Some years ago I was living in the Klamath Mountains of Oregon, in an off-the-grid cabin above the Rogue River, and coming into town only once every two or three weeks. I hated those trips: late July, temperatures in the high nineties, the great forests giving way to interstates, heat radiating in contoured waves from blacktop and rusted dumpsters and car hoods. I’d push a cart up and down the supermarket aisles in air-conditioning-induced shock; eat burritos as big as my head until I was nearly sick; sit in the laundromat and use the Wi-Fi to scan the three hundred e-mails in my in-box. I couldn’t wait to get back to the mountains, where everything I truly needed was close at hand — pen, fly rod, trail-cutting tool. I couldn’t wait to be on my own again.