The Summer We Found the Nautilus
There are seasons of life that, when you look back on them, you can hardly believe you lived through them.
And then there are the seasons you remember not because they were easy, but because you somehow found a way to make them beautiful anyway.
For us, one of those seasons was the summer we were homeless.
We were living in tents, and while there was certainly nothing glamorous about it, I made a decision that summer: I didn’t want my kids to remember it only as the summer we didn’t have a home.
I wanted them to remember the adventures.
So on the weekends, we started looking for things to do. We searched for places to explore, things to see, and experiences we could turn into memories. We couldn’t spend a lot of money, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t have fun.
And that’s how we found the USS Nautilus.
The USS Nautilus (SSN-571) is no ordinary submarine. It was the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine and became famous for something even bigger: on August 3, 1958, it became the first submarine to complete a submerged transit of the North Pole.
Think about that for a moment.
A submarine built in the 1950s was designed to go places submarines had never gone before. Nuclear power allowed the Nautilus to remain submerged for extraordinarily long periods, opening possibilities that had previously been out of reach.
And there we were, years later, climbing aboard this incredible piece of history with our kids.
At the time, I don’t think I fully appreciated the symbolism of it.
We were in a season where life felt uncertain. We didn’t have a traditional home. We were figuring things out day by day. There were plenty of reasons to feel discouraged.
But instead of letting that season define us by what we didn’t have, we started asking a different question:
What can we experience with what we do have?
We had each other.
We had weekends.
We had curiosity.
And we had the willingness to turn an unconventional summer into an adventure.
Even my daughter came along for this one. She hadn’t been doing the tent camping part of our summer with us, but she joined us for the adventure, which made the memory even more special.
I remember how exciting it was to explore the submarine together. There is something about stepping inside a real submarine that immediately makes history feel different. It’s no longer just something you read about in a book. You’re walking through the tiny spaces. You’re seeing where people worked and lived. You’re imagining what it must have been like to spend days beneath the surface.
And this wasn’t just any submarine.
The Nautilus was commissioned in 1954, decommissioned in 1980, and eventually preserved as a museum ship. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1982 and opened to the public in Groton, Connecticut, in 1986 as part of the Submarine Force Library and Museum.
Today, visitors can actually tour portions of the historic submarine.
But for us, it wasn’t just a museum.
It was one of our summer adventures.
That’s the thing about difficult seasons: sometimes the story you tell yourself while you’re living through them isn’t the story you’ll tell years later.
At the time, we could have looked at that summer and said, We were homeless.
Instead, we eventually got to say:
Remember that summer we lived in tents and went exploring?
Remember the places we found?
Remember the things we did?
Remember the USS Nautilus?
That distinction matters.
Because our children don’t necessarily need us to create a perfect childhood for them. They need us to help them find meaning in the imperfect one.
We couldn’t give our kids everything that summer.
But we could give them experiences.
We could give them stories.
We could give them laughter.
We could give them the feeling that even when life didn’t look the way we expected it to, there were still places to go, things to discover, and memories waiting to be made.
And maybe that’s one of the lessons that season taught me that I still carry today.
You don’t always get to choose the circumstances of your life. But sometimes you get to choose what you do with them.
We could have spent that summer focused on everything we lacked.
Instead, we went looking for what we could find.
A submarine that had once ventured beneath the Arctic ice and crossed the top of the world became, for our family, part of a very different kind of journey.
Our journey through a season of uncertainty.
Our journey toward something better.
And our journey toward memories that, surprisingly, still make me smile.
When I think back on that summer now, I don’t want to erase the hard parts. They were real. Being homeless was hard. Living in tents wasn’t always comfortable. There were undoubtedly moments of stress, fear, and uncertainty.
But that wasn’t the whole story.
There was also adventure.
There was exploration.
There were weekends together.
There were kids discovering new things.
There was my daughter joining us for one of those adventures.
And there was a family finding ways to make something good out of something that could have easily become a very painful chapter.
Sometimes life gives us a chapter we never would have chosen.
Maybe the goal isn’t always to pretend the chapter is wonderful.
Maybe it’s to look for the little pieces of wonder that exist inside it.
For us, one of those pieces was a submarine in Groton, Connecticut.
And all these years later, I don’t remember that day because we were homeless.
I remember it because we were together, we were exploring, and for a little while, we were just a family having an adventure.
And honestly?
That’s the part of that summer I want my kids to remember.
Located at: 1 Crystal Lake Rd, Groton, CT 06340
