September 4. First night in the hammock. Unexpected. An animal prowling around the hammock – or is it just ferns rubbing against it as the mat swings back and forth? Surely the animal must realize there’s a human in here and stay away. But it doesn’t. Didn’t it pay attention in animal orientation class? What kind of animal might it be? It would certainly take me a minute to get out of this cocoon. A dangerous opponent for any animal. Unexpected: contact lenses extremely awkward, difficult to remove and use with improvised lighting. Easy to lose, and I only carry one emergency lens for each side. Unexpected: How much it cools down at night. Even at midnight I think I can lie there with my jacket open, in the morning I’m completely hooded in my sleeping bag and happy to pull the hood over my head – and I’m still freezing.

How many kids do you have over there? – Four. And how many do you? – Voices at the campground, which is, strictly speaking, a patch of forest in the middle of thousands of square miles of wilderness. You can just about see the next campsite between the trees, but the voices carry a long way. Many have white, futuristic trailers with sonorous names on the front: Big Country. Cougar. Laredo. Grey Wolf. Some sites have wooden signs engraved with the names of everyone in the family. We have our hammocks and a campfire. Actually, everyone does the same thing: abandon the house for a moment and build a new one. The only thing that differs is the degree of abandonment, the level of self-imposed primitiveness. The people with the engraved wooden signs seem crazy to us, but we may seem just as crazy to them or to a homeless person.

We have a gothic canopy of leaves above us. At the very top, the leaves still stand bright green in the flat evening sun under a blank-swept sky. Thousands of square miles of such leaves in the evening sun.