’d trust to shepherd a pod.
It will work out, the parents said. It had to. They were dual-income couples with no relatives near the city to which they’d chosen to move, once lauded on lists of the most livable, back when metrics like restaurants per capita meant something. But they’d let the enrollment deadlines for conventional schools slip by months earlier with a vague resolve to maybe put one of their careers on hold and pursue secular homeschooling as an alternative to online kindergarten, plans that disintegrated long before implementation over the course of a camp-less summer. The parents tried not to dwell on the wilted houseplants in The Founder’s background.
Channeling their doubts into research, the parents peppered their newly formed group chat with links to various studies, glossing over the occasionally small sample sizes and questionable methodologies. Mixed-age classes cultivate leadership skills, they reassured themselves.
Outdoor play correlates with higher SAT scores.
Not to mention better self-regulation.
And a lower incidence of myopia!
They dared not broadcast their good fortune on their public feeds during this time of hardship. With each other, however, they could safely brag, confessing their private delight that the children would be able to embrace their innate love of mud while also learning how to weave. Such a useful skill! They marveled that, with tuition rates as low as what The Founder was charging, it felt like they were getting away with something.
The parents re-watched the short video the influencer had shared, which showcased children climbing trees, making sourdough starter, humanely trapping nutria—so many activities they’d never tried in their own childhoods, cooped up indoors, sharing their a/s/l with strangers while neglecting their Tamagotchis. They’d held their littles so close for so long—too close, some might say, for the world they’d inherited, this generation of children who’d never known a less fearful way of being. But the experts who wrote the parenting newsletters said it was time to let go.
Tears flowed at the first drop-off, sparked by the children’s collective shock upon realizing that, at Crescent Nest, there were no screens. No air conditioning, either—just two blue tarps that The Founder and the pod leaders had rigged to oak trees with long pieces of twine to create makeshift shade, denser than natural canopy.
Under one tarp, the Roseate Spoonbill pod would gather, led by Miss Lark, the teacher with the hot-pink hair. Across the clearing were the Sandpipers, supervised by Miss Paloma, who patiently explained to more than one parent that, yes, her tortoiseshell cat-eye frames were vintage. The teachers both wore brightly colored sneakers and matching short-sleeve jumpsuits that showed off each one’s enviable array of artful tattoos. The parents wished they were the ones getting to hang out in the forest with these cool teachers all day instead of having to work remotely.
The children’s first task, The Founder said, would be to take out their new knives, their serrated edges of unblemished plastic astonishingly sharp, their handles meticulously labeled. “Then our new friends will practice trimming the twine,” he said, absently pulling a loose string from the hem of his tunic and wrapping it around his pointer finger until the tip purpled. “They’ll tell you about it this afternoon. But now, grown-ups, it’s time to say bye-bye. Bye-bye, grownups!” He adopted the same singsong tone one might use when speaking to an infant, flapping the fingers of his unstrung hand up and down against his palm as he waved the adults away.
As they retreated to the gravel parking lot, where a humid breeze kicked up swirls of dust, the parents could still hear their children wailing. They tried to recall how, in the event of an emergency, the Founder had said he would notify them. They could not remember. Unable to isolate any one voice from the group, they reminded themselves that they, too, must have learned how to handle a knife, a mundane occasion that seemed more dangerous in hindsight, like the first time they’d tried to swallow a pill or get behind the wheel of a car. Events they now hardly remembered. They reminded themselves, too, that summer’s heat would soon be abating into a less miserable fall, then a winter mild enough to make outdoor school a viable option for more than the most hardcore free-rangers. Until then, they resolved to pack super-insulated water bottles that kept ice cubes frozen all day long and to take turns bringing twelve ice pops to pass out at pick-up, scheduled two hours before the ostensible end of their workdays. Any childcare was better than nothing.
That afternoon, the children were unrecognizable, a mass of mud-streaked limbs in constant motion, dirt crusted in the crevices of bare feet. Sweaty hair matted to their small foreheads and scarlet stains of unknown provenance dribbled down their waterproof shirts. The children, their morning tears long forgotten, jubilantly swooped around their new play space in the clearing, which to the parents resembled a crime scene, abandoned belongings strewn across the forest floor. The teachers seemed surprised that the parents had returned so soon, as though hours hadn’t passed, the trees’ shadows cast in the opposite direction. They reminded them not to linger.
