“He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air…” – John Krakauer, Into the Wild
When my wife asked what I wanted to do for Father’s Day this past June, I told her that I needed to have a Wild Man Night, which she initially interpreted as me going to a bar and trying to seduce women, an idea she wasn’t particularly keen on. She was much more understanding when I told her that all I merely wanted to disappear into the woods and devolve into some lesser-formed creature, with no man, woman, or child within shouting distance. We explained the plan to my 5-year-old son, Conley, and he looked at me like my face had exploded. Why? he asked. Are you going to go crazy? Yes, I thought: if all went as planned, the end result would be a temporary sort of ferality.
All of this is a little silly. I’m no Bear Grylls. I couldn’t survive on a diet of squirrel hearts, rainwater, and recycled piss, nor would I ever want to. I love the outdoors, but toss me into the woods for more than a couple nights and I’d have a profoundly miserable time: starting a fire would be a Herculean task, attempting to build a shelter would expend valuable energy while accomplishing nothing, and I’d inevitably eat some poisonous thing that would turn my innards to scrapple. In short, I exhibit the existential yearning of a Chris McCandless-type figure without possessing his naive daring or phenomenal hubris: I would never wander into the Alaskan wilderness and believe that I’d have even the slightest chance of emerging alive. I know my limitations, which is why I chose a Wild Man Night, not a Wild Man Week: I can survive anything for one night, no matter how uncomfortable it may be – save, maybe, hypothermia, which wouldn’t be an issue in June, or at least I hoped it wouldn’t.
I thought back to Conley’s simple question: why? My answer, at the time, what I actually told him, was: one day, you’ll understand. To an extent, that’s true: most adults of a certain age, particularly parents, feel the occasional urge to temporarily step outside the social and emotional demands of adulthood when things become too humid and claustrophobic. This getting lost looks different to different people: for some, it might be an all-inclusive vacation on some poverty-stricken Caribbean island that cleans itself up for tourists, for others it might mean attending a cruised-based orgy (which is something you can actually do), for others, like me, it simply means escaping to an isolated place where you can pretend that humanity doesn’t exist for a predetermined amount of time. I wanted to get so far away from everything that I could theoretically strip naked without fear of crossing paths with an unsuspecting family of four. Such an isolated place was within reach: it was Goshen Wildlife Management Area.
Wildlife management areas, for the uninitiated, are essentially untamed state parks: they’re mostly used for killing things when killing those specific things are in season, but can also be used for hiking or camping, so long as you pay the day use fee and register your car; that way rescuers have a chance of finding your incompetent ass if you end up hurt, lost, or both. There are trails in wildlife management areas, but they’re primitive, not the kind of well-maintained, highly-trafficked ones you’d find in, say, Shenandoah National Park. Broadly and hyperbolically speaking, national parks are for Instagrammers and influencers, while wildlife management areas are for people who haven’t shaved in decades, enjoy killing things for sport, and feel comfortable tying a bowline knot. A wildlife management area would be a great place to bury a body then disappear into after burying said body.
I set my sights on the isolated gem at the heart of the Goshen WMA: the Meadow Ground, a sprawling 55-acre meadow that wouldn’t look out of place in a ‘90s Disney movie. This idyllic destination is briefly mentioned on the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources website, but in true WMA fashion, there are no clear directions on how to get to it, other than “it’s found near the southwestern boundary of the area.” I asked AI for directions – because why not trust an often-inaccurate non-being? – and it told me that I needed to park at the Gochenour Access Road gate (true) then walk two miles on a service road to reach the Meadow Ground (mostly false). What AI, in its infinite wisdom, forgot to mention was that the road forked three times and that there are no trail markers. I ended up taking all of the wrong forks and wandering around for almost two hours with a 30-pound backpack before I stumbled into enough cell service to open Google Maps, which I surveyed until I found an open plot of land that seemed like it had a decent shot at being a large meadow. Then I retraced my steps and took the correct fork to a trail that seemed to lead to the bald spot on the map.
