What I did on my summer vacation

Fifty years later

My childhood lasted 18 years, same as everyone else’s. I had friends, went to school, spent some time at my grandparents’ farm during the summers, and went to visit the other set of grandparents in Cleveland for two weeks each year. It was normal and average and nothing really to write about.

But there was this:

For three summers when I was 11, 12, and 13, my parents, who were both public school teachers, packed us four kids in a station wagon pulling a fifteen-foot trailer with a canoe on the roof and took us all over America experiencing things my friends at home in New Jersey only dreamed about.

I felt like one of those “Fresh Air” kids from the sixties—children who lived in New York City but came to the Jersey Shore for the summer to experience suburban life near the beach. My family sponsored a Fresh Air kid one year. Her name was Migdalia. She was Puerto Rican and allergic to every soap except Ivory. That was the year I learned that bars of Ivory soap float in the bathtub and I was excited to have the kind you didn’t have to go hunting for. Six-year-olds are easy to impress.

The three years we traveled “out west” we always started with a few days in Cleveland at my grandparents’ house. We enjoyed the climate-controlled, chlorinated pool, knowing the rest of the summer we would rough it in frigid mountain streams and leech-filled lakes.

From Cleveland we would drive to Elgin, Illinois, where there was some kind of park that had an old fire engine we could play on while Mom made dinner. I don’t remember if we camped there or just stopped to stretch our bodies and eat. 1973 was a long time.

From there we took either the northern route toward Montana, or the southern route toward Arizona, but most of our time was spent in Wyoming and Montana.

My daddy taught me how to fish. He and the boys fly-fished (and my mother, a few times). I wasn’t much interested until he said he would make my brothers catch grasshoppers for me and bait my hook. Then I was all in.

Here I am with my very first trout, caught at Moose Flat. I couldn’t wait to eat it for dinner until Daddy said I’d have to clean it first. Somehow I thought that was going to be on the list of things brothers do, but it didn’t happen that way.

He took me and my fish down to the river (in this case, the Greys River in the Bridger-Teton National Forest, Alpine, Wyoming) and whipped out his pocket knife. I was suddenly wishing I’d stuck to picking wildflowers and reading my baby brother stories. Daddy showed me where to insert the knife and how to make a clean cut, then reach in with my thumb and scoop out all the guts with one swipe. Then he told me to hold the fish underwater and wash out the inside cavity well so it wouldn’t be contaminated.

I kind of remember feeling squeamish about the whole process, but the thing that stands out in my mind is that the water in the Greys River (in July) was so cold it froze the natural oil on my hands. Seriously. When I pulled the fish and my hands out of the water, I could feel my skin crackling when I bent my fingers. A few days later we would actually bathe in that river because adults think some kind of bath is better than none. I would have begged to differ, and probably did. What’s the sense in being clean if you freeze to death?

Moose Flat Campground was one of our favorite places and we went there every year. Back in the early seventies, it wasn’t much of a campground, just a big field with one tiny outhouse and a hand pump for drinkable water. There were no designated places to park your trailer like today. I don’t think there were ever more than two or three other campers there with us, and it was plenty big enough that we never heard from the others. It was where I learned the meaning of “wide open spaces.” You just pulled up along the river wherever you wanted to be and set up camp. You had to look for a homemade fire ring made of rocks that someone else left behind, and you ate on a blanket on the ground since there were no picnic tables. (See first photo.) It was paradise.

Another of our favorite places was the Broken Arrow Ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. We always spent a week there. It was more civilized than Moose Flat with designated spaces and electric hookups and actual hot showers and laundry facilities, but we would park the trailer there and travel around to other rivers nearby to fish and explore.

Yes, that is an old, canvas Army tent my brothers slept in. It was held up with two long poles in front and two short poles in back, and the front flapped down and zipped on the sides, open at the bottom. It was not waterproof, and definitely not animal-proof, a story we’ll get to later.

Broken Arrow Ranch is also where I learned to ride a horse. The first year there I was not quite 11 and pretty small, so Halfpint was my horse for the summer. I never understood why, since Halfpint was almost as wide as he was tall, but he was a placid little guy and good for learning on.

In subsequent years I lived every pre-teen girl’s dream and rode Target, a beautiful Palomino who had a little more giddy-up than Halfpint. By then riding was old hat and my brothers and I could take off at a gallop across a field toward a mountain trail and I kinda-sorta knew what I was doing.

