I’ve said this once (wait, I’ve said this like way more than once), but I’ll say it again. Get your kids outside. They are better off for it in so many ways. And you, most likely will be, too.
At the start of our Oregon trip, The Nugget and I did a quick camping overnight on the beach in Northern California. After a 7.5 hr drive, we rambled down a curvy, skinny gravel road in the thick of redwoods opening up onto a wide and untouched stretch of beach. Huge driftwood trees lay bleached and silent on the sand while wind whipped at the water.
I’ve been here before. This beach, yes, but even more so in this inner space. When everything feels tight and cramped and incapable of fitting in the box it ‘should’ go in. When the voices around you are the voices guiding you, telling you where to go and what to do. When your insides feel raw from all the scrambling and scratching and you’re exhausted from chasing down things that don’t exist. Yes, I’ve been here before.
So, it comes as no surprise that the second those trees thinned and the sunlight streamed into our car windows, I rolled them down. Breathed. A big, deep, salty inhale. A long, emptying exhale. Beaches were made for this kind of thing, y’all. For breathing. For being. For scampering and spinning and running and shouting and screaming at and emptying and searching and learning and feeling small and being held and filling you up.
You couldn’t have picked a better beach for this. Or a better place to pitch a tent for a night. My Nugget and I have a rhythm, now, which is no rhythm at all except freedom to be in nature and enjoy each other. We set up camp, munched on ramen, played UNO by lantern light, talked like friends, read stories to the light of our headlamps and slept cuddled next to each other in sleeping bags. We’ve had plenty of camping drama over the years, but this trip held none of it. And we both went to bed with smiles on our faces, knowing that in the morning, we would search for fairies and gnomes in ‘the canyon of magic’.
Fern Canyon is more well known than I would like it to be, but that fact alone doesn’t negate it’s magic. Soaring walls covered in countless types of ferns follow a stream deep into a gash of coastal cliff. This is literally, where fairies live. Lush and wet and green and wild.
This is stream jumping and rock balancing and fallen tree climbing. This is banana slugs and wet shoes and slip sliding over muddy logs. This is hours of play and hours of smiles.
And the beginning to an unwinding of tethers; a loosening of a stifling grip; magic you don’t know you need until it starts to work something out in you.
