November 19, 2020

Some writing in the morning, then I set out for the forest. The coats I had in the car were barely enough for the first chill of morning. Wandering the tangle of trails around Bent Creek I broke my record set earlier this week, my phone counting 11,000 steps, quite the longest hike I’ve taken since the thin blood set in. It was too long, but the complainant is not the pneumatic system, but the feet, and that because I hadn’t planned on going so long and wore the wrong shoes. Years of debility SEEM to have been largely undone in a week. I think back. . . . dumfounded. . .I was so sick I figured it couldn’t be iron deficiency, but something much worse. It wasn’t. I have lost years of vigor, and it’s nobody’s fault but mine. You think you’re being realistic, you’re putting yourself past surprise and dismay when you assume the worst. Sometimes you’re just an idiot. Down by the road I ran into AM hiking with some of her neighbors. She introduced me as “the famous writer.” The Bent Creek forest is really quite poor in animal life. Maybe too much human traffic. The path kept crossing the Bent Creek Road, upon which I strolled, remembering coming to it for the first time 37 years ago, when I looked to the trees and the river and the changing light, but also for sex. I recalled the pine alcoves and rhododendron thickets I crawled into to meet pleasure. Sat on a bench that now looks at a Liriodendron grandiflora against which I braced my back while strangers knelt on the ground in front of me. These things cannot be spoken of, not because one is ashamed, but because one cannot imagine the proper audience. But I smiled thinking of it. That, anyway, I would go back and do again.