I don’t know if she saw me looking at her, or if my eyes found her because she was looking at me. But she signaled to me and I got up and went to her, leaning over her seat.

“Can you take me home?” she whispered.

She was sitting near an exit and we were able to leave without attracting much attention. When we reached the door, she stopped for a moment to look back. The environmental writer had just dimmed the lights and was showing a series of wildlife slides: coyote, skunk, black bear, owl.

“Look at that,” Viridian said quietly. “The animals are watching the animals.”

We came out of the building and stepped into the profound quiet of the night. Only gradually did you become aware of the lap and push of river water, the breath of wind in the pines. It was dark except for the small clutch of lights that marked the buildings, and the paths between them.

Viridian looked around her uncertainly. “Is this home?”

“It is for right now.”

“Oh of course. Of course you’re right.” She laughed a little, a breezy sound.

I took her arm and guided her, and we made a slow progress along the paths and toward her cabin. Yes, I was anxious about her, but there was something dreamlike about walking in this way, through the listening darkness. The sky above us was clear and the moon was only a slice of white just above the horizon. “Are you tired?” I asked her. “Did you need to stop and rest?”

She didn’t answer, but she did halt and look around her. “Do you know what poetry’s for? So that you can make use of a night like this. Make it into something that lasts.”

Slowly, slowly along the wooden pathways. The night was cooler and there was a lonesomeness to it, a thrilling lonesomeness with wildness at its center. There were only the two of us, two small human animals at the edge of a vast forest.

We reached Viridian’s cabin and I said I’d go in ahead to turn on the lights. But she said No, not yet, and so we sat on the bench of the small front porch in the dark. By and by we heard the voices of the others as the assembly ended and people made their way along the paths, and after a time one of the fiction writers, Jane, who was staying at the cabin, came walking up to us and said, “Oh my goodness, I didn’t see you sitting there. Aren’t you cold? Can I get you a blanket?”

Viridian sighed and said she would go on in now. “I used to be able to sit up all night. No more.”