News from Jules | 08.21.2023 | It's All Relative
I was excited and slightly nervous as I set out on the 1.3-mile trail to Third Beach in Olympic National Park to camp on the beach overnight. I don’t own a bear canister and hadn’t figured out yet what to do with my food overnight. Last week, the backpacking campsite in the Redwoods had a permanent bear canister to store my food. I didn’t see any bears but there sure was a lot of bear poop, so they were definitely nearby.
The past two weeks of roadtripping through Northern California, Oregon and Washington was slowly renewing my faith and reminding me: Something would work out. It always did. I just needed to stay relaxed and alert.
Be in the moment.
As I came around a bend in the trail, I saw a long blonde-haired man holding hands with a tiny human on his right whose blond curled head barely reached his knees. My head turned to the side as I recognized it was the same family that I saw at the diner in Forks, Wash. that morning when I treated myself to a hot breakfast after a wet night of camping.
A moment later, I noticed the huge bear canister on top of the dad’s backpack was about to fall off, so I yelled out for them to stop. As soon as he started to take one strap off of his shoulder, the canister slid off and crashed to the ground.
“Gosh, that almost fell on her head, huh?,” the dad said with wide eyes. “Thanks!”
From there we picked up a conversation about our respective breakfasts at the diner that morning, hiking with kids, thru-hiking, and Olympic National Park, until we came across his wife, their older child, and “Mom-O,” the kids’ maternal grandmother, who I proceeded to chat with the rest of the way to the beach. Once there, I asked about food storage. Sure enough, they were willing to share their bear canister, so I set up my tent nearby.
More trail magic. Not just trail angels, but a trail angel family.
After I returned from a hike further down the coastline, they invited me to hangout. We swapped stories and real talk while eating dinner, whale watching, playing with bubbles, and climbing on the rocks, followed by a cleverly contained campfire of tealights—made by the professional thru-hiker dad—until the stars came out.
The next morning as I was packing up, Mom-O hugged me goodbye and handed me her Therm-a-Rest seat pad. They had an extra and I had just lost mine. I gratefully tucked it in the outside of my pack and walked along the beach back up to the trail.
Hiking back to my car, I reflected on what felt so special about spending time with them, as well as when I visited one of my best friends, her kids, and her parents, at the start of my trip the previous week.
It was that moment sitting around the tealight campfire when all of our faces were glowing in awe as we looked way, way up for the first starlight, star bright first star we’d see in the sky that night.
Just like that moment at the dining room table sitting across from my best friend with her young sons on either end of the table, as we all messily and silently slurped our spaghetti in blissful unison.
Whether I had known them for several hours or 15 years, it felt the same. It felt like love. It felt like family.
Family always seemed special to me. But over the years, I formed an idea of family that grew farther and farther away from the feeling of family. This idea was packed with personal values, high expectations, and unfulfilled needs.
So, the less that the idea was fulfilled, the less space I left for the feeling.
Long before I was even conscious of this disconnect, nonetheless able to articulate it, I started to wonder if I could relate to my family at all.
We are not a family with group texts every day—or week or even month. There are months without communication and seasons without visits. My Dad gained a second family when he remarried after my Mom died, both of my siblings are married with children, and they all have dogs now. Everybody also has sports, hobbies, work, and philanthropy. They travel as much, if not more, than me. They are all as independent as I am.
This is my immediate family. But also applies to the relationships with our extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins—and my grandparents when they were alive—who all live on the East Coast.
Every summer growing up we traveled to Cape Cod, Mass. to stay with our extended family for several weeks. We stayed at the cottage my Grandfather built in 1946 across the street from his brother’s cottage where their families had gathered every summer as well.
Because we lived so far away, we celebrated holidays in Oregon with friends instead of family. Summer was the one time a year when all of the generations were together.
Reflecting on nearly 17 summers of memories, it all blends together—my adolescence especially eclipsing the carefree little kid years. I do not remember being five years old and running into a just-as-surprised skunk in the cottage’s backyard, only to get sprayed again after we both ran to safety in the front yard. I do not remember making forts in the bunkbeds with my cousins. I do not remember sitting on my Grandpa’s lap reading bedtime stories. These memories only live on as stories and photographs.
Instead, I remember rules, disagreements, judgment, not fitting in, and thus feeling highly self-conscious.
And yet, I still moved to Boston for college, then went back to visit nearly every year into my early 30s. Just like how I kept showing up for our family reunion after the first grandchild was born in 2010 and the summer tradition continued.
All of this came back to me as I was driving along the Washington coastline toward this year’s family reunion on Whidbey Island and I saw a perfect town called Seabrook, Wash. in the middle of nothing. How odd.
I did a doubletake of deja vu and confusion, as I realized this oddly familiar and quaint little New England-style town not only looked like Cape Cod, but was where we went for our first family reunion when my niece was just six weeks old. Soon after my Dad became co-owner of a cabin in Parkdale, Ore. near Mount Hood where we gathered every summer for 10 years. We couldn’t gather during the Pandemic in 2020 and 2021, and then he sold the cabin, so it truly was a family reunion last summer in July, 2022 when I finally made it from New York to Jasper National Park, Canada. A doubly special trip to help my Dad check Jasper and Banff off his bucket list in celebration of his 75th birthday.
This year our family reunion is on Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound north of Seattle—just an hour and a half away for my brother, a four-hour drive from Portland for my sister and Dad, and a seven-hour drive for me if I had driven directly from Central Oregon.
But, I didn’t. Instead, I chose the winding and indirect route to get there—two weeks on the road—but I made it. Pretty similar to my own journey with my family actually.
Over the years, I’ve come to accept my family the way we are.
The less I conformed and tried to fit into my family, the more I wondered if I could relate to them at all. But, if my family was going to accept me for who and how I am, then didn’t I need to do the same?
As I stopped projecting my personal values, high expectations, and unfulfilled needs onto my relatives, the idea of family started to fade and made more space for the feeling of family. I no longer wondered if I could relate to my family, but how could I relate to them?
I realized: It’s all relative.
It’s not about similar interests or lifestyles. It’s not about the past or the future. It’s not about memories or dreams. I realized what truly matters.
Relating is simply about being together and being present. Right now. That’s how anyone—or even anything—can feel like family.
I just need to show up.
After one more night of camping, I eagerly woke up with the sunrise and immediately headed to catch one of the first ferries across the sound from Port Townsend to Whidbey Island. By midday, I was sitting beside my brother, basking in the sunshine with beers on the porch, as we awaited the rest of the family.
See fun photos from my adventures on Instagram.
More than just having fun and being outside while exploring the beach, hiking and biking, enjoying a beer at the local brewery, Slip & Sliding with the dogs, BBQing, and snuggling by the firepit. It’s about being present, together.
This is why we make the pilgrimage to reunite as a family every year.
Tuning everything else out and tuning into love.
May you feel related to everything this week.
Love,
Jules