I live in the mid-Atlantic coastal tidewater region, near the top of the northern most habitat for native bald cypress swamp on the east coast of the States. We are 20 to 30 minutes of backroads away from the most tender, unique and ancient public habitats you could imagine, making me endlessly grateful for state parks. 

There’s a knowing an older part of your body calls down–a soft, deft stillness when you behold mighty aged cypress coming out of the water.  I watched it take over my mom and aunt last week, the hush when they first lay eyes on them.  

Wednesday was the first night I camped alone since I had my kid.  She joined me for the second night, our fifth time I counted camping together just mommy and babe.

The park we were at, especially the camping cabins part, opened up to me during quarantine.  One of my dearest ppl had quieted away there for a number of days in the middle of the pandemic to concentrate on making music. I met them out there one of those days and we celebrated in-person connection then got wondrously, ridiculously lost on the miles of trails cut through the American hollies and hardwoods and loblollies and drenched, black backwaters of cypress, in thick or thin or wide or tall stands, peeled brown knees rising between lime green sponge tump to tump of a wood between the world. 

Prior to that day in March 21 I’d only ever hiked the same three trails there, clear on the other side of the park and short little happy trails.  I didn’t know there was also an interchanging network you can mix and match in an actual choose your own adventure style.  I also didn’t know I could camp in a rustic cabin and have total privacy, me and the megalith earth I imagine underneath these swampy mud spaces just a solid shelf of immovable stone, compacted ancient bone rock of the Chesapeake basin under us and reaching clear down this whole peninsula and out several miles into the Atlantic before dropping off.  Just me and the honking frogs and great big majestic birds of prey and sea birds like heron with its dinosaur cry or colorful feathered spring and summer friends.

Anyways I was five months pregnant that day we hiked so far we didn’t make it back to the cabin til well past dark.  I wasn’t sleeping well and nothing was staying down but that long day of walking in the damp 40 degrees did something for me that stayed in my soul.  Two weeks later I got my own cabin for myself for two nights.  It would be the last overnight in nature I’d know as a solo traveller.  I’d come to the cabin tucked away in the ancient misty forest to reckon. 

Strangely, I ended up in the exact same cabin without planning it last week, the only one available when I planned my return to camping solo. Last time I was there under the moon, fixated for two full days continually on the fire. My daughter is nearing 3 fast already and it’s hard to believe I haven’t been back out to nature overnight alone since then. Reckoning with that, with the return, has been a vast exhaust of restless ire that comes and goes without warning enough so that I couldn’t put it off another month.

And ohh, the moon. Rising silver blue on the water edge right out my back door…

So I returned to camping solo exactly where I last left?

Cypress backwaters surrounding me.

When I first arrived to the camp during quarantine I was wheeling back the cart used to drop all the supplies to the cabin and ran into my friend who goes on girl dates with me to eat or do local culture stuff.  It was eery that we both were there to escape and find ourselves in nature but ended up right across from each other.  Without us too much getting into it the truth of me losing grl-independence to child without either of us knowing what that would be passed between us quietly. We were both reminded we already had been upended by the pandemic in ways we’d not at all begun yet to sort out. 

I returned to camping solo in the same place and literally nothing is the same. But for her ancient groundedness. Boy did the mists come over the swamp thick tidewater at twilight the last night I was there. I tended fire two afternoons into sunsets into moonrises in a row for two days. I rode a bike for 45 minutes all around one side of the park and read and read and read and cooked by fire and oh– the first cup of coffee at camp. I took a lovely hour walk on a trail I didn’t know that led to a beach once segregated and vitally important to local black legacy right here on the cypress banks.

I wrote and wrote and let the land undo me.

Literally, after 24 hours I felt all the knots untie themselves in my body. In my being.

The morning I left the cabin back when I was still preg I drove straight here to my house on the Wicoco backroads. It was the first time I ever saw it. Cypress knees all around. My realtor smiling when we ran into the forest first, before even considering the house. It was spring equinox week 2021, I had just turned 44. My daughter born four months later.

Memorial day weekend we signed the papers. Three years ago this weekend!

That’s a hell of a long time out of the woods.