Photo credit: Neha Gautam
When I lived in Pennsylvania, the hikes gave structure to my days. I was drafting a novel, but I wouldn’t understand the story until after I left the Susquehanna River valley behind. Each hike was four miles, a long stretch of gravel road and dirt path. On either side lay the half-visible hunters in their neon orange camouflage. Deer couldn’t see orange, somebody said, but humans could. More than once, on a certain stretch of trail, they would stray out of the hunting preserve. The pop of gunshots would echo through the stands of silver birch and Osage orange, and we would throw ourselves down behind the low ridge that lay between the trail and the forest. We, too, wore neon orange during hunting season...