First comes the Cape Cod walk. Past the private beach, past the houses, out to the bluff below the scraggly scrub oaks and toward the cluster of rocks where the cormorants gather. How many times have my feet padded along this sandy path? Hundreds, I think, until I do a little math, and realize the answer is thousands. Thousands of times, then. Occasionally as a child, often as teenager, daily as a young confused man fresh out of college, and then again for six years after the return from Colorado with my new wife.

I would like to say I was loyal to the Cape walk when I headed west at thirty, that I pined for it. This would not be true. In Colorado I daily hiked a squiggly red line, heading straight up into the mountains—leading from the room I rented in the blue gingerbread cabin in Eldorado Springs, the hippie / biker / rock climber town where I’d landed—up into the sandstone flatirons that shot up in the sky like a ripple in the land’s carpet after the thousands of miles of flatness called the plains. Swifts carved the sky overhead. I stared at the nearly fluorescent lichen that glowed on the rocks hanging above me, stopped to splash my face with the cold creek water, crushed sage like smelling salts, and inhaled an odor that reminded me this was a whole new place.

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