Into the wild places

to find a gift that only a child could give

One of the three beautiful alpine lakes we journeyed to.

When you have two children it’s not often you get to spend time with one of them and not the other. But our children need focused, one-on-one attention, just like we do as adults. They need to be seen as individuals. They need our time.

My two children have so much in common, but they are very different people. They play together, they argue, they fight, they collaborate, they create their own businesses together, they craft outdoor spaces to play in, they build their own gardens, they share one another’s art. Both of them dearly love the outdoors—bugs and animals and plants and dirt and trails and running water. We enrolled them in a weekly nature camp years ago, and they’ve both kept up with it until very recently. My oldest is a die-hard outdoorsman. His younger brother has become the artist-in-residence.

But let’s go back twenty years, to when my wife and I were newly in love and learning how we wanted to craft our lives together, building our dreams and imagining all the places in the world we would explore.

Actually, now that I think of it, we should go back further, possibly thirty-five years, to the point in my life where there was a distinction between the family I grew up in and the family I desperately needed and wanted.

The color of the water was so richly blue that no camera could quite capture it.

My parents were never outdoorsy people. They didn’t like heat or sunshine or sweat, they didn’t like rain or getting wet, they didn’t enjoy any sports, they would never sleep on the ground, and adventures were just plain scary. But my uncle, who lived out here in the Pacific Northwest, was a mountain climber. He skied in to open his cabin the in the Sawtooth Mountains every winter. He took me out in a boat on a swift river when I was 12, and he told me stories about hiking for days and weeks in the forests around Mt Rainier, Mt Baker, Mt St Helens.

I wanted to grow up to be him.

My childhood was not filled with hikes or camping trips or kayaking to tidepools, but the fantasy life in my head contained all of those things. I dreamed about climbing to alpine vistas. My mind was filled with notations on how much water I would need to carry to trek through Moab or the Painted Desert one day. Career goal? Park ranger, of course. Or naturalist. Or survivalist. I craved that connection with the wild world that my parents shunned, and I knew that I could have it as an adult. Because adults get to make those kinds of decisions for themselves.

Now we can talk about all of that dreaming my wife and I enjoyed before we had kids. We bought the backpacking tent, we researched all of the equipment we would need, we procured maps, we tested some things on tame car camping trips.

When we use the term “wildflower meadow,” do you assume it’s flat?

But there were jobs. There was grad school for her and then grad school for me. There were car payments and house payments. There were dogs. There were obligations. Soon there were children to carry along with us. It’s funny how all of those obligations can become barriers to the things we dream about, even the big things that we want to define our identity.

No regrets, really. I love all of those obligations.

But the mountains have always called to me.

We can spend a lifetime yearning for the dreams that carried us through our childhood, and if that had been the course of my life I can’t say I would be unhappy or unfulfilled. In truth, the dreams have been enough to sustain me this far, and I have seen so many parts of this world that I can still rightly call myself an explorer.

But I was given a gift recently, and it’s the sort of thing I will think about and remember and revel in for all the rest of my days.

Morning mist over our campground lake.

My oldest son, who is eleven—the outdoorsman—asked me several months ago if we could go backpacking. Real backpacking, way up into the wilderness, to somewhere we had not been. Here he was, the child who had been one of the many good reasons NOT to do this very activity, suddenly reaching back to me to invite me into the wilderness of his imagination, of the yearning he felt inside for this very same type of exploration.

We packed up our bags with the essentials, only the least of everything we needed, conscious of the weight and heft of everything we wanted or needed for a night away from civilization. And for a guy who weighs less than 100 pounds, my son did an admirable job of shouldering his own supplies.

We climbed over rocks and roots and fungi and streams along a heavily forested path through old-growth trees, just the two of us, untethered and free. There was no car at the trailhead to rescue us if anything went wrong. My wife would pick us up the next day. For a bit of added tension, there were some wildfires to the north of our location, and a bit of lightning was possible that evening. We made plans for how and where we would go if anything went wrong.

And perhaps the only thing we didn’t take that would have been nice was some bug spray. They ate us alive.

Tall mountain peaks in the distance, a new alpine lake 800 feet below, and a boy who just could not stop climbing up and down rocks.

But nothing kept us from the 2-mile hike up and up and up to the top of a ridge overlooking a crystal blue alpine lake surrounded by Mount Baker and Glacier Peak and other mountains whose names I don’t know. I should know them. I should ask them their names, but all I could do standing there at the top of that ridge was stare and smile at my kid who delighted in climbing and scrambling over rocks, tossing stones into a small pool, and whooping with joy at our accomplishment.

Sweaty and exhausted, we descended the mountain, our feet slipping in dry, loose rocks and gravel. More than once the scree path we crossed tumbled in a wave of skittering stones down the incredibly steep slope below us. We traversed distinct wildflower meadows filled with penstemon and bleeding hearts and foxglove and thistle, Oregon sunshine and alpine bistort and tiger lily, western columbine and Sitka valerian and pearly everlasting. He asked me to stop at each of them, to photograph them and guess at their names. I must admit that I only knew half of them, and the images I collected were essential in explaining to you what we walked through, what we touched, what we experienced.

I don’t know how to write about the sensation of stopping to watch a low cloud of mist run like a slow-moving locomotive through the valley we hiked above. I cannot capture the feeling of cool breeze washing over me at the top of that mountain, its clear sky so bright I had to close my eyes (but I did not want to shut any of it out). It is impossible for me to explain to you how it felt to watch my son’s joy at all of these things, at even the most mundane tasks like dipping our toes into the lake as we collected water to filter for our dinner that night.

And I know I have to be honest, that I bruised the nail of my big toe really badly, that I put on a brave face so as not to limp in front of him, because I didn’t want any of my inadequacies to hinder his love of the moment we shared. I did not fake strength or resilience. I was buoyed by his reverence and laughter and outright amazement at the world we walked through together.

It was one of the most incredible gifts I have ever received.

I ate a lot of ibuprofen when we got home.

And we laughed together as we looked through the photos. We scratched our bug bites and chuckled about tent farts and told all the stories about what a backcountry toilet really looks like and immediately made plans for the next trip (to a destination with maybe a little less elevation gained over such a short distance), and yet I’m still sitting on that rock at the top of the world with the kid who unlocked an opportunity I have dreamt of for thirty years.

The sweaty smile of achievement at the top.

When you have kids everyone rushes to tell you what you will teach them as they grow. But time and again it is my kids who have given more to me, whether in words or experience, and I am forever in their debt for all of it.

“The mountains are calling, and I must go, and I will work on while I can, studying incessantly.”

– John Muir, naturalist and mountaineer, 1838-1914

Your trans friend,

Robin