I spent the summer building us a small house, one room, a bed made from feathers I found around the forest and from a few birds I’d managed to kill with an ever impressively growing skill at throwing rocks quickly and accurately, a stone fireplace for warmth and cooking, a small desk for sewing or writing or sharing meals over. She built a chicken coop, a fenced in area for the animals and planted a garden. The summer was full of long hours of toil, the good, fulfilling kind of work that comes from building your own life, not the kind of “building a life together” that people call securing a 401k and going to Home Depot for solar powered driveway lights, we were actually building our life, carving it out of the mountain forest home we were procuring. She would bake flat breads for us and I would bring home fish or nuts or whatever wild vegetables and fungi I could find, she would check them over and let me know which were potentially poisonous. We mended our own clothes, kept one another warm through the nights and took Saturdays, or whichever days we imagined were Saturdays, time had been lost on us, to hike around our new woody neighborhood or lay naked in a small nearby field and I’d tell her stories or read poetry and she’d pull out any ingrown hairs that may have been trying to get back into the warmth of my neck. She learned to make cheese and we had fresh milk and eggs every morning. The Summer lasted forever, and the house was complete. The area had been properly readied for Winter, and we had just finished the second and most bountiful part of the Harvest as she was cutting open a great squash to prepare for dinner. That night it began to rain, the temperature dropped, and snow fell over the house, the garden, the land. I held her as close to me as I could, we were layered thick in blankets and were prepared for the coming cold, well prepared.

I woke in the morning, our first snow plated mountain morning together, we were to celebrate with a feast of rabbit, vegetable stew and a bottle of homemade wine. I opened my eyes and went to stir her awake, to dive into this great new day. She didn’t move. I leaned over her to kiss her into the morning, but she had died in the night. This dream of mine, perhaps much more mine than hers, had brought her up here, set her to work, and then taken her life, and with it the dream.

I carved a hole into the ground that afternoon, the bottle of wine emptied, and laid her body — wrapped in a thin Afghan blanket — in the ground. I slaughtered the goat and let it’s blood run down into the spaces between her stiffening, bluing form and the cracks in the dirt, and falling snow mixed with the crimson as I said some final thing, perhaps outloud but of course, no one to hear or know what was happening. I ate what portion of the goat could fill me, raw, and lit the whole thing on fire. The flames licked at my boots and then raged up to singe eyebrows and beard. I turned and left everything behind me, one footprint in the snow at a time.

Within a month the chickens would be eaten by some wild hungry animal, the mule left to wander through the mountain cold, Question, who’d stayed behind at her burning side when I left, would go off to join or be killed by some pack of wolves. Eventually I returned to the town, though not on purpose, famished and pointless. When two people have spent so much pure energy together, for so many long decades, well when one dies they both die, one to burn up or be eaten by worms or locked forever in some casket, the other to roam for some many more years on this planet wandering how hard he might have to beg for an end.

Computers are eating your children. The average child is smaller than an adult, their brains are not yet quite as developed, and as anyone who’s ever seen a 12 year old wreck his bike into a barbed wire fence at 25 mph and not feel the need to cry until he realizes no one will wait up for him to hear his story, they are nearly invincible. My point is, that children are not real, they are simply a developing organism which will someday turn into a jumbled twine of conscious thought, buried emotions, and ever-mounting divorce papers. The only “real” thing about children is their immense propensity to spew energy and imagination, breaking all laws of science and nature by both running at 110% of capacity on 13% of the fuel and imagining the most wonderful scenarios for play, whether they’re hiking down into the Grand Canyon or sitting in the backseat of a car on a long trip to Grannie’s.

So if we are all in agreeance, and at this point I believe we are, that children are precisely made of 50% energy and 50% imagination, how can we most easily destroy them? By transforming them into an input rather than an output. Television, including that damned Big Bird, is the succubus of the 20th century, and just when you thought it was safe to sell your HD TV and move into an old station wagon to live in a Walmart parking lot, the Internet appears on the scene. High schools across these great United States are all faced with a monstrous dilemma: How to afford computers for each and every child. Technology is important, and keeping our children at the cutting edge of the latest Firefox download will ensure that we are able to survive well into an Asian dominated future, right? Correct. Even before our children can read, they’re given a username and password in the hopes that when someone does get around to teaching them the fine art of connecting verbs and nouns, penning out their thoughts and distancing themselves from the shackles of the momentary nature of thought without graphite, we’re literally signing them onto the instant access Wide Web of Worlds. I write loosely, in jest today, perhaps, because it is a lovely summer day, cool in the desert as the rain flirts between a trickle and a downpour, but I am being quite serious in undertone. NPR today reported that schools across the country are concerning themselves with how they’ll be able to afford new computers, personal laptops in fact, for each and every child that comes through their doors. One little girl had to have her teacher spell out her password for her, because she is not yet even able to read.

