Choosing to camp with children sometimes feels a little like volunteering to lock yourself in a bathroom with three raccoons. Not the charming storybook kind that wash berries in streams and tilt their heads at the moon. I mean the frantic kind that steal your snacks, fight over a flashlight, an d ask where the marshmallows are while standing directly in front of the marshmallows. Still, this is what you do in the summer if you live in postcard country. You sleep outside. You unplug. You reconnect with nature and your family. Or at least I think that’s the idea. By hour 14 at Rock Cliff Campground, after refereeing disputes over camp chairs, locating a missing shoe, and explaining for the sixth time that yes, the bathroom was still exactly where it had been five minutes earlier, I began to suspect reconnecting with nature might actually be easier at a labor camp. But eventually we hiked down from our campsite at Rock Cliff to the edge of the Jordanelle, and the children did what children do best. They noticed things. “Wasn’t the water closer last time?” The walk to the shoreline felt longer this year. More rocks. More mud. More of the reservoir showing itself. The children scrambled over stones that would have been underwater in other summers. They threw sticks into water that seemed farther away than memory said it should be. “Did the lake shrink?” The snow in the mountains melts and fills the reservoirs, I explained. There wasn’t as much snow this year. Maybe next year there will be more. All of which was true. All of which felt incomplete. My 7 year old picked up a piece of driftwood and asked if it had always been this far from the water. My 10 year old had already moved on, hopping from rock to rock and trying to land a stick in the reservoir with every throw. They accepted my explanation immediately, the way children accept most things adults tell them. Then they went back to throwing rocks. I watched them crossing ground that used to belong to the lake. I remembered different shorelines without being able to remember exactly when they had changed. A little farther every year is hard to see while it is happening. A little farther every year eventually becomes where the children play. I stood there for a minute longer than they did. And then we hiked back to camp. Because I think that may be the assignment now. To drag children outside even when they complain. To make them put down their phones and pick up minnows and pine cones and skipping stones. To teach them the names of wildflowers and mountain peaks and constellations. To insist on campfires and cold lakes and mosquito bites and wet shoes. Because we protect what we know. Maybe they will miss what slips out of reach. Maybe that is the best we can give them. Heather Bryant is a Park City resident, writer, longtime educator and mother of three. She writes educational curriculum and essays on parenting, conservation and the importance of place. The post We protect what we know appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less