Washington State Park over the years

Reflecting on the outdoor legacy my grandfather leaves us

The cabin my grandparents would stay in at Washington State Park

My grandpa Jim Lipsmire, my mom’s dad, passed away recently. Priya and I flew back to St. Louis for the funeral and to spend a little time with family. He died at 85, after a year and a half with advanced pancreatic cancer, far outliving the grim expectations at the time of his diagnosis. It’s clear that he had a lot to live for and wanted to enjoy as much time as he could. He spent that time with his 7 children and 16 grandchildren; going to the Fox to see musicals with my grandma and aunts and uncles (masked and vaccinated); playing with his rambunctious golden retriever; ushering at the 10 a.m. Mass at his parish of several decades; even mowing the lawn. He celebrated his 60th anniversary with my grandma. Just a week before his death, he walked down the aisle with Grandma at my cousin’s wedding and stayed long into the evening. Priya and I got to talk to him for a bit at the reception, somehow hearing each other over blaring dance music. He passed away peacefully a week later, surrounded by family.

One of the biggest legacies that my grandpa left, and one that has shaped me to an extent that’s hard to estimate, is our extended family’s annual weekend at Washington State Park. I wrote a glancing photo essay about this tradition a few months ago. I reached for photos as one way to reduce the huge scope of those experiences – the problem is that those weekends have meant many different things at different stages of my life, in a way that’s difficult to summarize. I’ve explained it as a “reunion” to friends before, but that doesn’t really explain anything, because we all saw each other often. Most of my mom’s side of the family lived around St. Louis, so minor holidays and kids’ birthdays brought the relatives together on many weekends.

I guess the most straightforward way to give a sense of these trips is the schedule. Families would arrive one by one over the course of Friday afternoon and evening as schooldays ended and soccer practices wrapped up. The park is an hour and change away from St. Louis, a drive that seemed long as a kid and pretty short now, living far away in Providence. As the exurbs of St. Louis slid past, hills of white oak and hickory rose around the highway. The park smelled of fresh autumn leaves, rust-colored soil, and woodsmoke. Each family dropped their bags in a simply furnished cabin of their own: my grandparents arranged for us to rent a block of cabins near each other on a hilltop, so that the seven families of their children formed a little temporary village for the weekend, centered around a fire ringed with camp chairs and food.

Friday evening dinner was a fixed tradition: Grandpa made hamburgers and hotdogs on a charcoal grill. Veggie burgers entered the menu as several of us got older and went meat-free. Eating quickly, the cousins kicked off games as the light waned, including a combination of tag and hide-and-seek that we think we invented, called “Gremlins.” The adults threw footballs around and talked by the campfire. We played word games that made less and less sense as the night wore on and people announced they were going to bed.

Grandpa was in his element at the park. A longtime volunteer for St. Louis County Parks, he loved spending time outdoors and encouraging young people to do so, too. When we were younger, he pointed out the difference between poison ivy and other plants, trying to demystify a fear that keeps many kids out of the woods. He’d get to make use of his countless outdoor gadgets: waterproof radios, multitools, camping lanterns and flashlights that each found a specific use on these trips. Sitting around the fire, he’d alternate between taking center-stage as storyteller and dishing out one-liners during brief lulls in the conversation. In many ways, he set the tone for the gathering, leading by example rather than making up rules.

The first year of this trip, I was the only grandchild there. Nearly every year the family grew through marriages and births, eventually to 16 grandkids. When I was very young, on one of these Friday evenings, I noticed sparkling fragments of quartz crystals lying on the side of the hill. Much of it was “smoky quartz,” translucent and shadowy like the campfire smoke. I was amazed that I could come across a crystal like this in its natural landscape, rather than something processed from a distant mine. That sparked my rock collecting craze, the first time I can remember taking an active interest in the natural world. Over the years, that’s grown into an interest in wildlife, plants, birds specifically, and a career centered around conservation. There are many other milestones in that story, but I can still point to that moment looking at rocks on a hill as my family was gathered around the campfire as a point of origin.

Saturday, the longest day, had several options. If it was still September and the day was hot, we might go to the riverbank and swim or fish. If it was October, we might take a long hike. For many years the uncles played football, until injuries piled up to the point that it became inadvisable. For several years, I was tasked with creating a scavenger hunt for the younger cousins. In my senior year of high school, I gave the clues in impenetrable rhyming triplets in the style of Dante’s Inferno, which I was reading in English class. That kept the gang busy for a while but was also very hard to write. The next year, I went back to standard pirate buried-treasure prose. As my interest in ecology deepened, I tried to put names to the birds and plants around the campsite. In recent years, my mom has started recording water quality measurements for the nearby river as a Stream Team volunteer, and we’ve helped out as her assistants.

We didn’t make a big deal of it that I can recall, but there was no Internet and little phone reception. That probably matters as context, though. We had to fill our time doing things together. The days centered around the fire rather than a TV with a football game.

We’d often stay up the latest on Saturday night, with Sunday’s return trip looming ahead and not wanting our time to end yet. Playing “Gremlins,” we’d sprint from the cover of one cabin to another, avoiding the bright circle of the campfire and passing through secret trails in the woods. Smores and other treats kept people’s blood sugar up for the long night next to the fire. As I was younger, I did a lot of listening, enjoying the unusual spectacle of a large fire and the stars.

Sunday morning, in my memory, is always cloudy, foggy, and cold. People broke out sweaters they hadn’t needed the rest of the weekend. I’d usually be up early enough to say goodbye to my grandparents as they left in time for the 10 a.m. Mass. Two people would dump a cooler of melted ice-water on the fire, and we’d clean up the picnic area as the last embers smoldered. I associate those mornings with the unpleasant return of normal life, school, homework, responsibilities.

But as I got older and time with family became more precious, I enjoyed the last morning more. I’d take a short walk around the cabins, appreciating the soft morning light and the unkempt grassy slopes shaded by post oaks and shagbark hickories. We had a couple of hours to catch up with relatives as we tidied up. As an adult, that became a gift rather than a chore.

The tradition continued during the pandemic, since it was relatively safe under the circumstances: each family in their own indoor space, interacting outdoors. Priya and I haven’t been able to go for the last couple years, though. We hope to be there in the future. Priya and I were long-distance for a couple of long stretches while we were dating and again shortly after getting married because of our work situations. Washington State Park was one of the places we were able to meet up. One year, I drove on interstates and then small rural highways to get there on Friday evening, and Priya drove from her family’s home in Peoria (the second leg of a longer trip for her.) Like the many in-laws before her and others that followed, these marathon weekends spent among the crowd of relatives helped Priya become part of the family, joining into the bigger picture. Grandpa, who used to sell medical equipment, enjoyed talking to Priya about working in healthcare, often sharing his many stories about dealing with doctors as she completed med school and began her career as a psychiatrist.

I’m grateful to my grandpa for helping create this opportunity for all of us to share weekends together. He and Grandma couldn’t have known, twenty-plus years ago, that the idea of gathering his relatively young adult children for a short stay at a state park would help lead to my interest in ecology or be an opportunity for his grandkid’s future wife to get to know the family. But when you give a gift of this size, the effects are far broader than you can predict.

During his illness, we again took cues from him as we would at the park. Rather than expressing regrets, which would have been completely understandable, he treated his remaining time as a blessing to be shared with family and friends, approaching mortality with an impressive level of acceptance and wisdom. And we, in turn, tried to make the most of our visits with him. These last months have been a little like one long Sunday morning we’ve had with him. We knew it wouldn’t last, but we made a point of enjoying every minute.