Mark and I are at our favorite campsite. I’d tell you where, but it’s our secret spot that we guard jealously. We keep an eye on the reservations.gov website to see when an opening occurs, usually due to a last-minute cancellation or bad weather.

Mark came here as a little boy with his siblings and parents. They had a small pop-up camper, and their Mama would prepare real meals. I’m talking fried chicken and all the sides cooked on a hand-pumped Coleman stove, all week long while wrangling four kids. Mercy.

This campground is located in a National Forest that was established during the Great Depression to provide jobs for young, unmarried, and unemployed men. The initiative was called the Civilian Conservation Corps and was part of the New Deal under President Franklin Roosevelt. The men lived on-site, constructing roads through rugged mountainous regions, planting trees, and building campsites. Although it was hard work, it provided three meals a day, medical care, and lodging in tents. Wages were $30 a month, with a requirement to send $25 back home to their families. It gave their starving families a reset from hunger and poverty.

Mark and I are sitting here today, surrounded by trees after driving on the roads these young men constructed about 95 years ago. It is magical.

It is the perfect place for a reset.

For the past several weeks, Mark has been renovating my parents’ old house. So far, he has rebuilt part of the deck, added stairs, rewired and installed a gas stove, reworked cabinets, replaced two doors, and dug a backyard fire pit in the concrete-like Georgia clay. He added rocks and a brick wall. He has hung pictures, ceiling fans, and repaired flooring. All. By. Himself.

He is either very driven or crazy, but likely a little of both.

He has worked on the house seven days a week. The past few days, he has complained that his back hurts. I wonder why. He is only 63, after all. Snicker, snicker.

I see many similarities between Mark and the young men who built this place. Tenacious. Stubborn. Creative. Determined to finish anything he starts as soon as possible. But he ain’t 18 anymore. I try not to remind him of that much. I try not to nag. I really do try. Sometimes.

My role has involved rehoming plants from our house to the new one and providing the occasional wifey-required sammiches for my workhorse Husband. I wash his sweaty, red clay-stained clothes every day separately from my own, because red clay is surely a permanent dye, similar in strength to mustard on a white shirt or tomato sauce in a Tupperware container.

My back hurts now too, not from manual labor or from dumping nasty clothes in the washer, but because I like to stretch really hard as soon as I wake up.

I stretched and pulled a muscle in my back, while lying in bed. Yep, I’m 63 as well. Mercy. Youth is wasted on the young. I would have bungee jumped off something if I had known the body acts up this much later in life. Probably not, considering I am afraid of heights.

We needed a reset. We should be packing moving boxes or at least buying boxes to pack, but… we needed a reset.

We drove up on Memorial Day because retirees vacation during the week to avoid the weekend crowds. Rain is in the forecast all week, leading to many cancellations, so we have the campground to ourselves, except for one or two brave campers and several folks staying in tents in the primitive section. It’s called ‘primitive’ because those sites have no water or electricity, just a fairly flat gravel area for tents and a large above-ground firepit for fires and cooking. Primitive campers have to dig holes for most everything and throw trash away as soon as possible because of bears. Big, big bears with large paws and big appetites. Humans are just oversized, tasty burritos.

Thankfully, our campsite has access to water and electricity, as well as a nice, clean bathhouse. Essential, very essential. Primitive is not a consideration. Trust me.

We spent a lot of today driving and checking hourly weather forecasts and radar. But like the old US Postal Service slogan, through rain, sleet, or snow, we got here.

Reaching our campground is both incredibly beautiful and terrifying. The road winds past a lake flanked by a mix of old-money and new-money homes, built as close to the water and mountain views as possible, with zero clearance between the crumbling stone walls and the two-lane road. Zero.

Our (secret) site is right at the trailhead for three waterfalls, with the first one located next to our camper. It is stunning. But it is also misleading. So misleading. The trail starts with a gentle slope next to our waterfall, then becomes a bit steeper, followed by a complete circus of a monkey-climb.

I don’t know this for a fact because I never made it to the top. Not because the path was treacherous, but because I once saw a large snake resting on a sunny rock at the second waterfall. Nope. Nada. Ain’t happening.

I love nature from a distance, as long as it doesn’t involve falling from a high place down a rocky path into a waterfall full of snakes, crawling out of the water only to have a large bear snatch my face off because he smells ham sandwich on my breath. No. Just no.

