Illustration by Harry Tennant
When I was a kid, my dad and grandfather would wake me before dawn and whisk me off to bodies of water I was too young to locate on a map. In their company, I floated rivers in canoes and explored lakes in bass boats. Often, we’d get home just before bedtime, unpacking stories along with the gear stored in mud-splattered trucks. But when I turned 12, they decided that I was old enough to go on a camping trip: two nights on Lake James.
North Carolina’s Lake James is dotted with small, wooded islands. Not long after the idea of a camping trip was suggested, we headed to an island my grandfather knew well and set up tents on a small beach. As we worked, my grandfather told me that the island belonged to our family. He called it my inheritance.
He was a tall-tale teller, my grandfather. But, to this day, I hold fast to the way that he—a man who had never broken eggs in a kitchen—cooked a full breakfast on the shoreline of that island. At some point during the trip, he gave me a pole very different from the fiberglass ones he usually placed in my hands. It was made of cane. It didn’t have a complicated reel. And my guardians let me wander off with it on my own.
There’s no way to know how long I spent with that cane pole in hand, traversing the edges of the island, alone with my preteen thoughts. But I still remember the weight of mysterious things pulling on the other end of my pole. I remember a sailboat passing. It was the first of its kind that I’d ever seen up close—and when wind caught in its billowing sails, I imagined all the places a boat like that might take me.
The experience imprinted. I can still conjure light glinting off the lake, the lapping of water. I felt at home, even though I knew my family had no real claim to the island. My grandfather was many things, but he was no real estate mogul.
In the decades since that camping trip to Lake James, I’ve spent nights in deserts and rainforests. I’ve swam with sharks on the Great Barrier Reef, watched wildebeest migrate through the Serengeti. I’ve seen the Northern Lights. I’ve ridden schooners and boats of all kinds. A myriad of influences led me to those places and experiences. But when I try to trace my love of outdoor travel back to its origins, my memory often lands on that lakeside beach, eggs sizzling on a camp stove, cane pole held high, my beloved elders giving me just enough freedom so that they might be able to reach me quickly if I called. Childhood fishing trips gave me a thirst for adventures large and small. And my time on Lake James taught me that, even if we don’t hold deed to any islands, the natural world belongs to us all.
Leigh Ann Henion is the New York Times bestselling author of Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark and Phenomenal. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Smithsonian, Garden & Gun, Men’s Journal, Backpacker, and a variety of other publications. She is a former Alicia Patterson Fellow, and her work has been supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Henion lives in Boone, North Carolina.
This article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of Southbound.
