With the camper securely hitched to our GMC Sierra EV, we pull onto the narrow street in front of our house, then onto the wide boulevard that connects our neighborhood to others, and then into the dense traffic that crawls north along the interstate. My husband’s favorite band, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, plays on the stereo. I don’t particularly care for “King Giz,” but the driver chooses the music, as per family road trip law. In the back seat, our teenage children exploit a loophole through their headphones. The dog sits on the bench between them, her long shepherd tongue dripping out the side of her mouth. From the front passenger seat, I watch out the window as we pass strip malls, parking lots, railroad tracks, power lines, and abandoned stacks of shipping containers. As King Giz’s most recent album comes to an end, the paved landscape beside the highway begins to disperse, making room for trees to grow between built things. Finally, it starts to feel like we’ve left behind the city and all its demands on our attention.
My husband and I have lived in Houston for almost 20 years. For about as long, we’ve been escaping to the Piney Woods region of East Texas for a long weekend of camping, always around the time the first real cold front blows in. This tradition began before our children were born, when my husband was still my boyfriend and we had just moved here from Missouri so I could attend graduate school. As a family, we’ve traveled to tiny slivers of land in the greater region of the Piney Woods—state parks, national forests, preserves. Now, our youngest child has started his first year of high school and the oldest has just finished their first semester of college. I suspect we’re nearing the end of the season of our lives where we’ll get this much of the kids’ time and attention, but today both are sitting right behind me in the truck. My oldest is drawing on their tablet. I reach my hand behind me to give their leg a little squeeze. They touch my arm, squeezing me back.
Over the years, camping has been the way we’ve gained a deeper understanding of the place we live in and of ourselves and one another. When we leave behind all the busyness and distractions of our lives in the city—our work and school obligations, our technologies, our extracurricular activities and errands—all pretense falls away. We become our true selves.
We turn from Interstate 69 onto a two-lane highway. Houses are set back from the road, under the trees, where people can see who is coming but not be seen. We pass an abandoned general store and washateria, then a historical marker for the ghost town of Swartwout, which once flourished around a ferry crossing over the Trinity River. As we turn again to approach Lake Livingston State Park, the landscape becomes more manicured and intentional. Pine trees grow in wide rows with a grassy understory—evidence of a healthy forest maintained with prescribed burns. We roll down the windows, and the dog sticks her head out, closes her eyes, and lets the wind blow her ears back. We stop at the ranger station, where we receive our site assignment and a park map, and then we pay for the firewood we load into the back of the truck. Once inside the park, we drive slowly. Children pass us going the other direction on bikes, electric scooters, and in the beds of trucks.
My husband reverses into our campsite. We all tumble out of the cabin and begin to set up camp. We unhook the trailer from the hitch, pull out the chucks to immobilize the wheels, and open the door to the galley kitchen in the back. After decades of camping in tents, we bought this camper—a tiny box-drop camper that sleeps two in the main compartment—one year into the pandemic. The kids sleep “upstairs” in a rooftop tent: “the penthouse,” we call it. We brought this rig to East Texas for its inaugural trip in fall 2021, then drove it to the Smoky Mountains, to Yellowstone, to the Redwood forests and Joshua Tree. Two years ago, we took it to Big Bend, ending that trip feeling closer than ever as a family. But since then, our lives in the city have accelerated. We haven’t been camping since.
It takes a moment to remember our tasks and in what order to do them. Who unhooks and levels the trailer? Who opens and secures the awning? But soon we find the familiar rhythm. I set up the camp kitchen and make up the bed in the camper; the children open the rooftop tent while my husband tosses the kids’ bags up to them; then my husband unfolds the chairs by the firepit. The place begins to feel familiar: the brown of the oak leaves crunching on the forest floor, the bronze of the feathery sprays in the cypress trees, the pine needles on the high branches a bright shimmering green. The symphony of woodpeckers, cardinals, blue jays. The smell of fall—of cell walls breaking, of return.
