We drove into the forest on a skinny paved road, 
a regrowth of not-quite-wilderness, all the trees 
young and slim, rising in the age of the internet 
like the son who had chosen this time to stay home, 
he’d seen it before, we stopped at the site of a 
long-ago visit and turned off the engine.

And everything was silent but for birdsong and
the creak of timber, the fall of a walnut husked 
in green and tumbling down the slope, it came 
to rest in the place where once my companions 
had pitched their tent with their son, young 
and willing then, happy to bathe in the lake,

to poke at tree roots with a lichen-covered stick,
to listen to the chitter of squirrels, and when the 
rains came late into the night, they woke together 
and listened in three-part reverie until a torrent 
poured down the slope behind them and swept 
the last of the sleep away.

They broke camp in the dark and found their way
to the shelter house a quarter mile back along 
the skinny paved road, all soaked and sodden, 
without dry tinder for a breakfast fire, they 
shared the last of a box of Teddy grahams and 
waited for the sun to rise and the sky to clear.

And when it did they drove the last miles to the 
Indiana hamlet with the day-long festival and
dried out to the sound of fiddle and banjo and 
three-part harmony, awake and alive in that 
long-ago time when a young boy felt at home 
in the world, and would dance alongside them 
like no one was watching.