Camping and Motherhood

Wherein Mom and Dad take the 8-month-old to the end of dirt roads and beside the rushing river for her first taste of the outdoors.

Photo Above: Mother and daughter share a moment far above the New River Gorge.
Photos Courtesy of Laura Forrest Hopfauf.

As a mother, all I want to do is make a home for my family, so it feels almost counterintuitive that when my daughter was 8 months old my husband, Tyler, and I decided to take her camping in New River Gorge National Park. But as a new family of three, we wanted to instill in our child a sense of wonder in the world, a love of the wild.

Compared to our life before baby, this four-hour journey from our home in the Panhandle of West Virginia should have felt tame. We’d camped in the middle of the Everglades, in the vast Sahara, in hammocks in a rainforest, slept wide open on mats at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and lived for days on uninhabited islands in both the Pacific and the Atlantic.

All of this to say my husband and I were decently self-sufficient, aware of our surroundings and capable. But on that drive down the state toward New River Gorge as the towns became further and further apart, the mountains grew and the trees reclaimed their land in a mosaic of green, I felt nervous. Maybe even a little scared. Butterflies ticked around my stomach as if I myself were a child on my very first camping trip with my own father trying to sleep after he had told me a ghost story about Union soldiers prowling the night on horseback and the branches of the trees, to my small ears, sounded like the click of hooves.

There is something scary about having a baby, a child, a family. Something that I can’t quite name. From the moment I found out I was pregnant, I have carried this urge to hold everything together, safely in my hands, as if I can turn myself into a home where no harm can touch.

But there is the contradiction of wanting to go, to explore, to retouch that spot without cell phone service, and cable, and flushable toilets, to reintegrate into the wild. That’s what we wanted this trip, not just for ourselves, but for our first born too. For her to be able to feel the earth wholly, without distraction.

So, we went into the wilderness, driving away from the New River Gorge Bridge, the focal point of the park, into the gorge itself. Turning from normal paved roads, to narrow paved roads, to gravel, to dirt. The wilderness rising around us with each passing change until we were only following a narrow dirt trail, barely wide enough for our vehicle, through thick pines and tall cedars that sliced the sun into strips as we passed beneath them. When the road dead-ended at a primitive campground at the bottom of the Gorge beside the mighty river we stopped. Cell phone service gone, cribs long forgotten and all entertainment but nature lost.

Around us the valley hummed with life that thrives in the thick air in the final stretch of sticky summer days. Bugs zoomed past, birds dove for them, fish leapt from the water, the river swam thick and muddy.

We set up camp in the trees, rain dripping finely around us. A damp tent with lukewarm oatmeal sitting in our bellies didn’t seem like a good enough home for my daughter even for a night.

But long after the sun settled behind the mountains after painting its way yellow and gold through the branches of trees and over the curve of our tent, I laid awake with my husband asleep on one side of me, my baby on the other, and I felt home.

It’s easy for the idea of home to transform from somewhere you return to when you need comfort and rest to that of a house with an HVAC system, a full fridge, soft beds, throw pillows and walls that don’t sag with humidity, especially as a mother.

But somehow in all her wild rugged beauty, with her mosquitos buzzing and hills humming with gnats and flies, with her open sky roof and dirt carpet, the gorge had made a home for me. Not out of anything that could be bought but out of what she was.

Camping doesn’t sound like it’s the same as motherhood, but perhaps they aren’t all that different. At the heart of both is the desire to make a home, however temporary, out of themselves. And even when it doesn’t feel like enough, maybe, just maybe, it is.

The story above first appeared in our July / August 2024 issue.