Henry and I walk in the woods. Sometimes on our portion of the Appalachian Trail (coordinate points 41.61993, -73.65205/41.58979, -73.65908 if you care to join us). Sometimes in the deep woods which surround our home and adjoin the Trail. Uncultivated and privately owned, these woods lack paths other than what’s left of an old logging road. Brimming with life they’re empty of humanity. Partly these woods are aboriginal – forbidding glacial gullies and peaks; the rest have reverted to woodland since the mid-nineteenth century, when railroads rejiggered the economics of dairy farming. Dilapidated stone walls recall cows with their bells.

                  Our wildwood walks challenge these old bones: straining up steeps, bushwhacking prickles, fording rivulets. One day, not distant, they will be too much for me. Sometimes, stumbling, I feel for the smartphone in my pocket, which I’ve brought along just in case. It’s hard to vanish in today’s wireless world, even if one wants to.

                  Henry encounters no difficulties, only delight, zigzagging, sniffing, as avidly curious as a college freshman in a long-ago college library. Existence is so vast if you let it be! Mostly practicality and trepidation blinder us to our stretch of a trampled path. Making one’s way, who has time for wonder? Why risk lostness? Think – we might never be found!

                  The woods astound in all seasons. Except for a combustion engine somewhere – in the sky, on a road, a neighbor’s chainsaw – we are alone. Absence of silence is among the saddest privations of our epoch. My entire awareness I have sucked from silence. Now every ear is jammed with diverting noise. Listening you can’t think – or cultivate the companionship of solitude. From earliest boyhood on, alone in the woods with my dog I got to know myself, hearing what I might have to say.

                  Our course is never the same. Clock and sloth dictate our time. I get lazier as I age. I love our walk but I ache a little and hanker to get back to my books. More and more, as my days dwindle, “time off” spooks me. “Off” means not writing – or readying myself to write. This is insane, I concede, but an insanity that spares me more dangerous ideas. The world hardly needs my words, but if it does not, what’s my worth, why bother? I overhear myself negotiating with myself – another fifteen minutes or cut it short? For Henry, no walk is too long.

                  Silence, scenery, solitude suffuse me with syllables. I don’t really understand this process. Words trickle into me as into a reservoir that requires constant draining. It’s not so much that I have something to say as that I have to say something. My words discover their topic as they disgorge. When they stall, sleep is called for. One day this trickle will cease unless I do first, which is what I hope for.

                  The woods are always new, Henry and I agree. The vegetation is different, the streams’ urgency, sky, weather, sun-slant, all. Jagged boulders remember tribal boys with their soft shoes. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” wrote Henry’s namesake, my bro, Thoreau. That seems true – so is the corollary also? If we deplete our wilderness, do we lose the world?                        

                  Each day, the security of these untidied acres is threatened by human improvements – houses, roads, trails, engines. One day the considerate owners of this ruggedness – or their heirs – might sell and that will be that. The mystery of our origins will be lost to excavators and commerce.

                  Blessed am I to have passed a lifetime strolling deep woods with a curious dog.