I’m using the term “trail” very loosely here. There’s no question that it was a trail, but it was unclear if anyone had used it since the first Obama term. I walked face-first into a procession of spiderwebs, crawled under several large trees that had fallen across the path, and muscled through thick rhododendron branches. I was humping it straight uphill, the backpack growing heavier with each step, exhausted from futzing around like a lost golden doodle for 120 minutes. My arms were branch-scratched and my feet were blistering and thorns were lodged in my right calf, and I was leaking sweat. I had ventured into the wilderness to become a Wild Man, but in truth, I felt like just another underprepared dummy in the woods, a hopeless sentimentalist, an idiot idealist. Yet perhaps all Wild Men have a little naive idiot in them – Bear Grylls does drink his own piss, after all – so in one sense, I was merely doing what all great Wild Men before me had done. I set my mind on the wonderland that presumably awaited me at the end of the trail, envisioning cute cuddly cartoon rabbits, weightless butterflies, maybe a deer or two, and lush grass that would embrace me like I was a prodigal native. The trail was, thankfully, opening up a bit, widening and flattening out, becoming much easier to traverse. I was in the home stretch, if the little blue dot on Google Maps was to be believed. AI had tried to kill me with its sad-sack directions, but I had prevailed over its murderous intentions, as all good humans should.
___
How to say this without sounding pollyanna? There are few times in life when the expectations of a thing and the experience of that thing actually align. Watching the Meadow Ground stretch out before me was one of these rare moments. Much of it had to do with how much I’d endured just to get there, and the fact that I wasn’t sure if I’d ever even get there at all. It was quite similar to any meadow anywhere else in the Shenandoah Valley, but nevertheless, seeing a bright blue sky hanging over a field popping with green trees and golden grass rustled by an invisible breeze filled me with such joy that you would’ve thought I’d just summited Everest. It was the uncanniness of its existence, up there at roughly 3,000 feet, coupled with the fact that I’d have this bowl of natural beauty all to myself, that made me realize that this was where I’d been destined to spend my Wild Man Night ever since I’d conceived of it … which was, I think, five days beforehand. It’s been said that all good Wild Men never plan too far ahead, and I try my best to live by this maxim.
I briefly considered stripping naked, walking into the meadow, and throwing my hands towards the sky like a false prophet who’d just hallucinated the face of God. I have no doubt that this would’ve been worth it, but then I thought about the off-chance of being happened upon by a virgin-eyed family of four, and the resulting headlines in The Daily News-Record: “LOCAL FIREFIGHTER/MADMAN ARRESTED FOR INDECENT EXPOSURE IN THE DEEP WOODS.” After nixing the Going Nude Plan, I howled at the top of my lungs while fully-clothed, because I could do this without the fear of anyone, anywhere, hearing my beastly wails and wondering what kind of creature was making such a racket. I didn’t hear my echo, I didn’t hear anything except for the faint whooshing of the wind and the pleasant chirping of birds, in particular a whippoorwill, which I was able to identify by expertly decoding its signature call of whippoorwill. My legs were very tired and my back very sweaty and my mind punch-drunk with delirium; the birds made beautiful sounds. I stumbled down into the pit of the Meadow as the knee-high grass licked my skin, then I proceeded to twirl around in a wondrous stupor while the isolation settled over me like dust on the top of an old ceiling fan. I felt like a man in a snowglobe, a very small man in a very large snowglobe that had been cast out into some distant neighborhood of the universe. It did seem like I’d stumbled upon a world that was at once entirely our own yet not ours at all, like some undiscovered planet way out in the far reaches of Nothing that had the usual characteristics of Earth while also possessing some intangible feature that made it fundamentally alien. All of this might sound overwrought, like Thoreau writing about the majestic isolation of nature while essentially living in his parents’ backyard, but you’ll just have to believe me when I say that this is not hyperbole as a literary device but the way that it actually felt, almost subcutaneously, to finally reach the Meadow Ground.
___
The sun was setting and casting a rusty golden glow on the windswept fields, and though it was still warm, the temperature was starting to drop. I thought: this will be a long night. The hypothermia that I didn’t think would be an issue in June might make an appearance after all; maybe not full-blown hypothermia, it wasn’t cold enough for that, but with temperatures in the low 50s and strong gusts of wind whipping through this unprotected area, it might be far chillier than expected, even for a serious Wild Man like myself. The blanket I’d brought was back in my car, considering my original plan was to make two trips to the campsite, grabbing my pillow and blanket the second time. That was back when I foolishly believed AI’s claim that the Meadow was only two miles down a gravel road. In reality, a walk back to the car would take me roughly three hours roundtrip, straight down then straight back up, so I had to decide between getting the blanket and having to hike back in the semi-dark or enduring the long and gusty night with nothing to warm me other than a stale old rain cover that’d been left in my bookbag since the last time I’d used it, which was years ago, back when I still thought camping was fun. The decision wasn’t much of a decision at all: I’d tough it out with the rain cover as a blanket. A cold night would be uncomfortable, but infinitely better than getting lost in a dark forest and forcing rescuers to hike in and save me … while still being cold and uncomfortable, on top of being a helpless moron.
