When I was a child I didn’t need to try to be free. The door slamming behind me proclaimed my freedom. The creek beckoned at the bottom of a precipice. Untethered, giving in to impulse, I clambered down with abandon. Using tumbled boulders as stepping stones, I followed the water upstream … or down. Direction mattered less than the sensation, more real than imagined, of walking on the water … and of walking into wilderness. No matter how many times I went, over many years, the sensation was always new. No matter who was with me—siblings, playmates, usually no one, never parents—or how often I would hear a car pass by up above, it was always wilderness. …