Up the Mountain in a Windstorm with John Muir

At dusk this Halloween past, under a waxing gibbous moon, in a gale that bent the trees like rabbis at prayer, the forest is haunted not with spirits but with the mad wind. I head out from the crude shack in the mountains that my mother built five decades ago – my mother who now is so debilitated by arthritis and old age she can barely walk. (Death stalks her, and she evades, oh so slowly.)