Windshield picture.
June walking on ice.
Sign in woods.
Catherine.
Keeping score when playing Carcassonne is always a little convoluted, but we keep coming back to it.
Ibex Ramble wool pants have a way of making every place you wear them feel like home.
Birk reading.
Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North is beautiful and sad.
A little before our family invented “Fire Jenga.”
Wood stove.
Make the most of the snow you have.
Our first hint that parenthood changes your relationship to the outdoors came before we even had kids, at the beginning of a trip to hike the rocky eastern coast of Lake Superior. After the local maniac whose 4×4 dropped us off there rambled back into the woods, we met a young family setting up for an overnight car-camping adventure there in Gargantua Bay. The parents couldn’t have been much older than we were, but their eyes contained a wisdom, or perhaps just stress, that made them seem like well-outfitted sages. “You remind us of how we used to be,” the mom said.
I think we were flattered or something, but, watching them drag a car’s worth of gear just so that they could make it through an evening in a tent with their two kids, it was probably gratitude we felt, gratitude that we were just us, worried about little more than whether we had timed it right to hit prime blueberry season once we got onto the trail.
Pretty deep into parenthood ourselves now, we have done what we can to raise kids who want to spend time in wild places. It’s not too hard, really; the places themselves do most of the work, but in our part of the midwest, these spots can be tough to find. The only easy camping available here is in state parks, which is wild only in the sense that it is debauched, full of noisy drunks and unattended children learning the wrong kinds of lessons.
So as parents here you have to be willing to drive. And it also helps to go outdoors when it is cold, when the high-density campsites are largely empty. Even better, you can do both. One of our favorites is this place, an off-the-grid CCC cabin at the end of a 2-track in northern Michigan. The nearest neighbors are at least five miles away and are there for the same reason you are, to be alone in the winter quiet.
When there is snow, the only access is via a two-mile ski, pulling a cast-iron pan, board games, and a Bialetti behind you on a sled. This year, the predicted blizzard turned into rain, so we drove and did the thing where you pack everything you can so that the kids don’t get bored, just like the family we met years ago.
And once again, this place worked. Adventure books good for reading aloud, like Swallows & Amazons, go a long way, as does the game Carcassonne. As a parent, though, you have pretty much done your work just by getting your kids into the sparse second-growth forests of Michigan. There are not many places like this in the midwest, but they’re worth finding.