The Last Good Time in the Highlander

On a cold October night, we pulled into Shipwrecks Creek campground at dusk, exhausted from nine hours on the Superior Hiking Trail. All day, I had kept you in my sights, your tall frame moving through the forest ahead of me, our daughter’s old purple pack on your back marking your location. You walked fast. I stopped for moss and mushrooms and trees catching light just the right way. I wish we had known the trail was rerouted, wished we had bought detailed maps for this section. Navigational markers were sparse, and we could never depend on a cell signal up here. As the light faded, we were lost and cold. Eventually, we moved toward distant sounds of Highway 61, the spine that winds through the North Shore of Lake Superior, and made it to Split Rock State Park. 

At our campsite, you suggested that we skip the tent and sleep in the car; I said no. You sleep expertly anywhere, deeply, even when our babies cried, or our teens were out too late. My mind revs, always. My sleep routine is like a Catholic mass, composed of curated objects and rituals performed in an exacting sequence. I planned to run the protocol and sleep on our cushioned cot—in the tent.

My damp shirt, wet socks, and bone-deep chill changed my mind. You started the bonfire, I prepared our bed in the Highlander: collapsed the middle row seats, unrolled the plaid flannel sleeping bags our kids had worn into soft skins over years of camping and basement sleepovers. Crammed pillows against the front seat headrests, hung our tiny lantern from the clothes hook. I imagined myself reading all night, unmoored in this back seat, the vacated province of our four children.

The fire warmed my bones. We cracked open Nordeast tallboy beers and set the tinfoil potato packets on the rack next to my wool socks. A wall of boulders, pine, and birch curved around us. Above us, constellations. We talked easily in the warmth, sorting through where we took the wrong path, how far we planned to hike the next day. A month ago, we barely spoke on the drive home from Chicago after moving our youngest into her college dorm. Silence filled the Highlander, a quiet like a movie theater at the end of a powerful film, everyone still in their seats as the credits rolled. Our house was an empty vessel, and the uncharted territory we’d found ourselves in made me nauseous and addled. Yet up in the northern Minnesota woods with you, I felt grounded and light. Something was falling away.

*

Remember our first time here at Split Rock State Park? We traveled light and walked a half mile to Campsite #20, with its cliff-top view of Lake Superior. We fell asleep to waves, made morning coffee over the bonfire, and napped in the steamy tent each afternoon. Years later, when we finally made it back, four kids spooned around us in our tent; naive campers, we had not packed enough warm clothes for them. We heated rocks in the bonfire, wrapped them in towels, and stuffed the improvised heat into our kids’ sleeping bags. One morning our baby cried from the cold, so I drove her along the shore, heat blasting, and nursed her in a gas station parking lot near barges loaded with taconite.

Time passed, and campsite #20 served as a mere rest stop between steep descents to the black pebble beach, climbs up to the lighthouse, and cliffside hikes. One year, all six of us crammed into a packed park cabin for a ranger’s talk about the 1905 Madeira shipwreck. Who could resist the story of the Madeira, a massive schooner under tow by an equally large steamer, during a fierce November storm? According to the ranger, as the vessels thrashed around in the waves, the steamer captain decided to cut the tow line connecting them, sending the Madeira crashing into the very cliffs we had just walked along. Our kids couldn’t get over that. Or the rescue: one man climbed to the top of the 60-foot cliff and dropped a rope to the Madeira’s deck, rescuing all but one of the crew. Remember how the kids ran to the cliff’s edge that night, hoping to see the wreckage?

*

In the far north, darkness falls hard in October. We looked long at the stars, marveling at the clusters and objects in transit we can’t see from home, then tucked into our car chamber by nine o’clock. How odd it felt to be in the backseat at all, let alone to sleep. This was our kids’ space—but they are no longer kids. We don’t really know what to call them anymore. When we bought the Highlander 10 years ago, they were 16, 14, 12, and 10. You and I planned epic trips, squeezing experiences into the dreg years as a family of six. All of us knew this charcoal gray car by heart: the bucket front seats; old school dashboard with easy dials, radio, and CD player; ancient stains on the middle row bench; coveted last row seats; cracked right taillight; and Minnesota State Park stickers lined up on the windshield.

It matters that we remember details—and that night in the car there was no escaping the memories, so we nested down among them. Surviving the long road trips by listening to all seven Harry Potter books on CD. Camping at Signal Mountain in the Grand Tetons National Park, our gear packed into the home-crafted extension kit attached to the Highlander like a barnacle. The elk that wandered into our campsite each morning, the kids scrambling down to a secluded beach flanked by ten-thousand-foot-tall mountains. All the endless loops we drove to school, sports, plays, jobs, and friends’ houses. The year we let our son take this car to Burning Man in the Nevada desert; vapors from the event still lingered. We gripped the “parent of new driver” hook above the passenger seat until our hands ached; looked at our kids’ faces in the rear view mirror a million times; and moved all four into college in this car. 

These kids are now 27, 24, 22, and 19. Complex and marvelous beings, remnants of their younger selves impossibly fading and shimmering into new forms. We rarely inhabit the same space as a family of six.  

I said goodnight to you by ten, and miraculously, I fell asleep immediately. In what felt like an hour, I opened the door to a sky blue with dawn. I had slept through the night for the first time in years. I peed in the woods as the wild rush of Lake Superior waves crashed into the new day.

*

That morning, we didn’t know that car camping at Shipwrecks Creek would be our last good time in the Highlander. Three months later, it got rear-ended as our oldest was driving. You got the call: he wasn’t injured, but the car was damaged. In a sense, he was saved by the Highlander. Our insurance company towed it to a nameless lot and put its fate on hold for weeks. Eventually, they decided it was unsalvageable, and it sank into their bureaucracy—and with it, the physical space that held our memories. I cried when we got the news.

You drove to the salvage yard, where wrecked cars were stacked up like dead bodies. The workers lowered the Highlander from crane claw to ground. You sorted through the detritus: dried out wipes; old CDs; ice scrapers. Pulled the Atlas of the United States out of the driver’s seat back pocket and peeled the Burning Man sticker off the front window before the vehicle was taken away for good.

*

That October morning, after you and I slept in the car, we drove to the black pebble beach and watched the sun rise. Two orange kayaks bobbed on the waves. The island just off the shore rose in shadow like a fish with pine trees for fins. Remember how the kids loved walking over boulders to the island when the water was low, how they wanted us to stay on the shore, so they could explore on their own and wave to us?

You put your flannel around my shoulders, your arms around me. I looked toward the cliffs, wondering if we’d finally see the dark shadows of the shipwreck Madeira in the morning sun. We didn’t. I thought of all the hulls and cargo holds at the bottom of Lake Superior, the artifacts of their journeys rusting in the depths. The throaty groans the ships made as they settled into the sediment, empty of their crew.