I grew up in the woods and spent a week every summer at an environmental education camp, trawling my ponding net through the muck in search of diving beetles and tadpoles and dissecting the occasional owl pellet.

At fifteen I spent three weeks in Maine backpacking and rock climbing with Outward Bound, which taught me that hiking stops being terrible after about two weeks, and that your hair starts to clean itself (!) after about the same about of time. It was in the final days of that trip, scrambling south through the field of boulders known as Mahoosuc Notch, that we encountered an extremely thin and haggard-looking man walking very, very slowly in the opposite direction. He told us he’d walked all the way from Georgia, and our little minds were blown.

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