Four Kids, One Van, Zero Air Conditioning
Four Kids, One Van, Zero Air Conditioning
There’s a version of this story where we are the cool outdoor parents who raised a tribe of fearless trail kids who could not wait for the next adventure.
That is not this story.
This is the story of three children who went everywhere with us — some more willingly than others — out of a Toyota camper van with no air conditioning, into weather conditions they did not always choose. One loved the outdoors completely but had very little interest in running. One was selectively available depending on whether the trip had air conditioning. And one was simply embarrassed by us, which was arguably the most reasonable response of the three.
(There was a fourth. Amber — the oldest. She had already adulted and moved out of the house before the van era started. She was spared. We still feel bad about this, depending on the day.)
The Van
Let’s establish the van.
It was a Toyota camper. One of the short-wheelbase ones — not big. Not comfortable. Not air conditioned. What it had was a sleeping setup that, looking back, was an engineering achievement nobody will ever give us credit for:
- Main bed in the back for two adults
- Elevated loft above the cab, where the kids went
- Hammock strung between the front seats for overflow situations
Three kids. Two adults. One German Shorthaired Pointer named Lacy. All of them in this van.
The kids were not always thrilled about this. The dog had no opinion, because the dog has won the genetic lottery in terms of how she experiences everything.
What all of them had, though, was a childhood that went places. Not a lot of hotel rooms. Not a lot of planned itineraries. A lot of national forests and state parks and campgrounds with no hookups, and trailheads with a lot of elevation, and rivers you had to filter before you could drink from them.
Not Just Trails
The van didn’t only go to trailheads.
It went to rivers. It went to the beach — right onto the sand when the tide allowed. It parked at canoe launches and whitewater put-ins and snorkel spots from Florida to West Virginia. The kids paddled Georgia rivers in a canoe and ran the New River Gorge in a raft. They tubed the Guadalupe at Gruene. They drove to Crystal River in February and put on wetsuits and went looking for manatees in water cold enough to make your face hurt.
The New River Gorge rafting trip was guided — New Country River Adventures, Class IV rapids through the gorge walls. The kids held on. Nobody went over. The guide stood at the back of the raft looking like she’d seen everything, because she had.
At Crystal River, they snorkeled with manatees. Lacy came. Of course Lacy came.
On a Gulf beach at dusk, they watched sea turtles hatch. Nobody had planned for it. They just happened to be there.
This is the part that never quite made sense to people who didn’t know them: the family didn’t specialize. The van was an everything machine, and the kids were along for all of it.
CaCaw
CaCaw — Bella to everyone who knew her before the trail — got her trail name from something she did on trail. Most trail names are like that — the story is almost always embarrassing, and if you earn it, you keep it.
What she could not escape was the van pickup.
Imagine being in middle school. Your parents come to get you in what is effectively a rolling campsite — wood paneling, side windows, the kind of vehicle that announces these people live differently before anyone even gets out. CaCaw would come out the school doors, clock the van from across the parking lot, and you could watch the calculation happen in real time: is there a way to avoid this.
There was not a way to avoid it.
She got in the van every time. She came on every trip. She complained in the way that children complain when they secretly don’t hate something but the peer credibility cost is real.
This is how you end up snorkeling in Key West in six inches of water with a full dive flag.
They had camped in Key West — the van at a campground, as usual. The first time they walked down to the water, a shark was cruising the shallows. Not a scary encounter. Just a shark, doing shark things, right where they were planning to swim.
CaCaw took one look at it and made her position clear: she was not getting in that water.
She did, however, agree to snorkeling. With a mask and snorkel. And a proper dive flag on a buoy, anchored in place. At a depth of approximately one ankle.
You can see the sandy bottom through the water in these photos. You can see the sandy bottom because the water is not covering it by much. CaCaw is fully committed — mask on, snorkel in, face down, technique solid. The dive flag says divers below. There are no divers below. There is a child, on all fours, in water that would not reach your knees.
This is CaCaw in one photograph. She said she wouldn’t do it. She did it anyway, on her own terms, in a way that was technically not wrong.
A note on the family cookie tax: in this family, if you acquire something worth eating — a cookie, a treat, anything notable — Polly gets a nibble. We call it the tax. It is non-negotiable and has been in effect for years. CaCaw understood this. When the tax came due, CaCaw paid it without a fight. This was not everyone’s approach. (See: Zac.)
She also found the climbing gym. And the outdoor wall. She put in serious time on both — the kind of athlete who shows up already knowing she’s going to figure out whatever the route asks of her.
Somewhere in those trips — in the miles and the trailheads and the campsites and the rivers and the ankle-deep snorkeling and the climbing walls — she became someone who runs.
This October, she is running a fifty-kilometer race with her mother.
Blakely
Blakely has not yet earned a trail name, and she will be the first to tell you this is fine.
Here is the honest version of Blakely: she liked doing her hair. She liked her makeup. She liked air conditioning. She did not always come on the camping trips, because she was making informed decisions about how she wanted to spend her time, and sometimes that decision was not in a van with no AC parked in a national forest.
This is a defensible position. We respected it.
What Blakely liked — without any parental coercion involved — was rock climbing.
Not just the gym. The gym and the outdoor wall. She was selective about camping trips, but she was not selective about climbing. On the wall she was focused and athletic and had a competitive streak that pointed straight up. The outdoors she chose was vertical.
