Books first, once the sandman had departed and we were all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, Then breakfast a the pancake house, followed by strenuous fun at Doctor's Park. And then the parents came home.

Hard frost overnight, followed by a beautiful late autumn day.

From the book The Path by Chet Raymo:

In my daily rambles along the path, I have been inspired by a famous observer of the Irish landscape, the early-twentieth-century naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger, who walked over all of Ireland "with reverent feet," he said, eschewing motor transport, "stopping often, watching closely, listening carefully." And although I have aspired to Praeger's pedal reverence, I know I have fallen short. Another thirty-seven years walking my path would not do it justice. The contemporary writer and cartographer Tim Robinson, another close observer of the Irish landscape, defines something he calls the "adequate step," a step worthy of the landscape it traverses. The adequate step takes note of geology, biology, myths, history, and politics, says Robinson in Stonesof Aran. It also includes the consciousness of the walker. And even all of that, he states, is not enough. No step, or series of steps, can ever be fully adequate. "To forget the dimensions of the step is to forgo our honor as human beings," he writes, "but an awareness of them equal to the involuted complexities under foot at any given moment would be a crushing backload to carry."

A crushing backload, indeed: fiddlehead ferns, downy woodpecker, pickerel, granite flake, Canada mayflower, moonrise, bluebirds, spring peepers, monarch butterflies, glacial scratches on bedrock, and, of course, the human history of my path, which in its transformations over the centuries encapsulates in many surprising ways the history of our nation and of our fickle love affair with the natural world. Step by step, year by year, the landscape I traversed became deeper, richer, more multidimensional, always overflowing the mind that sought to contain it. Ultimately, almost without my willing it, the path became more than a walk, more than an education, more than a life; it became thePath, a Tao (Way), a thread that ties one human life and the universe together.

A weed plucked at the side of the path might have found its way to the New World in a seventeenth-century sailing ship. Scratches on a rocky ledge evoke colossal mountain-building events on the other side of the world millions of years ago that modified the planet's climate and caused glaciers to creep across New England. The oxygen atoms I suck into my lungs were forged in stars that lived and died long before the Earth was born. It is something of a cliché to say that everything is connected to everything else, but when you know one place well — not just intellectually but with the deep-gut knowledge that enters through the soles of your feet — connections just keep popping up. A character in Anne Michaels's novel Fugitive Pieces says: "If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another." Having learned to know and love my path in all of its local abundance, the light-years and the eons no longer seem quite so forbidding, tropical rain forests and droughty deserts seem not so far away. A minute lived attentively can contain a millennium; an adequate step can span the planet.