Before we ever reached Poe Valley, summer vacation began at Ron’s Fruit Market.

That was where the week really opened.

The car felt packed to the roof, even if it probably wasn’t. Sleeping bags, clothes, coolers, towels, flashlights, a lantern, food in grocery bags, things my mother said we needed, and things my grandfather said we wouldn’t. I don’t remember every item that went into the car. I remember how the trip felt before we got there.

It felt like escape.

The regular world had been folded up and left behind. School was gone. Bedtime lost some of its power. Shoes got dirtier. Hair stayed wet longer. The clock still existed, but it no longer ran the place.

At Ron’s Fruit Market, I got my supplies.

Creepy.

Eerie.

Famous Monsters of Filmland.

Those were the magazines that mattered. Other people looked at fruit, candy, snacks, ice, or whatever else families grabbed on the way to camp.

I went looking for monsters.

The covers seemed to glow from the rack. Strange faces, haunted castles, graveyards and creatures with bad teeth and worse intentions stared back at me. Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie hosted those pages like grinning guides to the strange and awful. They promised a darker world than the one outside the car window, and I loved them for it. I could take them into the woods and let them work on my imagination for a week.

I carried them to the car like cargo that mattered, stacked on my lap for the rest of the drive. Poe Valley hadn’t even come into view yet, and the week was already good.

By the time the road bent toward Poe Valley, it narrowed and climbed; the trees closing in on both sides; the light going green and cool.

Poe Valley State Park sits in a fold of the Bald Eagle Mountains in Centre County, the kind of place that feels both close and remote.

A week at Poe Valley felt enormous when I was a kid. Seven days could stretch like a whole summer. Maybe childhood does that to time. Maybe the woods do. Maybe a campsite, once you’ve claimed it, becomes its own little country.

We would get there and start making camp. Adults knew how to do things that seemed like magic then. They could turn a bare patch of ground into a place to sleep. They knew where things went. They could make a fire behave. They could hang a lantern, and suddenly the trees had walls.

My grandfather always seemed to know which job needed done next. My mother had the practiced patience of someone trying to keep a vacation from turning into a weeklong search for whatever somebody forgot.

The tent had its own smell. Canvas, damp earth, sleeping bags, and the faint odor of last year’s campout lived in there together. At night, the tent felt huge and close at the same time. Every movement made a sound. Every zipper sounded too loud. Every shadow had a job.

In daylight, Poe Valley belonged to the lake, the woods, and the small adventures we found without anyone organizing them.

We swam. That was one of the great privileges of the week. Swimming filled the long middle hours; the water cold enough to chase the August heat out of you in about ten seconds. We stayed in until our fingers wrinkled and our eyes burned. We came out of the water hungry enough to eat almost anything. Wet towels gathered sand, grass, and dirt. Bathing suits never dried all the way. The sun did what it could. We went back in anyway.

We looked for salamanders, and that felt like serious work. You had to know where to look. You had to turn over the right rock or nose around the right damp place. A salamander seemed like a secret the earth had kept under cover. Small, slick, and ancient-looking, it gave a kid the feeling that the woods had trusted him with something.

We walked in the woods.

That sounds simple now, almost too simple to mention, but it mattered. The path could bend and make the campsite disappear. The trees closed around you. The air changed. Leaves moved above you. Twigs snapped under your feet. Somewhere, water moved over stones. You could feel brave in those woods, then less brave, then brave again because someone you loved walked nearby.

Those days needed little decoration.

A lake. A trail. A salamander. A sandwich eaten outdoors. That was plenty.

Then evening came, and everything changed.

The campfire became the center of the world.

Someone would get it going, and we would sit around it as if people had done that since the first family got tired and cold and scared of the dark.

The fire gave us light, warmth, and something to stare into. It cracked, shifted and threw sparks into the trees. It changed every face around it. Older, kinder, stranger.

