The story of our camping trip

Saturday morning, my husband, myself, my visiting niece, our five kids, and our half-grown puppy Moxie embarked on a trip to camp at Traverse City State Park with my brother and sister-in-law and their two kids. If you count the dog, that makes nine of us who piled into my mother-in-law’s Yukon, stuffed to the gills with gear and food and people and chatter, and started on our four-hour drive.

Well, it should have taken four hours. But we had to stop twice in the first hour to check the baggage and bike rack and make sure everything was secure. Then it was lunchtime so we stopped to eat. Then we had to stop so one of the older boys could pee…never mind that we had JUST left the restaurant fifteen minutes earlier. Then we had to stop at a grocery store to pick up ice and batteries for the flashlights. Then we realized that the dog had chewed her way through her camping crate and had to stop to fix that. It was one of those moments “we’ll laugh about later”, seeing the dog triumphantly sitting ON TOP of her crate instead of, you know, inside it where she was supposed to be. Ha ha!

Finally we were really (really!) ready to go. The baggage was securely bungee-corded to the top of the car. The bikes were stable. The dog was duct taped back into her traveling home. The batteries and ice were purchased. Our stomachs were full. So what if we had been on the road four hours and only made it 90 miles down the road? Now we were on our way!

Of course, at this point, Owen, our four-year-old, got upset about something (I’m still not sure what) and started crying. And Clara decided to join in, adding a sobbing “Mom-MY! Mom-MY! Mom-MY!” to the chorus. This kept up for the next 90 miles of the trip. After a while they would both get tired of crying and wailing and quiet down. Then one of them would start up again and the other would join in even more loudly, not to be outdone. My husband and I looked at each other and laughed. What else could we do? Oh, besides look straight ahead with white knuckles and grim expressions? Yeah, we did some of that, too.

After six-and-a-half hours on the road, we finally wound up at our destination. And we had a really nice time. Stressful? Well…yes. But fun. And such a nice way to put some space between ourselves and the day-to-day grind, the commonplace routine that’s so fast-paced and goal-oriented, so focused on getting places and getting things done that sometimes you forget to notice the new freckle on your preschooler’s nose and don’t even realize your six-year-old has lost his lisp until he hasn’t had it for…how long has it been gone, anyway?

At one point that evening I was walking down the little road leading from the bathroom to our campsite. Clara, who has evolved from an occasional step-taker-but-mostly-crawler into a real, bona fide Walker over the past month, toddled along beside me, holding my finger. It was nearly dusk on a perfect, 70 degree evening, pine trees all around and fresh northern Michigan air in my lungs. Clara, a.k.a Lurch, took her trademark jerky steps in her tiny little tie-dye patterened Crocs and stopped every few minutes to yell one of her few words…either “Mommy!” or “Goggy!” (doggy) or something else I couldn’t quite make out.

After a while I realized we had been walking along like this, not making any noticeable progress, for at least ten minutes. At any other time I would have had to fight the temptation to scoop her up and carry her. But there was no reason to hurry. There was no rush, because what we’d come there for, we were already doing. Just a mom and her girl, toddling along a quiet road in the middle of a state park, smelling the air, hearing the birds, enjoying each other, appreciating the moment we were in…living life.

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When people ask me how camping went, it’s tempting to tell the story of the car trip. That’s the one that gets the laughs and the sympathetic sighs. The crying children. The escape-artist dog. It’s the easy story to tell, because we all relate to chaos, and things not going the way they’re supposed to, and kids screaming in the car and a dog chewing up its (did I mention it was a very EXPENSIVE) crate. It’s easier and funnier and more conducive to dramatic flourishes than the story of a mom and her baby girl strolling down a quiet path, or brothers big and small cheering each other on playing bean bag toss, or a quiet evening gathered around a campfire while cousins and siblings chase one another with glowing sticks. But I think that’s the story that matters more.

The chaos and mishaps will always be with us parents, to large and small degrees, in ways that make for funny memories later and ways that just make you wish you could forget. Confusion and calamities are always noticeable; they demand our attention. But the quiet, slow moments of pleasure don’t scream out or jump in our faces. They require us to notice them, and to acknowledge them, to ourselves and to each other and to the people we tell. Because the things we choose to recount will often be the things we most strongly remember later, and I want to remember the campfire, the bean bags, the bicycle rides, and the  slow, sunset walk with my fast-growing daughter.

And that, I think, is the real story of our camping trip.