It was dark and windy when we pulled our car into the last available campsite we could find. We were up on a high desert plateau in Moab on the first weekend of summer vacation, along with everyone else in the Western Hemisphere.
Our trip was fairly spontaneous, and I was concerned about where we would sleep. We had a reservation for a place to stay when we arrived, but after that, our destination was unknown.
And I don’t really like the unknown.
Perhaps I don’t handle the unknown as well as I think I should. Perhaps I am more of a creature of habit than I ever realized. Nothing brings that fact into focus more than the beginning of summer.
As a kid, I loved summer. I took long road trips with my family. I played outside. I rode my bike all over the neighborhood. I got lost in the nearby woods. I created stories in my head and flag routines on the driveway. I watched TV. I filled out workbooks for the next school year.
My mom knew the benefit of keeping a routine even in the summer, so she wrote a schedule for me. I had increments of playing with Play-Doh, reading, workbooks, free time, and there was always something to do.
I have such good memories of summer, I am surprised every year when, inevitably, in the first few days after school ends and summer recess begins, my children go through a transition process. It is not fun. They wrestle with each other as they try to reconcile their incredible expectations and excitement for summer break with the onslaught of time. They relearn how to be bored. They must remember how to entertain themselves, and it frustrates them.
They resist summer routines, but really, I think the loss of routine the day school ends is part of what makes them feel so untethered and vulnerable. They are glad school is over, but it takes time to adapt to a new rhythm. And they are anxious to know what happens now.
But some things are unknown.
I like to take my family camping as soon as school is over to jumpstart the growth of their summer skin, as they shed the vestiges of all they carried with them during the year. We don’t have electronics, we don’t have places we need to be.
We have water and food and nature.
And usually, we have a place to sleep. But this time, we had the unknown, and my summer skin needed to grow. It is a daring thing to go to Moab with three children and expect to find a campsite. My strategy was to find a site and stake a claim on the first night, then go sleep in a yurt and come back to the site for the second night, for which we had no reservations.
But after our good fortune of finding the only empty site in a camp of 55 spots, my husband and I got out of the car to retrieve our tent and I suddenly realized, I had forgotten it at home.
We had nothing to save the spot, so we left and went to the yurt, and talked about what we should do next. We entered into the unknown.
My kids didn’t like this uncertainty, but they went along with our plans to look for another site the next day, where we would put down a tarp and our sleeping pads and sleep under the stars. Luckily, the weather was clear and warm and there were no mosquitoes. We looked for a new site for hours. We checked 12 different campgrounds for an open site the next day, and every single one was taken.
So we decided to go off the grid. It turned out to be one of my favorite camping experiences yet. We built a fire, we looked at the Big Dipper, talked about the Milky Way, and we even woke up at 3 a.m. to sand blowing on our faces from a brief wind. After it was over, my children said, “Mom, you should forget the tent more often!”
The unknown can be scary, and unsettling, and it can be a hard transition to make. But sometimes, it can be better than anything.