Sabbatical Outdoors

My daughter sees the world different than me. I’d like to think she’s a chip off of the old block, but I see her individual spirit rise, especially in these photos she took of our time together.  She sees the world with more emotion, more intensity, and more beauty than I do at times.  Here she takes in a twig for the color burst it brings to the dirt background …I see a branch dying.

She sees the beauty in everything. I’ve  had enough experience to feel cautious and cynical.  She takes in the world around her at face value.  She makes time to stop.  She not only sees, but she lingers.  She savors the flowers bursting into their full glory on every hike we take.

She is extremely hopeful.  She has big ideas.  She sees a horizon and makes plans to go beyond it.  Just because the sun is setting here, it is rising somewhere else.

She is as pure as this dandelion unblown.

But as soon as she learns the other side of a moment, she can wither quick and go to a dark place because she is afraid.  She is afraid of storms, mostly because she can’t see the view above the clouds. Yet, she is always searching for the silver lining to help raise her own spirits.

She is afraid of why bad things happen and why people have to hurt. We do our best to point her in the right direction, but she has her own perspective.  We can’t explain it all because not everything makes perfect sense.

We can reassure her with our love for her.  We can help her pay attention to the things that make her feel happy and secure.

We can provide her with our time and our  presence to get through a tough moment.

She is taking in the world from a different angle and I want to pay close attention to what moves her. I want her life to explode with good things but it will require me to not be moving so fast that I miss the moment where I might be needed most.

She is different than me.  She is carved out of me, but she stands on her own.  She will always be her own person and we may not always share the same view, but I will love her regardless.

She is independent in every way…and then I remind myself, aren’t we all?

(Note:  All pictures taken by Wilson except the one I took of her before blowing the dandelion:)

Smiling is something we all have the ability to do, but some smiles are more natural than others. We have threatened many a kid with a forced grin, but what strikes me as I look back across our two weeks out together is how genuine their smiles are.

Each and everyone of my peeps are grinning from ear to ear.  Virtually every photo we took, even in the outtakes, our family was looking pretty happy.  Having logged many an hour in our truck, our kids and our new puppy keep smiling.

This tells me a couple of things:

Its easy to tell a forced smile from a genuine smile.

And secondly, a genuine smile from someone can turn any bad day around.

I will always have these pictures to go by.  I have no memory on my own, sadly, so I document my memories with photographs.  I’ll have a collection of pictures to remind me how happy we were this year on this trip.

How happy we were that we took a week away from scheduled football training to make a bonding trip happen between a father and a son.  Even this picture below tells me the tiny bit of nervousness my oldest is feeling about this adventure …the smile tells me he is a bit unsure.

But when I compare it to the end of the trip. . .I’m more than confident he figured out that we knew what we were doing all along.  We earned his respect along the way.

Weights were brought along in the back truck bed to keep up with the workouts and to be sure no time was really lost, but I cannot say the same if we had stayed in town and ditched this road trip.

This trip meant a lot to me.  Having a rising 9th grader, close to tweenager,  and a Senior Kindergartener, I just knew that we needed this summer to lock in a few more family moments before we let our kids loose to experience the big world on their own.

I’m home now and all I have is this memory of a trip to look back on.   I can promise you this:  these smiles can turn my bad day around in a heartbeat.

Quiet. Being a mother of three, my acceptance of noise has raised a decibel or two. (Yes, we resorted to plastic handcuffs to keep the little one from pestering the others and he thought it hilarious).  It takes a lot to get my attention.

Parents in general seem to learn their own children’s squeals and ear piercing shrills so on a playground, it sounds like nothing to me.  Unless my kid gets injured and I can quickly recognize that voice.

I learned to function in my former career on conference calls shuttling kids from school to practices with up to six kids in the car, while ordering through a drive thru, only to unmute and try and sound intelligent. I have an uncanny ability to tune out unwanted noise.

So on this trip, in the absence of noise, I realized how much I genuinely love the quiet. Not the quiet I’ve tolerated, but the quiet that comes with nature. Water rushing to reach the lake below is awe-inspiring. Knowing all of its momentum lands into the quiet abyss of water pooled  is nothing short of a miracle.

Hearing my breath on a bike ride becomes the beautiful beat of the pattern the mallard ducks fly across the elk refuge.

Unnatural noises dissipate in the wild. There is an utter respect of quiet from the world of campers to create an environment of only natural sounds. We heard birds chirping, grass whistling in the wind and water rushing down creek beds. With sometimes more than 100 or so people at a campsite, we would walk out of the airstream and believe we might be the only ones on property. We often were the loudest, especially the night we played a family game of Simon Says one night in Montana, but the laughter was genuine and natural enough.