We roasted marshmallows. Some people have patience for a golden marshmallow. I’m sure there’s virtue in that. I usually wanted mine finished before good sense had a chance to speak. Burnt sugar, smoke, and sticky fingers were part of the bargain. A marshmallow pulled from a stick at a campsite tasted better than anything cooked properly at home.

Then came the stories.

Ghost stories belonged to the night at Poe Valley. They needed the dark, the trees and the firelight. They needed a little wind in the leaves and a little quiet between sentences. Tell a ghost story in a living room in the middle of the afternoon, and it might limp along. At camp, it had legs.

Sometimes other campers joined us. I loved that. People who had been strangers earlier in the day drifted toward the fire, drawn by the story, the glow, or the old human need to sit near others when night filled the woods. They would stand for a minute, then sit. Someone would make room. Someone would poke the fire. Someone would lower his voice.

I had those monster magazines in my head by then. Creepy, Eerie and Famous Monsters of Filmland had already done their work. So had Uncle Creepy and Cousin Eerie.

The woods did the rest.

A branch scrape became something with claws. A bird call became a warning. A dark gap between trees became a doorway.

That was the wonder of it.

Poe Valley gave me a safe place to be scared. The adults were there. My family was there. The fire was there. Still, the night had enough mystery to make a boy sit closer and listen harder.

Family camping also had a way of making comedy out of darkness.

One night, inside the tent, my mother sat on my grandfather’s head.

I can still see the scene the way old memories show themselves, in flashes. The tent was dark. People were trying to settle in. Someone shifted. Someone reached for a place to sit. Then came the realization that my mother had sat down on the wrong spot, and the wrong spot happened to be my grandfather’s head. By the time the lantern came on, the damage was done, and the laughing had started.

There are many kinds of laughter. This was tent laughter. The kind that starts in one person and spreads because everyone knows the situation has become too ridiculous for dignity. The kind made worse because you’re trying not to wake the campground. The kind that makes sleeping bags shake.

My grandfather, I imagine, did not find it as funny in the first second as everyone else did. That only made it better. Families live on stories like that. They may forget what they had for supper. They may forget the weather. They will never forget the night someone sat on Grandpa’s head.

It doesn’t improve with age so much as it deepens, the way small moments do when they attach themselves to people you love.

That memory keeps the whole thing honest for me.

Memory can turn those vacations into a perfect postcard. Childhood lets us do that. Time sands off the rough edges. We forget the rain, the mosquitoes, the damp clothes, the arguments, the work, and the things that broke or got left behind. Maybe all of that happened. It probably did. Camping has never been as effortless as memory makes it seem.

You don’t know while you’re living it what you’ll carry thirty or forty years later. You don’t know that the magazines on your lap, the salamanders by the creek, and the sound of the fire at night are settling into you for good.

The feeling remains.

A week at Poe Valley gave us a place apart from the usual world. We had water to swim in, woods to explore, stones to turn over, stories to hear, and a fire to gather around. We had enough darkness to make the light matter.

I think now about what my mother and grandfather may have carried into those weeks that I never noticed. Adults bring worries with them even on vacation. Bills don’t vanish because a tent goes up. Work waits. Sickness waits. Life waits.

For a week, they helped build something that felt free to a child.

That is one of the quiet kindnesses of family. The adults do the hauling, packing, and worrying, and the child remembers the magic. The child remembers the fruit market. The monster magazines. The lake. The salamanders. The fire.

The child remembers laughter in the tent.

I’ve been to plenty of places since then. I’ve seen bigger water than Poe Valley. I’ve stayed in places more comfortable than a campsite. I’ve had vacations with better beds, better food and fewer mosquitoes.

Still, when someone says summer vacation, my mind goes first to that road, that stop, that week.

I see Ron’s Fruit Market. I see the magazine rack. I see those glorious monsters waiting for me.

I see Poe Valley opening up at the end of the ride.

I see us at night, gathered by the fire, faces lit orange, marshmallows turning black, ghost stories moving from person to person while the dark leaned in from the trees.

For a boy with monster magazines and a week in the woods, it was enough.

More than enough.

It was summer.