There’s a place I remember quite well from my childhood.

It was tucked way back into the woods, along one of the wider dirt roads we used to travel in our old family station wagon.

In those days, before their divorce would separate me from my siblings across an international border, my mom and dad would take us for long rides in the woods.

Depending on the season, we’d pack fishing poles, berry-picking pails or paper grocery bags for apples, bug spray and a picnic lunch my mom had put together.

We’d travel old logging trails and railroad grades, turned two-track roads, looking for whatever wildlife we could see, a chance to enjoy the sunshine and to listen to the car radio.

This was back before cassette, or even 8-track, tape players made their way into the dashboards of American automobiles, back when the radio would play folk, rock, soul and country, back-to-back, all on the same station.

Sometimes, on our way, we’d stop at the little store that sat along the black-topped county road. We’d wait in the car for my dad to come out with a slim-jim for him, a Bit-O-Honey for me and my mom and whatever my younger brother and sisters had wanted.

At the end of the blacktop, where the road split into three dirt roads, we’d often take a right. This is where the adventure would really begin for me. We were finally past all the houses, the town and the trains and cars.

One of my favorite things was water – whether it was playing with the garden hose, in the plastic backyard swimming pool or down at the lake by our house, hunting for frogs and turtles – I loved it.

Out here in the woods, that meant bridges. My dad would stop on the bridges long enough for me to look out both back passenger windows to see the water flowing on one side and then the other.

I discovered a lot of these bridges were like the 45-rpm records I played at home on a box-styled record player we had – there was a fast side and a slow side.

I liked them both.

Not surprisingly, the fast side was usually more exciting, but the slow side was deeper.

I never tired of stopping on bridges to look at water.

The forests and countryside we’d drive through would change as we’d ride, like watching a movie out the window.

Tall red and white pines would change to leafy, green northern hardwoods to alders and cedars along the creeks to grassy fields and yellow meadows, flanked on their sides by beautiful, ghostly poplar trees.

My mom would bring a little gardening spade and maybe a cardboard box or a plastic pail. If she found some pretty flowers in the woods – remnants from some deserted homestead garden or something growing wild – she’d get a start to bring home with her.

She grew vegetables and flowers – green beans, carrots, lettuce and peas, not far from red tulips, purple and pink hollyhocks, poppies and trellis-climbing morning glories.

We knew a small, shallow lake back in those woods, where there were picnic tables overlooking the water. This is where we’d many times stop for lunch. 

While my mom was pulling out the food and paper plates, my dad would sit at the table, watching. He’d draw a drink out of the old yellow-and-brown tartan-print juice jug we had.

They’d talk, while me and my siblings would wade among the lily pads and swamp grasses, exploring. I remember one time we found leeches stuck to our legs when we came out of the water. My folks called them “bloodsuckers” and my dad pulled them off, while my sisters screamed.   

If our constant kid pleadings had found favor with my mom, lunch might mean bologna, or split hot dogs and ketchup, or peanut butter and jelly, on white bread, with orange or green Hi-C or Kool-Aid to drink and potato chips or those canned Pik-Nik original shoestring potatoes.

Once, when a thunderstorm ruined our woods picnic, we put a blanket on the floor at home and had our dinner there. 

From the lake, the road wound slowly through the trees, up and over a few hills, with at least a couple more wooden plank bridges to cross over little creeks, rolling streams or places where the sun had sucked almost all the water dry, leaving only grass, rocks and sand in the river bottom.

I knew every bridge on every road, and the names of all the streams. Because of this, some roads were favorites, while others didn’t rate at all. What’s the point of even having a road, if there were no bridges on it, I wondered?

Which brings me back to the place. That place way back in the woods, past a farm powered with a wind turbine, several deer-hunting camps and countless raspberry and blackberry brambles crowding the sides of the cobbled dirt road.

We’d usually get there late in the day, as the sun was sinking down behind the treetops, the air had cooled, considerably, and we needed to be heading home.

There was a bridge there – a glorious bridge, maybe the best bridge.

Not because of the bridge works, but because of one of the best combination fast sides and slow sides I had ever seen – like Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Travelin’ Band” and “Who’ll Stop the Rain.”

This fabulous icy water – which clearly held trout – was combined with a quiet set of modest campsites, which sat on a flat place under the trees, at the top of a set of wooden steps that reached from the river.

This place was amazing. A kid like me could live here forever and fish trout all day, every day – "brookies", rainbows and browns. I could eat berries along the road, drink water from the pump and make a campfire all the time.

To heck with having a fort in the backyard at home, my brother and I could sleep here in a tent – every night. Maybe even have pizza.

There were often people camping there, but not ever in any large numbers. They seemed to be folks like us, eating dinner from a frying pan or a dinner pail, looking to find a place to connect with nature, away from home.

We’d drive slow through the campground sometimes, looking at the folks and nodding hello – like Henry Fonda and the rest of the Joads in the labor camp arrival scene from movie version of the “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Unfortunately for me, my parents weren’t the camping kind. Consequently, my brother and I never did live out my dream of camping there – not even once – at least not yet.

We were young when they divorced, and my brother and sisters moved to Canada with my mom and her soon-to-be new husband.

As the oldest – a 13-year-old with the choice of where I wanted to be – I stayed with my dad here in Michigan and learned how to cook dinner, do laundry, clean house and other stuff my mom used to do.

My dad would take me out to the restaurant in town every payday for supper.

Those early experiences helped shape me in becoming the person I am today. There are lessons there I am very grateful to have had.

I’ve often been struck over the years with the tremendous power of that place by the river – a rustic state forest campground in the wilds of Upper Michigan.

It grabbed me and never let go – at once capturing my heart and my imagination, without my ever having stayed there even once.

These days, I’ve got two boys of my own, even a beautiful little granddaughter my dad never got to meet before he died.

I now imagine a time when me and my brother, and my two boys – who are now men themselves – might one day find ourselves together in that wonderful place.

Underneath those pines, sitting around a campfire looking up at the stars, listening to the water – raising a glass to mom and dad and those days gone by – when the biggest thing in life was stopping on a bridge to look at the water.

Michigan has 138 state forest campgrounds, most all associated with a body of water, some found along state pathways. These rustic campgrounds are found throughout the Upper Peninsula and northern Lower Peninsula.

Learn more about these rustic state forest campgrounds to start an adventure of your own today.

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