I settled into my hammock, which I’d strung between two trees about 10-feet apart, and tried to read Infinite Jest, which is something I’ve failed to do at least three times in my life – failed, I mean, to finish it, because the thing is over a thousand pages long. I’m pretty sure Wallace was a genius, but I’m also fairly certain he was batshit insane and also kind of a literary show-off who sometimes went way too deep in the weeds and used words nobody actually uses just to put his intellectual superiority on display. It’s my humble opinion that Wallace could’ve been, like, 30-percent less Wallacey and still been the greatest writer of his generation. Some of my favorite stuff ever written was written by him, some of my least favorite stuff, too, but at any rate, it takes a lot of concentration to get into any of his work, especially something as dense as Infinite Jest. If ever there was a place that lacked distractions, this was it: no cell service, no traffic noise, no five-year-old running around the house shouting about how he wants to grow up to be a horse. I thought: where better to concentrate than in a grand meadow with no one else around?
That’s when the whippoorwill started short circuiting. The bird’s call started out innocently enough, in the sense that it was just doing its normal whippoorwill thing right as evening was setting in, but it soon became clear that this whippoorwill was, like, malfunctioning. Its call was far louder than all of the other calls ricocheting across the meadow, and it was also far more frequent and had a certain crazy lilt to it, like someone was trying to stuff it into a Ninja blender. It was going whippoorWILLwhippoorWILLwhippoorWILL, and I had a sudden notion that maybe this bird was the unhinged neighbor of this neck of the woods, that all the woodland creatures on this particular street were like God damn it, there goes Bill again. Same time every night. I wish he’d move to the other side of the friggin forest. I can’t imagine that the other birds were happy about having their love calls drowned out by crazy neighbor Bill, who’s nice enough when you see him out grabbing his mail during the day, or whatever, but gets a little too deep into the cocaine at night and devolves into an insufferable madman who drives the whole neighborhood straight up a cedar.
Needless to say, I couldn’t focus on Wallace’s serpentine sentences in the presence of a coked out whippoorwill, so I laid the brick of a book on my chest and tried to relax as the sun ducked behind the mountain and the wind picked up and the temperature dropped to levels that would’ve been acceptable in October or even September, but seemed out of place – and, frankly, cruel – in June, though perhaps I should’ve expected them, given the heightened elevation of the Meadow Ground. The long dark night loomed in my psyche like a demon I had no choice but to confront. I wrapped the uncomfortable rain cover around me like a starchy cocoon and stared up at a fingernail moon hanging in the twilight sky; I knew, in some indeterminate way, that this gray sliver of rock was going to shepherd me through the night. Bill’s cocaine must’ve worn off around 9:30, because his manic bird shrieks were replaced by the ambient static creaking of various native insects that sounded like it was being produced by a white noise machine from Target. Their collective hum was pleasant and calming, a balm for an exhausted body and mind. I tried to get as comfortable as I could, which was not very, and whispered to the moon, so far up there beyond the clouds: just you and me, buddy. Just you and me.
___
When I see a moon, of any phase, hanging in the sky, I’m transported back to our former home in Western North Carolina, where we lived for almost three years on 16 acres in more or less a holler about 45 miles west of Asheville. We were 20 miles from the closest town, Waynesville, which itself only has a population of 10,000 people, many of whom are retired Floridian transplants who, for the record, can’t drive a lick. Caitlin and I were isolated out there during the height of the pandemic, with a newborn son and my mother-in-law slowly dying of a terminal illness. On warm summer nights when the moon rose above the dark ridge and hung weightless in the sky, I’d walk barefoot into the rain-plump grass of our side-yard and stare up at that hanging rock glowing like a freshly-cleaned tooth, then turn my gaze to the pasture leading into the deep dark holler as thousands of fireflies clicked on and off like tiny flashlights in an endless cave.
