I went out into the woods behind the amphitheater in Chief Logan State Park yesterday and took a short hike on a trail I remember from my past, an obscure one until now, thanks to a new sign by the main road announcing its presence. Along its path were cabins and bridges, and even more direct evidence of humans, in the form of actual people camping out in actual tents, sitting solitary by fires and talking in small groups, wearing vaguely evangelistic t-shirts and eyeing me with the usual mix of friendliness, curiosity, surprise, and skepticism that I always see reflected in the eyes of the people I meet here.

On the way back I stopped to clamber across the remnants of a huge tree that had uprooted itself and fallen across a creek. I wanted to sit comfortably in the midst of everything and contemplate my life at the moment and the way it felt intersected with the scenery.

The tree was huge for these forests' standards, but all the trees here come across a little skinny and young compared to the moss-covered giants I've seen on the Olympic Peninsula. Also, I am persistently reminded of the Blair Witch Story when in these eastern woods. But mostly the setting impressed me with its beauty, serenity, complexity (all those leaves! rustling together to the same gust of wind!) and sanctity—somehow I am always reminded of a cathedral when I am surrounded by a canopy of trees.

My perch was comfortable but it was alive with a layer of small moving things. I notice this morning that I have picked up several nasty bug bites, and I am blaming them on my stay on this log. It was worth it, as long as the wounds heal in the usual manner. But as much as I should have expected it, I did not, because I have become accustomed to the absence of such provocations in Seattle, where there seem to be no true seasons, no true bugs, and no true community, all of which combine to remove something of the challenge, and the sweetness, from life.

It makes one want to devote oneself to travel. In some parts of the world, red, itchy welts on the skin as a result of sitting practically bare-assed in a skirt on a tree in the middle of the forest are not, in fact, inevitable. What other kinds of injury and pain might one be able to forget about, which seem to be so inevitably a part of human experience, but which might turn out to be simply a geographic peculiarity?