I just finished Bill McKibben’s short book Wandering Home, his thoughts on environment and place as he walked through Vermont’s Champlain Valley and New York’s Adirondacks.

Here’s one passage, about how it feels to arrive somewhere on foot: “It’s not like arriving in the car for a dinner party. On foot you arrive late or early, without excuse, and settle into whatever conversation is under way. It took you a while to get there, so you’re obviously going to stay awhile. It feels like visiting in an older sense of the word…”

And here’s McKibben on the loss of old codgers: “It’s as if someone came and knocked down a thousand-acre stand of mature timber, as far as I’m concerned.” When these people were alive, McKibben says, “there was a quality of memory that I believe informed the place. It was tangible. It was in the air, it made the place what it was for me.”

In the suburbs, old codgers, or even young ones, are in short supply. Perhaps that is one reason why there’s no “there” here.