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7-year-old boy ventures out for short-lived camping trip.

Taking in the great outdoors while camping as a kid is often that first taste of freedom and independence for kids (even if it's right in your backyard). So when blogger Rhyan Caminske (@rhyancaminske) and her husband Carl's seven-year-old son asked if he could camp out in a field all by himself, they fully supported him.

In a heartwarming video shared on Instagram, the couple (along with their daughter) escort him to the nearby field with his fully packed luggage in tow. The family does a supportive send off before hanging around in a nearby parking lot to watch him unpack and savor his freedom--before he ultimately calls it quits for the comforts of home minutes later.

"Our 7-year-old son wanted to 'camp in a field' by himself," she captioned the video, adding, "We found out he doesn’t travel light….. 🤣😂🤣."

As the start of the video, the family pulls up to the field and begin to unload the car. They share a family hug and Carl says, "See ya later, bud," before Rhyan adds, "Don't let anyone take you, okay?" Their son replies, "Got it!" before his sister also tells him, "And don't forget to use the bathroom," as she points to the nearby facilities.

As their son wheels his luggage into the field with his blanket over his shoulder, he gives his family an assuring, "You're good!" They tell him they love him, and they hop back in the car and drive off to a far corner of the parking lot to keep tabs on him.

freedom, independence, boyhood, boy, childhoodfree freedom GIFGiphy

His sister expresses concern over his safety, but they reassure her that he will be okay and not to worry. "We're not actually leaving," Carl tells her.

To their surprise, he fully leans into the experience: he lays out his blanket and unpacks his suitcase, which hilariously contains essentials like his Nintendo, his Pokémon card collection, and a night light. "Full unpack of all his stuff," Rhyan says while laughing.

And the cherry on top: he pees on a nearby tree, encompassing prime boyhood as his parents laugh hysterically. "He's truly camping. I thought he was getting nervous," Carl says. "Nope! He just had to take a piss," Rhyan adds. Once he's done doing his business, he 'shocks' his family by running over to the car and announcing: "I actually don't want to go camping," he tells them. "I want to go home." Carl walks with him into the field to pack up his stuff, and the video ends.

go home, home, leave, family, goGo Home Year GIFGiphy

The video got a rousing response from viewers, including some famous fans. Singer John Mayer commented, "That’s one special little dude who will go on to do great things in life," and Caminske replied, "@johnmayer thank you SO much 🥰 we are blown away by the positive response to this video and having others appreciate his awesomeness. 🥰"

Other commended them for the way they parented. ""Great parenting. They most likely knew he wasn’t ready for this but knew he wanted to try and they let him try. They let him make the choice. Gave him the freedom and security. And was there when he decided it wasn’t the time. Well done." Another added, "That was flawless parental execution." A final viewer wrote, "I just wanted to tell you that you guys are KILLIN it as parents!"

On February 19, 2020, a group of outdoor adventurists took a 25-day rafting trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. During the trip, they had no cell service and no contact with the outside world. When they ended they ended their journey on March 14, the man who pulled them ashore asked if they had been in touch with anyone else. When the rafters said no, the man sighed, then launched into an explanation of how the globe had been gripped by the coronavirus pandemic and everything had come to a screeching halt.

The rafters listened with bewilderment as they were told about toilet paper shortages and the NBA season being canceled and everyone being asked to stay at home. One of the river guides, who had done these kinds of off-grid excursions multiple times, said that they'd often joke about coming back to a completely different world—it had just never actually happened before.

The rafters' story was shared in the New York Times last spring, but they're not the only ones to have had such an experience.


Twitter user @thought_grime shared a mind-blowing story of a man who came extraordinarily late to the pandemic party last winter.

"I will never forget the guy who came into my work this past December with no mask on saying, 'Can somebody please tell me what's going on!!??'" they wrote. "We gave him a mask, learned that he had been living off the grid for a while, and had not yet learned that there was a global pandemic. He was so sweet and so confused and he said he only came to town because he ran out of oats."

