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As I said, I was logical if nothing else as a kid. I am still. For example, I spent the formative years of my childhood believing that all anyone had to do when they needed something was to go to the local credit union and ask for money - they provided it. I believed this because my Dad was a teacher and my Mom didn't work until I was much older. Because of my father's career choice, he was home almost all the time. Early evenings, weekends and entire summers. He was there.

As a result, we spent a lot of time together being separate in proximity. Well, not all the time. My Dad had chores to do which without he failed to thrive. Us kids had showers to inspect or campground stores to examine. My Mother got effectively lost - oh yeah - "exploring" when there was work. She still does that. How does she get away with it? Still, we camped a lot. In fact, I can't remember a time that I didn't know camping would be a part of our summer vacation as sure as the sun would rise. We stayed at a hotel only once in all those years despite that some of our trips might have been improved if we had.

But . . . . this was the way life was in my house. It didn't matter that there were dead fish everywhere. No thought was given to why the fish had died. Or if there might be something in the water that had caused their death that might affect any other species that came in contact. If the fish died, it was their poor luck. A few hundred dead, stinking, fermenting fish were completely inconsequential. You just had to go out into the deeper water - where the bigger fish lived. Or better yet, just don't think about it. -Go play.

Not all the trips were horrible. Most of the time, camping was the only time we saw our relatives - with the exception of one of my Dad's brothers. His wife only "camped at the Hilton." As a kid, I had no idea what this meant. That remark may as well have been in Portuguese. As an adult, I cannot believe that this woman wasn't ostracized to the fullest extent of the family law. She was practically a heretic. I wish I had the nerve to be like her.

We saw so much. We explored. We learned about other places. We thought about what it would be like to be in another place and to think of it as home. We learned about the stories of history that lie in wait all but forgotten in every small town. There is one. You can find it. We saw what was available and how far we could go and we learned how to get back home. Most important, we learned that the view (any view) looks different depending on where you might be viewing something from.