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introspection, but not necessarily for happiness.
    As a teen-ager, I never traveled by myself in the woods or mountains. I went with John William. What we liked best was to walk where there were no roads or trails for as many days as possible, or to walk in country little visited and unmentioned in guidebooks, like the drainage of Depot Creek, northeast of Mount Redoubt, or the valley of Luna Creek on the north side of the Picket Range—those were the places we sought. A lot of hikers like off-trail travel where they can see across open slopes into the distance, but our preference was for forests without spacious views, for “the deep and gloomy wood” that made Wordsworth mushy above Tintern Abbey. I followed John William into this terrain—I followed him because he wanted to go—and gradually I came to like dark forests, too, forests no one went to because, in essence, nothing was there, no lake to camp at or mountain to climb, just trees and a lot of them, so that wherever you went it looked like all the rest: woods in all directions in an unbroken density, and no points of reference. A premium is placed on orienteering where the grid of things is all the same, so my journals from that era are full of terse waypoints we could follow in reverse, though the objects I listed had little to distinguish them—“pecker damaged snag (216),” “rootwad (221),” etc. It wasn’t exactly my calling to navigate, but from anxiety I navigated anyway until it became a pleasure, this sort of knowing where I was at all times, to a fault and neurotically. I didn’t want to be lost, and rigorously took bearings at every turn, never losing sight of what was behind us without noting something abreast or just ahead—though in the end I did get lost, along with John William and a boy named Pete Jenkins.
    To really understand “lost” in this context, you have to understand the North Cascades, which in ’73 was the largest roadless wilderness in the lower forty-eight—and not even that gets to the sense of being lost there, since the border between the U.S. and Canada is meaningless to anybody wandering without a map in this region. You have to throw in the contiguous roadless area in Canada, too, and then the wilderness of our confusion jumps from 3 million to 8.5 million acres, or 13,281 square miles, which is about like Massachusetts and Connecticut put together, or larger than Belgium. Granted, some of that was above timberline, but a region as large as New Jersey was “primeval American forest,” a terrain that by ’73 had become, for the most part, a history-class concept, even though it wasn’t all gone yet.
    Now I’m in my garret—my older son’s former bedroom—with a map out as a goad to memory. It’s a U.S. Geographical Survey Map prepared by the Army Map Service, in ’55, so there’s no North Cascades Highway and no North Cascades National Park; the place we got lost in was then called the “North Cascade Primitive Area,” which means no one knew much about it; that’s why we went there. We also went because of Pete Jenkins’ interest in getting into the country Kerouac had celebrated from his fire lookout on Desolation Peak during the summer of ’56—Pete, the Lakeside linebacker who liked the Beats; Pete, who appeared to have footballs in his calves as I walked behind him in the woods up there; Pete, who read Kerouac’s Desolation Angels three times during our escapade while tightly cinched in his sleeping bag. Pete’s father had been to Everest as an expedition physician, and Pete himself had climbed, with his dad, his uncle, and a mountaineering celebrity whose name I forget, in the Himalayas and Patagonia. Like John William, he couldn’t quite arrange enough personal disarray to dispel his birthright, and, like John William, he had with him good gear and that air of intrepidness certain upper-class adventurers bring to the woods. To me he looked like Jethro from The Beverly Hillbillies —if