Assistant Professor of Psychology Eric Olofson was born and raised in Washington state. But ask him to tell you what it was like to be a boy in the places he grew up, he doesn’t mention a house, or a neighborhood, or even the city of Renton, Washington, where he spent many years as a child.
"When I think of home, there’s really nothing made by humans that comes to mind," says Olofson, a developmental psychologist specializing in infant cognition and who is in his first year in a tenure-track position at Wabash. "The first thing I think of is old-growth forest—100- and 200-foot tall Douglas firs and Western cedars.
"And I think of salmon. If you were to have a mascot for the Northwest, I think it would be the salmon. You find people who aren’t even environmentalists who care deeply about the health and the plight of the salmon in a way that they wouldn’t care about other environmental issues.
"And blackberries. Every summer we’d go out with our pails to the woods and pick all the blackberries we could possibly eat—gallons and gallons. We’d freeze them. Blackberries with vanilla ice cream taste amazing!
"On Saturday morning you’d get up, eat your breakfast, and go out in the woods. You’d come back for lunch, then go out again and not come in until Mom’s yelling because it’s dark.
"We’d play hide-and-seek, and I spent a lot of time climbing trees. And jumping from rock to rock. Once we had a week-long project to divert this little stream to the larger creek. We lined it with rocks so the sides wouldn’t cave in.
"We couldn’t get enough of it."
Olofson’s other strong place of memory from growing up in the Seattle area is SeaTac, the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
"Mom was a single mother until I was seven, and she taught me to be independent," Olofson recalls. "She taught me to read before I was in kindergarten. When I was four years old she’d take me to SeaTac airport—take me to the map up front and say, ‘You have 20 minutes to get us to gate E12,’ and I’d have to ask strangers for directions, I’d have to read maps, I’d have to look at the clock to know that I was on time.
"She had to train me so that if she wasn’t around, I could take care of myself."
Even with all that training, Olofson and his siblings managed to get lost in the woods once.
"I was 10, my little sister was four, and she started to get really scared," Olofson recalls. His parents found them after the family’s springer spaniel picked up their scent.
"Barney came bounding toward us through this high grass, and all you could see were his floppy ears appear and then disappear. We were so happy to see him!"
These days, mountain biking rejuvenates the sense of exploration and wonder Olofson enjoyed growing up in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.
"It re-creates that childhood experience," he says. "Every time I go out I get away from the familiar and find something unexpected."
The expert in infant development will soon have a subject close to home. His wife, Carrie, is expecting the couple’s first child in April. The expectant father is looking forward to introducing his son or daughter to the wonders of the Northwest woods.
"In the Midwest, everything we look at is the result of something a human being did," he says. "But walking around in the non-inhabited parts of the Northwest, it isn’t long before you get to a place where the only thing humans have done that you can see is build the road that got you there. And if you walk off the road, you won’t see anything humans have done.
"That’s one of the reasons I love being out in the woods—you’re always finding something new. And when we were kids, we loved to think we were the first to see it."