He continued to use the telescope, too, day and night, making little diagrams of what it showed, just to practice making diagrams, to train himself to notice the details both on their own and also in relation to each other.

In the daytime, the telescope served up the forest, sky, and mountain across the lake. Sometimes, he could see small biplanes in the distance and with the telescope see the people inside, as if they were an arm’s reach away. He watched the hiking trails on the other mountains, too. There was a particularly popular one right across that he followed for much of its route, where he tracked upside-down people climb with their feet above their heads. Some jogged up. Some walked. Many he only saw once, and he crafted questions for them, imagined lives. But on the third day of this new activity he noticed a woman from the day before return and start at first, again, with a quick walk, then a jog, then back to a walk. She wore her hair in a ponytail, and she wore different colors of the same outfit, light tank top and dark shorts. She bobbed rhythmically when she jogged, with her ponytail accentuating the vertical motion.

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She was the first face to appear to him twice, and the next morning she was there again, and he was there waiting, with his phone on this time to mark the time. 8:30. The next day: same time. Each day different colors of the same clothes, always the same ponytail. She drove a red crossover that she parked at the trailhead. He made out details of her upside down face, and quickly, though he did nothing, though he touched nothing, though he thought nothing, he felt shame, like he was peering through her bedroom window, even though all she was doing was running. He stood straight and watched the eyepiece. For a moment, he forgot she was actually out there and that he could see her moving without a telescope. He let his eyes drift from the eyepiece and out toward the mountain across, and he glimpsed her and averted his eyes again.

He went inside and read.

*

When he read, he constantly saw Rachel in his mind. So many names reminded him of her. All that was needed were the R, A, E, or L, and so many names had these 4 letters in one arrangement or another. When she came to mind lately, it was in two forms. One was brief glimpses. Snatches of times together. The other was a total scope, from when they met when he was twelve and she was eleven, to when he last saw her, three months before he moved to the cabin.

They’d met as preteens and begun dating when he was fifteen and she was fourteen. They’d broken up six months before he moved, when they were both 21. It hadn’t felt significant for him that they’d met when they were preteens, even though people commented on how sweet that was. It had felt like he’d known her his whole life, but he had felt this was more off a spiritual connection than off the actual time of the meeting. He was very confident that he’d have felt the same about having known her his whole life if he’d have met her at 27 or 87. Now, without her around, with no plans to ever see her again, he felt that he still knew her, that she still knew him, and that his love wouldn’t and couldn’t stay sequestered in his mind and body, no more than his breath could. It would slither and wind its way out of him, leak into the atmosphere and reach her, wherever she was, even if neither knew it.

She still made him want to believe in the metaphysical.

The rod saved him from so much thought. He had to focus shaping it. He hammered little guides into it for the wire. He attached the reel and played with a weight on the hook. He made plans, set only in his mind, for fishing in the morning. Morning seemed liked the time when fish were hungrier, but this was just a hunch. He’d never fished in the morning. He’d never fished at all.

That night, he reread a passage from Portnoy’s Complaint and then another one about being marked from head to toe with repressions, about being able to make a roadmap from them. Then he was alone in the dark, and he did what he’d been doing almost every night when alone and bored. He jerked off onto his stomach, wiped himself with the sheets, and slept to forget.

*

In the morning, he woke up in the dark and took a bag of books and his makeshift rod down to the lake. By this point, he knew the route well enough to need only the frailest of daylight to make his way.

He dropped the wire and anchor. He set the rod between rocks and set to flipping pages. Among the books was an old magazine, one he’d browsed a week after breaking up with Rachel. It had been a period of life in which poems shimmered, as if here only for a short time as they were guests from another, truer dimension. He was still, despite the light air and sky, partly in that period.

There was “An Apology” by Robert Wood Lynn. Adam didn’t have to read it now to know what it said. The speaker was speaking to someone who wasn’t there. The speaker saw wild horses on a beach, and this symbolized joy or beauty. Adam had wanted to share the poem with Rachel. The poem had been Adam’s wild horses. He’d come up to the mountains and the town in part to hide from wild horses, or find ones unrelated to Rachel.

The fault in this plan, its major flaw, was that while all this was new to him and unknown to her, he’d brought along himself—mind, body, and heart—and none of him had learned what to do with wild horses if he couldn’t share them with her.

