Embracing Spring Break in the South

Chapter 15 of my work-in-progress camping memoir

Our campsite in Daisy State Park, Arkansas, March 2018. Photo by Sarah Styf

I started working on a camping memoir five years ago but abandoned it after a year of detailed work because the time just wasn’t right. Now I am ready to get back to the work I started and turn it into a true memoir of the first 21 years of marriage and parenting. If you want to get regular updates on this project, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

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For nearly our entire lives, the ideal spring break had meant an escape from the cold north, a chance to put aside the ice and snow and freezing temperatures that had plagued us for months, in search of sunshine, swimming, and shorts weather. While my spring break trips to the southern US had been rare for most of my life, I loved those few times after we got married when Jeff and I joined his family for a week of fun in the sun with his family in Florida.

A move to southeast Texas meant that we no longer had to escape the cold for our spring break. With a week off from school in mid-March, we were at the start of weather that frequently reached into the 80s. But the kids and I still had a week off from school, which mean that Jeff and I spent nearly every year that we lived in Texas looking for a new southern location for camping.

The first spring after we moved to Houston, we made reservations in Louisiana, ready to knock the state off of both our camping map and our personal states list. No one in the family had ever been to Louisiana before, so it would be a first for all four of us.

But then we learned how spring rains can impact the entire Gulf coast region. We were a month away from the Tax Day floods that would paralyze the Houston area for a couple of days, but Louisiana had already been hit by heavy spring rains that had closed down towns and roads all over the state, and that included I-10, the very interstate that we needed to take to get to the state park we had reserved. We made the tough call to cancel our reservation and then Jeff got online to find a campsite, any campsite that would still be open during the week the majority of Texas schools were out for Spring Break. We finally found a single site available at Sandy Creek Park, a US Army Corp of Engineers campground near Jasper, Texas.

We didn’t let the change in location ruin our plans for our short trip. We camped only a few miles from Martin Dies Jr. State Park, so we spent two days up the road visiting the state park. Our kids attended a ranger talk on butterflies and created colorful rubbings of fish fossils during a separate art activity at the nature center. We hiked along the trails that skirt B.A. Steinhagen Reservoir, crossed bridges, and watched as both of our kids looked for animal tracks and the different bugs that they could find along the trails. The beautiful escape took us out of the range of cell service, cutting us off from the stuff that often distracted us from each other.

But the kids wouldn’t let me forget that I had promised them a trip to a new state and I didn’t forget that one of my reasons for traveling to Louisiana had been a trip to a new National Park. So I convinced Jeff to get back into the truck for a day trip to Cane River Creole National Historic Site. Shortly after we crossed the border, we finally understood why I-10 had been closed. We drove past flooded rivers, homes, and roads. We were only a few miles from our destination when we realized that the road the GPS was taking us on was completely covered with water that was too high for our F150 to drive through. We turned around and found another route.

Jeff looked at me. “I sure hope you haven’t had us drive all this way for a wild goose chase. There is nothing out there.”

“The website said that it’s open. We’ll find it.” But if I was being honest, I really didn’t know what we were going to find when we got to the end of the route.

What we found was an eye-opening trip back into time.

The visitor’s center is actually the original general store at the Oakland Plantation. The main house was under renovation and the ranger offered a lot of apologies to us as we walked around the porch and the inside of the house, but the main house wasn’t the main purpose of the trip, and it’s not the memory that stuck with us.

Jeff and I were both northern raised, and our knowledge of southern history was limited to what we learned in history classes or from our own reading.  And as we learned on our trip to Gettysburg and so many other places through our childhoods and adulthoods, sometimes just learning about something isn’t enough. Until I have actually been somewhere and seen the remnants of the history myself, my understanding of the event is incomplete. This was clearly the case as we walked around the plantation grounds.

At the general store we learned the history of plantations post-Reconstruction. It’s one thing to be told that former slaves turned to sharecropping on the plantations they had worked for free. It’s another thing entirely to realize that “freedom” didn’t mean that they were allowed to leave the plantations to pursue their own interests. It wasn’t just that they had to promise a portion of their profits to the landowners (a business practice in and of itself that I had always believed was seriously problematic) but they had to buy all of their goods from the plantation general store and pay the prices set by the plantation owner.

A few years before the trip I had read Ernest Gaines’ book A Gathering of Old Men for one of my graduate classes. I devoured the eye-opening glimpse into life in some pockets of the deep south in the 1970s, over 100 years after the abolition of slavery. But I couldn’t picture it. I couldn’t picture the slave cabins turned sharecropper homes. I couldn’t picture the community that remained. I couldn’t picture the life that people stuck in the sharecropping cycle lived.

Suddenly I understood, and as we walked around the grounds of the Oakland and Magnolia Plantations, we tried to help our own children understand the significance of the historical footsteps they were walking in. That particular national historic site is off of the beaten path, and we never would have made a trip just to visit there. But because we were camping and it was close enough for a day trip, we did it. It wasn’t the first or the last time that camping would give us the opportunity to see places and do things that we normally wouldn’t do. As we drove back to the campground for dinner and a campfire, I was thankful that we had made the decision to find a place to camp for our spring break, regardless of the last-minute change in plans. 

Two years later we decided on another quick spring break camping trip. This time we needed to give Arkansas a fair chance.

No matter where I travel in the United States, if I make a trip enough times, certain states become my nemesis. I went to college in Nebraska and my parents and Jeff lived in Michigan. Every time I traveled home, I had to drive through Iowa. For four years I made the trek back and forth between eastern Nebraska and Michigan more times than I wish to count, and during that time Iowa became my nemesis. I got my first speeding ticket in Iowa. I narrowly escaped being stuck on the interstate in the great spring break blizzard of 1998 while racing through Iowa. And a couple of years after graduation, when Jeff and I were four hours away from ending our trip from Indiana to Yellowstone and back, we lost a tire in Iowa.

I don’t care what Field of Dreams says, Iowa isn’t heaven.

And in the years we lived Texas, Arkansas initially became our new nemesis. The primary path from southeast Texas up to Indiana and Michigan, where much of our family still resides, is straight through the heart of Arkansas. On our first trip back to Michigan after our big move, we discovered that there are few places to stop between Little Rock and the Missouri border. We were tired, hungry, and we needed to stretch, but no matter how hard we looked, there was no location that could handle a stop with our camper. When we crossed the Missouri border, our excitement over the welcome center sign quickly dissipated when we discovered that we had to wait another 20 miles to get to the promised rest stop. We were so relieved to be out of the truck and stretching our legs that we let our guard down just enough to allow then five-year-old Ethan to cross monkey bars that were far too tall for him, resulting in slipped fingers, a fall, and three days later the discovery of a broken wrist.

And despite the claims of the Arkansas welcome center, we hadn’t seen much evidence of the beautiful landscapes and plentiful outdoor recreation that the state park system offered. Our only camping experience in the state had been roadside campgrounds with minimal offerings for a family with small children traveling through.

But as spring break 2018 loomed in the distance, I had to decide what we were going to do to get away. Our previous spring break had been spent flying back to Michigan for a friend’s wedding, so we were hungry for another spring break camping trip, but it needed to be short because Jeff couldn’t take an entire week off from work. In southeast Texas, Arkansas is “close,” and I decided it was time to give the Arkansas state parks a try. Besides, if we found a camping spot close to Hot Springs National Park, we could knock another national park off of our list.