Eleven families drove up to New Spicer Meadow Reservoir for the Perseid meteor shower, and set up camp on bare granite at 6,400 feet.
The reservoir sits in a bowl of glacier polished rock, which means the campsites are slabs and the shoreline is a scramble. It also means there is almost nothing between you and the sky.
Camp went up the way it always does. People who had done it before walked over to people who had not, and the tents went up together. By late afternoon the kitchen canopy was standing and somebody had already claimed the good shade.
Days were spent in the water and on the rock. Kids swam until their lips went blue and then lay on warm granite until they were ready to do it again.
Meals were the anchor. We hauled in the food and cooked it as a group, which is less a chore than it sounds and is usually where the best conversations happen.
Then the sun went down and the actual reason we came showed up. The Milky Way came out over the tents so brightly you could read the shape of it, and the meteors came in ones and twos, and then in a rush.
People lay out on the slabs well past midnight, calling out when they saw one. Nobody was in a hurry to go to bed.
On the last morning we broke camp together, stood in a circle, and each said one thing we were taking home.
