BLast Wednesday, the water of Tippo Bayou was thick and tinged with orange.
From a normally gated section of the Tallahatchie Natural Wildlife Refuge along Mississippi 8, teenagers in kayaks and canoes slipped into the muddy waters for an afternoon of exploring along the wooded banks and out in the open water.
They were part of ArtPlace Mississippi’s newest summer program, Delta Wild.
On Tuesday, the group had set out turtle traps along the curves of the bayou, hoping to capture a few shelled critters for close-up observation.
Now they were returning to check their traps, paddling at a slow, meandering pace.
Before last week, most of the teenagers in this group had never ventured into any of the national wildlife management areas and wildlife refuges surrounding Greenwood and Leflore County.
They visited the Tallahatchie refuge and the Malmaison Wildlife Management Area north of the city, and Matthews Brake to the south, hiking deep into the forest and floating along wild waterways, learning something about nature and something about themselves.
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Exploring unknown worlds close to home was one of the original intents of Delta Wild, a summer adventure camp created and run by ArtPlace Mississippi, and funded largely by a grant from the Delta National Heritage Alliance.
The brainchild of Robin Whitfield, a Grenada-based artist and naturalist, and ArtPlace Executive Director Hart Henson, the program was envisioned “to connect people to the Mississippi Delta’s natural habitat and resources” through exposure and exploration, and through art activities connected with nature.
Whitfield was clear then, and is even clearer now after completing the inaugural session of the program, that connecting is not a drive-by experience, but an immersion that can push the uninitiated beyond their fears into places they have never seen or imagined.
“I’ve been wanting to find a way to get kids outside for a decade,” she said when she first discovered Delta Wild had been granted funding. “I feel it’s absolutely necessary for the future.
“I’m gonna try to make this fun, but also give them something substantial to think about and chew on.”
Most Delta kids get their exposure to nature through hunting and fishing, activities that take place in these same wild areas, making them resources that need to be protected for recreational purposes as well as for biodiversity and the ecological balance of the region, a common cause Whitfield believes environmentalists and hunters can agree on.
During the week of Delta Wild that ended on Friday, students who normally spend the majority of their time inside found themselves not just outside, but in wild places that might have seemed impenetrable before.
“My biggest hope, my number one goal was that by the end of the week, they would push through some fears,” Whitfield said.
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At Tippo Bayou, the group found its traps empty of turtles and, in some cases, stripped of their bait, likely by crawfish.
Tired of paddling and in need of a rest, they stopped on a bank covered at its edge with blooming stands of white mallow with rose-colored throats, a member of the hibiscus family so ubiquitous along this body of water it can go unnoticed.
Whitfield plucked a leaf from the mallow and showed the kids its shape and characteristics. She introduced them to the squarish seed pods of the plant that dangle along its branches like little Chinese lanterns.
Then she showed them how to make a print of the leaf’s outline using only mud and water as paint and pigment. For 30 minutes, the group of young men and women, ages 14 to 18, outlined and filled in details of the mallow leaf in a way that would cement it in memory: touching it, sniffing it, seeing it up close and spending time with it.
“There’s more to nature than just green plants that you normally see,” said student Ephraim Lee, 14, later in the week. “There are more actual colors and shades. It opens up a whole new vision for art.”
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At the beginning of the week, Whitfield asked her students what was the wildest place they’d ever been. The answers ranged from the beach to Yellowstone National Park.
“Not a single child named a place where nature is first, where you’re not being led by signage, where there’s more nature than people,” she said. “It’s possible they didn’t even know what wild is.”
After a week with Whitfield, and with expert assistance from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, many of these students found their perspectives changed.
They had waded in water up to their waists, hiked off-trail in deep forest, paddled through cypress stands, handled snakes and examined bones and skulls left behind when creatures died in their natural habitat, feeding minerals to the soil and surrounding fauna.
“I thought the woods were big and scary, a place you wouldn’t go alone,” said Nada Aziz, 18. “Now I’m kind of addicted. I want to go back.”
Donovan Weathers, 15, said that he often made a decision not to go somewhere because he didn’t want to deal with insects.
“Now I know that you can be in nature and not get eaten up by the bugs. You can be there along with them,” he said. “I want to go kayaking every single day.”
Madison Mai, 15, struck a philosophical note about co-existence.
“I discovered that the world of people is scarier than nature,” she said. “I used to be scared of spiders, but not so much any more. Now I know that as scared as I might be of an animal, it is even more scared of me.”
Whitfield equipped her students with magnifying loops they wore around their necks, so they could look closely at the structure and make-up of natural things.
Joe Bender, 14, said he liked learning to identify plants, and that he’d extended that pleasure into a larger vision.
“I liked learning how a plant is part of an ecosystem,” he said, “how it depends on and changes the things around it.”
Whitfield, a dedicated naturalist and an activist in preserving the natural features along the Yalobusha River channel in Grenada, said she was gratified at the students’ responses.
“One thing I wanted to accomplish was for them to learn how to truly be an explorer,” she said, “to be where you are and not just walk past it going from Point A to Point B, but stopping and learning along the way.”
• Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
