Our Walkabouts

This painting is of an Aboriginal Walkabout in Australia otherwise known as a "Songline."


Adam went to the doctor today -- calm and saying "ear, ear," leading the doctor's hand to the ears that seem to still bother him. We went there for a visit before our trip to Alaska as he contracted "swimmer's ear" with a blazing fever. The round of antibiotics had little effect -- his ears still bother him.

Usually, Adam has been terrified of getting his ears checked. Just approaching the doctor's office has usually sent Adam into tears. Yet, since being integrated into his quiet school and since being integrated at a camp, he is becoming more social, more aware -- being VERY aware of how others act around him. Obviously, he's an observational learner.

He's not the social butterfly of the group, but has what it takes to earn the nickname "Romeo" at camp as the girls have been fighting for his kisses, hugs and attention. Adam doesn't seem to mind. No, he's been beaming, in fact. Where close proximity and a swarm of people around him kissing him would have made him once meltdown, he is smiling and giggling away. He hung around the boys who came to visit us from Israel the other day, even though he can't find the words, "play with me." But "play with me," he is saying -- as clear as day.

Right, I was talking about his ears. I remember swimmer's ear. Adam comes by it honestly. He is the son of two former competitive swimmers and has come to love the water, advancing four levels at camp swim lessons. Shown once, maybe twice, he then launches on his own, dunking and jumping underwater and trying the "starfish" on his back. Adam wants to conquer the pool. I say this as I remember the days of pushing and prodding him as "expert" ABA therapists told me that he has to "learn how to learn" and that we had to reinforce everything because an autistic person had no intrinsic motivation. We never had to externally reinforce Adam, even though the therapists insisted that he had to be. No, it was when we said goodbye to ABA that Adam began to find his way, and I followed his lead and found the support he needed with Occupational Therapists, shadows and Speech Language Therapists. Adam had to be shown. He also needs to feel, experience -- experience through all the senses so that he can feel and learn, because learning has to have some meaning. Too often, if a child is presumed to be inattentive, they are denied the experiences. Lessons are confined to a table. For a child whose senses are alive, table-learning is non experiential. Table learning is usually based on an ability to perform and respond -- it has little to do with learning. It leaves big gaps in fact, as one needs meaning in order to become literate.

Yes, all that dunking in the water has its price, though. All that fun. I remember my own many swimmer's ear infections, and I hate to say that Adam needs the pus manually extracted. No more swimming for him -- at least not for a while and not without plugs.

So we play in our yard, we've had very little "therapy" but lots of activity. I once said, as the Canadian ABA'ers faulted me for doing so, that " a child has to be happy in order to learn." I remember educators saying that "learning isn't always fun." It sounded reasonable because learning was often made miserable for me. I was not good at math and was never given the time or belief that I would ever be good at it. For sure, the message was that I would always bad at it, the expectation was low, and it has stayed with me forever. There is absolutely no way that Adam could have learned as much as he has by following a pedantic ABA program -- one that would still have him reciting the names of animals because he can not necessarily "respond" in a typical way. It is true that learning is not always easy, but learning should never be married with the low expectation that is typically associated with autistic intelligence and "performance."

Adam blossoms and I look forward to the liberty of a non-ABA school -- a school that simply accepts Adam and happens to be the right setting for him at the moment. He is picking up math books, wants to write better (he has difficulty with his fine motor control), and he wants to gain those literacy skills as he enjoys lessons with mommy on categories and then go on jaunts to the grocery store to learn about "food." Or when we read and write stories about different kinds of "animals," after grandpa has taken dozens of photos from their trip to the zoo.

At the same time, Adam explores his yard, moving systematically from one bush to another, saying something to each, rustling our long ornamental grasses with his hands, getting his face really close. He walks to the pool and says something to it as well. He moves towards his image reflected in our glass door and takes steps backwards as if he's measuring the space.

"...repetitive, obsessive movement and interests," I remember being told. "They are dysfuntional. We have to make it functional." Again the famous last words of our ABA supervisors.

And yet, functional the behaviour is. Like a poetic mapping of his environment and a greeting of his familiar spaces. It reminds me of Dawn Prince Hughes' greeting of all the familiar trees and rooms in her house.

"I would silently acknowledge landmarks as the route unwound, whether they were the buildings or the hills or the flowers and trees. I had memorized everything. To me, each flower, tree, building and hill was a person, a being with its own personality and sense of agency. It I did not see it, it missed me and felt abandoned." (p. 19 of Songs of the Gorilla Nation).

Knowing her prose and meeting Dawn this year, I expect Adam is similar as we returned from Alaska and Adam greeting all our backyard plants. You call it odd? I call it an aesthetic: an ability to have one's surroundings pulsate with life within you so that you care for its very existence; an ability to know what it is to LIVE in our house, our neighbourhood. As I listened to This American Life on Mapping (Click here for This American Life), Adam's "repetitive movements" in his backyard are like a cartographical poetry. The interview asks rather pragmatically, "What do the patterns of leaf light tell you?" He asks as if the act is a meaningless waste of time. I would say that this kind of mapping is to know, to intimately know. To even know and understand the relationship of things in the environment to each other. What does it mean, in other words, to live?

Is that dysfuntional?

Is the Walbiri tribe in Australia? They "sing" there world into existence -- every stone and every tree. Or consider the Dream-tracking of the honey-ant, one of the totems of the Popanji:

"It was the Eternal Home, he explained, of the Honey-ant Ancestor at Tatata. And suddenly it was as though we could set the row on row of honey-ants, their bodies striped and gleaming, bursting with nectar in their cells beneath the roots of the mulga tree. We saw the ring of flame-red earth around the entrance to their nest, and the routes of their migration as they spread to other places.

'The circles,' Mrs. Lacey added helpfully, 'are honey-ant ceremonial centres. The "tubes", as you call them, are Dreaming-tracks.'

The American man was captivated. 'And we can go and look for these Dreaming-tracks? Out there, I mean? Like at Ayers Rock? Some place like that?'

'They can,' she said. 'You can't.'

'You mean they're invisible?'

'To you. Not to them.'

'Then where are they?'

'Everywhere,' she said. 'For all I know there's a Dreaming-track running right through the middle of my shop.'

'Spooky,' the wife giggled.

'And only they can see it?'

'Or sing it,' Mrs. Lacey said. 'You can't have a track without a song.'

'And these tracks run every place?' the man asked. 'All over Australia?'

'Yes,' said Mrs. Lacey, sighing with satisfaction at having found a catchy phrase. 'The song and the land are one.'" (from Bruce Chatwin's, The Songlines, pp. 27-28)

Adam sings as he meanders through are yard on these hot summer days. He mumbles words to them like a mutual secret. He does this several times until he moves on to something else, butterflies fluttering above his head.

Perhaps the "pragmatists" of our world need some lessons in the behaviours of various cultures. Pragmatism kills art. It kills creativity and perhaps even the lifeblood of "different" kinds of people or species. It lives for some ubiquitous "functionality," and even characterizes "autism acceptance" as a kind of "denial" of any intrinsic difficulty or disability. One must measure, however, how much of the difficulty or the disability arises from a majority that does not see the Dreaming-tracks, or the poetry of the environment -- that otherwise rushes from one task to another ever so "pragmatically" so to never, or rarely, see or feel or value little, if anything, at all.