How I Spent My Summer Vacation

In the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

Albert Camus

Like many of you I wrote that essay every year after returning to school in September: How I Spent My Summer Vacation. It was an easy task for me because it was always the same. Of course I spent my summer vacation camping.

Typically my family would take a week in June, another one in July, and the final camping trip in late August coincided with Labor Day weekend so that we could extract one more day from our summer in the woods. I would therefore return to school just a day or two after coming home from some wonderful place, usually Spirit Lake at the base of Mt. St. Helens.

There was always an uncomfortable disconnect for me with this abrupt transition from a campsite on a mountain lake to sitting in a classroom. Often the weather was still warm, but I had my back-to-school clothes on nonetheless, usually consisting of a wool sweater and skirt.

Thus summer ended abruptly for me and always too soon. As I got older and started backpacking the transition was even more painful, though it no longer meant returning to school. It was not unusual for the first snow in the mountains near my home to fall by mid-September. The trails, it seemed, had been blanketed and put away until the following summer, at least in the beautiful high country. For someone who loved to hike and backpack more than anything else, this was hard to take. It meant that I spent the rest of the year and well into the following spring waiting for the trails to be clear of snow, flowers to bloom, the satisfying feeling of a pack on my back, waiting for the thing I loved most.

As always the trail has been my teacher. Eventually I figured out that I did not want to spend ten months out of each year feeling unhappy under the gray skies of western Washington. I took up cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, other ways of getting out into the wild world during the winter months, but the most important lesson for me has been to create that space in my own home, in this daily life with all of its mundane responsibilities.

Over the years I have made a number of changes that have been aimed at creating that eternal summer in my heart. I moved to Wyoming, where there are three hundred days a year of sunny skies. I have consistently chosen to live in rural locations, where I am surrounded by the natural world so that I do not have to drive to the center of town and walk in the park in order to find wildness.

But the most important thing I have done is to take in beauty wherever I am and in whatever I am doing, whether I am hiking in the mountains, walking on the Rail Trail, or sitting on my back porch listening to the call of the loons coming up from the lake.

For that matter, I may be sitting in my living room listening to a beautiful piece of music, admiring the Navajo rug that hangs on the wall that tells the story of the seasons.

This is where the trail takes me. . .to the summer time and every season that follows, to a mountain pass, a high peak, a long slot canyon, a riverbank where I sit and watch water ouzels do their dance, or to a comfortable rocking chair, savoring the beauty all around me. This is how I spend my summer vacation. . .and the rest of my life.