The wallet was lost, so we went to find it. We started at Hunter Station, an old crossroads. Confederate troops passed through here on the way to Antietam; Union troops on the way to Gettysburg. As skinny-tire bikes blew past us (“passing on the left”), we walked briskly toward the Cross County Trail, turned left and entered an alternative universe of creek and fern.

That there is such a thing as a 40-mile ribbon of green in a place as crowded and over developed as ours is cause for jubilation. Sometimes paved, sometimes dirt or gravel or mulch, the trail meanders along stream valley parks and across hidden ridges, gladly using rejected land, the leftovers, the crumbs. Put enough crumbs together, though, and you have passage from the Occuquan in the south to the Potomac in the north.

We walked a small stretch of the trail, just enough to stretch our legs and convince us that the wallet probably was at home after all (and of course, it was). But the point wasn’t the wallet; it was the walk.