When I was a kid we moved to a little town just below Mount Rainier, where every day at school I would look out the window and sketch the NW face of the mountain during Social Studies class. At night we would tend to our chores, and on the weekends we would entertain ourselves with a game of touch football with friends out in the street, or with an expedition into the big woods behind our house. It seemed that we could walk from our backyard clear to the park border if we wanted without encountering another soul along the way, even if we wanted to. I spent many days and nights in those woods, learning mostly by experience how to stay dry, build a fire (much to the displeasure of the fire dept and my parents), hunt and trap animals, how to kill with my bare hands, how to navigate without a compass, how to forage grub etc. Later on as I became more mobile and more interesting to my dad, I made it to good fishing holes and such.

Nowadays when I go back to where I grew up, it is inundated with housing farther than I can walk in a day. Things change I reckon.