And what will a child who can’t read, or a teenager for that matter, do when they finally dial in? Read the Wikipedia article on the history of the collapse of the Roman Empire? Research their genealogy on Ancestry.com? Youtube a monkey getting it’s head stuck in an elephant’s ass? That’s the one.

Children are meant for but two things: doing chores that are too mundane for parents and running wildly through the forest expending all of that unbridled energy and imagination so that one day they might have some semblance of reality. And not the reality that involves house, babies, cars and jobs, and then insurance for each of those items, but the one that so few of us ever have the pleasure of realizing, the one that involves doing what makes you happy for these short 8 or so decades we have on this planet.

In short, if you’ve ever thought about how you wish you could have gone to Spain, or would have taken up knitting, or actually written that novel or tried out for that play, and you’re still wishing it, project that onto your child and then remember that you yourself were born in a time when having a Nintendo was the chief distraction, and that was only something that could be played at home. Now look in the rear view mirror as your little boy becomes part of his little Game Boy. Take a break from coffee at Grandma’s as your teenager is checking out the singles ads on Myspace from his cell phone. In Nevada, you can’t walk into a store without reaching across a gambling machine to pay the clerk. In the rest of the United States, you can’t walk ten feet without reaching across an iPhone to chat with a friend.

In summation: children, eat your parents before they let the computer that lives under your bed eat you. And that #1 Dad mug, handmade by my very own son, only moments before I allowed the very same Internet I make my living from and love to badmouth like a good boss gone drinking, eat me.

A man with a Bic-shaved head and beard to tickle his chest hairs asks the waitress if she watched the Daily Show last night.

“Oh I don’t watch TV,” she says apologetically, but with the air of teensy-bit-I’m-superior that anyone who says that with a lick of truth behind them often does. She’s a very cute and kind woman, though, it’s just an observation I’ve noticed about those humans who find television to be a waste of time. I’m among them, though it’s a bad habit I do occasionally splurge in when none of my other bad habits are available to be partaken. She came into the room from the coffee bar to bring me a veggie breakfast burrito. Breakfast burritos are a cornerstone of the Austinian morning, as ubiquitous as the morning paper, coffee and cigarettes, and painful awakenings into rush hour traffic, these things can be found anywhere. Corner stores and coffee shops, of course, but I swear even lawyers offices and the laundromat will have some sort of breakfast burrito dispensing method. I had inquired as to how long the fine things would be on sale today, as typically when I arrive around 10am at this place, they’re all sold out already. Today the tray is choke full and I realize it’s my chance.

“How long do you guys sell these?”

“Oh until noon,” she announces, and then drops the decibels in her voice to just below a whisper, “but after that you can get one for free.” She compliments my hoodie, a bright green thing which sports an image of a bicycle touting it’s low miles per gallon, fills up my bee adorned coffee cup and doesn’t mention anything about my snotty running nose as I retreat to a small, wobbly table covered in broken flecks of old pottery adhered to the thing in swirling and starry patterns.

The bald and bearded man continues to talk to her about how Jon Stewart tore some financial advisers career apart last night on the Daily Show. I smile a bit, a firm believer that Jon Stewart is one of the great men of our time and my disdain for all people involved in the creation and destruction of this house of cards we call our economy shining through. He’s enthusiastic to the point of his shiny smooth dome going a bit red, though he seems a very level headed gentleman, and he’s very easily my kind of person: in fact, anyone sitting at a coffee shop reading the paper at 11am on a Friday morning is my kind of person, I’d assume.

Bare in mind that retired Republicans are not particularly the average guest at a coffee shop not bearing the name Starbucks or McDonalds. Something about having a 45 year old tattooed man in a cycling hat and chain wallet deliver your coffee that keeps that type of riff raff away, to be sure.

Conversations go back and forth, over cell phones, through the glass framing the back porch, where it’s much too cold to sit today but a smoker can not be daunted, and a young smoker can ignore just about anything. No dogs are allowed. The music is slow, ambient and My Morning Jacket. Outside it’s still beating down, the clouds over Texas, having not formed more than a bucketful of rain in the past 8 months or so, have now broken the seal and are letting loose their mighty bladders, spraying down the city of Austin, God cleaning the streets just before the great music, film and Internet festival SXSW prepares its arrival.