After the parents had tracked down their children, they knelt to look them in the eye and asked if they’d foraged berries that day. The children shook their heads and said, “Don’t know.” The parents asked if the stains were something else. “Don’t know!” the children insisted.
The parents gathered the items they suspected were theirs, shaking off pine needles and flicking away carpenter ants as two boys peed on the trunk of a magnolia. “Leave no trace, friends,” The Founder called out to no one in particular, circling the space’s perimeter in bare feet. Crows cawed overhead. Beside the school’s red wagon, the bento boxes of half-eaten lunches had been lined up and flooded with murky water, the bottles filled with rocks. The parents could not find mates for any shoes. “Oh, they’ll turn up eventually,” Miss Lark said as she twirled around piles of gear, the legs of her jumpsuit billowing wide.
No notes about the day’s activities had been placed in the children’s backpacks, not even for the handful of parents who’d thought to create a communication folder, so before they left, they tried to ask the teachers. Miss Paloma laughed and said they’d done so many things as they traversed the forest that day, it was impossible to remember everything. “Every moment at Crescent Nest is child-directed,” she said, “totally guided by what our friends are most interested in learning. If you want to know what they’ve been doing, just ask them!” Then she ushered them all out of the clearing.
On the drive home, the children were silent. The parents asked what else their children had done at school. From every backseat, the children murmured, “Don’t know,” their glassy eyes tracing the passing landscapes.
The parents were prepared for this reticence, having skimmed an article someone had shared in the group chat about how difficult it could be for children at this developmental stage to discuss happenings of the recent past. They tried to engage them in conversation with the approach the article’s author had suggested—simply asking whether their child’s day had been thumbs up or thumbs down. “No thumbs!” the children cried. They giggled at their own cleverness as they kept their gazes fixed beyond their windows, taking in, as though for the first time, the bayou, the canals, the river, the levee, the stations responsible for pumping out of the city every drop of rain caught by the basins.
Many of the parents’ closest friends lived elsewhere, in the places they’d inhabited when they were completely different people, the places that topped the lists of the best college towns or cities for singles, the places they’d ultimately elected to leave. Some of these friends sent their children to daycares where every room was fitted with a nannycam and named for an Ivy, or to primary schools that kept them apprised of each day’s activities via mobile dashboard. But in this city, which a tourist could visit without ever realizing children lived there, no such environment existed, not without the outlay of sums greater than most of these parents’ salaries, usually backed by substantial generational wealth, inheritance of property on a posh residential block, or both. Unfortunately, these parents had to work very hard for what they’d earned, which made them cherish everything they had that much more.
The parents turned on the public radio station, inviting into their vehicles news of several accidents with injury, far away in the suburbs; the latest unemployment numbers, the newest conspiracy theories; some wildfire somewhere, zero percent contained; another round of funding cuts for the state’s struggling public schools; the dwindling availability of pediatric ICU beds in the metro area’s largest hospital. They flicked the radios off and finished their short drives home in silence.
Each weekday morning began with a localized weather analysis. The app the parents used often forecast rain, but did the day’s icon portray droplets sprinkling gently from a fluffy cloud over the city, or a more sinister thunderbolt? They became amateur meteorologists—checking the hourly for details, zooming in on the radar, trying to project the next eight hours from what happened in the last.
On mornings when the thunderstorm chance exceeded 40 percent, the parents received one-sentence emails from The Founder, directing them to drop their children off at the parking lot of an abandoned gas station. The station stood on the former main drag of a flood-prone neighborhood that had recently been declared uninsurable, surrounded by a chain-link fence that could be secured from the inside with a few bungee cords. It wasn’t the forest, but not much else was open. With packed days of touch-bases and check-ins ahead of them, the parents agreed this plan, though nowhere close to ideal, was better than canceling school. At the station, the children could remain outside, and the teachers affirmed that their friends’ small feet skillfully dodged the debris that collected nearby. During storms, both pods took cover under the metal canopies over the station’s decommissioned fuel islands, which had been colonized by cat’s claw.
