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Not being eaten by bears was the number one reason to camp in an RV instead of a tent.

The number two reason, Kia saw as soon as they pulled into the campground, was that tents hate people.

And if you weren’t getting eaten alive by your own tent, camping consisted of making millions and millions of trips to your SUV while your children jumped off every dangerous thing they could find in hopes of breaking a leg, so you’d have to drive all the way back to civilization.

“Watch this,” Kia said as she eased her truck and the RV down the narrow paved road.

Campsite number twelve waited for them. An eight-point turn positioned Old Girl over the gray water drain, and the truck pointed toward the exit for whatever reason might necessitate a fast departure.

“Now we pop up the pavilion and drink a beer.”

Kia and Sullivan stepped out and stretched their legs. At the neighboring campsite, two women in rugby jerseys explained to a boy why he couldn’t use the camping mat as a raft while a girl of about the same age stole a second mat from their pile of camping supplies and raced toward the creek.

“August Chrysanthemum Lowell!” one of the women yelled when she saw the girl splash into the water.

Another pack of kids was playing a game that seemed to involve shaking cans of soda and spraying each other with Coke. Several teenagers sat on a log, earbuds in, heads down, typing frantically on their phones.

“I should probably help,” Sullivan said. “Can you get the pavilion up by yourself?”

“Sullivan.” Kia folded her arms and pretended to glare. “Out there”—she tipped her head toward the campground—“I fear everything.” She nodded at Old Girl. “Back there, I can flush the radiator, change a tire, and filter gray water. In. My. Pajamas.”

Sullivan rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.

“Okay, Miss Point Six Percent.”

“Is it sexy?” Kia asked, climbing halfway up the ladder on Old Girl’s side and hanging off casually.

“That you can filter gray water?”

“And change a tire and flush the radiator.” Kia swung herself onto the roof of the RV.

“Yes.” Sullivan looked up at Kia. “Yes. It is.” Then in a voice loud enough to reach the children, Sullivan called, “Anyone want to see a slug the size of your arm?”

One of the teenagers put down their phone. “No such thing.”

Sullivan shrugged. “Probably not, but the poisonous newts are cool.”

Two children who’d been trying to remove each other’s eyes with medieval swordplay put down their sticks.

“I heard one newt could kill seven men,” one of them said.

“I guess if seven men shared one on a sandwich,” Sullivan said.

Kia watched from the top of Old Girl, amused.

“Ewww,” one of the tweens groaned from beneath chin-length purple bangs.

“But we’re not going to eat them, because they’re so cute,” Sullivan said.

Another pack of children had gathered in Sullivan’s orbit. She explained something Kia couldn’t hear. The children’s eyes went wide.

Kia heard Sullivan say, “You want to see? Go ask whichever adult is responsible for making sure you’re not eaten by bears if you can go on a nature walk.”

“So there are bears!” Kia called out from the top of the RV.

“It’s a figure of speech.” Sullivan didn’t turn around, but Kia could hear a teasing look in her voice.

“ Making sure you’re not eaten by bears is not a figure of speech,” Kia called.

“It takes a village to keep us safe from bears,” the smallest child proclaimed in a high voice.

“That it does.” Sullivan patted the child’s blond head. “Everyone back here in ten minutes. Can you little monsters tell time?”

All the children flashed cell phones.

“I despair for you.” Sullivan threw her arm dramatically over her eyes, but a moment later the kids were back, including the sullen tweens, and Sullivan was showing them how to use the food setting on their cameras to photograph close-ups.

“Every single thing in the forest is magical. You just have to look closely enough. But remember, look with your real eyes first. There’s no filter that’s ever going to be as beautiful as this moment.”

The kids started listing filters that might contradict Sullivan’s declaration.

“Indio Glow?”

“Lo Fi?”

“Sedona?”

“Nope. Nope. Nope,” Sullivan said. They were still standing in the middle of the campground surrounded by people unpacking tents, but Sullivan held the children’s attention.

She knelt down and pulled a piece of moss so small Kia only knew it was moss because she heard Sullivan tell the children that it was.

Sullivan’s camping clothes matched everyone else’s: hiking boots in earth tones and Patagonia microfiber. But somehow Sullivan looked cooler than the other campers. She looked like she had in school: confident, cocky, profoundly in her element.

“Now look closely,” she said to the children.