People who live that far off the grid for that long are rare, but they exist. It's hard to imagine being that unplugged from society, but even those who disconnect even temporarily can find themselves returning to a world that's very different than the one they left, sometimes just days before.

Imagine being backwoods camping when 9/11 happened. Or when the Soviet Union fell. Imagine coming back to a world forever changed by a major event you had no idea had occurred.

It's hard to imagine now with everyone carrying internet-enabled cell phones, but even being disconnected for a matter of hours can leave a person feeling dazed and confused if they miss a major event. There were some people who didn't know their loved ones were safe after 9/11 hours after it had happened, and even some people who didn't know it had happened.

We've become accustomed to news coming to us in real- time, but it wasn't that long ago that news of only extraordinary news events warranted interrupting regular television programming. And prior to television, news came out only as fast as word of mouth and print newspapers could carry it.

These days, it's generally people who have chosen to live in isolation or those who are living someplace remote who find themselves blindsided by major world changes that they missed.

For instance, imagine what it was like for this team of science researchers studying on a remote atoll 1300 miles from Hawaii, who returned to civilization—and a raging pandemic they hadn't heard about—in December.

Isolated Science Researchers Learn of Pandemic 8 Months Inwww.youtube.com

Absolutely wild.

There are other instances of people missing out on news as well, either due to being in a coma or in prison or some other circumstance.


Living in the age of constant connectedness and instant information makes these kinds of stories all the more incredible, and perhaps ironically, also makes them more accessible to more people. The fact that some of us can miss big things due to a lack of technology, and then utilize the technology we were lacking to share that experience with millions is a sort of surreal sign of the times.

What a weird and wonderful time to be a human.

For years, 9-year-old Miriam Gaston watched her dad Shafer leave home for months at a time to serve as an officer on a submarine.

Last July, she left home for the first time herself. She was going to summer camp.

"It was sort of scary because it was my first sleepaway thing for over 24 hours, and so I was sort of freaking out," she explains.


Miriam Gaston gets her face painted at camp. Photo via Tara Gaston.

For Miriam's mom Tara, the experience of sending her child away to summer camp was both totally completely new — and distressingly familiar.

Just like when her spouse was away, Tara wouldn't see her daughter when she woke up in the morning and when she went to sleep. She wouldn't know if Miriam was sad, got in trouble, or missed home.

For eight days, her 9-year-old would be on her own.

"I had to walk away slowly," Tara recalls, of dropping Miriam off. "And I went to my car and sat there for a second. But then I drove away."

Welcome to Camp Corral.

As she headed off to the dining area to make a name tag, Miriam became one of over 3,000 military kids each year who experience a week summer camp provided free of charge for children of injured, ill, or fallen service members or veterans.

It's a group that includes Miriam's dad — who was medically discharged from the Navy after a multiple sclerosis diagnosis in 2015 — and the parents of over 90% of her fellow campers.

The Camp Corral program, established in 2010 by Golden Corral restaurants founder James Maynard and his daughter Easter, takes place at 22 partner camps across the country.

The restaurant chain provides partial funding for the camps. Organizations, including Disabled American Veterans, and individual donors provide the rest.

A Camp Corral camper climbs a ropes course. Photo via Camp Corral.

Some camps have zip lines and ropes courses. Others have rock walls or lakes for boating.

For many campers, the particular activities are less important than the bonds they form with their fellow campers who share many of their same life experiences.

"Everybody there in their cabin, everybody there in their camp, is coming from a similar situation to what they are," explains Leigh Longino, Camp Corral's chief operations officer.

Campers at Camp Corral participate in a flag retirement ceremony. Photo via Camp Corral.

While thousands of organizations support military and veterans in the United States, few exclusively serve their children.

Longino, along with her small staff and a few dozen volunteers, works to provide a safe, healing, fun environment for the thousands of kids who were "drafted" into service, especially as America's overseas conflicts continue to evolve deep into their second decade.

