When I was 43 I backpacked for the last time. I’m sure of that, because the highlight of the trip was its ending. I would have paid a hundred times what I did for that hot shower.

Not that the trip wasn’t wonderful. There’s no denying that the way to get away from other people is to walk places where vehicles can’t go, and the gear is getting lighter and smarter every season. It’s simply that this comfort-seeking nester had outgrown the sport.

I could no longer achieve good rest on the ground. I was never okay without a toilet. I loathe mosquitos. I became so uncomfortable, trudging bent forward with that frame on my back, sweating in an almost sick way, that I had to restrain myself from throwing tantrum-like fits of irritability.

I have camped since, and I intend to again. I have slept in Humphrey’s Basin, but a mule carried my stuff in. I have enjoyed the eastern Sierras and some amazing nights in Death Valley, but we had wood and water in a pickup truck and we checked into a motel at least every third night. I’m not quite as stern as my mother, who says she won’t camp anywhere that doesn’t have an escalator, but I’m getting there.

That last backpack trip had fine moments I want to keep. There was a morning I rose alone and left the tent and perched on a big rock in the middle of a meadow. I felt like the only person in the world as I watched the rising sunlight sweep the valley.

And there was that final night, after Mike retired, when I sat with the campfire until it slept too. I started a sonnet about that fire then, and I think it’s just about fully baked now:

A crater pulses glowing at my feet
as if I were a goddess in control
of lava moving maggot-like in heat
and colors ribboning within its bowl.
As if Hephaestus mixed a soup for me
and brought it in a cauldron made of earth,
I stoop to sample radiance and see
the syrup of volcanic afterbirth.

The scarlet and the gold erupt in bright
calligraphy and then subside to black,
until I breathe on them and blow them light
again, and coax the searing color back,
until at last I let them cool and fade
and slumber, under night’s encasing shade.