I’d stolen the phrase from a class I’d taken the year before, World Literature with Dr. Doug Thorpe, in which we’d spent a solid third of the term unpacking the nesting doll of torment that is Dante’s Inferno. He’d made much, our professor, of Inferno’s downward spiral, that to access each of the seven levels of hell the narrator had to pass his starting point again and again. As a labyrinth provides the walker with endless opportunities to reflect on a fixed point from new perspectives, so Dante saw himself through different lenses in each of hell’s concentric rings and their inhabitants. I learned to think of spiral places as those that we return to, the penciled kitchen doorframe against which we measure our growth, year after year.

“At least,” I tried to hedge, suddenly uncertain. “I remember it being cool, the last time I was there. Which was—” I paused to rewind and calculate “—um, twenty years ago.”

Twenty years is a long time to my five-year-old. To my eight-year-old. To me. I’ve lived half of my life since the last time I saw this place. I remembered some turrets, some tunnels, dark passageways and narrow windows. Beyond that, it was all a little hazy, blurred by fortresses I’ve seen since: the trenches of the Western Front, the bunkers sunk into the Italian Alps, the crumbling remains of a castle in the center of a Romanian city I’d never heard of. My kids like anyplace new, especially if a ferryboat happens to be involved, and my husband loves water and military history, so this seemed like a good idea. I just hoped that I’d remembered correctly, that it was, indeed, actually cool.

We turned off of Highway 20, the same highway I’d grown up looking across, some hundred miles east, and onto Main Street, where I spy the house that I’d followed on Zillow for some six months, a Victorian mansion freshly painted. We continue through the quaint town, past elementary and high schools, out into the green February fields of the middle of the island and on to the edge of it. A row of peeling white farmhouses declares itself to be the Fort Casey Inn, and before we know it the grand former officers’ quarters of the decommissioned Fort appear. Beyond that, row upon row of dilapidated bunkers, light brown, where I used to return twice a year for a short, meaningful season of my life.

It all looks smaller now, somehow, though that doesn’t make sense, and somehow lonely, this camp without campers on a weekend in February. As we drive past, I try to imagine what few words could capture and convey all this to my family, three people who weren’t there, but I come up short. “Oh yes, this is the place,” I say, lamely. It’s still there, as if that’s the surprise. When really the surprise is that I’m here again, and with them. Back to this place that I never really thought I’d come back to.

I didn’t mark the last time I went to Camp Casey, that summer I wrote a letter to myself. I’d gone back so often that I didn’t think about it, that this would be my last time, like Peter and Susan growing up and leaving Narnia behind. Even a spiral ends, sometimes. I wrote an angsty letter I can’t remember, then went on, out into the world to new adventures, not to return for twenty years.

Following my family through the waving grasses of Fort Casey, peering out through a rusty hole onto the shining waters of Puget Sound, for a moment I look back, over my shoulder, at the nineteen-year-old on the dunes. I’ve asked plenty of classes to write letters to their future selves, but never their past ones. I don’t know what I would say to her, or she to me, if we met today. But still, I’m glad she came here, this place of reflection and recreation, of rest, and glad I’m back here today, for all the same reasons.