On any hike we took, we would almost be startled by hikers walking at a quicker pace to pass us, especially when one had a big black dog resembling the size of a small black bear.

Our kids have commented several times across our trip…it is so quiet. There is a deep respect that builds across each day and by the end of this adventure we have all lowered our voices.  We have let being quiet become a practice.  We have learned to listen for the stillness.

Upon entering the Grand Tetons we take note of a sign blinking with bars of color and see they are performing a noise study.

I can only hope our travel experience creates a natural meter in each of us to pay attention to the noise…or more importantly to give into the quiet that is all around us.

We are headed home. Four of us that is.

So the only noise I’m willing to crank up loud as we make our way to the airport is this…and it makes us all sing loud.

Thank you Keelan Donovan for creating this song, Love of Mine.  Our whole family sings along and takes in the absolute surprising beauty of the Tetons.   It never gets old, this view, and this song carried us into the mountains every morning on our family adventure.  It also prepared us for the quiet moments we experienced exploring the great places of the Pacific Northwest.  A little bit of this type of noise can take a family far.

And thank you AC/DC for taking us the final stretch to the Jackson Hole airport like we did every campground.

I’ll take both…the right type of noise and the right type of quiet.  I’ll figure out how to balance both a little better now.

Mirrors are almost completely unnecessary when camping, but reflections are important.  For a week, I rarely saw myself as all that exists in our trailer is a makeup mirror…and there is no reason to apply makeup out in the wild, especially when there are hats and sunglasses.

When I arrived here in Jackson Hole, I had a full length view of myself.  Even though we call it a bathroom vanity, I’m not feeling up to the name.  We have been hiking, biking and working out for almost two weeks.  I feel fierce.  (Photo taken at farthest point we reached by bike in our daily morning ride in Jackson Hole, WY)

I don’t really want a mirror to reflect anything different.  Yet, I take in my reflection and let my inner voice say a few unkind things.  My attitude of fierceness has met its match and they both come from the same place.

Being on the road allows for a different type of reflection.  There is space and quiet to think as long as the road stretches in front of you.  I’m carving out time to be a better me and a better us before I wrap up this adventure.

Several have told us we need to go to Jackson Lake to see the Grand Tetons reflecting in the water.  We have been a lot of places around this town, but we haven’t seen this.  I’ve seen images of it on postcards and t-shirts but not the real vision with my own eyes.

We love a more remote area where the beaver hustle their sticks back and forth to build their dams at the foot of the Tetons.  There is a murkier reflection here of the mountains because the water moves.   I’m looking at the actual Tetons but also a distorted image of them in the reflection.

And here is where I gather a moment of confidence.  I am who I am and the reflection I see in any mirror I look into is a distorted view, only a copy of the real thing.  There is only one range of mountains called the Grand Tetons.  People come from all over the world to see them for themselves.

There is only one me in this world and I have a handful of people who love me exactly the way they see me too.  While I take time to reflect on this, I decide I’m pretty happy with my view.

Today I thought a lot about being equipped for the seasons.  We are in a place that makes its entire living on the 3 months of the summer and the 3 or so months of winter.  Biking and skiing.  Polar opposites in elements but equally intriguing to the traveler looking for a wide variety of adventure.

As we biked through the National Elk Refuge, I thought how different this place looks in the winter.  We are swatting flies and slapping mosquitos but fast forward four months and they will both be nonexistent.   I have never seen this place in the winter, but according to th signs, the elk graze and roam with freedom all winter in the refuge area.

Here we are struggling to find one elk or moose in the summer because the water rose out of its banks on the Gros Ventre and it is unseasonably warm.

I’m reminded in this moment we are all equipped to handle the season we are in.  Whether we shed our coat or build thicker skin to brace for the elements that hit us, we are built to survive the seasons we experience.

If all of the animals around us can make it through the winter months, where nourishment is sparse and the weather is bitter, so can we.  Here I am sweating the hottest day of July Jackson Hole has seen in a while, but every animal I cannot find is doing the same…surviving until the heat subsides or the cold melts. The day brings what the day brings and we make it to another day.  We take a water break or we hibernate.  That’s the goal:  to do whatever it takes to keep pushing forward.  

I feel like I’m cheating while on this adventure.  We booked a week in Jackson Hole, WY thinking we would be ready for a long shower after a week of camping.  We also knew the kids would enjoy having time in town and feeling a sense of independence getting ice cream or walking to the park adjacent to where we stay.

