The Great Outdoors

As a kid, summer vacations were opportunities to collect the kinds of memories that become anecdotes in a humorous memoir years later. There was the night we slept on a hillside in torrential rain while canoeing in the Boundary Waters. A few days later on that same trip, my brother cut his ankle and had to be paddled out of the wilderness for stitches. Camping in northern Wisconsin one year, my dad let out a “Xena: Warrior Princess” cry in the middle of the night to scare away what my mom insisted was a bear, but turned out to be someone snoring from the site next to us. And who could forget the time we took a houseboat trip on the Canadian border and, like children in a Victorian storybook, my brother and I came down with scarlet fever? In truth, the splendor of the scenery may have been one of the few redeeming qualities of our adventures, but gosh darn it, we sure appreciated it. Now that I’m grown, I’m thankful to report that most of my forays into nature are accompanied by far less drama, but the beauty of the outdoors remains inspiring.