In the Boy Scouts I was a member of the Order of the Arrow. When someone asks me what it was I tell them it was an ‘elite camping squadron.’ I don’t quite recall what it was, but membership required participation in an ‘ordeal,’ which, among a vow of silence and manual labor, consisted of sleeping out under the stars with no food, water, or tent by yourself where ever you were instructed to sleep. In retrospect… not much of an ordeal at all. When I went camping just west of Cherokee in the Smokies I believe I finally earned my status in the squadron. My bright idea to backpack in away from the RVs and rabble for a quiet night in the woods backfired when the fabled black bears of the area took an interest in our site. Miles away from anyone, we spent the night dead still and silent, mentally rehearsing our primal screams inside our tent and listening to the creatures shuffle and gallop around, intermittently grunting and groaning and sniffing. My hand never left my camp shovel. At one point one of the beasts trotted around and fell silent in a thicket near the tent where I was sure it lay in wait. The first bird song of the morning was beautiful and unzipping the tent fly to see a blank forest gave me pause to revalue my life. We got the fuck out of there shortly after sunrise and decided to check out the coffeehouse we had seen driving through Cherokee the previous morning.

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I have roots in New England but they are that: roots (buried and distant). I sense an affinity for the region or at least some historical connection that is either received or misapplied. One thing I have never felt about the region is ownership. It takes me very little time to feel like I have my feelers into a place, a geographic confidence, and some sort of observational baseline from which to string out analogies and sort memories. New England has always been a place that others have given to me but I still have never reined in. So on my second visit ever to Connecticut my aimless experiences were stolen by the obligations of a family wedding and the first words spoken to me on the trip: “We haven’t seen you since you got sick with the flu in our attic room (the other time I had been in Connecticut).”

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