COMING & GOING: The road (I wish I had) not taken: One man's failed attempt to connect with nature | Local

As a kid, I lived outside.

Not in the eating and sleeping sense of the word, but in a looser and more spiritual sense.

Never did I feel better, never did I feel more at peace, than when I was out there, somewhere, in our country yard.

I’d kick the heads off dandelions and the sandy roofs off anthills. I’d bite into yellow-red apples that had dropped from sagging limbs in our orchard. I’d chuck a well-worn football, straight up into a blue sky, and then I’d run off to catch my own plummeting spiral.

Life was good. In some ways, looking back, life was better.

Several weeks ago, I decided to take a hike. I’ve been spending more and more time outside my apartment recently, having bought a kayak and a mountain bike, and figured that hiking would bring me another step closer to nature.

There’s no better way to see the world, it stands to reason, than to walk right through it.

After work one evening, I traded my slacks for shorts and put on a T-shirt. In the kitchen, I filled a bag with almonds and a bottle with water. Then I headed out the door.

I had picked the network of trails behind Saint Mary’s University, hoping to reach the top of the bluff and look down, somewhat triumphantly, at the tiny campus -- maybe even pick out my tiny car in the tiny parking lot.

A few minutes in, the trailhead still visible through a tunnel of trees behind me, I began to wonder if I had picked a bad day.

It was 85. Humid. Even at the edge of the forest, mosquitoes were thick in the air. Their collective hum was close and constant.

As I waved the mosquitoes away from my face, and as I slapped rather wildly at my arms and legs, it occurred to me that a steady rain had drenched Winona the day before.

The mosquitoes were multiplying.

But I forged ahead.

I think I went left at one fork and right at the next. At one of those maps with a you-are-here marker, I tried to plan the rest of my route.

I stood there a few minutes, killing mosquitoes and studying the trails, but couldn’t figure out how to get to the top of the bluff. The map was faded and complex. I decided to simply walk uphill, and to leave my destination to kismet.

My trail wound through the forest, then wrapped for a while around the base of the bluff. The mosquitoes thinned out -- a little -- but the air was warm and heavy among the still-wet trees.

I stopped and took a picture, slipped my phone back into my pocket.

My shirt was smudged with sweat, and was beginning to stick to my shoulders. A couple pink-red bumps had popped up on the back of my right leg. My bag of almonds, intended to be a blufftop snack, was almost empty.

A few minutes later, after rounding a corner and finding a downhill bend in the trail -- a bend that led not up the bluff, but into more trees -- I decided to cut my losses and blame the kismet.

It’s hard to say how far I had walked. Maybe a mile and a half. Maybe two miles.

I walked for a while down the trail I had come, chewing up the last of my almonds and trying, in my head, to reconstruct the path I had taken.

When the mosquitoes got bad again, I decided to run -- sprint -- and get the hell out of there. My shoes pounded the trail. My arms pumped at my side.

I’ve never worn a shirt in a swimming pool, but one of my uncles, at a family reunion, once pushed me into a pool when I was fully clothed. I would have much preferred that to being soaked in sweat.

Soon, I began to notice mossy logs and gnarled trees that I had seen half an hour earlier. I jogged past a few disc-golfers and, later, past a few actual joggers.

At my car, at last, I wiped the sweat from my eyes. Sank into the warm leather of the driver’s seat. Cranked the air conditioning.

In my idling car, I thought about how much I had loved being outside as a kid, about how comfortable I had been. One particular memory, which had been locked away for a while, slid to the front of my mind.

It’s from a family camping trip. My parents and sister are sitting under the awning of our motorhome, waiting for a pounding rain to pass. I had refused to run for shelter, preferring to sit there, by the side of a rain-swelled lake, fishing.

That seemed like a long time ago.

When I was little, I never made plans to leave the house and go outside, hat on head, ball in hand. It just happened.

Sometimes, after school, I’d shrug my backpack onto the porch and, without setting foot inside the house, begin to play.

I’d throw a football or shoot a basketball. In the fall, I’d flick ladybugs off the sunny side of the house. In the winter, I’d throw snowballs at the faded square above our basketball hoop.

There were times, too, I was content to lie in the grass, to look up at the clouds and imagine.

I want to remember these moments the next time I feel like reverse engineering an outdoorsy evening.

As a kid, I didn’t need to hike to the top of the bluff, didn’t need to wander beyond our four-acre yard, even, to be happy with my view.