Midnight, mist rolling in across the mountain tops, it’s unclear whether the water speckling my glasses is rain or the fingerprints of passing clouds. Either way, I can barely see, as I watch the campfire slowly turning to ash amidst the drizzle. My brother’s in the orange REI tent on the other side of the fire ring, blessedly alone, while I seek a few moments of solitude before bed in the drivers seat of the rented RV, which is at capacity with sleeping children, mine and my sister’s.

My youngest, sleeping overhead, said as she drifted off “I love camping, we should do this a lot” and I surprised myself by agreeing. I haven’t been camping since the year before her dad died, and never without a husband. But it feels something like coming back to myself now that I’m doing it with siblings. We spent so many nights in a foggy-windowed RV as children, along the beach in Seward, in KOA’ s from Alaska to Washington DC. Family: crammed in too small a space, with not quite enough stuff, but somehow having an adventure that makes the hassle worthwhile.

This particular spot, where I came with childhood friends on skipped school days, the smell of burning brakes filling the Suburban on our way back down the mountain, feels exactly the right place to make my adult foray back into camping (RV to be clear, I will never be excited about a tent). This mountain pass between Palmer and Willow, Alaska, is one of the few places I go regularly where there is no cell service, no electricity, no running water except that which bubbles white across the rocks of the Little Susitna. It is one landscape both familiar and wilderness, which awakes in me something dangerous and spiritual, a sensation of being utterly at nature’s mercy and yet completely unworried. (I am almost never unworried).

There are places I love in this world, and Hatcher Pass is one of them: for the ties to my childhood when I didn’t know how much pain was coming, for the solace of a place where such pain as I now know can be blunted by beauty, and for the chance to connect my children to such joy and solace and beauty as they will someday need to have stored in their bodies to withstand whatever is coming in their futures.

I will sleep tonight with Susitna’s rushing waters as lullaby, and wake to gauzy, silencing mist or a breathtaking clear view across wide valleys, I know not which. The love of place and family and self and life which fills me tonight is big enough to cover these mountains meters deep, as the winter snows do annually.

But deeper still, this love goes with me everywhere as a portable sanctuary, a reservoir which is full to overflowing these days. I feel lucky in this season, something I thought I’d never feel again, grateful and aligned with who and where I’m meant to be. All in a rented RV, snuggled on a too-thin mattress, next to a gently snoring child dreaming of a life better than even this beautiful one we are currently living.

As my favorite dating coach Lily Womble would say: thank you, more please.