Not long ago, I sought the outdoors just for the challenge. Because it’s there, I would say. I charged into the natural world for the push, the strain, the triumph. Scale the mountain! Hike the trail! Swim across the lake! Twice!

But something got misplaced this last summer. Work was demanding. Family had needs. Friends were in trouble. My house was like an inn, with sheets to be changed and towels to be washed. I ate and drank too much and slept too little. My feet felt like two cinder blocks slogging my leaden body through the summer.

When happy people come to Maine during its most verdant season, they expect to indulge in all the glories and wonders indoors, outdoors, at the dinner table. That I had to be up the next morning for work, well, it didn’t register with them or (defiantly) with me – except for that headache the next morning on the drive to work. I meant to reap the benefits of summer, but the sad truth is I was too busy to visit my favorite swimming hole, let alone climb the mountain nearby it. I had dishes to do.

Then one morning, I noticed that the burning bush outside my office window was in full pink and that the tree across the field was red and I nestled my arms around myself because there was a chill in the air. Like a tiny needle, autumn was piercing my thoughts. Summer was gone. Soon it would be the holidays. I felt shocked and cheated and – this next part I feel every year – feared the joys of summer in Vacationland were mythical and elusive.

But mostly I felt tired. Very tired. So when my friend asked if I wanted to escape with her to the mountains for three nights in late September, the idea thudded annoyingly in my head. I was sure it was exactly the wrong remedy. I’m for camping, mind you. But not much. I like creature comforts, and that’s not – ever – to be mistaken for comforts close to creatures. Tents and tin cups are not on my to-buy list. Frankly, I believe that if you want to bask in the joys of the natural world, the last place to go is a state or national park. Isn’t that what I was talking about in the first place: too many people?

I agreed to two nights.

Turns out, I finished work earlier than she did on the Monday of the first night. So I headed north, toward Baxter State Park, alone. Any trip in that direction involves a gradual peeling away of the quotidian, starting at speeds upwards of 80 mph to half that much in towns and then half that much again at the camping area. The cell phone dies. The radio crackles. You roll down the window and you are the only noise.

Arriving in the dark, I was approached by a park ranger who asked to see my admission paperwork. “Been here before?” he asked. “Nope,” I said. “This was my friend’s idea.” He agreed to lead me through the last shadows of sunset through the woods to our cabin, an old sporting camp built, I was told, in the early 1930s or earlier on Daicey Pond. I traipsed along, lugging gear and trying to keep up, and taking visual notes as he spoke – here’s the outhouse, here’s the woodpile, here’s the place you turn to your cabin – because park rangers are not babysitters and I knew his guidance was a one-time gift.

And so it was. When he left me back at the car, I tiptoed through the trees looking for the path to my cabin. I fell over a rock, toppled onto the ground but eventually found my own humble abode, where I unpacked by the light of a kerosene lamp and started a fire in the wood stove. When my friend arrived, the place was toasty warm, but I was tired. I made my last trip to the outhouse two minutes away, and then curled up in my sleeping bag and slept. Deeply.

I awakened to – or could it be I was awakened by? – a fiery flame of orange in the morning sky. I focused my puffy eyes toward the light and watched it soften and turn to the morning yellow of day, as if dancing in its own pleasurable existence.

Soon my friend was awake, too, and after wrestling with the fire, she lugged armloads of wood into the cabin. Unambitiously, I watched her and sipped tepid tea. Her goal for the day was to find a moose. Mine was not to have a goal. She left. I sat in a chair.

The place was very quiet. I took a nap. I read. I ate Cheerios from a plastic container. Mostly I sat in the chair and watched the sun shift over the lake in front of the cabin. For a while, I perched on a rock and stared at a little frog, whose mission there in the sun seemed simpatico to my own. Being and nothingness, though perhaps not of the philosophical sort.

Eventually, I forced myself to take a walk. But, uncharacteristically, I tired quickly and the few people I passed on the trail annoyed me. They had walking sticks or wore expensive sporting clothes or pretend-you’re-global Mexican hats or were retired. Before long, I was back in the cabin, stoking the fire, sitting in the chair, watching the sun shift again. Surrounded by the quiet, I closed my eyes and rested. Breathed. Ah, if only this moment could last.

Alas, it was fading with the sun and, I confess, I wanted to read. I picked up papers in the wood pile and began scanning old news. Maybe I should have been reading Thoreau or the Nearings. Forgive me for not going for the gusto. In my defense, I did look into the cabin’s logbook, where real outdoors people had recorded their own back-to-the earth experiences – not to mention unusual intimacies on the cabin table – while camping in this spot.

At sundown, my friend returned, dressed in clamming boots and rain pants. She had been near swamps and in the muddy regions where moose congregate. She had seen her moose, she told me, as we watched the final shift of the sun together, along with a few others at the campground. One woman, an emergency room nurse from Bangor, told me she and her girlfriends escape to the campgrounds late every summer and often in the winter, when they have to ski in. It’s not exactly a vacation, she said, but a restoration.

After dinner – an undercooked mix of fried tomatoes and mushrooms sopping in oil, as well as leftover roasted potatoes from home, and bread I had topped with cheese and then overcooked (i.e. burned) on the little cook stove – we walked to the edge of the lake to look up at the stars. The sky was alive with light. Like teenagers, we lay on the dock head to head staring upwards, where I saw a flash of white light streak across the sky. I felt blobby and tired from the lethargy of the day. And somehow it was OK and necessary in a way plumbing and electricity and a shower and home were not in that moment.

I rose the next morning at sun break. As I left the park, I felt something big in my heart, about the size of a mountain and as fiery as a shooting star, as melodic and primal as a loon call. True, I missed summer, but I had retrieved a part of myself. Maybe it was waiting for me in Baxter. Or maybe it is always waiting – somewhere.