“If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”

Henry David Thoreau

Like every adult, I have come to realize that certain of my childhood experiences changed everything and defined and directed all that followed. I had the astonishing good fortune to grow up in the mountains surrounding Lake Tahoe in a time that the perspective of age sees as idyllic and that from any perspective was simpler for children and adults alike. Because my parents worked long hours in the Tahoe tourist summer season, I was largely unsupervised for three months a year. Some might (and did) consider such parenting as ‘benign neglect,’ but I think of it as an invaluable gift.

While the concept of “adventure” was unknown to a young boy, the impetus to explore, to follow curiosity, to reach and see beyond the edge of the familiar and acceptable is innate, though such stimulus is sometimes threatening to and feared by the cautious, invested and powerful, and it can be both trained and bludgeoned into conformity, incuriosity and blind faith. One summer day in 1950 or, perhaps, 1951 my buddy John Robinson and I had a day in the mountains that changed something‑‑perspective, scale, possibility or maybe direction‑‑inside. I knew it then and remember it now, and I never see that area of the Sierra without smiling.

The day stays in mind because it was the biggest of its kind in that pre-teenage Tahoe time when summer rules and parental supervision started and ended with the admonition to be home for dinner. Whether it was trust and confidence in our basic instincts and capabilities or uncaring neglect of the duties of parenthood, the children of Tahoe in the post WWII era had a lot of latitude and a great deal of personal freedom, many years before I knew the difference between Mahatma Gandhi’s practicality‑‑“The greater our innocence, the greater our strength and the swifter our victory.”, and William Blake’s spirituality, “To see the world in a grain of sand, And heaven in a wild flower: Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.”

My folks probably thought I’d gone to the beach the day John and I headed to what we called Eagle Rock, a remote, romantic, mysterious outcrop visible high above and to the northeast of Kingsbury Grade, which went over the Sierra to Genoa, Nevada’s first community. It seemed unreachable until we decided to reach it, and then it became a huge goal that gladdened our hearts from the moment we embarked. I was 11 or 12, John a year older, when we set off from south shore along Highway 50 and up the narrow dirt road of Kingsbury, filled with our quest and the self-sufficient knowledge, even glee, that no one in the world knew where we were or what was our goal. After a couple of hours we veered off Kingsbury into unknown terrain of pine, fir, aspen and manzanita, the evergreen shrub, sprouting out of the sandy soil of the great Sierra Nevada under a clear mountain sky. We were guided by a general sense of direction and the pure joy of going where we had never gone before, secure in the knowledge that even as we plodded up, always up, with fatigue taking its toll on body and motivation, turning around and going down would eventually get us back to Tahoe, the familiar, home, dinner.

My friend John was big for his age, strong, athletic and a fine skier. We encouraged each other to continue in those times when we could see neither Eagle Rock nor Tahoe and the dominant constants were the upward slope, the downward slide of our energies, our companionship and that ineffable something that had started us in the first place. We went on for hours and then late in the day we gained the ridge and scrambled up Eagle Rock on top of our world, the backyard of my childhood, the Sierra Nevada. To the east lay the Carson Valley and the high desert mountains of Nevada. To the west was the Tahoe Basin holding the Lake of the Sky, nature’s own bassinette, and being on and looking around from the summit of Eagle Rock was the most exciting and wonderful thing I had ever done. We went back down and I made it home for dinner and I never told my parents where we had gone. After that day I always knew solace and meaning were mine for the taking, always there to be explored and experienced in my own backyard, just one step away from the highways and byways of civilization, no matter where I may be. It would be many years before I discovered in the writings of Muir, Thoreau, Abbey and others that I was a member of a tribe, not a hermit of the spirit.