“A Place on This Earth, Where You Can Walk Downhill into the Drift of a Cloudbank”

I prayed for a pearl-grey sky. I needed

the altitude of weather and distance

from my life. I wanted resistance

walking, to be done with the unheeded

world that begins with me….

from “A Place on This Earth, Where You Can Walk Downhill into the Drift of a Cloudbank,” by Nicholas Samaras, of West Nyack, NY (a title that is not only the longest, but the best of all the 40 pieces that will appear in Deep Wild: Writing from the Backcountry this August!)