Almost immediately I realized the small mistake I had made, and I tried to back out of it, but something kept sticking. “Not that you don’t give to the community,” I said. “It’s just a different community . . .” My attempts to explain only drew the line more starkly though. Kurt nodded but I could tell his mood had soured again, and soon the undercurrents of the night before swirled back around us.

We kept walking, our shadows moving in shifting blobs over the ground. The sound of river rocks rattled under our feet. We turned along a bend in the stream and a curtain of poplar trees came into view, shivering in the distance, showing the white backsides of their leaves. I watched them for a while until an ancient, aching sorrow rose up in my chest. It was a familiar feeling. Something in the mute, unconscious trees resonated inside me, something so deep and fundamental it failed to remember its own source anymore. I watched the poplars flickering against the hard blue of the sky. What is sorrow? I thought. What is sorrow but old, worn-out joy?

I glanced at Kurt, his lips pursed, his eyes filled up with shadows. His strong brow was turned toward the ground. There was a cruel part of me still that triumphed in the truth that had been exposed.

Soon we parted from the stream and came to a ravine filled with lupine and heather, where we jogged down a twisting trail. Kurt moved easily over the ground, a healthy animal, taking the shocks into his knees and shoulders, and I followed him, tracing the nimble path he pioneered.

We crossed some unmarked boundary and entered the old-growth forest, where the air turned green and the earth mossy. Everything was different there. The trees were gigantic and primeval. The ferns were prehistoric, their huge fronds like bending, wet eyelashes. We walked over the spongy, damp earth as the creek whispered and crows called from high above. These trees had been growing for hundreds, thousands, of years, I guessed, in the same place, side by side. I wondered what they must feel like, being rooted in place so long. I wondered if at some point they had come to resent each other.

Kurt pulled ahead of me and loped up the trail over the thick, snaking roots, brushing his hands over the hairy bark of the cedars. He stopped on the top of a hill, where I caught up to him. We had come to the end of the trail.

“Okay, Mark,” Kurt said. “This is it. Hope you like it.”