The girls camping at Samuel P. Taylor State Park
The phone rang. “Hey Pop, it’s Miko. Corey and I are heading to the Catskills to go camping this weekend.” A week later Miya called, announcing that she was driving to the mountains east of Seattle to camp for Jose’s July birthday.
Samuel P. Taylor State Park is where the girls’ love affair with camping began. Each spring and summer we’d throw the girls in the car along with camping gear and head for the beautiful redwood park in Marin County. It was just an hour's drive from our East Bay home. Our first choice of campsites was a spot next to Papermill Creek, winding its way through Samuel P. Taylor.
After the girls helped set up the family tent, they waded knee deep into the stream. Sticks in hand and Jamie Lynn in tow, the girls spent hours exploring the creek’s pools and eddies.
In the afternoon, they took short hikes on a trail dotted with colorful native flowers: buttercups, milkmaids, and Indian paintbrush. Here a fallen redwood, worn smooth became a slide. There, the trunk of a giant redwood carved out by lightening became a perfect spot for hide and seek. And if little ones became bored with the park we could drive to the beach or over White’s Hill to Fairfax for ice cream or a movie.
In the evening, we cooked hotdogs and star soup. With great fanfare the girls sharpened sticks to roast marshmallows, which were sandwiched between graham crackers and melting chocolate, the perfect camping desert. There were S’mores, stars and stories around the campfire, until tired little ones crawled into warm sleeping bags. I burned the camping lantern’s midnight oil with my book, guarding our campsite by throwing shoes at marauding raccoons.
Those early camping trips to Samuel P. Taylor spurred a love of nature among the girls. They also built self-confidence and physical strength. On one camping trip in northern California, Jamie Lynn took her first swim in the Eel River. Standing on her tiptoes, with head barely above the waterline, she shouted, “Look everyone, I am swimming in the Evil River.”
As shorter legs became longer, I took each of the girls on their first backpacking trips to nearby Point Reyes National Seashore. Miko, on her first night at Glen Camp, felt panic when she awoke to a tent surrounded by baby quail, Point Reyes’ deadliest animal.
On our early backpacking adventures I carried the heavy gear. However, when Nicole and Miko reached high school I loaded them up, but they were still leading the march up the steep trail to Mt. Wittenberg. On Jamie’s first trip, Miya and Miko serenaded their little sister with a medley of Disney songs to make the long trek from Coast Camp to Sky Camp seem a little shorter and her pack a little lighter.
One evening at Wildcat Beach the girls wanted to know if the campground was named for wild cats that roamed the area. To stem the panic I said no. I was proven a liar the next morning when a bobcat darted across our hiking path. So much for trusting dad.
Your mom did not grow up a camper, although she did receive our camping award for a valiant stay at a northern California campground. She was also somewhat skeptical of the supervision that I provided on several trips. For example, she did not share my belief that it was OK for Jamie to eat dirt, as the other girls had done as babies on their first camping trips. It also leaked out that on one occasion I lost the girls at Samuel P. Taylor, when a confident Nicole led her sisters on an exploration a little too far outside the boundaries of the park. And it was true that Jamie had fallen off a log into the stream, but attentive sisters immediately hauled her up from the depths. No harm done.
Despite my missteps, I think that those early experiences in the wild did all the girls good. The shady redwood canopy of Samuel P. Taylor State Park, provided them with a taste of freedom that I experienced growing up among trees and creeks of Mill Valley and Mount Tam.
Camping trips were a time for little ones to explore, to stretch their legs, and live a few days in nature without the distraction of TV and telephone. We all had a chance to live without the schedule of school. I hope that the girls’ children, my grandchildren, will have a chance to walk among the redwoods, explore the creeks, and eat S’mores under a sky full of stars.