A school with nature as its classroom lacks more than a building. At Crescent Nest, there was no nurse, no principal, no lunch lady, no librarian. Being progressively minded, the parents didn’t object to the flattened hierarchy, though it did strike some as odd that administrative tasks typically shared across multiple departments were shouldered by one person—the shadowy Founder, who emailed exclusively after midnight and, after the first day, was rarely observed at pick-up or drop-off.
What the parents missed most, though, was a lost and found. One by one, the articles of clothing they’d researched at the year’s outset disappeared into the thick of the forest, so quickly erased from their children’s mental maps of their surroundings. What did return bore permanent evidence of rough use, even after laundering.
I swear I’m only buying black socks from now on—all our white ones have turned gray.
Good idea. I’m soaking a load right now that’s full of grass stains.
We’re missing an orange rain suit, size 5T. Anyone accidentally take it home?
Fortunately, the app from which they’d originally purchased the items made it as effortless to buy them again as a weekly grocery re-order. The new gear arrived in a cascade of deliveries, each item encased in a cardboard cocoon plumped with air pillows. The sight of new boxes on the porches of their fixer-uppers filled the parents with a peculiar pride, one they never discussed with each other. Not only were they able to give their children everything during this prolonged period of loss, but they were able to keep giving them everything, again and again.
At one morning’s drop-off, the parents noticed signs warning of diseased raccoons in the same area of the forest in which they’d just kissed their children goodbye, where their children were sitting crisscross applesauce in circle time. Distemper—was that like rabies, or worse? Throughout the workday, they shared their search results in the group chat and debated whether they should say something. Maybe another email?
By this point, they’d all taken turns writing to The Founder, trying to leverage their expertise in nonprofit development, graphic design, freelance copywriting, and event planning for the benefit of the school. No one had ever received a reply. Presumably, he was busy all day, supporting the needs of both pods, possibly even in the forest, though the children never mentioned him. If he were distracted by email, that would have made him exactly the kind of person the parents wouldn’t have wanted to be in charge of their children. But back to the distemper. The internet forums said not to let dogs play off leash—so what about kids? Should they stay home? Or was there something the parents could buy to keep the raccoons away?
At afternoon pick-up, the teachers shooed away their worries. Miss Lark assured the parents that the kiddos knew their place in the habitat, had learned how to distinguish friendly creatures from otherwise. Miss Paloma said they fed the sparrows, the feral chickens, the golden pheasant who thought he was a chicken. They pet squirrels and cradled insects in their cupped palms without fear. They identified eggs, spotted turtles warming themselves on sunny logs alongside baby alligators, and knew not to disturb the snakes that were poisonous.
Important life skills, to be sure, though they were doing far less weaving than the parents had hoped. How else, they wondered, would their offspring acquire the fine motor skills that would help them, once conventional schools became a viable option again, to learn to read, to write, to color inside the lines, to fill in the bubbles on the standardized tests that loomed in their future?
The families survived the closures of the rainy season, with more violent storms descending later in the year than anyone ever remembered. For weeks, the children were out of school more often than they were in, and they made it through each storm day by the grace of their tablets, at least until the power went out.
After wiping away their children’s tears, the parents pretended they were camping. “It’s like being at Crescent Nest, right?” They grabbed their emergency boxes that contained flashlights, battery-operated radios, and nonperishable food while their phones illuminated their darkened homes with storm alerts and boil water advisories. “Isn’t this fun? We’re roughing it!” The children shook their heads and insisted it was nothing like school, being trapped inside without air conditioning as water filled the streets, forced to eat expired granola bars and drink lukewarm juice boxes. School was where they felt safe, where they got to see their friends. At school, they said, they could fly.
