As I mentioned on Friday, the track to our camp site at Forever Florida was a twenty minute trek through cow pastures and wild fields.

As we drove back to it on Saturday night, my youngest son volunteered to open and close the cow gates. After one of them, he asked if he could not get back in the car, but could run instead.

I shrugged. “Sure.”

He jumped off the dirt road and started running through the grass. We were outside cow pastures at this point, and the grass was about as high as his waist.

“Wow,” I said to his oldest brother as we drove behind him. “He’s going six miles per hour.”

“That’s pretty fast.”

“Seven,” I said.

“Look at him,” he said, pointing.

The little guy was running up and down little hills. He looked like a small boat in a green ocean, bursting through waves of grass.

“Eight,” I said. “Nine.”

“I gotta hand it to him.” High praise from an older brother.

“Ten! Ten miles an hour! He’s rocking!” I shouted.

Outside the minivan, our runner lifted his front foot high to climb up what looked like another hillock of grass. Instead of landing solid on the ground, though, his foot disappeared into the greenery. The rest of him followed, vanishing beneath the green wave.

I stopped the car.

“Where’d he go?” his older brother said.

“That was weird.” I put the car in park and started to open my door, but before I could get out, the runner stood up, red-faced from laughing so hard.

He walked back to the car. “It looked like a hill,” he said. “It really did. Look! Look at that. Doesn’t that look like a hill?”

“Yup.”

“It’s not! It’s a ditch filled with super-tall grass.”

“No way to tell,” I said.

“You were going ten miles an hour,” his older brother said.

“And that was tough running,” I added. “Real cross-country.”

He climbed into the minivan, still looking sheepish, but with more than a bit of pride mixed in.