Sixty miles from that house, in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, there’s a spot you can go where the fireflies’ bioluminescence is synchronized; it’s such a popular thing that you have to enter a lottery just to attend, and we were lucky enough to win the very first year we threw our names into the hat. There’s a special breed of firefly out there called the Blue Ghost, which sustains a bluish-green glow for a minute at a time as it floats through the forest like a lost spectre wandering purgatory. I think of the Blue Ghost now, of the moon hanging lonesome at our old home in the holler, and it feels so long ago, like a different world altogether. My mother-in-law is dead. Our newborn is now a five-year-old who’s losing his baby fat and wants to evolve into a horse. We’ve moved out of the holler. We do, however, still enter that synchronized firefly lottery every year, but haven’t been lucky enough to win it again.
___
It was a restless night that didn’t bring much sleep: every time I’d get semi-warm and drift into a pleasant half-slumber, a gust of wind would rip through the meadow and shock me awake. I was simultaneously sweaty (on account of the tent-cover blanket) and cold (on account of the cold), which are two states of being that should never coexist. I tossed and turned and drifted in-and-out of consciousness like Dewey Cox enduring detox in Walk Hard. I kept thinking: all I have to do is make it to 4 a.m. As soon as the sun rises, I’m packing up and getting the hell out of here, to appreciate the middle-class life that I had been so eager to abandon just a few hours prior. The night probably would’ve been a complete bust except for the presence of three things: the moon (my constant companion), the chorus of chirping insects (which soothed my nervous system), and the fireflies – the beautiful, wonderful fireflies. They were a wink of solace from an otherwise downright moody Mother Nature.
After being awakened, once again, by a blast of wind at God knows what hour, I crawled out of the hammock and resolved to do some light yoga to get the blood flowing. Moving my body out there in the great dark and windy expanse, twisting from warrior one to reverse warrior to triangle pose, with thousands of fireflies blinking on-and-off around me, was a state of peak communion with the natural world. It was, perhaps, the throbbing heart at the center of the adventurer’s spirit, the exact thing a Wild Man is searching for when he sets off on a journey to the middle of nowhere – or, in my case, a nearby wildlife management area 40 minutes from home. It seemed to me that this whole excursion wasn’t about the dubious masculine ideal of dominating the natural world, but the softer, more traditionally feminine drive to appreciate the effortless art that nature so readily lays at our feet, despite its vicious underbelly. I hadn’t come all the way out here to get one over on nature, but to give myself over to it, to disperse, like a handful of ash tossed into the breeze. I was cold and sleep-deprived and tick-bitten, but I was also a part of this greater thing … we’re all a part of it, however hard we try to erect meaningless barriers with our cities and our technology and our superior attitudes. We can come out here and see the silent blinking lights and feel the lure of the Eternal any time we need to be reminded of where we came from and where we will ultimately return. “We require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable…we can never have enough of nature,” wrote Thoreau in that book about camping in his parents’ backyard.
I did get a small amount of sleep after the midnight yoga, as the hangnail moon continued to slide across the sky and the fireflies clicked on-and-off. I slept deeply enough to dream, in fact, and the dream was surprisingly vivid: I was on a tennis court, presumably at the Enfield Tennis Academy from Infinite Jest, and I stood stark-naked against a wall as 10 or so ETA recruits rifled their hottest serves at my exposed body. The balls were thwacking off various body parts and my skin was being painted with welts. Eventually I gave up and cowered in the fetal position, so pathetic and vulnerable, as green vines started colonizing the net and the fence at an unsettlingly quick pace, until the whole scene was swallowed up by this living green vegetation as I laid there like a dying old hound all covered up and breathing heavily and feeling like my world was coming to an end. This dream kept getting interrupted by the stark wind: I’d wake up, annoyed, see the fireflies, think oh, that’s beautiful, glance up at my old buddy the moon, then drift back to sleep and pick up where I left off in the viney-tennisy nightmare. This happened maybe three or four times, and each time I’d think oh no, I don’t want to go back there before losing consciousness and drifting into that other realm where I was pinned to the ground by evil fecund greenery.
