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trip has accomplished for me. It’s has gotten me out of the house and into the wide wilderness; it’s distracted me a bit, but I haven’t managed to venture very far into my internal landscape. I’m not sure I feel any better about my situation than when I set out. I suspect that when I get home I’m just going to want to pick up and leave again.
    As we ride the bus back from the wilderness to the motel for a shower, we pass the turnoff to a campground in Canyonlands National Park, where my parents are, coincidentally, vacationing this weekend. At seventy-four, my mother, who has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, is no longer backpacking, but she still sets out with my dad to find the scenery they love. I hope that when I’m her age, I will be as willing to get outside and as content to sit in the sun, accepting my limitations, contemplating the canyons. I admire that toughness in her, and that softness.

J une is lush and leafy in the Connecticut countryside, moistly warm and smelling like summer the way San Francisco never does. The minute I arrive at Wesleyan University in Middletown, I want to take off my shoes and run down a grassy hill. I want to dance outdoors to African drums, eat a steamed cheeseburger at a diner, thumb through random books in the library stacks, and walk around the cemetery drinking beer from a brown paper bag, reading old tombstone inscriptions. I want to be my college self for a while, with everything to look forward to, every possibility spread out before me, like a fat catalogue of classes.
    I’m here for my twentieth college reunion and wander around the stately campus, with its ivy and dark red bricks, 1970s-era dorms, and modern concrete arts center, which, though familiar, seems as foreign a landscape as when I first arrived from Colorado. I came here as a chubby seventeen-year-old from Littleton, wearing a blouse I’d sewn in home ec class with little pink flowers sprinkled on a western yoke, and spent most of my first year trying too hard to catch up with the fast company, prep schoolkids and punk-rock New Yorkers. I had wanted to go far from Colorado, to have a completely different experience, but I’d had no idea just how far away it would be.
    Now the recent graduates all look as if they’re about fifteen, wearing private galleries of tattoos, taking themselves very seriously, gesticulating while they speak. I remember being that earnest, drinking too many cups of coffee too late at night, smoking clove cigarettes, arguing about something very important and abstract, no doubt related to feminism, such as whether we’re all eventually headed toward androgyny or if you have to be a lesbian to really be a feminist (I remember announcing to my mother that I was a “theoretical lesbian” who just preferred sleeping with men, which didn’t much alarm her). I felt that my brain was on fire in those days, and only constant conversation and massive amounts of reading—along with a few hits of pot—would keep it stoked.
    Crossing the campus, I run across bald-headed dads and weary-looking moms who capably keep half an eye on their children while talking animatedly to other moms, women they haven’t seen since senior year. It takes me a while to realize that these nearly middle-aged people are from my class, i.e., my age. Everywhere are tidy groups of alumni in summer outfits, khakis with webbed belts, white sweaters slung around tanned shoulders. I half expected everyone to be wearing the same jeans, T-shirts, and flip-flops they wore the day after graduation, to have untamed hair and skinny midriffs, looking as if they just stepped out of dance class. Instead, they look so grown-up and responsible, so purposeful and prosperous, so paired off.
    Seeing them, I feel as if I’ve truly arrived in the heart of thestrange territory that is forty and hope these people, who seem to have figured it all out, will give me some clues. I’m among my peers, who had similar