"We are 16 years post-9/11, and this is our population. These are children we’ve got to take care of," Longino says.

The camp gives campers, especially those who have taken on the role of caregiver to a younger sibling while an able-bodied parent takes care of a disabled one, a place to "just to be kids," Longino explains. For Miriam, that meant writing a theme song for her cabin, kayaking, decorating her bunk, and covering her counselors with oobleck.

But it was a dance that was the highlight of Miriam's week.

"Everybody was clapping and jumping, and I’m pretty sure across the lake or river or whatever, the people in the city could hear us," she says.

For military parents, particularly those who have dealt with trauma, sending a child to sleepaway camp can trigger a host of fears, which the camp works to address.

"A parent who obviously has seen their spouse go away to war and come back differently, so now you’re saying, 'You want me to send my child to camp and are they going to come back differently?'" Longino says, of the fears she hears from parents. "We say, 'They’re going to come back better.'"

That means training staff, from directors to counselors, on handling issues that can crop up among the children of wounded, ill, or fallen service members and veterans — including separation anxiety and more severe homesickness.

Photo via Camp Corral.

It also means building in time for older siblings — who frequently take on a quasi-parental role at home — to spend time and counsel their younger brothers and sisters.

Even at camp, however, older brothers, like Miriam's, who also attends Camp Corral, will still be older brothers.

"Every time I saw him, I tried to hug him, but he’d shove me off to go hang out with his friends. Typical older brother stuff," Miriam says.

Camp Corral is also designed to give parents, who have spent many months apart over the course of their relationship, valuable time to reconnect.

"With submarines, it’s not so much the distance, it’s that there’s a lot of time that you can’t talk to them," Tara says.

Tara and Shafer spent Miriam's week at camp helping their in-laws clean out their apartment and preparing to move north to Saratoga Springs. For a family in transition, the camp's lack of a price tag gave them much-needed flexibility to plan the rest of their lives together.

"At that time, we weren’t sure what our income would be, where we would be living, what’s going on. It was very helpful to be able to give them that and not have to worry," she says.

Like most kids, Miriam's last day of camp was the exact opposite of the first.

"She and her friends were hanging out, and she was like, ‘Do we have to go now?'" Tara says.

It was a decision Miriam didn't want to make.

"I was sort of torn. Because if I didn’t leave, I would probably be abandoned by everybody, and there would be storms and I would probably starve," Miriam laments. "But if I did leave, I probably wouldn’t see anybody at the camp again."

As with any camp, Camp Corral is more about about friendships than archery — and more about transforming shy campers, who have already shouldered heavier burdens than most of their peers, into independent young adults.

Photo via Camp Corral.

"A great camp can run a camp in a parking lot," Longino says.

Camp Corral is much more elaborate than a parking lot. And it's free. But it doesn't come at no cost for families like the Gastons, who, for years, sacrificed their stability, health, and childhoods in service to their country.

They've already paid for it.

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"I opened my mouth and my life fell out."

That's how Rue Mapp felt in 2009 when she first shared the idea for Outdoor Afro, a blog to reconnect African-American people with the outdoors.

"And that was a surprising moment, one of those moments where all those things that you just take for granted about who you are come into really sharp focus."


Mapp whitewater rafting. Photo via Rue Mapp, used with permission.

Before she founded Outdoor Afro, Rue Mapp came of age in the great outdoors.

She grew up in Oakland, but her family had a ranch 100 miles north of the city. Mapp grew up hunting, stargazing, fishing, and participating in Girl Scouts. Her parents raised animals, preserved food, and made wine. Her family often hosted large gatherings of friends and people from church.

"So having this thread of nature and hospitality instilled in me at a very young age has become the centerpiece of Outdoor Afro today."

Mapp rock climbing. Photo via Rue Mapp, used with permission.

In 2009, she started Outdoor Afro, a blog that soon became much more.

At first, she shared her own stories of growing up in the fresh air and how her experiences as a child and young woman shaped her in the best ways. Before long, other African-American outdoor enthusiasts started following her and chatting online. Mapp was pleasantly surprised to learn she wasn't alone.

