Summer at its best is a welcome change of pace. For students, parents, and teachers, it’s the long break from the 40-week grind. For year-rounders, summer can still bring a shift in gears. Lots of memory-making, hopefully good memories.
Now that I am active-retired status, I mark the seasonal rhythms differently. Here in Oregon with endless sun for 3 months – seriously – summer is for out-of-doors. Hiking, gardening, exploring, or just relaxing and staring into the wild blue yonder.
And during some of that into-the-blue mind-wandering, old memories slide back in, reminders of summers past.
1960s: California dreaming
I was 12 years old, the perfect age to see the world. From the East Coast, I’d never been west of Oklahoma City. My parents and grandparents were all ministers. A national biennial church General Council was slated for Long Beach, California. This was 1967 – the era of California dreaming!
Grandpa Kenyon bought a 13-foot hardshell travel trailer and hitched it to his Buick Skylark, the kind with the third-row seat facing forward and skylight windows to look out at the Rockies high above us. All 8 of us – grandparents, parents, my 3 siblings, and I – crowded into the rig and headed west by day. By night, parents, siblings, and I crowded into the trailer, while grandparents slept in the car, seats flattened and a mattress laid out.
We saw it all, or as much as one can see in 5 weeks – relatives in the Ozarks, Colorado, Yellowstone, Mount Ranier, long-lost kinfolk in Washington State, Crater Lake, San Francisco, Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks, Disneyland, and Painted Desert. For lack of time, we missed the Grand Canyon. But otherwise, we saw America the Beautiful from coast to coast, and I grew a hunger to explore more regions beyond.
Nothing like eating pancakes your mom and grandpa are cooking as you sit by Old Faithful. Nothing like grandma sharing the next morning how she saw your mom stick her hand out the trailer door to shake off a washrag while a bear was prowling the campsite.
Nothing like your 7-year-old sister hopping off a San Francisco streetcar on her own and grandma jumping off to stay with her. Somehow, we all reunited later – without cell phones.
Nothing like scaling a high hill at a rest stop somewhere in the high plains and looking down at your ant-sized family far below. Nothing like falling in love with the Pacific Northwest, never dreaming you’d settle there 40 years later.
1970s: Buggs Island Lake
It was our favorite campground growing up, this reservoir bordering Virginia and North Carolina. No electricity, no running water, just our family’s pop-up tent trailer, a pup tent, a hammock, and a couple of canoes. We’d camp there the better of two weeks, dressing up only for church Sunday morning somewhere in town. Eating at the picnic table next to the camp stove and wash basin, roasting marshmallows over the fire, swimming in the lake right at your campsite.
One of the oddest memories comes to mind of the last time I was there. Having just finished my first year of college, I joined my family for the annual summer vacation. Only this time, we had a new piece of equipment with us. Not sure how dad rigged it up, but he’d brought a portable TV so we could watch the unfolding national drama.
This was 1974 and the Nixon administration was embroiled in the Watergate scandal. There in our rustic campsite close by the water’s edge, we took a break from our summer nature fest to watch a US president resign for the first (and so far only) time in history. In the middle of nowhere, we were but 200 miles away from President Nixon as he boarded a helicopter on the White House lawn to begin his sad journey home to California.
1980s: Tuolumne Meadows
In the early 80s, that dream to explore the regions beyond took on wheels. I ran a ministry called Campus 80s, drove 50,000 miles a year through all but one of the Lower 48 states, and lived out of my car, availing myself of a hundred hosts I could count on for hospitality.
Over some of those many miles, I had a traveling partner. Ruel was my co-pilot on this trip through the Southwest, camping our way to California. I finally saw the Grand Canyon. From there we headed through Death Valley and up the backside of the Sierra Nevadas to a campground in Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows high country.
Though it was already the end of July, piles of snow lingered in the campground, some 8,600 feet above sea level. The days were brilliant and warm, the nights frigid. We feasted on freshly caught rainbow trout at a tented restaurant just down the road.
We were heading to Fresno. Campus 80s was about launching new Chi Alpha campus ministries, and Dave Gable, former national Chi Alpha director, was pastoring in Fresno. A young couple, Steve and Juanita Hawthorne, had been sent out by Brady Bobbink’s ministry in Bellingham, Washington, to pioneer a work at Fresno State.
I’d contacted the Hawthornes before I set out on this journey – no cell phones or internet in those days – and told them we’d be spending a couple days in Yosemite before visiting them. Unbeknownst to us, they decided to visit Yosemite with the outside chance of finding us.
Yosemite is a huge park, the popular valley floor a distance from the high country and much lower at 4,000 feet, with millions of visitors annually. The chances of us connecting were slim. But there they were, right in front of us in the valley our second day.
I lost my head and invited them to spend the night with us at our campsite. They’d brought nothing to camp with, so Ruel and I loaned them our nice warm tent and sleeping bags. He and I slept in my Ford Tempo. We barely slept; we were so cold. But the memories that linger are warm.