Once everything is set up in its proper place, my husband lights a fire. The children swing together in a hammock they’ve hung between two trees. The dog sniffs along the perimeter of camp, one end of a long cable clipped to her collar, the other end attached to the picnic table. I make dinner in the camp kitchen, then we play a game of UNO in which the children and I gang up on their father. Soon, he is holding half the deck and performing his frustration for comedic effect. I laugh so hard it makes my belly hurt. Young children from other campsites play Frisbee barefoot in the road. A woodpecker taps the tree above our heads as the sunset turns the sky a dozen shades of pink, which reflect on the surface of the lake through the trees.
As night falls, another part of the woods awakes: Cicadas whir in unison, wind rustles the leaves, an Eastern screech owl trills to its mate. We gather closer around the fire and our campsite fills with laughter and jokes, then with stories about when the children were young or about when their father and I were young. Walls I didn’t know I had erected come tumbling down. I let go of the professor, the writer, the person with a demanding job. The distance between myself and my children closes. We are all right here, around this fire, together.
What does the night reveal that isn’t visible in the light of day? As a child on my parents’ farm in Missouri, I was rarely outside after dark—only those few times when I realized, after dinner, that I had forgotten my chores. Those nights, I would pull on a pair of boots from the garage and drag myself to the dimly lit barn, where I fed and watered the dogs and put out hay for the horses. Other nights, I took the flashlight on the trail down the hill to where we kept the rabbits in cages at the edge of the woods. My hair stood on end as I filled their tiny water bottles and food bowls. I was afraid of the woods at night like I never was during the day. In the daytime, the woods meant adventure and possibility, splashing through the creek or digging in the soft, cool mud at the base of a tree. At night, the woods transformed into a place I didn’t know and couldn’t recognize, a potential danger I couldn’t see.
As I got older, though, my relationship to the woods changed. My parents sold our farm and moved us to a house in town. As a “city” teenager in rural northern Missouri, I drove my parents’ car to the woods at night to break the rules or to hide from them, to make out with boys, to smoke or to swim. I moved away from that town to go to college, then moved away from that state when I came to Houston for graduate school with the man who would become my husband. We lived in an apartment near I-69 and could walk to the grocery store or the coffee shop or the museum. We could also drive to the park and watch trash float down a slow river the color of wet clay. After a year, I wanted to escape.
During our first fall in Houston, a friend who had grown up there brought a group of us to a campground in Sam Houston National Forest, about an hour from where we lived near downtown. This was my inaugural trip to the Piney Woods region. That first night, after the sun set and the cicadas started whirring, all the pressure that had been building inside me for months began to release. I convinced my friends to wade with me into the shallow lake, and we floated in the cool water on our backs, the stars above us visible in a way they weren’t in the city—like parts of myself became visible in a way they weren’t in Houston. This is why I’ve been coming here all this years: As the woods grow quieter and the dark gets closer, I know myself with a clarity I don’t encounter anywhere else.
The sky has begun to lighten when I realize the dog is standing above me in the bed, watching me with her tongue out, eyebrows raised, expectant. I slide into my overalls and open the door to the chilly fog, then slip into my sandals and clip the dog to her long cable. She jogs over to the brushy edge of the campsite, pees, and begins her exploration of all the novel smells available to her in the woods. I walk away from the campsite and toward the bathroom down the road. It’s well supplied with toilet paper and is clean enough. I wash my hands at the sink and look in the mirror. I almost don’t recognize the woman looking back. When did I get so old?
Back at the campsite, my husband has another fire burning. The dog wants me to rub her ears and scratch the long line of her chin. I oblige, then fill her water bowl, her food. I smash the pill she takes for her arthritic hips into a piece of American cheese. She hops a little to gobble it out of my hand—such are the shared pleasures of middle age. I put the kettle on to boil for coffee and carry two cups of it over to where my husband sits beside the fire. He is the quieter, more introspective version of himself this morning, whittling a stick with his pocketknife. I know after all these years that this means he is reflecting on the person he wants to be. I rub his back, kiss his cheek.
Above us, the sky is overcast. A flock of birds moves across the forest from tree to tree in a strange, leap-frog way I haven’t observed before. I watch as they arrive and leap and leap and then are gone. Thoughts arrive and disappear in exactly this way. There are emails I forgot to send, a report I need to write, a lesson I need to plan for class next week. All of it can wait.