Somewhere out there a South African woman is brushing her hair, or packing her black backpack full of computer cables and headphones and the days agenda. She’ll be visiting the coffee shop across the street, enjoying her own eavesdropping and interactions. A street away can be a good and far distance sometimes, one that a couple living in an RV can possibly use now and then. At the end of the day though, the rain and time will have washed away whatever problems that old mobile home might have stirred, or at least thinned their grime if not completely soaking out the stains. Time and rain are, let’s hope, good like that.

We came up here almost a year ago today, though to be honest I’m not entirely sure what day it is. We’ve been counting the moons, watching the stars, nearly every night of course, but we didn’t begin that until sometime last summer, so the specifics of the month and certainly the date, elude me. It was a decision that had been made long ago by myself, that I would come to live here, and likely die, far from the civilization that blessed and cursed the most of my life. Away from the computers that kept food on the table, the automobiles and airplanes that showed me around the world, the easy access to alcohol, food and plastic bobbles that kept me drunk, fat and always in need of more money to replace the old. Not that life was hard, mind you, I have been retired since the age of 27, now 52, mostly because I saw work as a way to live and so only put in as many hours as needed to pay for the above mentioned, and partly due to luck and a good woman.

We arrived in the early spring, though, and I can tell from the melting snow, the chirping birds and the buds all over these old trees that spring is indeed here again. I bought a donkey and packed him full with some tools for building, for gardening, for cooking; enough food to last us a month and my fishing gear. And a few bottles of wine and some tobacco. I knew these were two of the things I wanted to get away from, but if I was going to leave society for awhile, for good even, then I would need to ween myself off of it. We also brought some passtimes, such as a deck of cards, my old guitar, and some arts and crafts material. We brought two hens, a rooster, a pair of goat and my dog, Question. It was just the old lady and I. We’ve been silver for years, but she still looks like the heaven and space she always did, even if I’ve grown balder, a bit fatter and wrinkled over time. I believe her eyesight has diminished substantially, as she assures me I still please her fancy, but like I said, she’s a good woman.

It took us a month and a half to build our home, small, sufficient. Some of it made from fallen trees in the area, but mostly packed tight and made from the earth. A stone fireplace houses a cauldron full of soups, sometimes simple soups made from wild vegetables that grow in these woods, but during the harvest made of everything the land was good enough to let us raise. Tomato soups, squash soups, onion and cucumber and zucchini soups. Through this winter that fireplace has been our best friend, and most of the house is used very little while we’re inside, because only a warm fire can keep away this wintery lifestyle. Electricity, natural gas, pumping heat into your home with no effort, this is one of the things we left behind. Having pizza or sushi or Chinese take out whenever the whim struck, these are the things we have left behind.

I go fishing twice a week and typically catch enough trout or whatever else will bite to put some meat on the table most nights. We eat mostly roots, the vegetables we’ve grown in our garden during harvest, and a good deal of nuts and berries. That’s the most hilarious bit of it all, eating like squirrels, but food is now more of an activity than something that needs to be exceptionally extravagant. Fishing, tending to the garden, gathering blackberries and strawberries and walnuts, these are major daily activities. I find myself consumed with things to do, important, fulfilling things, not like when I was much younger and would sit around for hours on end doing nothing and wondering what I should be doing instead.

Building the house was an exercise in patience and bliss. Never had I created anything, short perhaps of my son, that was so perfect upon completion, so worth every chopped trunk, hauled stone and packed dirt, before. It is only two rooms, one to store food, supplies, and tools in, and the other to eat, sleep and live in. A small porch out front with a rocking chair, a bench and a small table, all of which I’d built last fall, after the harvest was over and I didn’t know what else to do with my time.

I make maps of the area, not specific, to scale maps, no, but ones that more or less mark off where one might find the fish plentiful, or where I’ve seen bears, or just where there’s a particular tree I might like to climb up into one day. The wife is constantly creating jewelry or weaving some new blanket, something that you can rarely find yourself with too many of near the middle of winter.

We’re not all that far from civilization, 30 miles or so from a small town which is only another 100 miles from the city. We could go back if we needed to, even if just for a break, or in the case of an emergency. But I can’t see what emergency would take me back now. I’ve found a peacefulness here in these woods that can only be equated to the feeling Atlas would have had were he ever given the chance to set the world down from his shoulders and rest awhile. I enjoyed life, fully, and feel like that part that kept me in cities and towns was nothing short of wonderfully lived. And while I didn’t come here to die, I imagine I still have another two or three decades in me, I am sure that this will be where I go when the time comes.

“Simon,” he said. At least, I imagine that’s what his name would have been if he were born on this side of the border, but he was Mexican and so even though it still may have been spelled the same way, he was definitely not your average Simon.

