Sticks and Rocks

I took my four-year-old camping for the first time. Two hours out to the campground, and there was nothing in the car for him — no tablet, no movie playing on a seat back, no books.

He complained a little early on. Then he started asking questions instead, mostly how much longer, on a loop, and then about the music I had on. He watched out the window for a long stretch of it. Somewhere in there he fell asleep for a while. That was the whole drive.

We slept in a two-person tent, which is exactly as much tent as it sounds like. Your gear goes at your feet and the two of you go in the rest of it.

The campground had rocks, and the rocks turned out to be the entire itinerary. He scrambled up them. He found the gaps underneath where a small person can wedge in and disappear, and he went into all of them. There were caves and he went into those too, further back than I would have picked for him. He came away scraped up somewhere in there, the way you do.

At one point he was working his way across the face of a rock, traversing it sideways. He got about halfway and stopped. He said, "I am scared." A moment later he said he was really scared, and he started crying, and he climbed back down.

We stood there and talked about it for a minute.

Then he walked back to where he'd started and went across it again, the whole way this time.

The part I didn't expect was what he did with the rest of his time. We hadn't brought a single toy, so he used what was on the ground. He ran around that campsite for a good hour with sticks and rocks, and the sticks were wands, and then they were guns, and the rocks were whatever the rocks needed to be. Nobody set that up for him. He had nothing in his hands and time to fill, and it filled itself.

He was thrilled about the tent. Getting into it was its own event, the whole business of the sleeping bag and the zipper and lying down in a space that small. In the dark he asked me a bunch of questions about rain, what happens if it rains, whether it would come through, and then he was asleep. We were both up at five-thirty.

He was four years old, two hours from home, sleeping in the dirt, and he was fine. On the drive back I kept waiting for him to say he wanted his own bed. He never said it.

We stopped at a Waffle House on the way home and had some waffles.