My neighbor Julie gave us two baby American chestnut trees. They were adorably small, just twigs, each with a few tiny branches. And they were special, bred to be resistant to the blight that killed the great chestnut forests of the eastern United States. The American chestnut was said to be the perfect tree: strong, straight-grained, huge, and a prolific bearer of a tasty, highly nutritious nut. By the early 1900s an Asian blight had arrived in our eastern forests. Within 40 years it destroyed the native chestnut as a commercial species.

But now we had two, and the blight wouldn’t kill them! Unfortunately, something else well might. We selected a spot for them in our new yard, carefully planted them, and surrounded them with chicken wire fencing to keep deer from nibbling their little lives away. One succumbed anyway, just up and died for no obvious reason.

The second hung on.

“More coffee?”

            The waitress, a round, pleasant woman, was a bit bee-like as she reached in, reached out, and backed away to regard our table. She had a thick country twang and beautiful coloring: jet-black hair and café-con-leche skin. When she tipped the coffeepot to refill my cup, I noticed a thin tracing of ink along the inside of her wrist, a garland folded gracefully back on itself to form an elongated figure eight. An infinity sign. Each loop was adorned with tiny figures, but I couldn’t tell what they were.

            I sat up in my chair.

Katahdin: A Native word meaning, roughly, biggest mountain; a place to be dreamed of; a destination to be earned.

         Mount Katahdin: At 5,269 feet it’s a middling peak by world standards. But it’s the highest by far in these parts, and a Maine icon. Simply getting a reservation to climb it is something of a triumph.

         As the centerpiece of Baxter State Park, Katahdin is ascended by hundreds of hikers each summer, all of whom must negotiate the park’s reservation system before setting foot on any of the steep, rocky, sometimes manageable, sometimes heartbreaking trails—every one of which passes through a piece of the wildest country in the East. Two years ago I tried and failed to get a camping and hiking reservation. Last year I snagged one but had to cancel when my hiking partner (Jeff) injured himself while sailing. And so a few weeks ago when we finally shouldered our backpacks and hit the trail under the bluest of skies, our spirits were soaring.

The rumble of the mower was slow to reach the house. The man at the wheel had begun by cutting the far end of the field and looping toward the back, mostly out of earshot. This wasn’t nefarious, just a sensible path for carving through the tall grasses across the road from us— in a field that was harboring bobolinks, a flashy, noisy, black-and-white-and-tan bird that nests on the ground. 
             He had made one pass around the front field and was completing a second when the rumble of the machinery caught my attention. I glanced at the calendar: June 28th. The bobolinks would be at the peak of their nesting cycle.
             Those fields, part of a state Wildlife Management Area, usually weren’t mowed before August.
            I slipped on my shoes and went out to investigate. Maybe it was something else. Maybe I was mistaken. But no: There he was, finishing a second circle around the field’s perimeter with a tractor towing a bush hog. 
             He had passed the end of our driveway half a minute earlier. I bolted down the road, running as fast as I could, barely gaining on him but gaining. He couldn’t hear my shouts. I got close enough for him to see me and waved my arms. “Hey! Please stop.”

One spring day nearly twenty years ago, I found myself in front of a class of bored eighth grade students, scrambling for whatever key I could turn to ignite their imaginations. I had walked into their school that morning with the assumption that I could easily run this class—that I could quickly engage these kids and get them thinking about their home landscapes: the places nearby that they considered special, and how those places affected their lives. Ha!

            Early that morning I had slung a backpack full of papers and books into my car for the hour-drive from our home on Roanoke Island, over two bridges and three islands, past fields of rolling dunes and glimpses of blue-green surf, to the Cape Hatteras School, grades K through 12. I was teaching in the school that week through a visiting writers’ program sponsored by the state of North Carolina.

Normally I loved this kind of assignment.  It gave me a chance to connect with young people—to spark a little creativity even in students to whom the idea of creative thought seemed utterly foreign. But for the previous few years I’d been teaching workshops with college students and adults. I was (I realized belatedly) badly out of practice working with students this young.

The assignment I’d given them had always worked well in the past: Write a few paragraphs about your favorite place in the world. Maybe it’s somewhere you can comfortably be alone. Or maybe it’s where you hang out with friends. What’s special about that particular place? How does it make you feel? I stood in front of the class trying to hide my deer-in-the-headlights surprise that my request was falling so flat.

I changed tacks and asked the students how many of them planned to leave Hatteras Island after high school. Twelve hands shot into the air. “I don’t know where I’m going,” one boy volunteered, “but it’s outta here!”