*

He was surprised when the fishing reel started going out. He grabbed the rod and lifted and for the first time felt the roughness of the unpolished wood. The reel stopped for a moment, and he tugged gently, picturing the small fish on the other end, knowing that this rod wasn’t made for sturgeon or even a hearty trout.

Whatever fish it was, he never saw, because when he tugged for a fourth time the little guides he’d placed tore off the rod, and the leverage was lost, and the reel broke off the rod, and Adam, defeated and full of premature humiliation let out a grunt more to express his anger than to find a saving burst of strength as the reel and spool flew from his grip and he collapsed onto a ground that was wetter than he remembered and stuck to his ass like mud.

*

That evening, he started a new shopping list with the simple item, “fishing rod.” He ate tinned sardines and a serving of beans. Afterward, in the dusk, he set up the telescope in what he was beginning to consider his front lawn.

Through the eye was a new sky, brighter and busier. Since moving to the cabin, he’d begun to study the sky for truly the first time. The city lights had made this type of sky a distant dream. Now, he planned to get a map or book of astronomy to learn about the stars and find constellations. Until then, he would appreciate the objects without reference, as points of light on a canvas.

He had come to notice that there were more colors than white in the sky. Some twinkles were white, others gold and yellow, and a few had a touch of red or blue or silver or even green. For some nights, he’d come out and tried to find a pink one he’d seen on his fourth night. Without a telescope, they had all folded into a great, luminous arrangement.

The telescope’s magnification introduced a sense of depth. The bodies were sharper. Adam felt, for a moment, a small sense of wonder, followed by a larger sense of relief at this wonder. It was a relief to know he could still experience genuine wonder, small as it was. And he felt a greater relief at the fact that he could see himself spending real time studying the cosmos now, distracted from his solitude. Along with the electric lantern, the telescope erased so much of nighttime’s gloom.

He turned it down and out through the forest around him, to the mountain across the lake. There was a shrub, and he could see its individual leaves now. It was all upside down, and the diminishing dusk was quickly making it all shadows.

No matter. He turned back to the sky, to the bodies of light that had risen to the take the place of the night, that were growing brighter as all around him grew darker. He tried, and mostly succeeded at, witnessing some marvels.

He had already decided that the days into town would be full days, not only little trips, and he had brought along a book to read at a coffee shop, like he used to in the city. He was reading The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. A teacher had recommended it, and he’d never gotten around to it until now. The day before, he’d marked one line: Pet names are never recorded officially, only uttered and remembered. He liked the book, especially this line. Certain things were meant for particular moments, and we should let them pass without record, let them be free of bureaucracy. He saw this as sympathetic to his project of living in the woods without internet or electricity. How much did he do now that went unrecorded?

Before buying coffee, he turned on his phone for the first time in a week. In the woods, there was no reception anyway. While his phone received the many notifications, he stepped up to the barista and ordered a latte with full-fat milk; he couldn’t be wasting money on fewer calories. When she asked him his name, he told her, “Adam.” He’d always liked that name, and always been jealous of the first Adam, the only person to never come from another one, to be shaped simply by God, call it Grace, and the earth, call it Nature. (He was a big fan of Tree of Life.)

He had never wanted to come from anyone. He had always wanted to be his own man.

*

When the barista brought Adam his drink, she smiled, and he thanked her, the clean, simple hospitality thrilled him; it had been a week since he’d last spoken to anyone. He tried to recall if he’d spoken during the week. He’d talked to himself in the woods more than he’d talked to himself when he had roommates. Maybe this was what you had to do to keep your vocal chords functional when there was no one else to hear you.

On his way to the library, he passed a window with a telescope on the other side of the glass. He stopped and looked at the metal and glass object. Telescopes were old devices and had advanced some of the earliest sciences. They were devices you could use at night. In fact, they were probably better for the night. The one in the window cost $400, and this was, if things went as he planned, more than he would spend in a whole month. Inside, he found one for $240, and he told himself that this was one of those early purchases he had set aside extra money for. Things like the lantern and wagon. This would nourish his mind. A man couldn’t live off food and books alone.

