The nearest “town” (the metropolitan area, in this case, referring to a gas station, post office, diner, brewery, and coal mine) was seven miles away. Since all the transport I owned at the time was my legs, it was a far trek. Grocery trips (to “Miner’s Market,” the gas station) required fourteen-mile walks before I began hitchhiking the highway portion of the trip. Most of the time, I played the game, “how long can I live off of flour, oats, powdered milk, cabbage, onions, and potatoes?” to avoid wasting a day that way. Denali National Park was ten miles beyond Miner’s Market, and I took vacations there with my bivouac, a stack of books I was too distracted to read in the cabin, and a desire for something more exciting than my day-to-day existence of taking short walks, sweeping the floor, and washing dishes in a bucket.

A whole crew of our men have chased reality in cabins, tents, trailers, abandoned buses: Thoreau in Walden Pond, Join Muir in the Sierras, Aldo Leopold in Sand County, Edward Abbey in the Utah Desert, Chris McCandless in Alaska. In my cabin, I read their stories, and the stories, too, of the few women like them: Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, Cheryl Strayed.

I lined the windowsill of the little cabin with these books, and looked at them as often as I did the landscape the window framed. The words urged me to get a sense for life before I got too comfortable in it. The writers told me to wake up, to see.

As much as I loved the books, there were times when these stories made me question my own project. Was I living a cliché? Walking a trail others had walked before me, giving this whole solitude thing a superficial and stereotyped trial? My friend Ray called me one afternoon from Sitka, a town in southeast Alaska. (I didn’t have electricity or water in the cabin, sure, but I did have cell service—3G, in fact.) She was working as an environmental activist, at the same organization where I’d met her the year before. She pressed me: “What good are you doing for the world from there? Why do you want to be alone?”

Diana Saverin

It was selfish in some ways, I knew. But I justified it to myself in lofty terms: I was living out an old and familiar American ritual, enacting some secular rite of passage, awaiting some insight about the world we live in and this one life I’ve got to spend.

But then I’d hang up, and remember how, before arriving, I’d dreamed of the insights, of the days I’d spend watching woodchucks and waterbugs, of the wind sweeping me up in its warm embrace and the whole world breathing into my ear alone air full of secrets. Then I’d look around. It was still hot and buggy, windier some days than I could believe, and a lot of the time, I was bored. I had no idea how to spend a day.

Things got better in July, though. My days had a straightforward trajectory, as my main task became obvious: picking berries. By then, I was much happier being outside than in. The mosquitoes were retreating and the blueberries were ripening. After all those days subsisting on powdered milk and potatoes, I was gripped by a feverish need to be out on the land, in the light, seeing and harvesting what I could, while I still could. Some mornings, before I’d left the cabin, I’d get impatient, restless, hungry. When it happened, I turned wild: I knew what to do. I took off my shoes, threw on my coat, and sprinted out the door and through the pathless woods—past black spruce and paper birch, past stray boulders and soft ground, toward the tip of the ridge where I could see into the valley or clamber down to the creek. My bare feet brushed over moss, rocks, roots; I collapsed face-first into a swath of crusty reindeer lichen. I’d crawl over to a patch of spongy moss, and dig my nose into the dirt. The ground smelled like spearmint. On one of these excursions, I passed by John, with his white beard, faded cap, and limp. He’d just seen a bear in the nearby woods, and he yelled after me in his gruff voice, “Ya better learn ta run fast!”