___
I woke around 5 a.m. and one of the first things I did after admiring the sunlight illuminating the meadow was stuff my mouth full of roasted chickpeas and barf violently into a bush, like an animal – or a Wild Man, even. I have this problem where I eat too quickly and the food gets hung up in my throat, and I either have to tilt my chin back and breathe through my nose until it passes or stick my finger down my esophagus and throw it all back up. It’s not good: my 70-year-old father-in-law has the same issue, and watching him struggle with it is kind of like gazing at the Ghost of Christmas Future. It’s more likely to happen if the food is dry and I haven’t drank any water, obviously, and it happens more often than I care to admit. The most frustrating thing is that I could easily avoid it if I would just SLOW DOWN AND CHEW MY FOOD LIKE AN ADULT. Yet I make the same mistake, over-and-over again, because I get ravenously hungry and just chomp through whatever’s in front of me like some kind of feral hyena on the African plain and before I know it there’s a plug of mush lodged in my throat and I start to panic, thinking: Jesus Christ, will I ever learn? This happens to me multiple times per week, sometimes multiple times per day, and it’s so stupid in its preventability. I noticed the vocal return of Bill the whippoorwill as I was down there on all fours, heaving. Bill was just as loud as the night before, but his tone seemed calmer, like he’d gotten a good night’s sleep and was more at peace with his surroundings. Good for Bill, I thought, as I yacked into the brush.
My original plan, which I’d made the day before the wilderness had destroyed me, was to hang out in the Meadow until late morning, soaking in all the wonderful ephemeral shit the natural world has to offer before heading back into civilization to put a tidy little coda on my Wild Man Night. I abandoned this plan as soon as the vomiting subsided. I was cold and tired, and nothing felt more appealing than returning to my very middle-class life in my very middle-class house. In short, I wanted to get the hell out of there. The hike down was nearly as difficult as the hike up, but at least this time I knew where I headed: at one point, I flushed a turkey from a treetop and the violent whoosh of his large wings spooked me so terribly that I nearly collapsed; later, a small root snaking across the path tripped me up and I tumbled face-first into a creek, causing the straps to fly out of my backpack and smack me in the back of the head. Nature, it seemed, wasn’t going to allow me to escape the woods without reminding me that it was my Complete Daddy.
___
I barged through the side door of my house at 8:30 a.m. and my wife, Caitlin, was making a bagel in the kitchen. She looked shocked, like I was some kind of haggard vagrant who’d just broken into the house. I worried, briefly, that she might instinctively stab me with a fork. What are you doing home this early? she asked And what happened to you out there? I wasn’t sure, and I couldn’t really put it into words, as I stumbled brutishly around the kitchen, making an espresso in a tiny little cup and admiring the pleasant humbleness of our middle class abode. I thought back to what my son had asked before I’d left: are you going to go crazy? My appearance in the kitchen that morning was all the evidence needed to know that the answer was yes. Temporary ferality had been achieved, for better or worse. I told my wife about the cold whipping wind, the fireflies, the coked-out whippoorwill. Do you think maybe, just maybe, the bird freaking out because you were sleeping too close to its nest? No, I hadn’t thought of that. That poor mama bird was probably having a panic attack because some giant human had wandered into its space and was endangering its chicks. I had to concede that she was probably right, as she usually is, more often than I like to admit. Then I told her about how Gemini had led me astray, about how it had gotten me into a dangerous kerfuffle out there in the forest. It was trying to kill you! she said. I confirmed that this was true, but also that I had prevailed, like all good humans should, against the tyrannical overly-confident sycophancy of artificial intelligence. Fuck robots, I thought.
I took a shower, which was a sweet shower, indeed, and pulled about 15 ticks off of me, including several that had sought refuge in the thick brush of my hair. I’d be pulling ticks off me for the next week. I found three crawling on the seat of my Hyundai sedan as I was driving several days later, and proceeded to crush them between my fingernails and flick them out the window, down onto the sizzling asphalt below. I exited the shower with a towel wrapped around my waist, feeling like a new(ish) man, off-handedly mentioning to Caitlin that I’d pulled, like, 200 ticks off of me while I was in there. The color drained from her face as if I’d just told that I actually had spent the night attempting to seduce women at a local bar. She instinctively, aggressively, ripped off my towel and shoved me onto the bed, hollering about how she needed to inspect every inch of my body. Her mind was set on crevasses, on places rarely seen. I was on my back in bed like an overturned sea crab, soft-belly up, trying to fight her off with wild flailing kicks, when Conley appeared in the doorway, a look of worry on his face. What are you doing? I shouted at Caitlin. Stop! This can’t be a core mention for him. That snapped her out of her tick-hunting trance. She apologized to Conley for scaring him, and explained that she was merely trying to save me from a life of Lyme Disease and/or never being able to eat red meat again. Then we repaired with a big family hug, after I was fully-clothed and deemed to be near-enough tick-free.