For now, I put myself to work making breakfast tacos over the griddle in the camp kitchen. The kids sleep and don’t respond any of the times I call up to them. Finally, I climb the ladder and stick my head into the penthouse through the tent flap. I see only a pile of blankets in the general shape of two nearly adult humans. I feel around the nest of covers for a solid mass of limb. I find a leg and tickle the socked foot at its end. They laugh so quickly and clearly that I know they’ve been awake.
Once everyone is fed and dressed, we decide to go for a hike, and a new set of preparations begins. We pack water, snacks, the dog’s meds and leash. We find an entrance to the trail a few campsites down from ours, but after only a few steps, we’re already taking detours. My son wants to see the edge of Lake Livingston—the reservoir created in the 1960s in an effort to create more surface water for the growing city of Houston. He is fresh off a growth spurt and almost as tall as his father. Now he is climbing down the steep bank into deep mud. The dog wants to follow him and explore. It is so easy for her to become a puppy again: just a few smells, sounds, a person to chase, even a little wind in the trees.
With some effort, I pull my family back on task. Once again, we are moving through the woods on a trail covered in pine mulch and oak leaves. A spiderweb stretches in the wide expanse between two trees, a spinybacked orbweaver crouching in the center, her back an electric yellow. We follow the trail behind sleepy campsites where dogs bark frantically, past the camp store where groggy parents pay for ice. We follow the trail for miles—slight twists and turns through the open woods, where at this time of year the light comes through the trees almost horizontally. We find a small pond where turtles compete for space on a downed log. We find a pair of benches—there is plenty of room, but the children compete for space anyway, as is their way—and pass around a water bottle, granola bars. My son offers us a half-empty bag of Corn Nuts. It is warm but not hot. My oldest sighs and says this is a perfect day.
On our way back to camp, we find an enormous tree partially fallen across the trail, barely balancing its full weight in the crook of a neighbor tree’s slender branch. Its trunk has been almost entirely eaten away. The trail here isn’t clearly marked, and this isn’t quite the one we intended to follow, but we have a general sense of where we are and are in no rush. We pass the camp store again, pass the lake. Now families are fishing off the pier. Farther on, a group of children wades in at the water’s edge, hand in hand. They shriek at how cold it is, wading deeper, pants rolled up to their knees.
Back at the campsite, we light another fire. My son sways in the hammock and listens to quiet music, playing it softly enough that we can still hear the sounds of the woods. My oldest child sits in a camp chair beside me at the fire, drawing on a sketchpad. A bee lands on their finger, and we both watch as it crawls from their finger to their hand, from their hand to their arm, spreading its wings in the warm light of the afternoon sun. My child does not panic; they know they have nothing to fear.
When the sun approaches the horizon, we watch birds and bats swoop for insects above our heads. I want to see the sunset tonight, and my oldest offers to come along. We enter the trail a couple of campsites away and take a few more steps to climb down the lake’s steep bank. We see the glowing red orb on the horizon reflected in the still water of the lake. We are reflected, too.
As darkness falls again, we sit around the fire, watching the flames. Children from other campsites dance barefoot in the street, spinning glow sticks on strings. We eat dinner and talk about the future, about goals we each have for the year ahead. My son wants to improve his basketball shot, my oldest is looking forward to taking animation classes at school, and my husband wants to spend less time on work, more time together. I want to find another time to do exactly this.
The dog grows restless, so I offer to take her for a walk. I grab a flashlight and leave the campground to saunter down the empty park road. In the beam of the flashlight, beads of dew glisten on the grass like diamonds. I shine it into the woods, looking for the green glow of eyes: coyotes, bobcats, feral pigs. I turn to look behind me, but nothing is there. Or everything is there that I would find during the day: fallen leaves, grass, the trail, spiderwebs. Also: my own fear, which I hide from myself in the daytime with tasks I give myself to do. I’m afraid of losing my children, of change.
At the end of the road, we turn back onto the campground loop, passing one campsite then another, each held so closely by the darkness that others can’t see in. As we approach the bathroom, I see my son standing there, waiting for his sibling to come out. He hugs me in recognition that comfort is something I need.
When we get back to the campsite, the children decide to turn in. They each climb the ladder into the penthouse. My husband and I stay by the fire. From here we can hear them talking, giggling, play fighting over what is a fair share of blankets and room. My husband puts another log on. Might as well put on two.