We All Travel the Milky Way Together

"An unanticipated benefit of life in the wilderness is its persistent inconveniences. Like a good joke or the best kind of love affair, the gratification is in the waiting—and not because you want to. Even the stove refused to light for coffee. And so we sat. And then we decided to have a swim. It was the kind of cold you don’t soon forget, the sort that lingers in your eyelids. // The sun slid along its celestial path, quietly filling our mountain bowl with light. Eventually, after almost an hour, the ice on the tent had been reduced to puddles. We brushed them off, repacked our bags and started walking again." A thru-hike of the John Muir Trail in California. Published in the Virginia Quarterly Review.,