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I’m running low on water again (not to mention food) with only a few cubies left, and since my exact termination date is still unknown I figure I’d better make one last water run. I could get caught up here for a few days in a sudden blizzard and have to wait out the storm before the packer arrives. It’s happened to other lookouts, though never to me. So one more time I hoist an empty cubie and packframe on my back and head down the hill. As usual, I need to get out of the cabin anyway to once more dispel the ennui that has accumulated over the course of the day. I find that walking is the best way to rejuvenate my spirits and awaken my senses to the world around me. I’ve always been a walker, perhaps due to the fact that I come from a family of walkers. My mother and father loved to walk around our small town niched in the Pennsylvania hills, talking with townsfolk, checking out others’ homes and gardens, and to take walks along the coal and slate-ridden roads through the woods behind our house, before the strip mines obliterated them. So I followed their example. When I reached sixteen I was in no hurry to get my driver’s license — I preferred to walk (though my high school sweetheart eventually convinced me that a car was a good thing to have). Once I moved to Philadelphia to attend college, I lived off-campus in the center of the city, happy to have left my car behind, taking the subway or trolley to school, and every night after dinner returning to my apartment I would walk back and forth along Pine and Chestnut and Spruce streets, from Independence Mall to Rittenhouse Square, pondering the books I was reading in classes, life in the city, the beautiful girls in classes I was too shy to talk to — all the while politely declining the of17 . the habit of walking fers of the many men who asked me to visit their apartments. Philadelphia, City of Brotherly Love! And of course hiking in the woods and mountains of the Appalachians in places like Glen Onoko Falls, near Jim Thorpe, where I once saw three rattlesnakes on a single hike during an unbelievably hot, sticky, summer day, as I was making my way up the trail past the three separate terraces over which waterfalls tumble in increasingly dramatic fashion, smelling the snakes’ split-cucumber scent before spotting them slither away. Then on to the Pacific Northwest and all those epic hikes in the Cascades — the Three Sisters, Goat Rocks, Indian Heaven, the Olympics, North Cascades. As well as regular city saunters in Portland, city of Roses: enduring the constant rain, walking the gauntlet of bums along Burnside Avenue, sampling the treats of Chinatown, Frankenstein’s, Produce Row, Elephant & Castle, The Streudel House, Forest Park. That interminably gray, cloud-shrouded, drizzly, conifer-darkened landscape! Followed by the northern Rockies of Idaho and many epic climbs and hikes, from the Selkirks to the Seven Devils to the Sawtooths. On to northern California: walks along College and Telegraph avenues in Berkeley, Market and Montgomery streets in San Francisco, hikes on the trails of the East Bay Hills, Point Reyes, climbs in the mighty Sierra skying out at nearly fifteen thousand feet! Finally, Midwestern exile, Iowa and Minnesota, the sweeping skies, the expansive prairies and lakes, the claustrophobic North Woods. In my life I have walked many landscapes. And hope to walk many more. I think of my favorite section of Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: I tramp a perpetual journey, (come listen all!) My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods, No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair, I have no chair, no church, no philosophy, I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange, But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooking you round the waist, My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road. Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself. It is not far, it is within reach, Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know, Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land. h a b i t...

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