___
Now, I fear, it is time for overwrought, Thoreau-like reflection: What had it all been for? Why had I chosen, on a rare night of freedom from parental responsibilities, to suffer alone in the horrible wilderness? I could’ve spent the day at the Homestead Spa in Bath County, pampering myself with free nuts and extended soaks in the warm springs. Why didn’t I? Why had I jettisoned self-care to punish myself alone in the wild? Is this what men most desire down in their conflicted core: not comfort or security from the brutal realities of nature, but the opportunity to tear off the shackles of responsibility and, for a brief flicker, live like their ancient Wild Man ancestors, to tap into something eternal and immense and true…even if their bellies have gone flabby from living in the Chick-fil-A comfort of middle-class America, even if they have no idea, really, what in the hell they’re doing, even if bumping uglies with the natural world is harsh and uncomfortable and not what one would traditionally classify as “fun” – or perhaps especially because of these reasons? Is what modern man needs, down in his soft little core, a sense of happiness that’s derived not from 401ks and wealth accumulation and security everywhere all of the time, but instead from challenge, from living on the fringe of social acceptability, from going naked (metaphorically speaking, maybe) into the wet and unpredictable world, not knowing with any degree of certainty that he’ll make it out alive?
Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps I’m only feeling this way because my son is starting to lose his baby fat and grow into a little man – not, it should be noted, a horse. Perhaps I’m having what amounts to some kind of stupid mid-life crisis. I think McCandless’ instincts were right, but his approach was way off: you can’t just wander into the Alaskan wilderness without an ounce of formal survival training and expect that instinct will kick in and things will magically end well for you. The self-delusion inherent in that decision is mind-boggling. There’s something to be said about losing one’s self in the world, but also something to be said about investments and 401Ks – perhaps the trick, the true test of middle age, is striking a Buddha-like balance between the two: going feral every once in awhile while also having some money in the bank, a secure-enough future, a house to barge into at eight a.m. and scare the hell out of your beautiful bagel-making wife.
If nothing else was gained from this dumb little adventure, it’s a renewed appreciation for shelter: I understand now why humans all those millenia ago decided that it was a good idea to get out of the elements, though they couldn’t have possibly known that taking that first small, practical step to erect a barrier between themselves and the natural world would lead to where we are today: obsessed with staring into little plastic screens, chronically air-conditioned, expecting frictionless comfort at every turn. I can’t even sleep well unless the thermostat is set to 68: not 70, not even 69, but 68. I definitely can’t sleep well when the temperature is in the lower 50s and the wind is ripping and I’m swaying back and forth inside of a hammock in the middle of a naked meadow. It was a rough night, yes, and I couldn’t wait to get out of there, but reflecting on it now, I see myself working my way through yoga poses in the dead of night, total darkness surrounding me inside the eternal yawn of a wide open Nothing, and the thousands of fireflies, too, and I think: how can I get back out there?
___
There’s a brief quote from Infinite Jest, which I swear I’m going to finish this time, that goes: If enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. A similar thing can be said about the pregnant silence of nature: if you’re quiet enough, you can hear the faint whisper of the eternal Godhead rising off the mud and the ferns and the flowers. It’s not easy to hear, and you have to be so still and hushed that you start to forget that you exist – like, as a self – but once you’ve heard it, it’s as if a lover is whispering into your ear about the veiled machinations of the cosmos. It’s as hard to unhear as it is to make out that first time, what with the shrieks of panic-stricken mama birds and your repetitive thoughts distracting from the basic truth of what’s right in front of you: the world as it’s been for a very long time, and will continue to be for longer than any of us can imagine. Even after our ashes are tossed into the universal breeze, the fireflies will continue their inevitable flickerings in a distant, familiar holler, but there will be no eyes left to enjoy the show, and no lips left to call it as such.
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