I have all but cried the whole way to our new stop.  I want my trailer back.  I want my family crammed into tiny spaces because it is where we connect the most.  We pulled up to my favorite campground only to hustle our clothes and food into the truck.  It was time to take our belongings to the condo we rented for the week.  Our time on the road is ending.  I feel only sadness. I’m watching everyone in the campground set up tents in preparation for the 4th festivities and here we are packing out, not in.

My kids have retreated to old habits, begging to hit the toy store, fighting over the bigger room. I feel like we have failed as parents.   The week we carved out driving across the Pacific Northwest was special for so many reasons…we were together as a family of five taking on adventure and choosing our next steps.

Now we are back to a place with limitless options and thousands of distractions.  A place that offers a different type of freedom than I’m ready for.  This is a place where the kids can walk further out to test their own independence.

Reflecting on freedom is important on a holiday such as this.  It means so many different things depending on your age, your experience, your view.  As my oldest plays pick up 5 vs 5 games out on the courts and my youngest is trying out the monkey bars, I feel an anxiousness for them both.

All of our kids are growing up, each want to feel out the thrill of freedom for where they can go.  I’m holding my breath as one stretches out for the easy lay up he might just miss and get his new teammates trash talking.  The youngest is trying to stick the landing, letting go of the bars with no broken bones.  As a mom with ten years stretched out on this playground, I know I’m holding on too tight.

All of this holding on forces me to think about letting go…to set free. We can provide as much adventure and risk in all we do as a family, but our three will remember our journeys in their own way. They will each test the limits of freedom and we can only hope we have given them enough time and space with us that they will have the tools they need to tackle their moments.

I sit on the bench and let myself have my moment of sadness, while Tommy sits beside me with his hand on my shoulder offering all of the comfort he could give. Without having to say anything, he knows  where the tears are coming from.

My daughter who pays attention, just like her daddy, is watching and asks if I’m crying.  This is her moment on the playground, her happy place in Jackson Hole, so I lie and say I’m not.  They love this place because we brought them here. We have made it a place to remember, whether we stayed in the wooded campground of Gros Ventre or whether we stretched out in a beautiful condo in town.

I’ll be over myself soon.

We hit the toy store first and order dinner from our favorite place here and we settle in our new place just fine.  We will have the Tetons to explore, cold lakes to swim in and we will all still be together.

We can also play a family game of Old Maid stretched out in a king size bed.

A tiny sacrifice for this type of freedom.

Camping has come a long way in food offerings.   Gone is the assumption that you can only eat Ramen noodles, canned food, and s’mores, although we do that too.

We have stepped up our game.  We travel with our Green Egg.  We don’t mind we may be judged a little for bringing it, but Tommy has learned to operate this little baby like a champ and like our kids, we carry it wherever we go.

We love the smoked flavor and we need our meals to feel five star rated to rival the scenery around us.  Food is not just fuel, it is the seasoning to the trip.  We do not want our food to be ordinary, we need it to be extraordinary.  When the boys were on the road in Montana making their way out, they picked up monster steaks from a local butcher, Matt’s Butcher Shop in Livingston, and treated us all to them again when we made our way back through.

For a hike, I take salad with fresh basil in a Yeti cup and drizzle it with balsamic vinegar for our picnic lunch.  I make kale chips for an appetizer (thanks fav cuz for the recipe). On a trip such as this, the food not only will nourish, but it will wow us.

This is one of the benefits of camping. If you bring the right tools and pay attention to the little details,  you can make a good day great.  No matter how long of a grind we make trekking across a state, we know we will have a delicious meal at the end of the day.  If we know we will have a long day ahead, we can get started with smoked bacon and everything falls in place.  

Good food doesn’t take much more effort, but it can help you savor the journey.

Happy 4th from Jackson Hole, WY!

For every long trip we take there is a lot of dirty laundry that piles up.  We have a huge black bag with straps that we bought once for the kids going to away camp that serves as our dirty laundry keeper. With each hike or workout, we add our sweaty clothes to the bag until it is bulging.  We know at some point we will have to deal with it but we let it accumulate until it is blocking our way in and out of the airstream.

We all have dirty laundry and deal with it a number of ways.  For me, it piles up until it cannot be ignored.  For others, maybe a little laundry is aired each day.  I’m not sure the answer but at some point,  I have to tackle the pile we have.  There is a certain sense of control and order restored when I do the laundry.  Folding shirts and making tiny piles of belongings makes me feel like I’m winning the fight against our dirty laundry.  For at least one day, we each have a fresh start.

