A Splendor Wild and Terrifying

On a summer afternoon when restlessness nudged me from my vacation cabin, I hiked into the forest, taking no compass or map or GPS or cell phone, and without informing anyone, including myself, of where I was headed or when I expected to be back. About an hour later, I spotted a small stand of old-growth timber that I’d never noticed before and hurried toward it, as if to overtake the hemlocks and maples before they could flee, and then to another such stand, where again I gazed upward with the awe I usually feel when in the presence of old trees. While departing the second stand, I realized I had lost my bearings and didn’t know the direction back to my cabin. As if I were Jonah and the six million acres of Adirondack forest a leviathan that had swallowed me.