When the rainy season ended, it didn’t stop raining. Forest days were rare, and every gas-station pick-up yielded the discovery of some newly terrible artifact: rusty screws, half-buried glass shards, rotting boards clotted with nails. Nearby, limp orange netting draped carelessly around a cavernous pit from sewerage work left incomplete. Not far beyond the sinkhole lay a large encampment of individuals with nowhere else to go; fortunately, they mostly kept to themselves.
In the group chat, the parents marveled that, despite the constant danger of these perceived threats that in any normal year might prompt mid-year withdrawals, the children never experienced any injuries. No bee stings or tetanus scares or broken bones from speeding down the zipline, nor any conflict with the unhoused. Further, no signs of emotional harm were observed by the parents, who knew their children better than anyone. Just as before, they were healthy and resilient, only they’d gained the uncanny ability to scale nearly any tree and a growing repertoire of folk songs the parents would sometimes hear them whispering to themselves after bedtime, further proof that their unrelenting worry had mitigated disaster yet again. Amid the swirling chaos, their children were some kind of miracle.
The free weather app grew less reliable. Entire days at the gas station passed without a drop of rain, despite storm chances exceeding 90 percent. Other days forecast sunny skies, darkened by lunchtime, bringing urgent texts for midday forest pick-ups that always arrived in the middle of meetings. The parents’ hearts sank when they retrieved their children, shivering and wet, from a bird blind near the pit toilets, the closest the forest offered to shelter.
The parents downloaded a new paid app, which someone heard advertised on a podcast. Better science to support their guesswork, with sophisticated radar to help them plan for longer than an hour into the future. Anything to facilitate the children spending as much time in the forest as possible, without needless interruption. Their employers were growing less understanding.
Fortunately, the colder months brought relative calm. The parents dressed the children in layers of thermals and windbreakers shed upon arrival, though by pick-up, they’d been put back on, along with hats and gloves, as the children huddled under the school parachute. Instead of hearing crying from the parking lot, there were audible bursts of song, though the kids always stopped their joyful call and response when they realized they had an audience.
The kids brought home foraged art: painted stones, flower crowns, pebble shakers, sticks wrapped with twine. No weaving, still, but they were where they needed to be, tucked away in the forest with teachers who cared for them while the parents put out fires from behind screens. The Founder had magnets printed with Crescent Nest’s logo, two garden-gloved hands cradling a winking moon, which the parents affixed to the bumpers of their hatchbacks and hybrids.
One rainy spring morning, the group chat blew up. I can’t believe what just happened, someone wrote. A long pause followed.
After a series of ???? replies, the group learned that an elderly man driving past the gas station had spotted a child climbing the canopy with a bright orange knife in his hand. The man threatened to call Child Protective Services, not realizing that the child was in fact being supervised, however loosely, by Miss Paloma, and that the knife was plastic. When made aware of these facts, the man demanded to see the school’s operating license, which one might assume the teachers could retrieve swiftly from the pocket of a backpack stashed in the school wagon. On the contrary, the teachers informed him that technically, no such license existed—nor did it need to, per the state’s guidelines for early childhood education. The school didn’t need anyone’s permission to meet in the forest, which was open to the public, nor did it need municipal approval to convene at a commercial property that the city had repossessed with no plans for redevelopment. The child had climbed the structure because the Sandpipers had decided they wanted to learn more about pigeons, and they’d spotted the nest of a mourning dove.
The man asked the teachers whether they knew who he was. The teachers did not. As it turns out, the forest preserve bore his last name, thanks to a generous gift from his substantial fortune. He was also a member of the board, a detail engraved on a plaque near the forest’s entrance that none of the parents had ever bothered to read. And right there, in front of the children, he vowed to get Crescent Nest shut down.
Oh shit, one parent typed.
He wouldn’t do that.
He can’t, another insisted.
He might.
Am I the only one who didn’t realize the school isn’t accredited?
Letting them play in a sinkhole? What the hell were they thinking?
I’m sure it was safer than it sounds, but yeah, the optics aren’t great.
A week later, The Founder called an all-school meeting, which the parents eagerly anticipated, until they logged in to the video conference, which had been set to listen-only mode. Only The Founder’s video was on.
