Because although I didn’t go to Iceland this summer, I did take care of a friend. The time my ex-editor and I spent as invalid and manservant was kind of like going on a cross-country road trip or to sleep-away camp together. We ended up with a hundred in-jokes and nicknames. We’re now less like friends than siblings, meaning that we may hate each other briefly but we’re doomed to love each other forever. Once you’ve carried someone in your arms while she’s weeping and bleeding, you’re never going to be indifferent to her again.

I didn’t go to Iceland, but I watched “Zapped!” and ate Taco Bell in a hospital bed, played cornhole at a pleasure club (not what it sounds like), spent indolent afternoons drinking wine on a back porch in Baltimore and opened a humane mousetrap only to have the captive mouse leap straight into my face while a friend was trying to leave an “out-of-office” voice mail message, which suddenly erupted into a chaos of little-girl screams and berserk cursing. I swam naked in the Chesapeake Bay, made martinis at 5 every day, watched fireflies after dark. I saw a Perseid meteor streak across the night sky and vanish so fast it was hard to tell whether its incandescent trail was in the atmosphere, on my retina, or only in memory.

I suspect that the way I feel now, at summer’s end, is about how I’ll feel at the end of my life, assuming I have time and mind enough to reflect: bewildered by how unexpectedly everything turned out, regretful about all the things I didn’t get around to, clutching the handful of friends and funny stories I’ve amassed, and wondering where it all went. And I’ll probably still be evading the same truth I’m evading now: that the life I ended up with, much as I complain about it, was pretty much the one I chose. And my dissatisfactions with it are really with my own character, with my hesitation and timidity.

In a couple of weeks I’ll resume teaching for the fall, and start boarding up my psyche for another hateful winter in New York. But the summer’s insatiate lust for travel still torments me. A couple of weeks ago I went to the American Museum of Natural History with some friends and their kids, and it occurred to me, looking at the beautiful dioramas of Animals of North America, that I would go to this museum to look at the dioramas even without any animals in them. It’s like a peep show of nature for New Yorkers. Those realistic vistas of Alaskan glaciers, the Great Plains and Yosemite National Park pull at my insides with a wanting that hurts. God, how I long to go out West again someday — to drive some blue highway in Nevada or Utah until there’s absolutely nothing around me, then stop the car, in the middle of the road, maybe, and get out and just stand there, where I can see the horizon in every direction, and smell the air and feel the sun and listen to the silence of the desert. I have this idea that if I could do this, time might hold still for a second, and I would know, for just a moment, what it feels like to be here.