I’m walking down a snow-covered, two-track road with the gray-blue skies overhead catching my eye as the sunlight peeks through briefly and touches down across the forested landscape.

The ice glazed over the bare branches on the trees begins to glisten and shimmer in the sunlight. The air is cool and refreshing as I take deep breaths and keep walking.

I’ve been out here for a while now. I passed an ice- and snow-covered beaver pond, with its waist-high, yellow autumn marsh grasses adorned in bonnets of white-lace snow.

No open water there anywhere. The road soon takes me under the frosted boughs of king white pines and later, jack cedars and queen hemlocks.

The road bent uphill and the tree types around me shift to northern hardwoods. This place used to be one my dad would frequent on grouse hunts each fall.

Since all those years ago, my dad has died, and the grouse he pursued did too.

My dad died from Alzheimer’s disease, which oddly stole his recollection of simple things, like his love for coffee drinking, but left intact smaller details, like his bowling average from the 1950s.

In his last days, he no longer recognized me by name, and many other details of who he was were missing from his mind.

As I walk, I wonder whether in those times he still thought about this place, or dozens of others where he used to fish or hunt or drive or walk.

If so, that’s beautiful.

If not, it’s deeply disappointing.

I want to believe that he could recall his times outdoors with his own dad, with me and the rest of my family, and alone.

I miss him so much, and I miss those simpler times when I was a kid.

In those olden times for us, our comings and goings were almost always dictated to us, at least in a general sense – we had to be home in time for supper, and we had to be in the house by dark.

I remember not being able to wait to become an adult so I could stay out as long as I wanted to fish, play football in the backyard or anything else I wanted to do.

It’s a drag to realize that even adults can have limitations on how long they stay out or what they get to do. More so, to understand that a lot of those restrictions are self-imposed seems like the biggest head fake imaginable.

Walking down this road, I wonder what my limitations truly are, how many have I self-imposed and how many of them I have the power to remove by simply ignoring them or by reciting a different narrative to myself.

If I had thought about the possibility of spending the night in the woods before I left the house, I could have prepared better by letting my wife know my plan or letting my boss know I would be taking a vacation day tomorrow.

Now, because I hate the disruption of a cellphone and didn’t bring one with me, I have no choice but to return home tonight. I guess I could go all the way back home to let folks know I’ve changed my plans, then turn around and come all the way back out here.

Just thinking about all of this is producing a big string-ball of anxiety knotting up in my chest. The stress immediately detracts from the time I do have to spend in this peaceful wild setting.

So, I decide to push aside the idea of changing my plans, and I will go home tonight, making sure to arrive before dark so as not to worry anyone.

The idea of figuring out when to turn around to be sure I could make it back on time is something that was sometimes hard as a kid.

Being late for supper would mean we would come in the back door to avoid having to pass by my dad, and if we were really lucky, my mom.

I’ve walked at least a couple of miles so far, but I keep moving forward. I don’t know what I am looking for, but I will know it when I find it.

Sometimes, I am waiting for nature to teach me something or show me something or to let me witness some kind of natural event I am not used to seeing.

Other times, I base how long I stay on internal factors, like how long it takes to unwind the stresses and anxieties I brought with me to nature from the other parts of my life.

Today is one of those kinds of days. I know this road like I remember how to tie my shoes, but walking out here in the late afternoon, partly cloudy daylight, I feel disheveled, tired and a bit lost.

I feel like I am riding on the tip of a compass needle that is going around and around, with so many of the things I’m seeing in that “other” world, I’ve seen before.

But the tightness of my chest, that I felt as I headed out from the Jeep, went away somewhere back by the beaver pond. The farther I walk, the lighter my feet feel, and I sense that my posture has improved.

So, I keep walking and talking with myself while I continue to commune with nature.

Outwardly, I am silent, except for the sound of my feet crunching in the snow with each footstep. Inwardly, I am effervescing and conversing, bubbling up and reordering all kinds of things, resorting in efforts to improve the conditions.

I see fresh deer tracks on the road.

It looks like a doe was out for a walk.

I wonder if she was thinking while she was walking, doing some ruminating of her own?

I want to keep walking, maybe all the way up to the north-south gravel road?

But that’s probably at least another couple of miles ahead of me.

The position of the sun in the sky tells me I don’t have enough time for that if I am going to make it back home by nightfall.

Instead, I decide to stop walking.

I find a fallen stump to sit down on, and I take more deep breaths of the wintry air.

A black-capped chickadee lands on a branch a few feet away and starts chickadeedeing to me, likely asking if I have brought any food to share.

Sorry.

I lie back on the log and stretch my back out.

All I hear is a soft swishing of the wind through the trees.

I really think I could lay here like this for weeks, maybe months.

I am worn tired.

This log feels good.

To be alone feels safer.

The way the world is spinning so fast and deliberate these days – dizzy, choking and coughing – it seems like the spool is set to come off the spindle.

All hands, on deck.

Women and children first.

The ocean waves slapped together with a mighty splash.

The sea then reformed and laid flat, except the rolling waves that kept time to a dirge for the dead and dying.

Oh, it was sad when that great ship went down.