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Their wide vistas afford a big view, and Jack ranges farther and farther ahead, testing his own comfort level as well as my parental oversight’s limits. The open balds are a rare gift in the East’s forested high country. Now I watch Jack range far ahead, striding through waist-high grasses bent low by the wind. And it’s better than parking them at the mall. But I have every good excuse, I tell myself, to want to write these moments in bolder strokes than the faint pencil outlines of my own memories of my father. You can’t make your kids carry your cross.
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It’s not easy, what with soccer and swimming and church and algebra.
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Long ago I vowed to spend as much time as possible with my kids in the woods. I was left with precious few memories of him on the trail, and a handful of topographic maps with his favorite routes marked in faint pencil. I had just a few chances to backpack with my dad before he died in an airplane crash when I was 13. I remember riding together for an hour and a half to the nearest camping store that sold goose-down sleeping bags, German mountaineering boots, and the clunky old Svea 123 backpacking stove. In the late 1960s, when backpacking was in its infancy, my father took up the pastime with a passion. Yet there’s something more to this outing. We’ll be awakened by birds and warmed by the sun, tied to the rhythms of the natural world. In return for a tacit agreement to work with what the land and the weather offer, we’ll have vespers of firelight and stars. If the trail crosses a mountain, they’ll climb. Untethered to power supply or convenience store, they will learn to take what comes. It’s the boys’ first serious backpacking trip, a chance for them to sample a kind of restraint and focus that is largely missing from their day-to-day lives. Our 10-mile loop will take us through the alpine meadows of Virginia’s Mount Rogers National Recreation Area, a 200,000-acre chunk of Southern Appalachian splendor. We are on a three-day backpacking trip with Jack’s pal Robbie Simmons and his dad, Chris. Just as he disappears around a corner a thought stops me cold: My father would have seen this. Only occasionally do I catch a glimpse of my 10-year-old son’s face, in silhouette, as he weaves through the 10-foot-tall thicket. Jack is ahead on the trail, two winter-white legs protruding from the bottom of an oversized purple backpack, like a grape Popsicle, shouldering through the rhododendrons, leaves curled like wood shavings in the late-March cold.