1990s: Urban camp
We called Xi’an, China, home for more than a decade. Kim organized a summer stay-at-home camp for our four kids for a week, with lots of fun activities in the air-conditioned indoors and physical games outdoors on the dead-end street in front of our house. I’m guessing Robert, our oldest, was 10 or 11, Hannah, the youngest, was about 4.
Kim packed the schedule with loads of fun. Games, lessons, music, stories, crafts, and more. The AC held up, so the indoor program went smoothly.
Xi’an is one of those places with long cold winters and long hot summers. Most midsummer days the heat exceeds 40o centigrade (104o Fahrenheit), the temperature on the cement street even hotter.
That first day Kim rallied us all outside for a ball game on the street. We immediately wilted and, within minutes, fled indoors and never came out again. Kim made sure we all still got physical exercise, albeit in the comfort of the AC.
2000s: Thailand resort without the crowds
Summers in China were filled with short-term teams coming to help us with projects in rural communities. We’d meet these teams in Thailand, give them an orientation and time to get over jetlag, then send them into China to meet our coworkers for their assignments.
On these trips, our family took advantage of the English-language wing of the world-acclaimed Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok. You could get all your medical appointments for a year completed in a couple of days – and cheaply. Then before returning home, we’d travel to some local resort for a family holiday.
Though Thailand sounds like an expensive destination for people living in North America, it was a short, inexpensive jaunt for us. One summer, friends told us about a gigantic hi-rise resort with inter-linking pools a distance outside Bangkok on the Gulf of Thailand. In winter, droves of Russians and Chinese came to holiday. That summer, we were the only guests in the whole complex. We had all those huge pools to ourselves!
2010s: South Beach
I grew up a half-hour from the Jersey shore. Kim is a West Coaster. We both love the ocean.
For years we traversed the nation and the world. Since moving to Oregon, we’ve stayed close to home.
Now the big annual excursion is a week at the Oregon coast, with whatever of our kids are available. A number of years, we went to South Beach near Newport, renting a house high on a cliff, the waves crashing below. The beach was a short jaunt down the cliff where we could explore the coastline. Some of those years, we had grandparents with us, first Kim’s folks and then my dad.
The ocean along Oregon is for watching or sticking your toes in. Only wet-suited surfers or kids too young to know better venture in. But what scenery! The Pacific extends far beyond the horizon. Waves crash the shore night and day, the tides coming and going. We take hikes, play board games, read, eat (lots), and hang out as family.
Those years with grandparents were never-to-be-repeated special. 2018 was difficult. Kim’s mom, who’d been with us to this beach site before, was in rehab, her memory and body failing. With her in good care and only a phone call away, we kept our beach date. My father-in-law came with us, but his mind was on her. Though he could no longer make it down the cliff, he loved to sit and watch the fishing fleets and whales pass far out to sea.
Little did we know Kim’s mom would leave us in a matter of days. Even less could we have foreseen that her dad would be gone another 9 days after. What my memory clings to is a photo of him peering through a telescope out the window of the house high up on the cliff, watching the boats and whales go by.
2020s: Sacramento Wedding
By 2023, Child #3 had fallen in love with this California guy. Having grown up a Third Culture Kid, Hope wasn’t yet rooted in Oregon, so they got married in Sacramento. Michael had lots of family in the area, with others flying in from Idaho and Texas. Family from our side came from Florida, the Northeast, the Pacific Northwest, and South America.
Our side of the family booked rooms in a hotel near the airport and made the breakfast area our base camp. We talked and laughed and reconnected. Our other base was the wedding site, Michael’s home church. Here, too, we talked and laughed and connected with his extended family and friends.
On the wedding day, Project Church in the historic center of Sacramento was packed with friends, 3 generations of family on our side and 5 on Michael’s. My dad and Michael’s Salvadoran great-grandmother bantered, albeit with little language in common. Chrissy Cole, a minister and wife of the church’s lead pastor, performed the wedding. And then we partied.
In between the ceremony and the reception, family and wedding party gathered outside for photos. In the 107-degree heat, we corralled the horde of extended families together for a once-in-a-lifetime shot. The last of my dad’s many trips, he died 16 weeks later.
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Wherever you go (or not) or how many photos you take (or not), summer is for connecting and making memories. Some memories you’d rather forget – I’ve focused on good ones.
What makes memories good is not where as much as with whom, not so much how big the event is as much as the little experiences that make up that event. We’re not promised tomorrow or even the ability to keep our memories, but while today lasts, I’ll cherish each one.
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Photo montage: Dad Robbins at the Oregon coast, Gonzalez-Kenyon wedding extended family, family swimming in the Gulf of Thailand
Going through mom’s photos and found some of mine. Walked down memory lane. Im glad we have them to recall those times with those we loved.
Photos and recall do help each other. Grateful for both, as well as those they remind us of.