ANTHONY DOERR
Am
I
Still Here?
Looking for validation in a wired world
I
harbor a dark twin inside. He’s a sun-starved, ropy
bastard and he lives somewhere north of my heart. Every day
he gets a little stronger. He’s a weed, he’s a creeper; he’s a
series of thickening wires inside my skull.
Call him Z. I like weather; Z survives in spite of it. I like skiing; Z likes sur>ng the web. I like looking at trees; Z likes reading news feeds. I pull weeds in the garden; Z whispers in my ear
about climate change, nuclear proliferation, ballooning health-insurance premiums.
Last week I ?ew into central Idaho on a ten-seat Britten-Norman Islander to spend >ve days in the wilderness. The
plane’s engines throbbed exactly like a heartbeat. The sky was a
depthless blue. Little white clouds were reefed on the horizon.
Slowly, steadily, the airplane pulled us farther and farther from
the gravel airstrip where we started, over the Tangled Mountains
and the Tangled Lakes, big aquamarine lozenges gleaming in
basins, ?anked by huge, shattered faces of granite, a hundred
miles from anything, and the ridgelines scrolling beneath my
window were steadily lulling me into an intoxication, a daze—
the splendor of all this!—and then Z tapped me (
metaphorically) on the (metaphorical) shoulder.
Hey, he said. You haven’t checked your e-mail today.
“I think,” Thoreau wrote in his essay “Walking,” “that I cannot preserve my health and spirits unless I spend four hours a
day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering
through the woods and over the hills and >elds absolutely free
from all worldly engagements.”
