Mythical...Beavers?

As you can probably guess, I'm really into folklore, legends, and fantasy. I've always been a big fan of imagination, particularly mythic-level imagination. My bookshelf reflects this. I have a few books about animals and a lot of books about history, but there is an enormous section devoted to stuff that never really existed.

With the arrival of children, I looked at all my fantasy and folklore books with a new eye. I mean, if an alien visitor popped down and perused my library, he could be forgiven for thinking that dragons and manticores were real. It's not like this stuff comes with a disclaimer or something.

So I was naturally curious about how this would fit into raising a child. Being a parent means spending an inordinate amount of time worrying about things which you probably don't need to worry about. One of these things for me has been what will happen when a child who needs to be schooled in the Real World encounters the make-believe at such a young age. We had a few story books when I was little, but they were colorful, childish things that sat on the kids' shelf. My parent's bookshelf, meanwhile, was stocked with professional-looking natural history books and a row of staid encyclopedias. The was an inherent difference between childish imaginative stuff and adult reality.

Not so with my bookshelf, which has caused me to wonder if my kids will have trouble differentiating truth from fantasy. I suppose I could go out of my way to say "this is made-up" when we encounter this stuff in a story, but that gets kind of exhausting and, as a storyteller myself, I feel like it's a betrayal to interrupt the sacredness of a narrative to say the narrative is a lie. A preface or afterward to that effect is fine, mind you, but footnotes are for academic works, not stories.

At any rate, as it would happen, the eldest had already begun to pick up on real/make-believe divide without any comments from me. Unfortunately, he came to the wrong conclusion altogether.

We were walking around a lake the other day and came across a fallen tree. This initiated a discussion about beavers, an animal that appears in one of his favorite cartoons. To my complete surprise, the child interrupted the discussion by saying "But beavers aren't real."

Yankee readers may be a little perplexed by this statement, so I should clarify: this park was in Florida. I don't know if it's the weather or the alligators, but beavers don't like it here. Since the child had only seen beavers in a cartoon, he jumped to the weird but understandable conclusion that beavers were make-believe, same as dragons. Though his thesis was wrong, this was a really good moment for me because it reminded me that even young children have a pretty good B.S. sensor and cartoons, thankfully, push that sensor into red.

I tried of course to explain to him that beavers are real and that his father had, in fact, seen beavers before. He didn't seem convinced, though, so my wife has suggested we find a zoo and settle it that way (frankly people like us always look for a reason to go to the zoo).

My own encounter with beavers is an interesting story. I was in Alaska when I was 19 or so with my folks. The first time I saw a beaver lodge out the window of our rental, I demanded we pull over so I could see if there was a beaver around. My parents were floored. To them, beavers were nuisance critters. Why would anyone want to see them?

To a Florida boy, though, beavers are pretty strange. They may be rodents, but they're giant rodents. Giant aquatic rodents. Plus they build things. Giant aquatic rodents that build things! How could anyone not be excited by them?

My parents didn't pull over, but eventually we went hiking near a beaver lodge. I tiptoed off the path, got my camera out (these being the days when one's camera was not also a phone) and made my approach. I saw a widening wake in the water and....

PAT! PAT! PAT!

Nothing.

I looked around for a minute then went back to my mom on the trail and told her about the noise.

"They slap their tail on the water when there's a predator around," she said. "It's a signal to hide."

"There's a predator around?" I looked around excitedly.

"Yeah." She gave me a significant stare.

I must admit that it took me a minute to comprehend her.