Then there was the day Target figured out he had a greenhorn on his back and decided he’d rather eat clover than go for a trail ride. He buried his face in a thick patch of it and refused to be torn away. I pulled. I kicked. I slapped his shoulder with my hand. I may have even asked nicely for him to please follow the other horses.

Finally, when it appeared my group was leaving without me and Target still would not get on board with my wishes, the trail boss, Guy (a handsome 16-year-old who I might have had a pre-teen crush on) came riding over and jumped off his horse, Quiche. He told me to switch horses and he jumped (literally, from the ground without using a stirrup) on Target. He grabbed the reins in one hand and swung them hard at Target’s rump, ending in a loud “thwack” that got my beloved Palomino’s attention, and Target took off like a shot toward the front of the pack. As much as I loved “my” horse, I was almost as thrilled to be riding Guy’s personal steed. There were a lot of emotions rolling around inside my almost-13-year-old head.

Okay, last story.

One of the places we went—maybe only one year?—was called Upper Slide Lake, also somewhere in Wyoming. The Upper and Lower Slide Lakes were formed by a huge landslide in 1925 and were completely primitive back when we were camping there. I don’t even know how we found them. There was a dirt road cut into the side of a mountain, barely one lane wide, but that’s all. No gravel, no guardrails, no signs, and definitely no place to turn a station wagon and trailer around. Once you got on the “road,” you were committed. Who knew my dad was so daring? There was no outhouse and no drinkable water. I’m not sure what we went there for other than the fishing, or maybe solitude which, depending on where you were sleeping, you either had or didn’t.

In those days, my parents and baby brother slept in the trailer. I slept on a thick foam mat in the back of the station wagon with the back seat folded down. And remember the old Army tent my brothers slept in that was open at the bottom? You can see them in this photo walking a good distance away from the trailer and car to set up camp down by the lake.

After dinner and some exploring, the sun was going down and it was time for bed. Mom and Dad and baby brother went in the camper. I got in the back of the car and spread out my sleeping bag. The two older brothers walked down to their campsite at the lake. But they made the almost-fatal mistake of taking a snack with them. I think it might have been sunflower seeds or something like that.

Sometime in the middle of the night, I was awakened by my two brothers climbing in the back of the car with their sleeping bags. Turns out there were chipmunks in the area, a whole colony of them, who were very interested in a midnight snack and made themselves at home in the tent, down the boys’ sleeping bags, across their heads, inside their shirts and up their pant legs—everywhere a chipmunk could fit—and drove them out of their sleeping quarters and into mine.

There is a legend in the west of a creature called a jackalope, sort of a jackrabbit with antelope horns. But my brothers’ invading critters were much smaller than rabbits, so we called it the attack of the chipalopes. Whether they had horns or not is still in question.

When it was time to leave Upper Slide Lake, we packed up all our gear and headed back out the narrow dirt road we’d come in on. Everything would have been fine except that it had rained the night before, turning the dirt road into thick, sticky mud. The car struggled to pull the trailer through it, and there was some significant sliding going on. At some point the car slid into the side wall of the cut—thank God the road was banked toward the inside wall instead of the outside cliff.

My Dad got out to see how much farther it would be until the situation got better and had no less than four inches of mud stuck to his shoes. Things did not look good. Somehow my older brothers wound up outside the car and my mother didn’t want them getting back in with all that mud. And then she decided she didn’t want to be in the car if it slid off the cliff, so she grabbed my baby brother and she, too, exited the vehicle. That left me in the back of the station wagon when Daddy got back in to try to get us out of there.

I remember vividly sitting in the way-back of the car looking at my mother and brothers and wondering why I had been left to die with my father. But did I open my mouth? Did I ask to get out? In true enneagram nine fashion, no, I did not. At the tender age of 11, I did not want to bother anyone in such a tense situation.

I’m pretty sure this is the definition of an unhealthy nine: one who would literally die before they inconvenience someone.

Obviously we all made it out of there and I am probably the only one in the family who has such a vivid memory of that place, but hello trauma. These memories don’t just go away.

Those summers were a lot to take in—mostly they were the highest of highs with just a few lowest of lows. When we went back to school in September and had to write the annual “what I did on summer vacation” essay, my choices were overwhelming and I never got to write about everything I experienced.

So you, dear reader, get to hear it now. Thanks for being here.