It was the first time anyone had seen him in weeks. Even under his ring light, they observed dark circles behind his glasses, newly patched with duct tape at the bridge. His linen robe was wrinkled, its collar creased at an angle that suggested it had been slept in. The browning plants on his shelves had shed their leaves into a puddle on the floor.
He spoke with the deliberate gravity of someone who’d recently retained a lawyer, and his every word further confirmed the parents’ fears. The board member’s complaint had not been the first. Some pearl-clutcher had snitched after seeing children urinating in the woods. Others griped that the kids’ songs were too noisy. One community member, likely an affordable housing advocate, believed archery to be an inappropriate activity, while an anonymous tip raised concerns about water play near alligators. A rumor had been circulating that the children had been eating raw acorns. Each individual infraction had been minor, The Founder said, but the previous week’s incident prompted an emergency meeting of the board. “The forest’s board,” he clarified. The school didn’t have one.
“In retrospect,” he continued, “I should have set tuition rates higher—frankly, at least double what I asked you to pay—to fund the construction of a more permanent shelter. Unfortunately, we must cease meeting at the gas station, effective immediately, and upon this year’s conclusion, we’ve been informed that the school is no longer welcome in the forest.”
The parents would have paid three times that year’s tuition rate, a few even more. Unfortunately, they had no idea how to handle a situation money couldn’t solve. The few remaining weeks of the current year would depend entirely on the whims of the weather, and next year was a fog, as hazy to imagine as it was to recall precise details from any year before the current one.
The parents tried to type their questions, but the Q&A function was off. Their raised hands went unanswered. They retreated to the group chat. It would have made sense for them to band together, to rally around their common cause with a single vision for moving forward. But everyone had different ideas.
Should we go public? Anyone have contacts in the media?
Forget it. Let’s find a new location. I could help to build a rain shelter.
Here’s a link to a petition I created, please sign and share—
What should we use as our hashtag?
Do you think we could get a meeting with the Board?
What was that influencer’s handle again? I can’t seem to find her anymore.
To consolidate these disparate thoughts, someone copied the group on a mass email, to which the replies mounted so far into the double digits, they spilled into a new thread. The thread soon replaced the group chat, though no one noticed that a handful of parents had stopped chiming in.
Without telling anyone, these few had applied months earlier to the city’s most selective private schools for first grade in the fall. While the parents admitted that these tony academies for the local elites shared a problematic legacy, in more recent history, they’d proven themselves more capable at handling each new pandemic than the struggling public charters the parents had once vowed their children would attend. After multiple rounds of academic testing that the parents had pretended were well visits to the pediatrician, they’d received their acceptance letters and routed their deposits via bank transfer. The remaining tuition payments were sizable, but they’d scrape together the money somehow—beg family members, borrow from friends, set up a GoFundMe—whatever it took. It was impossible to put a price tag on peace of mind.
With one week left in the year, a storm warning canceled school for two days—two days that brought nothing but blue skies. The following day, the radar was clear, and the kiddos wriggled free from their parents’ hugs at drop-off to run into the forest they’d sorely missed after two days confined to their backyards. As the adults drove home, the cheery clouds darkened into slate gray, and they scrambled to park on what they knew to be high ground.
With the wind blowing sideways, they raced inside their homes, cursing themselves for not packing rain gear as they watched the streets fill from their front windows. They changed into dry clothes and hoped for a power outage, which would have brought a merciful pause to the workday, but the electricity remained annoyingly functional, so they stopped video on their calls and paced creaky floors while waiting for the water to go down. Every few minutes, they refreshed the city-run map of which streets were impassable, hoping to see some sort of improvement.
Hours passed before they were able to retrieve their children. The gravel parking lot was dry, but every step toward the clearing brought them deeper into wetlands. They listened for the familiar songs and laughter, but the forest was eerily quiet, just the sound of rain boots squicking in the mud. When the grown-ups arrived at the clearing, there was no school wagon, no tarp, no backpacks or lunch gear. A pile of rain boots stood at the foot of a live oak tree like a cairn. The only sign of life rustled in the limbs overhead, where the parents spotted a congregation of yellow-crowned night herons—a dozen, maybe more.
