A few days ago my nephew Mike, son of brother Mike, emailed me and asked if we (my daughter Blake, my husband Murray and I) could meet them (Mike, his wife Susan, and his daughter Em) for an early dinner the next night. He said they’d be “passing through” the Oakland/San Francisco area. I assumed that Susan had a business meeting in San Francisco and they’d chosen to extend the business trip by visiting the city.
It turns out I was dead wrong. They, the Mike Davies Jrs, had been on a camping odyssey since early September, leaving their suburban Boston home to drive (in a purchased, second hand driveable camper) to as many National and/or regional parks across the country as they could visit between then and January 11 when Em has to be back in Belmont to register for the next hybrid session of her sophomore year in high school.
We met at the Longbranch Saloon, a very informal restaurant on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley, that serves in a combination inside/outside room with heat lamps. I have not seen my nephew since a few years after my mother died, probably 2014. He is now 48, near as Blake and I can figure, and has had an unusual adult path to now. He earned a PhD in Microbiology, studying flies’ eyes, at Dartmouth. His wife Susan, the same age as Mike, and the corporate brains of the operation, earned an MBA at Dartmouth during the same years. They had two kids, Darrel and Em. Darrel is now a freshman at the University of Vermont. Em is a sophomore in high school.
When Mike couldn’t find a job post-doc, he renovated their first tiny house, AND got in trouble with alcohol. It took a few years, but he got sober and started taking on more serious projects. After their first renovation, he has gone on to perform major renovations on two more houses and has built a third on a peninsula outside of Boston in a town called Hull. The pictures of the house are breathtaking. It’s right on the water, a slice of Boston Harbor. He is also a gourmet cook. Susan has had a series of high-paying corporate jobs (Mike often cooks for her executive meetings) and is now the COO of a grocery start up.
Over hamburgers and pizza, they regaled us with stories of their trip, including a 3-hour detour on a fire trail (Google Maps said it was a shortcut) where the camper got stuck in a sink hole. Susan has been working every day and flying out of various airports to occasional live meetings. Em has had schoolwork every day so the two women are online 5–6 hours, before, during, or after Mike’s 10–12 hour daily drive. They’ve already been rained and snowed on. Oh, they also have their two dogs with them, one chocolate lab and one golden retriever. These are not small dogs!
I can’t tell you how much fun the evening was. The stories, the descriptions of places they’ve been, the internet challenges, the sleeping with dogs in a rainstorm while every tent seam leaked into Em’s sleeping bag, and Em’s school schedule which begins in the tent at 5 AM. Instructors require that she be on screen.
Murray got to ask Susan every question about her job that he’d been dying to ask for at least a year. Blake and I heard Em reveal herself to be an unusually bright and entrepreneurial 15-year-old. (The trip was her idea, and she is the navigator.)
It made me so happy to see Mike and Susan so happy. They said it hadn’t all been bliss. Not by a long shot. Mike and Em said that when Susan elected to walk alongside the camper rather than be driven in it, they knew she had temporarily reached the end of her tether.
You could say this was a small thing, having the very occasional meal with a relative. To me it was the most fun I’ve had since the beginning of this pandemic. I was so impressed by their spirit of adventure, of their willingness to take chances, and of how Mike seemed so at peace with himself.
For the last few days I’ve been thinking about how creative their response was to the national lockdown. I’ve also thought about the amount of planning necessary to accomplish this trip, including purchasing the camper in Tucson and driving it back to Boston BEFORE the trip.
Of course Mike and his family are younger than my own children and have the energy and spirit to make such a trip. What it makes me wonder, though, is what could I have done, or what could we (Murray and I) have done in these last long and sorrowful months to create joy and adventure for ourselves. What could we do now?
