Child of the City Brandon Joshua Dixon

I am a child of the city. My summer afternoons were spent baking under the tyranny of the sun, whose heat bounced unforgivingly off of the blacktop streets and the harsh, cement sidewalks. Blaring hip hop mixes and soulful R&B ballads filled my childhood. Block parties and cookouts. Freeze tag and quickly erected pools. I am a child of the city, tempered in the fires of urbanity, but of all of the places on this vast earth, the forest is the place that has my heart.

The first time that I went camping, rain poured on my Boy Scout troop from the time that we entered the campsite until the time that we left. It was a wholly miserable experience, having to prop up tents in the dark of night while rain soaked into every fiber of my being. It seemed as though every attempt to keep the water from creeping into my tent was doomed to fail. But some love affairs only prosper under duress. Even with the less than pleasant weather, that camping trip was one of my best experiences. We hunted for snakes in thigh-high grass, scrambled up an old, twisted tree trunk; went on a night hike on an off-beaten trail; roasted marshmallows inside of a spitting fire and carved staffs out of fallen tree limbs. In the moonlight we chanted old scouting...