His First Trip

Fossils, mushrooms, and a fishing pole — the weekend my son and I became fellow explorers

I'd been promising him a camping trip since he was old enough to ask for one. Not a backyard tent night, not a cabin with a bathroom down the hall — a real trip, with a trailhead and a fire ring and nothing between us and the woods but whatever we carried in. He was seven the summer we finally went, and I don't think either of us slept much the night before, though for very different reasons. He was too excited. I was too busy running through a mental checklist of everything I might have forgotten.

We got to the trail a little after nine in the morning, packs on, and within about four minutes he'd already stopped twice — once for a beetle crossing the path, once for a rock he insisted was "probably a meteor." I let him carry both discoveries in his pocket for exactly as long as his attention span allowed, which turned out to be roughly until the next bend in the trail.

The trail ran along a lake for the first stretch, and that's where he wanted to stop first — not for bugs or rocks, but to actually fish. He'd been asking about it the whole drive up. We found a flat spot on the bank, and I showed him how to cast, badly at first, the line looping back over his own shoulder more than once. He didn't care. He stood there for the better part of an hour, quiet in a way he almost never is, just watching the water and waiting for something to happen. Nothing bit. It didn't matter. He told me later that standing there was his favorite part of the whole morning, and I believed him.

It was an hour or so past the lake, further up the trail, where things got really interesting. We'd stopped to rest near an outcrop of pale gray rock, and he started poking at it with a stick the way kids do when they're bored for exactly four seconds. Then he stopped poking and started staring. "Dad. Dad, look." Pressed into the stone, clear as anything, was the spiral shape of something that had been alive a very long time ago. A fossil, right there at eye level, like the rock had been waiting for someone to notice it.

I've seen my share of fossils in books and in museum cases behind glass, and none of them made an impression on me the way his face did in that moment. He ran his fingers over the ridges of it again and again, like he was checking it was real. "How did it get in there?" "How old is it?" "Is there a whole animal in the rock or just this part?" I didn't have great answers to most of it. I told him what I knew, which wasn't much, and admitted the rest was a mystery to both of us. He seemed almost pleased by that — like it made the rock more interesting, not less, that his dad didn't have it all figured out either.

We must have spent twenty minutes at that one outcrop before he'd let us keep walking, and even then he kept glancing back at it like he was worried it might not be there anymore.

Not long after that, it was mushrooms that caught his eye — a strange, pale shelf of them growing right out of the base of a pine, unlike anything he'd noticed before. He crouched down next to it the same way he had with the fossil, completely absorbed, and before I'd even finished walking over, his hand was already reaching out toward it.

"Hold on, bud — don't touch that one until I take a look first," I said, and he pulled his hand back without any fuss at all, like it hadn't occurred to him that I might say no. We looked at it together instead, turning our heads sideways to see it from different angles, talking about how strange it was that something could just grow straight out of a tree trunk like that, no roots, no stem in the ground. I didn't have a name for it and didn't pretend to. We just admired it for what it was — odd, and a little wonderful, and not ours to mess with.

That's the thing about a seven-year-old on a trail he's never walked before: everything is new, and he doesn't yet have a filter for what's worth stopping for and what isn't. Which means, if you let him set the pace, absolutely everything is worth stopping for. We covered maybe three miles that whole day, a distance that should have taken us an hour and took closer to five, and I wouldn't trade a single minute of the delay.

By the time we reached camp, the light had gone that deep gold color it only gets right before evening, and he was more tired than he'd admit to being. We got the fire going together — he was in charge of finding "the good sticks," a job he took extremely seriously — and sat close to it as the air cooled, eating dinner out of tin plates that felt fancier than they had any right to.

He fell asleep leaning against my arm before I'd even finished telling him about the fossil again, retelling it back to me the way kids do, half question and half performance. I sat there a long while after he'd gone quiet, watching the fire, thinking about how much of that day had nothing to do with anything I'd planned. I hadn't planned on the fossil. I hadn't planned on how long he'd stand at that lake with his line in the water saying nothing at all. I certainly hadn't planned on how much I'd enjoy simply following him around while he decided, moment to moment, what deserved our attention.

I've been on plenty of trips into the woods in my life, some for work, some for myself, some I didn't choose at all. None of them looked quite like that one. It wasn't about covering ground or bringing anything home. It was just two people, walking slowly, noticing things together. I think about that fire a lot — the two of us close to it, tired in the good way, the whole trail behind us still sitting somewhere in his head, waiting to be told back to me all over again in the morning.