“Really look. See the little stalks? Those are like moss flowers. And here, the green part, imagine you were a tiny, tiny fairy and this was your whole world. And did you know that all the trees around us talk to each other? I’m serious. Guess how they do it?”

The children guessed, and she said no to all of them but not like a stern teacher telling them they were wrong. She was a magician delighting them with the mystery.

Finally, she said, “The trees are connected by a giant, underground mushroom, it’s not like the kind you eat. It’s like the internet. Except it’s real! Let’s go see the forest.”

Kia was on the ground before Sullivan took ten steps.

“Wait, Sullivan.”

Sullivan’s smile was sunlight coming over a mountain.

“I want to hear about the giant slug.”

Apparently, there was no slug big enough to impress Oregon children.

The hand-sized yellow and black banana slugs impressed Kia, but the children all declared that they’d seen bigger.

They were still riveted as Sullivan rattled off facts about the moist, slow-moving creature covered in a slimy mucus.

Kia was too. Sullivan found one of the poisonous newts ambling across the path, the same color as the dirt, with a bright orange belly. She scooped it up.

“See how chill he is?” The newt ambled over her thumb and onto her other hand.

“He knows I’m not going to eat him. And look at his little smile.

” She knelt down and held the newt up for the smallest child to admire.

“Who wants to touch him? We don’t want to scare him, so just let him walk off your hand and onto the next person’s. ”

“But it’s poisonous,” one of the tweens pointed out, echoing Kia’s reservations.

“If you lick your hands. Who’s going to lick their hand after handling a newt?”

The children laughed. Sullivan shook a finger at each of them.

“Are you going to lick a newt? How about you?”

A hush fell around them as the children reverently let the creature walk from hand to hand. When it reached Kia, the boy with the newt held it out.

“You don’t have to,” Sullivan said.

But this might be the only chance she ever got to touch a poisonous newt in a forest with a pack of strange children and a woman who was her wife, and whom she’d been kind of in love with since she was twenty and was… really, really falling for now.

She held out her hand, waiting for the burn of poison. The newt felt cool, light but solid. It didn’t burn. It wasn’t slimy. It looked up at her with tiny gold eyes.

Sullivan went on to describe the network of fungus biologists believed passed messages between trees.

She encouraged the kids to press their thumbprints into sap oozing from a pine tree.

Everything smelled like freshness and pine.

When they returned to the campsite, the tents were up.

Grills were lit. Camp chairs were out. Phones were put away.

A few people sat around a firepit stacked and ready to go when it got dark.

“Wash your hands!” Sullivan said by way of farewell.

“I didn’t tell them half of it,” she said to Kia as they walked toward the bathroom and the soap that would save them from the fate of the legendary newt sandwich.

“When the banana slugs mate—they’re hermaphrodites—they both have a penis that comes out of the side of their heads, and sometimes if the penis gets stuck on the other one, one of them will chew it off. ”

“Ewww.” Kia sounded a lot like the tweens.

“And the newts, when they mate, they create these flotillas, like newt sex rafts. All twirled up together, so you can’t even pull them apart. Or you shouldn’t.”

“I have no desire to pull apart newt sex rafts.”

They washed their hands and wandered toward the creek. Sunlight dappled the mossy ground, and the water glittered. Kia could almost imagine splashing into it without giving a thought to what might brush past her legs or the disturbing fact that snakes could, indeed, swim.

“You’re good with them,” Kia said when they were sitting, side by side on a large boulder overlooking the creek.

Sullivan had retrieved the binoculars Kia had picked up for their trip in case they got lost at the top of a mountain and had to look for help. Sullivan said there was a blue heron on the other side of the creek, and she wanted to get a better look.

“I’m good at talking about stuff I’m interested in,” Sullivan said, raising the binoculars to her eyes.

“They were totally hooked,” Kia said. “You could have told them about dirt.”

“I think I did tell them about dirt.”

“And they loved it. You’d be a good mom.”

Sullivan handed the binoculars to Kia. She put the strap over her head.

“It’s over there.” She pointed. “I wouldn’t be a bad mom. But what kind of legacy can I leave them?”

Kia looked for the bird but saw only wet children with their dripping child-hipster mullets.

“You mean what if they didn’t keep the house?”

“I mean what if there’s no planet to leave them. No fresh air. No… snow?” Sullivan stared at the stone beneath them.

Kia let the binoculars hang heavy around her neck. She thought Sullivan might have teared up, but her expression was calm and still.