Every summer, our family went camping in Ontario. These days, they call it car camping, but we just called it camping. We packed up a lot of stuff in the back of our red 1962 Buick station wagon and headed out.

It probably only happened once or twice, but it seemed like an important part of the trip was driving several hundred miles, realizing we had forgotten something, and turning around to go back for it, My parents were never big on making lists.

It was also traditional to arrive at the campsite when it was starting to get dark and the three of us kids were starving. My dad would set up the tent in the dark, while my mom would take us to look for the local water. We camped near lakes.

One year, we drove from our house in Western New York to Sault Sainte Marie, which is pretty far west in Ontario. We were meeting up with a friend of my parents who they later told me believed that getting high was the answer to life. Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of don Juan was his bible. The adults sat around the campfire and got stoned. I have no idea how they brought the weed through the Canadian border crossing in the sixties.

The very last time we went camping together, there was a sadness in the air, even though only my parents knew it would be the last time. We started off for Nova Scotia, then realized we had forgotten something (what was it? I don’t know if I had ever known what it was that had made us turn around and go back).

Once we got to Nova Scotia, we stayed in a cottage instead of a tent. There was heather growing nearby, and we picked wild blueberries.

I had a book about how to tell fortunes with playing cards. This was in the days before tarot cards were so familiar – at least I had never seen any. The book had a system for mapping the meanings of tarot cards onto regular playing cards, and I was trying to learn it. At that time I was interested in magical spells and the occult. Maybe it was my way of feeling like I could have some control over my life.

I think that if you were to ask my sister, she would say that the cards foretold my parents’ crumbling marriage and impending divorce. Even without the cards, we could all feel the sadness.