Dear Erin,
Funny you should bring up Mountains versus Beach because pretty much this is the story of my early years of marriage. Mountains versus Beach. Mountains versus Beach. To put it simply: I am definitely Mountains and my husband is definitely Beach. And yet, somehow, we’ve managed to persist through 18 years of compromised travel.
Ha ha. Not really. We’ve just had to find a way to do both.
I actually remember the first time Justin saw me camping. His Beach side of things had always been taken care of for him with his yearly family reunion. Someone else planned and delivered his childhood memories for him year after year without him having to lift up a single grain of sand. (A fact which earned me, as you’ll remember, several gold stars in return for my habitual attendance.) For me, the family camping trips of yore had fizzled away as my siblings (all quite a bit older than me) moved on to bigger and better vacations (i.e. vacations with beds, and bathrooms, and someone who did all the cooking for you).
All this to say, it was a few years into our marriage before Justin and I went camping with our children. Our church community had planned a campout and off we went with three small children trailing behind us. It was one night in the not-so-wilds, and since we were in Iowa, it wasn’t that warm. We weren’t even technically in the Mountains. BUT STILL. Anyhow, as we all nuzzled into our sleeping bags that night I had a glow about me that did not at all match the temperature, the lack of adequate food, or the impending crying heading my way. And at that moment, Justin looked at me and said: “Oh! This is your Beach.”
And we’ve tried to camp every summer since.
In fact, we camped last weekend, a trip I’m still recovering from today (laundry, laundry, and more laundry) which accounts for this late-night letter (or not, since I’ve pretty much written all my letters late at night for the last several turns, each time claiming that next time I will have my ACT—other words perhaps applicable—together.)
Still, it was a good campout. We’ve graduated to an add-on cabin (with bathroom and bed) which I actually enjoy, while still declaring that next year we will go BACKPACKING. (I say that every year and maybe one year it will stick.) This year’s cabin and tent in the woods came completely devoid of any cell service. We were so cut off from reality, that I didn’t ever receive all the texts sent my way, and am still mildly nervous that I’ve missed something important. (I’m sure the offer for a three-book-deal was texted. Absolutely sure. Wink, wink.)
But who needs cell service or three-book-deal-texts when your teenage daughters insist on acting out the trailer for Disney’s ZOMBIES in Italian? (They were very insistent it was in Italian.) Who needs cell service when your children (all six of them) decide to sing different songs in the car, at the top of their lungs, while you drive to yet another lake? Who needs cell service when you lean back in your slightly damp camp-chair (so we should have put the chairs away for the storm) and see not one, but TWO shooting stars in the now brilliantly clear sky? Who needs cell service when your husband comes back two hours late from his morning run into the nowheres of the Sawtooths? (Me on that one. Definitely me, but I guess he did eventually come back…)
And I suppose this is the point where I tie this all back down to writing and such. But I have to admit the writing connection is failing me at the moment, except to say that the feeling I get inside about camping, the glowy ache that insists I do something that takes WAY too much work year after year, I think it’s the same way I feel about writing. Boy it’s a haul. It’s a haul and you’re really just living in the wilderness, almost like a joke, until you run out of food and have to head back to the land of grocery stores and toilet paper. But those stars are pretty stellar (ha ha) and you can really hear life out there in a way that you can’t with a solid roof over your head.
Overall, despite the lateness of this letter, and the reality of real life speeding at me this week, it was a good last hurrah of the summer. And I’m still a Mountains girl. And I think my husband is still a Beach guy. But the wonderful part is that my kids are both. Mountains AND Beach. Mountains AND Beach.
To be honest, I’m so glad we could give them TWO difficult traditions to have to keep up throughout their entire lives.
I really feel like we’ve won as parents that way.
Jamie
p.s. This week it was CAPITAL letters. In case you didn’t notice. YOU’RE WELCOME.
I am mountains, my husband is beach. We wound up in a mountain town with a beach at the lake. How lucky is that?
You rock the all caps the way you do everything else, my friend. What a letter! And those photos? Breaking my heart like a cookie.