There are forms within and under the sky. Everything, in the world.

This morning, a chipmunk jumped in my cereal bowl. I wasn't looking, then I was. Milk on his tiny chin.

As I waited for the park ranger to print my camping permit, I crouched down and inspected, for almost five minutes, a miniature garden in which there were a variety of structures and textures. Mushrooms growing like tendrils of coral from the side of the road. Shrunken pines and cornflowers. A pebble painted white and porcelain blue.

The man at the check-in booth was young. He said the printer wasn't working properly. I said I didn't mind waiting. He had to knock on the door of the supervisor's lodge and out came a man roughly four times his age.

I don't count the first thirteen years of my life. By that calculation, if I'm lucky, I might be only a quarter of the way through. Ever since I was twenty-one, I've oscillated between feeling ancient and feeling brand new.

I climbed Black Bear Mountain without water, in running shoes. I wanted to see and to not see a bear. I want to experience everything at a safe distance, but I want that distance to be paper-thin.

Jeb Butterworth, when asked how he does it, talked about sitting down in the evening with a glass of wine to 'see if there are any fish in the river'.

A few minutes ago, I saw a young dragon-fly collapse into the lake. I was drying my underwear on the sharp stump of a balsam fir by the water's edge.

Earlier, at the top, in the rain, I could see enough of the surrounding land to imagine how great the view must be.

Pulau Weh, off the Aceh coast. I remember seeing bats return to shore and I remember the sunset behind them. It was like they'd been spawned from a stargate. Perhaps they were birds. That must have been roughly ten years ago.

Tomorrow, I'm thinking of climbing the exact same mountain, the same route, no water, but at a different time of day. I'm hoping for a different configuration of weather, a different collapse of spray and light. I want the texture of the air to be transformed, the way the texture of this lake is transformed by the wind, sky-glow, and the diving bugs. Infinite variables.

Watching the bats that might have been birds, I thought about living in a hut on that spot by the sea, becoming a local. I was drinking a lot at the time. I had recently started eating fish. I swam across a channel between two islands wearing a snorkelling mask. Through the goggles, I watched the sea floor drop away into an imperfect dark, spotted with white scraps of jellyfish, filament-thin. That was a different day. I knew I would never actually live there, but I was poised between the present and the possibility, just like now, when there's a future in which I climb Black Bear Mountain a second time, perhaps in different shoes, with different eyes. The forecast suggests the views could be the same, but there's no such thing as a similar view.