I went for more walks when fall arrived. One day the sparrows were flitting through the high grasses and the leaves were orange and crisp and would crunch if you were to close your fingers around them. At midday the shadows ran long beside the low sun. The end-of-summer creek in some places was not a creek at all, and the dry path stirred dust into my shoes; by the time I returned I had to shake them out.

I have come to this trail for eight years. I know where it curves and climbs, that there are three bridges crossing a seasonal stream, and what that stream looks like in all seasons. Most often they are a procession of smooth riverbed rocks with very little water running around their sides, eroded and edgeless after all their time out here.

Even in the dry season there is life. Once, horrified, I pulled a live hummingbird from the bullseye of a spiderweb it had flown into and had became stuck. I’ve found frogs beside the water and rediscovered the water striders that can walk across it. I hadn’t thought about them since I was small, but being out here always brings me back to other times. Life reflects life. This is sometimes the reason I visit; other times I need to look at things that are far away: hilltops and mountains and far-flung clouds if there are any that day. Sometimes I just need exercise. There is nothing complex about that.

One day while walking down in the valley I climbed up a nearby hill wanting to know what was at the top, and after the steep ascent and catching my breath, I found only more hills beyond that. A ho-hum finish line. But a person needs to satisfy curiosity where they can and never knows where there might be surprises, which you can find anywhere so long as you expect to find them.

I remember the few times I’ve brought friends with me to this path, but I usually come alone as it’s hard to coordinate gatherings and I’ve never been a patient person when I’ve gotten my mind set on doing a thing right here and right now. I imagine there are others like me who enjoy nature but might have no one to go with, and then they don’t venture out because they don’t like doing life alone. Many people become bored alone. It took me some time to absorb this, since I am always finding little adventures and joys wherever I stand and enjoy dreaming about what else might be out there; as a result I am rarely bored when I am by myself.

And perhaps not everyone grasps the importance of escaping to somewhere they can wander long distances without disruption from our modern world – all the surprises that you didn’t know came along with adulthood until you were wading through them. There is nothing to wade through out here. When I am out here wandering, if the day is not too hot, it is easy to feel that everything important is here and everything else is sawdust.


*

Now it is February. I sit writing at my bedroom window. The wind blows the tree outside in a gray scene that makes me think of Seattle, although I left twelve years ago. I reminisce about it from time to time in the way some people talk about family they aren’t close to anymore, babies they almost had, or relationships that seemed okay at first but left you bruised and so you left, never quite reaping the benefits you’d expected. But as much as a person can pack up and move from one place to the next, we cannot leave our stories behind like shoes or jackets if we decide they don’t fit us anymore; they follow, sometimes sleeping but occasionally shouting, wherever we go. We drown them out with new and better stories, and perhaps good food and books and sports and new people, until one day we can finally look back and can see the good parts.

*

Here I am in California, steadily growing older which is the one thing we all have in common. For a while I didn’t know what to think of all of it, but today I think that I am lucky. My proof is all the books on my shelves that I have loved and the sunflower seeds I set out for the birds in the yard and my dusty shoes showing that I have been places: a favorite canyon trail, a waterfront path from where I watch the bay, and if you can believe it a pasture out east where sometimes I’ll stand among cows and their calves and then come home as if nothing happened and for all anyone knows I have just been out running errands.

I once went to new places to escape old places, to replace whatever it is I thought I lost, the way some people use new lovers to replace old lovers. Unlike people, nature is neutral; your feet in their worn shoes may ache, but the sky and the river rocks and the hills with more hills beyond them will never hurt you on the inside. The natural world is a church of wonders, its healing balm is that we all belong to it – almost a religion. The simple sparrows in their grasses, the wonder at what might lie over the next hill – almost answered prayers.