The trail name will come. Probably on a route she wasn’t supposed to be able to do.
Zac
Zac is the one nobody would have predicted.
Let’s be clear about something: Zac loved being outside. Genuinely. He was not dragged anywhere he didn’t want to be. Put him in the middle of nowhere — national forest, river camp, rhododendron hollow in the Blue Ridge — and he was exactly where he wanted to be. He liked nature. He liked the quiet of camp. He liked the hammock. He liked having a book and nowhere specific to be.
What Zac did not want to do was run.
He was in a phase — big feet, still figuring out how to use the body he was in — and running was not his thing. When Tortuga and Polly were heading out for miles on trail, Zac was content to stay behind at the campsite, read his book, take his time. He was not missing out. He was exactly where he wanted to be.
And when he did come out on trail, he had an eye. You would be moving and you would turn around, and Zac would be somewhere behind you — off the path, crouched down low, or perched on a rock, working the angle on something he’d spotted. A flower, a patch of moss, the way light was coming through the canopy. He stopped for things that runners blow right past. He had a photographer’s patience for the outdoors.
Zac at Letchworth State Park in New York — the Grand Canyon of the East, one of the most dramatic gorge waterfall systems in the Northeast, Civil War-era railroad trestle spanning the canyon above the falls. He has found a good spot on the stone wall. The falls are right there.
Zac in a North Carolina rhododendron forest, getting the shot. You would turn around on the trail and he would just be gone — somewhere behind you, getting down low for something he’d seen.
The Cookie Tax Incident
There is a rule in this family: if you acquire something worth eating — a cookie, a treat, anything notable — Polly gets a nibble. We call it the tax. It is non-negotiable and long-established. CaCaw understood the terms and paid without a fight. This is the correct response.
Zac did not accept the terms.
At Niagara Falls, Zac had acquired a large chocolate chip cookie. Polly announced the tax was due. Zac looked at Polly. Polly looked at Zac. Zac ran.
What followed was a full cat-and-mouse chase through the overlook area at one of the seven natural wonders of the world — Polly in pursuit, Zac with the cookie, tourists watching this unfold — until Polly finally caught him and tackled him. As she did, Zac stuffed what remained of the cookie into his mouth in one motion.
Polly did not get her tax. Zac won. This was the only time in the documented history of the family tax that the tax went uncollected.
They also went out on the Maid of the Mist — soaked from head to foot, blue ponchos, Horseshoe Falls fifty feet away. Zac was present for this. Whether he was lining up a shot is not confirmed.
The Night Run
There was a run through a rhododendron forest in North Carolina. Night run. The kind of darkness that gets complete when you’re under a mountain laurel canopy with no ambient light.
Tortuga turned the lights off.
The idea — and this is a genuine idea, not a prank — was that your eyes adjust, the darkness becomes something different, the forest sounds come forward, and the whole experience changes. This is genuinely true. Polly has this experience. Tortuga has this experience. Zac, in the daylight, clearly also appreciated what that forest had to offer.
Zac in the dark had a different experience entirely. Zac was terrified. The darkness was immediate and complete and did not become beautiful. The poor kid was dying in that rhododendron forest while Tortuga thought everyone was having a moment.
He would not do that run again. He was very clear about this.
And yet.
You cannot spend your childhood outdoors — camping, photographing, sitting on stone walls next to waterfalls, wandering rhododendron hollows with a camera — without it changing something in your body. The miles accumulate even when you’re not running them. The elevation becomes familiar even when you’re not paying attention to it. And at some point the body that was in a clumsy phase and didn’t want to run is just a body that has been outside constantly for years, in all conditions, because that was always where it wanted to be.
Zac is arguably now one of the better runners in the family.
Nobody is more surprised by this than Zac.
This October, he is running a fifty-kilometer race with his mother.
What They Didn’t Know
Here is the part that nobody tells you about raising kids this way:
They don’t always know they’re being shaped. The trip they were embarrassed by, or too clumsy for, or selectively absent from — it’s building something they can’t feel yet. The campsite, the trail, the river, the van parked on a beach at midnight — the one that seemed inconvenient at the time is the one they’ll describe later as the trip they remember.
The van pickup they were embarrassed by? Every single one of them misses that van now.
Every one of them.
Just not in the moment. In the moment, they would have preferred a different van. A quieter van. A van that did not pull up outside their school. A van with air conditioning.
But the van is gone, and they miss it.
October 10: Glen Rose, Texas
The Mammoth Trail Runs in Glen Rose, Texas — hill country limestone and cedar, Paluxy River Valley, the kind of terrain that rewards people who grew up going places in vans with no air conditioning.
On October 10, Polly is running the 50K.
CaCaw is running with her.
Zac is running with her.
The kid who was a nature photographer content at the campsite, scared of heights, unwilling to pay the cookie tax at Niagara Falls, and would not run a night trail through North Carolina ever again — he has registered for a fifty-kilometer race and will be on the start line at dawn in Glen Rose, Texas.
We are not saying we planned it this way.
But we are not saying we didn’t.
Amber’s Kids
Amber escaped. She had already moved out before the van era started. Her childhood was spared.
Her three kids were not so lucky.
Now that CaCaw and Zac are adults — running 50Ks, living their lives, doing their thing — what do we have left to do?
Hello, grandkids.
The cycle continues.
Find trails and free camping near Glen Rose, TX on Trek4Free →
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