We came home from our wonderful camping trip upstate and slammed back to reality. Brand new, tummy-butterfly-filled days of first grade for Stella and a 3 year-old nursery school program for Maeve, plus check-ups at the pediatrician, emails and phone calls with insurance companies and plumbers and potential violin teachers, a shopping expedition with grandma, a marathon playdate for Maeve with the best friend she hadn't seen all summer... oh, and it was my birthday! The word that comes to mind when I think about last week is flurry.
In stark relief to all this frenetic activity was our trip. Our trip was busy too, of course, what with all the setting up shelter and finding kindling and bringing back water in water jugs (though we did have a fire pit and a picnic table, as you can see below... also a port-o-potty. It was a good beginning camping situation with kiddos), but the feeling of it in my memory now is of stillness and quiet. It took us going through a bit of a grouchy detox-from-civilization period, and the girls weren't any better behaved out in the woods than they are in our living room, but we did manage to find some of the peace I was hoping for. Mostly it felt great to be so unencumbered by stuff. We brought crayons and coloring books for the car ride, and books for reading before bedtime, but we brought nothing in the way of toys - and the girls didn't even notice, just entertained themselves as I'd been pretty sure they would. They collected stones and pine cones, made mudpies and fairy houses. When the sun set at night, we enjoyed the fire for a little while and then went to bed. When it rose in the morning, we did too. It was simple. Restorative.
{Stella decided our tent was incomplete without a welcome sign, though I'm not sure who we were welcoming. The mosquitos?}
The absolute highlight of the trip was the hike we did through the gorge at Watkins Glen state park. It's not a hike through the middle of nowhere, by any means - it's actually pretty touristy - but the gorge is so freaking gorgeous that you don't care. Walking through it, you feel like you've tumbled down a rabbit-hole and ended up in some fantasy world populated by goblins and fairy princesses.
The most immediately unbelievable thing about the gorge is the rock facades. They are craggy and flaky and otherworldly. Walking between these dramatic walls of rock, you feel yourself inside the earth, rather than on it, in a very palpable way. There are huge vertical cracks in some places, which are evidence of ancient fault lines rubbing the plates of the earth's crust against each other. One side of the gorge faces north and the other faces south, so that you have two very different microclimates of plant life. The north-facing side is all ferns and shade-loving trees, while the south-facing side boasts berries and wildflowers and trees that need plenty of sun.
The magic of the gorge, though, is not really the rock, but the relationship of the rock to the water.
The sound of water surrounds you: trickling, gushing, thundering... The stairs and bridges that have been built to allow passage into and out of the gorge (in the warm months, at least) are slippery. A veil of mist settles on your skin.
It is like a love song between water and stone, both impacting the other. Each making the other more beautiful. The gorge is a thousands-of-years-old testament to the power of water - this innocent little creek's ability to pierce deep down into the earth over time. 
But the rock answers back, shaping the flow of the creek into something new and beautiful, something that doesn't just flow but falls. The park pamphlets call it "a staircase of waterfalls." 
This conversation finds its perfect peak in one pool, where the water that had once worn away one section of the rock then changed course and started falling against a different side, making two lobes of a heart. The water changed the stone, the stone changed the water. Back and forth. 
The heart-shaped pool is one of the great selling points for the gorge hike, and yet still you are surprised when you come to it. It seems almost showy, the crazy coincidence of events that led to it. And you know, looking at it from the trippy and huge perspective of time you get from being there, that it won't last. Eventually the water will erode the second curve more, so that the shape no longer looks like a heart. Or it will alter its course again and turn the pool into a clover. You are seeing it right now and that is all.
We hiked about two miles in total, Stella walking the whole way (mostly cheerfully), while Maeve, tuckered out after a mile, spent the second half asleep in the sling. But we said hello to lots of families with children along the pathways. 
It was a beautiful day, a special camping trip. Not long enough, but not the only time we will do it, now that we know we can. Now that we know that a real getting away, getting off the grid - even just a taste of it - is something we can hold onto once we're back.