Since then, the program has moved beyond the web to local meetups.

There are now Outdoor Afro chapters in 30 states. Each group holds open events and programs, including hikes and walks, camping trips, rock climbing, local farm tours, river rafting, and more. If it's outside, someone in the group is probably willing to give it a try.

An Outdoor Afro meetup on the water. Photo via Rue Mapp, used with permission.

The programs and trips are led by volunteer Outdoor Afro leaders.

They're not professional mountain climbers or adventure athletes; they're often professionals with a fondness for the outdoors: more community organizer than wilderness expert.

"Outdoor Afro leaders don't need to be the one that has all the gear and expertise," Mapp says. "We want people who can connect-in with other people."

Outdoor Afro leaders at a training session. Photo via Rue Mapp, used with permission.

Brittany Leavitt, an early education teacher, discovered Outdoor Afro on a blog and decided to give the group a shot and is now their D.C. leader. Stefan Moss, an environmental science professor and leader of Outdoor Afro-Atlanta joined the group to find more outdoor activities for his young family. Plus, getting outside helps him feel more connected with the world.

"Through outdoor activities I find a deeper understanding of meaning and purpose as I observe the natural order and the way in which things interact with each other," he writes in an email.

Outdoor Afro Leader Stefan Moss takes it all in. Photo via Stefan Moss, used with permission.

That's what's so powerful about Outdoor Afro. It's not just about getting outside, it's about getting outside with black people.

While everyone is welcome at Outdoor Afro events, the meetups and programs are designed by African-American people to encourage African-American people to explore together.

"In the outdoors we can celebrate our humanity and our melanin, without intimidation or judgment," Moss says.

Members meet up for a hike. Photo via Rue Mapp, used with permission.

Members can also celebrate the unique and often forgotten relationships black people have to outdoors. From the Buffalo Soldiers of the Old West to the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail in Alabama, there's world of history to take in. Leavitt planned a four-day backpacking trip through the Appalachian Trail, mirroring part of Harriet Tubman's route to freedom.

"It was really fun," Leavitt says. "We had seven outdoor leaders total, and two people who were brand new to backpacking."

Hiking the Maryland section of the Appalachian Trail. Photo via Brittany Leavitt, used with permission.

Communing with each other became especially important in the wake of violent and hurtful attacks against African-American people.

After Ferguson, Mapp braced for a long night of protests and demonstrations in her hometown of Oakland. Like many people, she felt heartbroken and wondered what she could do to "show up" for the movement. She reached out to partner organizations and launched the first of many  Healing Hikes, a chance for Outdoor Afro participants to collect their thoughts, share, and reflect together in natural spaces.

Photo via Rue Mapp, used with permission.

"The following weekend we had ... about 30 people show up in the Oakland Hills, and we started off with some yoga and some intention-setting, and we worked our way down into the Redwood Forest."

Soon the group found themselves hiking along a beautiful stream and the weight of history and purpose immediately struck Mapp.

"It was this clear epiphany that we were doing what African-Americans have always known we could do, and that's to lay down our burdens down by the riverside," Mapp says. "We were doing something that was in our DNA to do."

Finally tried out this whole selfie stick thing. #HealingHikes with #GoodPeople 💙

A photo posted by Jesstastic 😎😘✌🏾️🌟 (@missjessica2u2) on

It's easy to feel intimidated by the great outdoors, but it's important to get out anyway.

You don't have to have all the gear or all of the answers, just a willingness to follow through on your curiosity. You may already be more outdoorsy than you realize. If you grill out, garden, or walk your neighborhood, you're farther along than you think.

"If you like to walk, consider a hike at a national park. If you like to swim find the most scenic lake or beach in your area and swim there," Moss says. "Have fun, take lots of pictures and celebrate your own connection to the outdoors!"

In other words: Get outside and let your life fall out.

Go ahead, take it all in. Photo via Stefan Moss, used with permission.