Family vacations for us were always hiking and camping.  National park camping with our own little patch of Earth and trees and miles of trails, and that distinctly American sense of the sacred outdoors.  Re-creation via the wild frontier, renewal via trees, lakes, mountains, solitude.  The rushing sounds of wind and rivers and the chirp-punctuated silence of woods.  And of course, the divine camp snacks: granola bars and Cheez-its and cheerio-and-M&M gorp.

There were usually a token two or three days in a city, where we’d irritate Meg endlessly by being too high-strung to visit museums, but otherwise the whole time was spent in the woods.  Calling it woods is a philosophical decision – vacations with my family will always be, for me, in the woods.

There we’d go, pulling up in the duct-taped old van to our camping spot after a few precious minutes of scouting – “That one, it’s got two picnic tables!”  “No, that one, it’s got that patch of shade for reading in the chairs!”  “Ohhhh, look at the one by the river.”

We’d finally settle on a mix of aesthetics and practicality and start piling everything out of the car.  Or rather, Jack and I would chase each other around the campground and go giddily exploring (unleashed after hours upon hours in the car, bored of trivial pursuit and I Spy) while my parents got around to setting up camp.  For dinner there’d be some packaged broccoli fettuccini or burritos made from instant cups of beans and spices, and it was always out of this world.  I yearned for camping food; our healthy homestead of brown rice, veggies, nori, and other Moosewood-derived staples made Cap’n Crunch a straight up shot of heroin.  I remember the smell of maple n’ brown sugar oatmeal on a crisp morning, the smell of firewood, dirt, and trees, the feel of fading sleep mingling with the warm wet clouds drifting up from my steaming bowl of oatmeal.

Dad would spread the maps on the picnic table and trace out our plan for the day.  We let him go.  I suppose I should learn a lot from my stepmom about knowing your significant other in these circumstances.  I don’t remember her ever fighting him, ever telling him to “just choose one, already!” unless it was in jest.  She let him meander his way through ten “I’ll tell you what, guys, we could take this trail and bring the bikes, OR…we could go through these Cottonwood groves on THIS trail” knowing that the possibilities and potential were all part of it, were an integral part of him as that cool white sand was a natural component of Lake Michigan.

We’d listen earnestly (until up to about age 14) and make some group decision, and then we’d pack things up into their little compact bags and boxes and pile into the van.  The door slammed shut with a shudder and we were off, Michigan pines, snatches of lake, the shadow-then-light of the woods passing outside the window.

It was vacation and it was heaven.  We’d hike, we’d eat sandwiches (mine cheese, Jack’s PB and J – I didn’t develop an affection for peanut butter until the tail end of four years of living overseas.  And even then, it was for the novelty factor, and not for the taste.  I still can’t deal with the squishy-sweet-gooey combo of PB & J and, like my six and eight and ten year-old selves, would prefer cheese and mustard).  If it was going to be a serious hike – say, to the top of a peak in the Cascades, or a climb up precarious rock trails in Acadia National Park in Maine, then we were bribed with candy.  We didn’t necessarily need to be coerced or forced and were generally enthusiastic about going, but my parents understood that a little incentive in the form of Nerds can go a long way.  And perhaps those Nerds worked Pavlovian magic on my brain, because now when I get to the summit of a peak I feel an insuppressible thrill, an ecstatic separate peace that makes all the swirly day-to-day thought and action below look like so much endearing fretting.  I think it harks back to sitting down with my family and cracking open that flimsy little box of nerds, shaking out a spoonful of watermelon and a spoonful of grape and licking them off the palm of my hand, taking in the view.

My dad has a natural fascination with the natural world.  I say “natural” because it comes easily to him.  He isn’t desperately searching within it for spiritual answers or a certain otherness to the city – for him, it is a deeper part of the soul and a deeper mystery he feels connected to all the time.  Being in it for a week at a time with his family is simply a closer and more immediate connection.

On hikes he would take hemlock or sassafras between his fingers, gently crushing the nettles or leaves to get the scent; he’d point out the names of flowers and trees which drifted over me at the time as all part of the same web of good-smelling woods.

I have many memories of being on the trail alone, half-thinking, thoughts floating through my head unmoored and unconcerned like milkweed drifting along on a breeze.  I remember walking a trail in the Lake Quinalt area three hours north of Seattle.  I’d already settled into my strong and determined walk at that age and I’d gotten ahead of the rest of them;  not, however, without having slyly asked for the box of Cheez-its.  There I was in the middle of a temperate Seattle rainforest, walking a trail, hand plowed into a box of Cheez-its, Cheez-it to mouth, Cheez-it to mouth, hiking and thinking.  That moment and so many others like it have led me to where I am now -

- hiking the Cerro Fortin at 3 p.m. in the afternoon, recognizing the familiar white blossoms and magueys and pines and glowing gold-red trees with peeling translucent bark, whose names I still don’t know despite the increasing writer’s guilt at not getting further into detail, not achieving another level of connection.  I took my camera and the dog today.  I am normally averse to photography; it usurps the moment for me, kills its potential to bloom into a piece of writing.  But today was an exception.  Taking photos freed me up to see.  Freed me from all the mid-afternoon mind-wringing over “what project is next?” and “Should I be writing about writing and photography or about the pueblos negros or the beach or dog training or…?”

Once my mind gets started on this track I’ve got to derail it somehow, via books or cooking or hiking.  Sometimes it works, sometimes the jabber continues.  Today, luckily, the solid, regular snaps of the camera and that particular light, shadow, and detail driven way of seeing forced me out of the anxious grappling of my mind.  It was just tree bark and the spectacular late afternoon light on the Fortin making everything glow like a dream.

There can be something gentle about photography.  It can be a form of caressing, of admiring the world with the eyes and the respect of a human being fumbling around trying to appreciate the planet through art.  That is how I felt today, photographing the arched white trunks of birch trees.  I put my hand on their smooth bark, I leaned backwards to capture their reach into the kaleidoscopic sky.  There were small, feathered yellow leaves scattered on the reddish brown trail, and I knelt down to photograph them, too. The sweeps of soft-looking amber grass, the grooves of stoic trees that seemed almost barely to lean back into the sky, the small tangles of grasses and the occasional blossom filled me with distant tenderness.  Mountains always do this to me – calm me, relieve the trying-to-understand with meditative ease.  Today photography did it, too, yanked me out of my own clambering desperate way of trying too hard to see and let me simply focus on a leaf, a tree.

I have family vacations to thank for this.  That feeling of pleasing insignificance among Seattle rainforest, eating Cheez-its.  The satisfaction of Nerds at 12,000 feet.  The search for the campsite.  The smell of pine needles, wet Earth, oatmeal from the camp stove, trees, the cool air of the woods in summer.  Vacations taught me how to seek positive escape via the natural world and how to recognize it when I find it: that feeling of rising above the increasingly distant jabber of the day to day, stepping into pace with the rhythm of something greater and wider than my life.  Now, I don’t even need the Nerds.