Weapons of Mass Destruction in America’s wild places? Hardly, although I’ve finally reached the point where nothing the Bush Administration does surprises me. If Karl Rove has decided to turn our archipelago of wild areas into storage depots for nuclear weapons, weapons-grade smallpox, and our just-in-case remaining stocks of nerve gas, well, you read it here first.

But that’s not what I’m talking about. My version of WMD stands for Working Mother, Desperate, and it’s not the presence of single mothers in wilderness areas that worries me, it’s their absence.

That single working mothers could become an endangered wildland species occurred to me years ago, when I observed that you could sit with a tool box on the shores of Idaho’s Redfish Lake and serve humanity well by fixing the bikes of the kids whose fathers weren’t there.

Times have changed, and not just because helping the children of strangers is no longer seen as evidence of a good heart and a selfless nature. It’s also that Redfish Lake, like a lot of the West’s other recreational assets, has become less and less available to the working poor.

One thing that hasn’t changed: most of those working poor are single mothers who have to work at low-paying jobs to house and support their kids. Fathers are gone. Child-support or VA benefits are too low or nonexistent. Idaho’s status as a Right-to-Work state guarantees low wages, and the cost of raising children guarantees that those low wages won’t be enough.

Children used to be brought to Redfish Lake for a weekend or summer vacation that didn’t cost much and was in sharp contrast to the urban distress that many of them were raised in. The increase in camping fees, the price of gas, the gradual change of lakeshore camping from low-cost informal recreation to a technology-intensive, reservation-requiring, motorhome-based, urban-focused ritual has kept them at home.

That’s worrisome. Kids who don’t get to the woods can’t learn its lessons, and the most important of those lessons involves seeing the natural world as it is—a delicate interbalance of living and cognitive systems—rather than as its portrayal as groomed parkland on TV.

Camping out offers unprogrammed experience at a time when most experience, if you’re a poor kid, is programmed, from your video games to your dumbed-down school curriculum to your advertising-generated fantasies, which leave you wandering the aisles of mall shops, sick with unappeasable need.