We sit smugly outside our camper watching the hikers. We wish them well; however, there are some, despite the hike being ‘moderate’ according to the US Forest Service, who ‘ain’t gonna make it.’

One type of hiker resembles the front cover of any Patagonia catalog, showcasing thousands of dollars’ worth of newly de-tagged, fully outfitted clothing suitable for upper Maine and minus 20 degrees, along with assorted shiny gear strapped to their sides. Additionally, there’s a loaded backpack likely filled with organic granola, vegan meat sticks, and a Stanley water bottle. The waterfall trail is a mile and a half—not the Appalachian Trail—but you do you, K?

Another type of hiker is on the opposite end of the spectrum, wearing flip-flops with beach sand still caked in the crevices, a tank top, ‘running’ shorts, and carrying a cooler of something they have already been drinking. A lot.

On a past visit, we noticed a family in the parking area for the trailhead. They had small children in strollers, picnic baskets, and a huge watermelon. It seemed they hadn’t done much research about their intended destination. As Jeff Foxworthy said, ‘Here’s your sign.’

No matter, none were going to make it to the top. Maybe they would be lucky enough to get an excuse like seeing a sleeping snake on a rock.

Mark occupies himself by sneaking into the camper and playing the theme from Deliverance on the outdoor speakers. After a moment of panic, any man over forty starts laughing at the crazy old folks in the camper. Those under forty think we’re just weird hillbillies and hurry away. Both are right.

But there are no hikers today. It’s raining, and the temperature is around 50 degrees, which is freezing to Southerners. We’re bundled up in whatever clothes we can layer, and trying to figure out how to screen mirror, use a hotspot, or whatever it takes to make the black TV screen turn blue in the middle of the woods. We give up and watch an dusty DVD found at the back of a cabinet, still wrapped in plastic. I’m sitting on the bed because Mark and our breakfast griddle are taking up our tiny couch, and that’s the only other place to sit besides the toilet.

Sitting on the bed, I have a small window open so I can hear the waterfall. I have thought about this waterfall often over the past year. We had reservations back in October, during prime leaf season, but Hurricane Helene tragically impacted the area, along with the surrounding regions.

The waterfall, despite the weather and the frailty of humans, continued to flow.

Does a waterfall make a sound if no one is there to hear it?

Our campsite is situated in a valley surrounded by several mountainous hills, and the forest is dense with trees and ferns. The tree canopy reaches about 100 feet, and only by looking straight up can we see the sky. The hills and trees protect us from most of the rain as well as the summer heat.

Many of the older trees were planted by those young men during the Great Depression. I wonder if any of them imagined a future where, sheltered by the trees they had planted, two 63-year-old newlyweds would be thankful for their handiwork.

Last night, the rain held off for a few hours, and we sat outside around our campfire, turning off all the lights in our camper. Our only light came from the campfire, which wasn’t much, as the wood was sputtering and smoking from all the rain we had that day. However, we could see stars in the darkness that we couldn’t see at home, and we talked about how very small we felt in the world.

Tomorrow we will head home and won’t see many stars in the sky because of all the streetlights and brightly lit homes, but all those stars, along with many others, will still be there.

The astronomer Carl Sagan described the Earth as a “Pale Blue Dot,” based on a photograph taken by the space probe Voyager 1 in 1990. He lobbied for Voyager to turn around for the last time as it was leaving our solar system to capture the photo from 3.7 billion miles.

Astronauts experience a phenomenon known as the Overview Effect when they view Earth from space for the first time. It is characterized by an overwhelming sense of awe and an acknowledgment of how small and fragile our planet and human life are.

The Pale Blue Dot is a beautiful place for a reset.

Humans are a mess, no doubt there. But God loves us anyway. So much that he created this tiny Pale Blue Dot in the blackness of space, gave us the beauty of mountains, trees, oceans, and waterfalls. He made the Earth perfectly balanced on its axis so we have seasons and warmth and coolness. He created a thin slice of atmosphere, just enough for us to breathe and for our crops to grow. He made our bodies, miraculously to the tiniest molecule, to give birth, to heal, and to thrive. He made us perfectly designed for this planet.

Psalm 8:4 says, “What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?”

He gave us all this messy beauty to help us reset our busy minds and hurting backs for one purpose. To reset and refocus on what is truly important…Jesus, our ultimate reset.

Psalm 19:1 “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the works of His hands.”