I’m writing from a charming yet empty campground in Glacier National Park. It’s been 30 days on the road. 30 days and nights of outdoor activity in sub 40 temps and sleeping amongst wild animals. It’s amazing how the cold can whittle your energy reserves, day by day. I picked up the flu, and now perform the zombie shuffle quite well. After a certain time sleeping outdoors, you start to meld with all you hear, see, and smell. I am no longer a marketplace robot, head buried in a smartphone between strip malls and office parks and red-faced people in traffic. There is something out here in this mountain range, something else entirely, a fleeting thing out of the corner of your eye in an aspen patch. It’s a playful thing that tries to pull you in deeper, into the core of nature. All you have to do is promise to stay a little longer, and more wonders will reveal themselves. But it will not last, sadly. I can feel that other thing, the strip mall-tollway-concrete thing tugging at me even now in this million acre park. And soon I will have no choice but to turn my back on that aspen patch. We can never be a bear. But damn it, we can try.

A black bear in the cliffs of Glacier National Park.