Toby’s school recently sent out a survey to parents asking for info about their practices and opinions regarding students’ walking to and from school. This reminded me of a conversation that Stephanie and I had during the week or two prior to Jacob starting kindergarten. 

We asked ourselves under what circumstances we would let Jacob walk to school, because we would like Jacob to walk to school. I walked to school starting in kindergarten and continued to do so into my midde school years. And I remember the experience fondly, both in the mornings and afternoons. Of course this is a different world now than it was when I was in kindergarten. Or at least it seems different. Or at least we parent differently and with different phobias.

I explained to Stephanie that my kindergarten walk to Farine Elementary was longer than what Jacob would have to walk to his elementary school. I guessed my walk was about four miles. I don’t know what Stephanie based her objection on other than innate contrariness, but she said she didn’t think it was that long. But of course I had the power of the internet on my side.

I googled the address for Farine Elementary, where I attended K-5, and of course I remember the address of my childhood apartment from birth to twelve years. Pop those in to Mapquest, and I got a distance of 0.4 miles! Shorter than I thought by a factor of ten, but whatever. Then I googled Jacob’s school address and put that into Mapquest and got a distance of 0.72 miles: almost twice as long! Crazy.

Today was such a gorgeous Fairbanks day, and since I’m still enjoying an extended paternity leave, I walked to pick Jacob up from school this afternoon. It took me all of twelve minutes. How long must it have taken me to walk to school when I was a kid? It felt like such a trek at the time; an Odyssey overcoming myriad challenges and obstacles. It’s crazy now to think that today I could walk it in about six minutes.

All this thinking about walking to school reminded me of a TED talk I saw recently by Ze Frank in which he encouraged the audience to use Google Maps Streetview to take a stroll down memory lane. I found the street view of my apartment and then “walked” the path I took to school every morning and home every afternoon. Sure enough, there was the tree I climbed so often. There was the telephone pole in which I broke the blade off my dad’s cherished pocket knife. There was Kevin’s house where I spent my one and only childhood sleepover. There was the tree stump where I fell backwards while flirting with DeeAnna, my childhood crush, hitting the back of my head on the sidewalk. There is the crosswalk where I almost got hit by a car while riding my bike to school at breakneck speed because we had all overslept. There was the rail fence surrounding one of the many houses where I imagined living. All of this, experienced anew today while sitting in front of my laptop via the incredible power of the internet.

I want all of this for Jacob. I want him to walk to school and seredipitously discover all of the shrubs, rocks, trees, culverts and intersections along the way. But I just don’t think I can let him simply walk alone to school every day. Perhaps it is irrational to fear an abduction. What are the statistics on this kind of thing? At what age would I let him? I don’t know.

It turns out that between 100 and 300 children are kidnapped by strangers each year, most of these are sexually assaulted and/or killed. Given the roughly forty million kids in America, the odds of being kidnapped are very low. This is cold comfort. It reminds me of the statistic that in Alaska about one person is killed by a bear every year. Given all of the people hiking, floating, hunting, camping and living in the wilds of Alaska, the odds of being that one are also relatively low. But I tend to think about it the other way: a person is killed, by a bear, every year. It makes me want to carry some serious deterrent. And drive my boy to school every day.