From the archive. This piece first ran in Issue 6, April 2026, when most of you hadn't found us yet.

My daughter Julia invited me. That still feels like the right way to say it. Not that we planned a trip or that I pushed for it, but that she invited me. There’s a difference.

We had talked about traveling together for years. Just the two of us. It kept not happening. Then Julia made it happen. Peru. Four nights along the Madre de Dios River at a reserve in the Amazon where she had worked one summer during college. I said yes immediately.

She came home from that summer different. I could see it. She tried to explain it and I tried to understand it, but I didn’t really. Some things don’t come through over the phone. Now I was going to be there.

We went through Lima and Cusco first, mountains and ruins and cities, all of it interesting, but I knew that wasn’t why we were there. The rainforest was why we were there. I just didn’t know yet what I was going to find.

In the Forest

She knew the forest. That was the first thing I noticed. She spotted things before the guides pointed them out. She knew which sounds to pay attention to and which ones to ignore. She talked to people in Spanish I didn’t know she had. At one point I thought, I don’t actually know what my daughter is capable of. Which is a funny thing to realize. She’s my daughter. But there it was.

That’s what you miss, the years after eighteen. Not the big things, you hear about those. The smaller stuff. What they’ve gotten good at. What they’ve stopped being afraid of. Who they’ve become when you’re not around to watch it happen. I was watching it here, which was something.

The reserve was not comfortable. Two narrow beds, cold water, no electricity, heat that didn’t quit. Everything was damp all the time. Julia didn’t notice any of it, or if she did she didn’t say so. I noticed all of it.

That Evening

One evening after dinner we ended up at a table in the main lodge with a couple we had gotten to know over the days. A British doctor who worked on cruise ships, his German wife. They had been everywhere, lived in a handful of countries, raised kids while moving around. No fixed home, not really. They talked about it easily, like it was just a fact about their lives.

I kept thinking about Julia. She had done the opposite of these two. She had come to one place and stayed long enough for it to get into her. I thought about what it meant that she brought me here specifically. Not to Cusco, not to Lima. Here.

It was dark past the edge of the light and loud in the way the forest is always loud at night, all of it unidentifiable. Nobody was looking at a phone. There wasn’t anything else competing for your attention. You just sat there.

What She Was Showing Me

I remember noticing at some point how relaxed Julia was. Just sitting there, comfortable. That was probably the moment. I can’t point to anything that was said because I don’t think anything was. It was just her, at ease, in a place that had known her longer than I had recently.

She wasn’t showing me Peru. She was showing me herself.

Debbie Perelman is a Nomadic Spirit reader. She lives in Cleveland with her husband and travels often.