It was in late August that I first felt the happy dizziness of seasons spinning, doubling back and oddly moving ahead at the same time. There, topping the list of my Sierra campmates, was Nan, senior prefect to the 9th grade girls who’d be trekking together for five days (six, if you throw in the day of intense preparation on campus). Three years back, almost to the day, Nan had herself been in my charge, an ebullient spirit and competent outdoors-girl raring to march into the wilderness with her classmates and her prefect, Emily. Now, it would be she setting the tone and the pace, essentially a colleague to me.

Then there was the sense of redux in the greeting at Golden Trout, three or so miles from the trailhead where the bus had dropped us: wilderness stewards Cam Spaulding and Nick Tranmer welcomed us to camp, and in their warm hugs, I remembered them as boys, classmates from the Class of 1992  for whom  I’d signed letters of Admission when they were thirteen. Coming-of-age writ large–and bearded, to boot.

And how did these two instances of “circling around” converge to form a third? This way: When it was time for camp chores, NanCamFam (our group’s name, from the camouflage bandanas we all sported) landed the most aromatic of all the possible duties: cleaning out and around the Pee-goda and the Poo Palace, Golden Trout’s “specialty” outhouses. Nick was there to instruct–and, soon enough, to marvel with me at the way the girls set to their task: squealing, laughing, joking, then getting the job done, bandanas pulled up over their noses.

“Captive on a carousel of time”? Not so, at least for me. Rather, the cycling seasons deliver me to ever-wider friendships, deeper laughter, higher mountains–and the surety that I’m where I was meant to be.