Getting dirty on a trip like this also reminds me we are doing exactly what we came for…sand, dirt, salt water…all of it washes out.  Here it is again, the restoring power of water.   If you live the life God intended, you will get dirty.   Life is meant to be lived.  We were made to walk this earth and explore. What else is true is we will get messy when we become His hands and His feet in the world…but we also have a promise.  Water washes over and makes all things new again.

Swimming at the lake feels completely different than swimming in the ocean, at least I can say this confidently for me and for Wilson, our daughter.  If she knows there is no chance of shark or jellyfish, she could swim all day.  She will also swim farther because her fear is at bay.  We spend the afternoon at the shores of Lake Couer D’Alene where the water is cold, clear and refreshing.

Fear holds us all back so much.  When I read through scripture I’m aware of how often it speaks to not being afraid.  I think so much of this is because when we are afraid, we are not living true to what we are capable of accomplishing.  Fear distorts our view, like murky water prohibiting us from seeing far enough.

We spend the day enjoying the water and paddling our kayaks around the area.  Wilson, as usual, makes a friend.  I have a quick moment taking in the scene…her little brother coming in between her and the boy she has met and think we are just at the beginning of how often this will happen.

We actually treat ourselves to a night out and book a reservation at the floating restaurant called Cedars adjacent to where we are staying.

Parker can barely keep his eyes open he has played so hard.  We tempt him with food and point out the swimming geese to feed and he perks up a little.  It’s a beautiful sunset due to the rains that came through.

What we are not afraid of for this meal is over indulgence.  We act as if we haven’t had a proper meal in a long time and top the evening off with the Mile High Mud Slide, Stuart going for the whole version on his own.

We laugh. We tell stories. We don’t use our phones once except to take pictures of the backdrop for our dining.  We may not have seen all of Couer D’Alene but we have seen as far as our eyes can see and that is enough for now.

This man. This man deserves a post all to himself. He is the sole reason we are campers and why we have all come to love it so much.

He is the ad for adventure. He is predictably unpredictable. Yet these are a few things I know to count on:

1. He will buy a hat everywhere we go despite how many hats he has.

2. He will put a sticker on the back of his truck to document every place we have touched.
3. He will misidentify dozens of rocks as bears.
4. He will call somebody an idiot on the road, especially if they cut him off or drive to slow.
5. He will fist bump everybody in the car every time we cross an hour, counting down to our arrival.

6. He will dress us alike when he falls in love with a brand.
7. He will crank up the tunes of ACDC on the homestretch to any campground (picture taken mid-singing)

8. He will chew more gum than all of us put together.
9. He will be sure we all laugh a lot.
10. He will be solely focused on us as a family.

We have come a long way. In some ways as a couple we have come full circle, back to our beginning. He is sitting beside me now with his hat backwards like he did when we dated 25 years ago. This is a sign of him being completely relaxed and carefree. This is the look and the boy who stole my attention.

We had the realization that not long after we said I do and certainly after we had kids, we started seeing less and less of each other. It’s a bit uncanny how you can say you want to spend the rest of your life with someone and yet spend so little time with the one you chose. Work. Kids. Extended family. Friends. We had everything but us coming first. Our time was riddled with schedules, commitments, shuttling kids and talking via text instead of face to face. We were getting the worst pieces of us in any given week. We could feel the distance but didn’t think we could do much about it.

I credit this man for fighting to get us back to our center. I was so distracted by everything we created.  He was paying closer attention. Little by little we began making time to be more present with each other, to connect during the day instead of at the end of it. I had a big revelation in that process.  I was loving him as I loved myself.  At the time, the reality was I had not been loving myself well.  My energy was placed everywhere but where it mattered.  His request for my time seemed almost silly seeing how he held my heart but he and I both acknowledged he no longer stole my attention.  He seemed self-sufficient so I treated him as such.

We built in opportunities to be present with each other.  We created tiny blocks of time at first and found the more we tried, the more space we carved out for one another.  This is no simple task but it was deliberate work.  Feelings hide in all sorts of corners.  We had a lot to say to each other in order to move forward, but we drew closer together.  We worked hard to accept the changes in us, the mistakes we made, the hurt we caused.  What we found is we are still two people in love.

We will celebrate 20 years together this coming January and we decided this year we would celebrate all year. One day is not nearly enough to let the person who makes your world go round know it.