“Simon,” I replied. It’s nice to say a person’s name back to them when you’re drunk, or so I’ve learned.

“No, See – moin,” he corrected me.

“Ah, sorry Seemoan,” I turned to my beer and back to him. “Nice to meet you–”

“No, Seeeee – moe – een,” he once again corrected me, this time with a little more of that “Talk slow to the gringo” attitude I would come to realize he was so famous for.

“Seeemoean?” I tried again.

Shaking his head in disgust, setting his beer down and turning his head like a chicken cocked and ready to spray buckshot all over the broadside of a tractor. “You’re not listening to me. Seeeeeee – mOE – ee – eeen.”

“Like Samoan but with an ee thrown in there?”

Now I could see the disgust in his eyes, and though the smell of longneck bottles hung too heavily around my own breath for me to get a steady solid whiff of his own intoxication perpiration, I could see that he was hammered and more interested in starting trouble than reassuring me of his name. I made an excuse to go and sit at a table where some ranchers I’d met earlier in the day were all laughing and drinking and generally being cowboys.

Several minutes later he sits down in the thick of our table, right beside me, but I was headfirst into talk about big cattle scores and how city folk would pay hundreds of dollars for an old cowboy hat and whether Lone Star is a joke beer or not. He starts trying to talk to me again, more like at me as I’m doing my best to keep from having to get back into it with him. I prefer a good laugh to bickering about the pronunciation of a name that’s always changing, and to be honest, I feel a little bad. Am I that drunk that I can’t hear or speak or what? I didn’t think so, but relying on one’s judgment while intoxicated is like relying on the moon to keep you warm. He keeps nudging me and talking to me, until he finally interrupts one of the ranchers telling me a story.

“Dammit Simon,” pronounced in as plain English as you’d use to refer to Alvin and Theodore’s brother, “I’m talkin’ here.” Throughout the night I realized that everyone in the town, Mexican, American or otherwise, called him Sie – mun, the standard pronounciation.

The moral of this story? It’s fun to go out drinking.

Around the time that I felt it actually was perfect, at least perfection in my own opinion, my life outside of the garden had become better. Well, it had become everything I had strived for, all of the hours spent dreaming of a different life while in the garden had given me insight as to how to change the rest of my life: my work and personal relationships and responsibility as a parent and where I was living and where I was trying to go and be. Everything was coming together.

I still spent time in the garden, and so much more actually. Hours upon hours became, literally, entire days spent surrounded by the flora I’d nurtured. Sometimes I would only leave it to sleep. Other times I would fall asleep inside of it.

And then one day I realized that I not only no longer enjoyed being in the garden, but that all of my flowers had turned to weeds. I was now visiting the garden simply for the sake of being there, because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. All of my ideas of romance and escape and my personal dreams had become petty bickering over politics and religion and all of the things that I had come to the garden to escape.

I wanted to burn it to the ground in that instant, but even as I had the gasoline and match available, just a flick of the wrist away, I couldn’t do it. I was afraid, as I have always been afraid, that I would have no idea what to do without it.

I’m still in the garden and dreaming, but now I dream of how I’ll get out of it one day.

But that’s all that it is, the urge. The drive seems sunken so far into this old leather lazy boy that the day, as soon as it seems, when I finally make myself into that motion is desperately far away.

It’s a clear and thick morning mist over our own personal piece of the small lake stretching out from between the thick of brush on either side that lays perfectly still save for the occasional eating of mosquitos or inquisitive fish. A Minnesota marsh is about as green as they come, that Kelly green that is typically reserved only for animation or felt cross-shaped bookmarks for your grade school Bible. We’ve been here for the past week and only now that Thursday’s rolled around and what with the long weekend and all, people are starting to fill in the gaps around the other end of the lake. The larger part of me loved being the only ones in the entire park, alone with nothing but three of us, the zombie quiet creaking of crickets, and the loosely latched aluminum door of the RV. Even still, the lake’s far side dotted with yellow and red tents and spending an evening watching more and more fires glow up into the night will been well spent.

But the time for sitting around fires and sipping wines and trying to convince one another to get into some karaoke or figuring out who’s going to finally get the frisbee down from the tree Tristan threw it into on Tuesday will come later. For now, I propose we walk picnic-backed into the lush until we’re sufficiently stink with sweat, and reckon what these poor woods can do.

For the wanderlusty soul who is riddled with a desire to remain close to the hearth, for the schizophrenic in every young adventuring homebody’s blood, remember the simply comfort of this: No matter where you go and what you become, you’ll always be built on what you were and where you come from.

Happy trails to each and all.