A Walk in the Woods

The other day, in the northwest corner of Connecticut, I stepped out for a walk. I was not sure where I was, in any exact way, from the moment I stepped off the main road and turned onto an unfamiliar street.

It was early afternoon, and the March sun was unseasonably warm. I kept trudging into nothing but dubious my sense of direction, thinking that at the very least, if I stuck to a paved road, I probably wouldn’t get shot for trespassing, or mistaken for a deer.

After some scenic twists and turns, edged by woods and fields and rushing streams, I felt correctly oriented, and after a mile or so, was vindicated by a sighting of the spire of the town church. Past the rambling nineteenth-century inn, past the weeping angels in the cemetery Charlie loves to poop in, and I’m back home. In the distance, birds sing, and a dog barks. Green nubs poke through the dead brown scruff in our garden.

I am still trying to figure out why there’s pretty much nothing that makes me happier than a meander while indulging the absurdly remote possibility that I’ll get lost. Maybe because it mixes my two favorite states of being: feeling alive, and knowing I’m safe.