After finding some books at the library, he hopped on the computer and watched videos on how to be more self-sufficient. He was hunting for one video in particular, one about how to make your own fishing rod. It was simple enough. You just needed the spool and wire, which he’d bought before coming, a good piece of wood, a knife, some tape, and patience. He watched the video and took notes. He watched the twelve-minute video ten times. The two hours passed with almost no thought, but then he was told the library was closing for the day, and when he went up to get a card and check out the books, he was asked for proof of residence and learned that the PO box at the post office wasn’t enough proof and he would need ID with an address or a bill or a tenant agreement. He had none of those things, but when he told the librarian his situation, the librarian said he knew Henry, Adam’s landlord, and if he could get Henry to call and vouch for him, then the librarian, Carl was his name, could take his word for it. So Adam got Henry on the line, and Henry vouched for him, and he checked out his many Philip Roth books.

He wondered about a town in which a PO box didn’t count but a man’s word did, and he decided that he liked this.

He planned to go into town once a week to buy groceries and supplies, see what was happening in the world, and take a break from his solitude. It was stranger being alone than he had imagined. It was strange to have so much time. He was young, barely into his twenties, and already always feeling like he was running out of time. He had so many books to read, so many words to write, so much love to give. Man wasn’t made to waste his life in the office, and he in particular wasn’t meant to spend his life in front of a computer screen.

His plan was to eventually return to people, but not for years, not until he’d accomplished something with his mind, even if that something was a little-read treatise or a micropress-published novel. He had never had a way with words, but now he would find one. But a person couldn’t read and write all day. A man had to have other parts to his life. The days stretched on, and he had to fill them.

First was gathering firewood from fallen trees and branches. This was simple and time-consuming. He woke up on the third day with a sore back, legs, and arms, a sore everything. The stove was gas, and he would have to go to town to refill it when it ran out, but to heat the home, and he would have to heat the home soon, he needed firewood.

There were various trees and shrubs, but he hadn’t yet learned to tell one type apart from another. He made a note to himself to pick up a reference book from the town library. He already had a reference book on foraging. He had foraged some berries and some mushrooms, studied gills and colors and leaves to assure himself he wouldn’t die, and after his first attempt, he’d woken up in his room to find that he was remarkably all right, that there were no cramps in his abdomen, no seizures in his extremities, and no blood in his stool.

The room he lived in had already been built before he’d moved to the mountain, but it was very much like the room he’d dreamed up. First of all, the cabin was basically one room. The kitchen was the dining room. The dining room was the living room. The living room was the bedroom. Only the shower and toilet received some separation, a small door. It was a minor miracle to even have a running toilet. He was grateful for the septic system, a small one that he would have to clean out himself on the regular, and he was already imagining using his own shit to fertilize the ground around him, already picturing the various mushrooms that might bloom from the mounds.

He didn’t deceive himself about his ability to live off the land, however. He had bought some veggies on the way to the cabin, along with 5 pounds of steel-cut oatmeal, a gallon of yogurt, a gallon of milk, some cheeses, canned beans, canned fish, jerky, and 20lbs of ice. He had an old fashioned ice box, and he was seeing how well it would store food for a week.

Four days in, he found the biggest trouble to be the nighttime. It was early fall, and it got dark while he was still wide awake. He had a flashlight, but it was for emergencies. He had candles, but not enough of them, and it strained his eyes to try to read with them, so instead he went on walks with a candle, just enough to see his feet and avoid tripping over roots. At first, he tried to walk off the trails, but on the second night, he got lost and found that he was going in circles—useless, pointless circles—so he learned to take the trails, at least in the evening, at least until he knew the land.

He would go home and still not be tired, so he would try to meditate in the dirt outside his front door. He waited for revelation and came across tremendous boredom. He hoped one day to discover the revelation that he was fine with boredom. Better yet, he hoped to find he couldn’t be bored. He hoped to always be engaged, always veering toward a state of wonder.

On the sixth day, one day from his planned trip into town, he looked at the ice box, where most of the ice had melted, and decided he couldn’t risk losing the lettuce, so he went into town with his list of items needed, on which he’d added the item of gas lantern.

*

In his car were two boxes of books, one box of clothes, some cooking and cleaning utensils, some notebooks of blank pages, and three photographs: of a dead friend, a young niece, and of a group of people whom he’d loved. He loved them still. The place in the mountains was the place where he would express his love for them an all mankind. You love someone and see them. Hug them and kiss them and tell them, “I love you,” and what else is there? He was there now to find out what else there was.

The mountain was about love, alone, and about time alone. He had read Thoreau, and he knew all the critiques against him. He remembered the article in The New Yorker, by Kathryn Shulz. He liked Kathryn Shulz, and he liked Thoreau, and she disliked Thoreau, and this was okay. He was always reckoning with what was okay.

Pt. 2: