I stayed outside all day. Mostly I raked, but I also moved planters around, piled empty pots behind the garden shed, and cleared off the trail in the back woods where deer bed down at night, and at dusk a fox always scurries around waiting for Michael to toss some leftovers into the brush. The oaks are nearly bare, except for a few that keep their leaves until spring. This land has mostly hardwoods, so the view above isn’t impeded anymore, but down at eye level an abundance of holly keeps the property green all year. The laurel, as well, remains, and a little higher up the thin pines stay green.

It might snow this year. It seems every year snow falls more regularly. Three years ago it snowed so much I don’t remember it clearing out enough to see the grass until well into February or March, which for this part of Virginia out on the Chesapeake is unusual. I’ll take it, or the heat, doesn’t matter. Ice cold hands from doing work without gloves or a back covered in sweat in August are equally satisfying. I like being in nature, wearing it, letting it penetrate beyond the visual so that all of my senses come to life.

From my perspective in these woods, whether the view be unobstructed across fields and waterways, or blocked, able to see only the nearby thicket like shadows on the wall of a cave, it is a beautiful world; yes, despite the news today, we live in a beautiful world. While humanity gets hung up on every metaphoric syllable, the natural world bends and turns and spins and thrusts itself forward in endless revolutions of perpetual next. This country is still an infant, despite what we call history as well as histrionics. It teethes on change and feeds on self-indulgence. It always has.

But this country, where the river has ebbed and flowed for tens of thousands of years, and the watermen still cross the reach each day before dawn like their great-grandfathers did, is infinite. Here in the early morning a channel marker rings, and the oyster boats return to their docks by the time the morning news anchors have poured their first cup of coffee and sign on to keep us informed about what is “important.”

I have no argument in nature. I have no sense of conflict. The paths are not compromised by a lack of decorum, the deer are not prone to an absence of character, and the osprey and eagles which frequent these skies do not suffer from questionable integrity. Nature is neither crass nor belittling; it does not lie. The trees remain firm in their convictions, the birds—with one exception—do not mock other birds, and the skies, whether cloudy or clear, have no ulterior motives.

Next month I’ll head to Utah, so now I think of the mountains, or Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake; and then Florida, where I can stare for hours looking for manatee, watching the gulf, bothered by and bothering no one. But here, always here along the river, the extremes which occupy my mind level off and remind me of the complicated gift of simplicity.

During high school I spent a good deal of my time hiking and biking, often with my dog, Sandy, through Seashore State Park. It’s a beautiful wilderness stretching between the Chesapeake and Broad Bay in Virginia Beach. Even today I have friends who bike or run the trails under Spanish Moss and across bridges through marshlands. But it’s not called Seashore State Park anymore, it’s First Landing State Park because John Smith first landed there on the Atlantic beach. A cross marks that spot.

Talk about arrogant and, well, wrong. It was not the first landing, and not only because of the Icelandic peoples up north or the Spanish in Florida (San Marco Fort in St Augustine was built before John Smith was born), but also not even the first Brits, with some vicious colleague of Smith’s arriving several years earlier.

So when tourists arrive from Pennsylvania or Quebec they marvel at standing on the first spot in the New World. The name needs to be changed back, either to Seashore State Park again, or something historically apropos, like “Seventh Landing State Park” or “Greedy Bastard’s Landing State Park,” (my personal favorite).

This rebranding isn’t unusual in human history. Before the Romans were in Italy it was the Etruscans; before England it was Engla Land, “Land of the Angles,” a Germanic tribe; and before Virginia was even the Old Dominion, it was Tsenacomoco; and this region of the Chesapeake known today as the Middle Peninsula had been Powhatan land, ruled by Chief Powhatan, father of Pocahontas, who grew up not far from here.

My point is names change. I don’t tell anyone, “Oh, I live in the former Powhatan Lands on the once-hunting grounds of the Rappahannock Indians, long before John Smith was stung by a Stingray at the mouth of the river in the Chesapeake, but the Greedy Bastard survived.” No, I just say Deltaville. It’s easier to find on a map.

I was out on the former hunting grounds (my backyard) and walked to the river (still called the Rappahannock, I’m glad to say, as opposed to the freaking James River (the Powhatan River), and the York River (The Pamunkey River). Even the Chesapeake has had some identity issues. Before the English called it The Chesapeake (two versions exist: Great Shellfish Bay and Mother of All Waters), the Spanish called it Bahia de Santa Marie, or Bay of St Mary, but the Powhatan, who certainly had first naming rights, called it, “Chesepian,” which is an Algonquin word meaning “Village at a Big River,”

This brings me back to me. When I was in high school not far from Greedy Bastard Landing State Park, we lived in a beautiful neighborhood, Chesopian Colony. We had just moved from New York where growing up I was Robert to everyone. Everyone. My family, my friends, teachers, strangers, and had I been able to have run into any Native Americans—and there were many on the Island—I’m sure they would have also called me Robert.

When we moved I decided to call myself Bob. Only my Uncle Bob ever called me Bob (he knew), but at the high school, everyone called me Bob because that was how I introduced myself. This started my struggles with multiple personalities. You see, when I got home I had to slip back into Robert mode. I tried telling my parents I was now Bob and Robert decided to stay in Great River on the Island, but it didn’t take. Once, a girl I knew well and had a serious crush on called my house looking for me. My mother answered the phone and said, “Oh no, I’m sorry, there is no Bob here,” and hung up. “MA!!!! NO!!!” Damn. My father was good about introducing me to his co-workers or golf buddies as Bob, but he always said it was a small sneer, like I was adopted or something.

Very few people call me Bobby. A friend in Albany, a priest in western New York, and another friend who floats around the eastern United States. No, I’m solidly Bob now. In fact if you Google me, Robert comes up mostly in reference to collegiate issues, like Rate My Professor, but if you Google Bob, I’m the only one, making it easy to find most of what I’ve written. That’s good. I’d hate to be a writer with a common name like Tom Williams or Robert Frost.

I suppose nothing is what it once was, and even our memory only goes back so far. What were these lands twenty-thousand years ago, before the Algonquins, before the other peoples crossed land-bridges or built reed boats? Do we have to return to Pangea to understand? Is it possible that the “original peoples” were themselves Greedy Bastards? Probably not since the population was so much smaller. I like knowing that these lands above the Rappahannock River were only previously occupied by animals. I like animals way better than nearly all people I’ve met.

When I sit out near the river at night and look across the Bay, I forget that people everywhere are not only replacing people everywhere, but we’re also simply passing through, guests, temporary settlers in a land that was green for millennia before us and will return to her natural state pretty much as soon as we’re gone. Somehow this brings me peace. I still don’t understand why people everywhere don’t understand this—that we must remain connected, learn each other’s names and ways, histories and hopes. It is so much harder to invade a place when you know their names.

My roots are not Native American; they’re, in descending order of percentage, Irish, English, German/Italian, French, and Neanderthal. I have felt equally connected to the people of Connemara as I have those in Brooklyn. The Celts of the Wild Atlantic Way are there now and go back a long time, much longer than the four hundred years of the people on Long Island’s western tip. Those names have been changed so many times it would be difficult to keep track.

My son’s middle name is Frederick, after my father, who was named after his grandfather, whose father came from Germany. My brother, too, is named for my father.

I’m not named after anyone. I suppose that’s good; it’s like I’m the first visitor creating my own identity without previous inhabitants of my name setting some sort of expectation. I’m the original Bob in the paternal line of my family.

Hmmm. I think I’ll go with it for now.

At the river again.

An eagle rises from a branch and lifts toward the far side of the marsh, and a heron methodically moves from the reeds on my right deeper into the duck pond searching for minnows and other small fish floundering near the surface where the water is warmer. Out on the water a workboat chugs back toward the docks at Locklies upriver a mile or so, and Mike is out in his PT banking out across the Norris Bridge and moving in for a quiet landing at Hummel Field.

A new moon tomorrow means spectacular stargazing this weekend, and a few hours ago both Jupiter and Saturn sat above the trees in the west. Tomorrow night earlier than this we’ll check out the moons, the rings. I am always taken aback by this same site seen by astronomers hundreds of years ago, same celestial location, and I am certain with the same terrestrial wonder.

The river is quiet this evening, like a mirror, glass. Some lights on the far shore reflect in a perfect motionless line pointing toward me, and the cars crossing the bridge appear inverted just below themselves. There’s something about standing at the river at night that makes me forget the sun is still out over the Pacific and just rising in the Urals. It’s breakfast time in Irkutsk and lunchtime in Vladivostok.

But here it is dark save the cars and lights across the water, and nighttime on the river can be engulfing. Worries and concerns, anxiety and stress drift west with the night, as if that’s Beryl Markham herself flying up there, gathering the problems of those of us along the shore, and lifting off toward the mountains to let them disperse in the dark. I’m not daft; I know this is a temporal relief to the daytime deluge of discouraging news and worries about tomorrow, about today, and even about things that were, but tonight, in this blackness, nothing is more worrisome than accidently startling the heron or the buffleheads on the water, which not even the workboat bothered as it went by.

And it reminds me of something it took me some time to pinpoint. But I did.

I lived across the street from a reservoir in Massachusetts in a yellow house in a quaint village at the corner of two roads which wound around the water, the Wachusett Reservoir. Across a small bridge and up the road about half a mile, a small strip of land reached into the water to a round piece of land on which is an old stone church, abandoned when I lived there, with thick walls and windows so wide you could sleep on the sills, fresh air blowing through the open spaces.

It was common for me to walk out in December along the road to the skinny stretch to the church, walk into its blackness and climb into a sill and sit for an hour or two, watching the occasional cars go by from West Boylston past my house and up toward the mountain, or up on the road heading north into Sterling, through that village and on up toward Leominster and New Hampshire. It could be cold, and geese often settled there for the night, letting out the occasional honk, not minding me, noticing me just the same.

It is an odd mixture of absolute peace of mind, of space, of being, wanting to stay there for a long time, but stirring my soul enough to make me want to do something, to get my guitar and play quietly, or to find a pub and talk to people, to come to life in the dead of night, but I always knew that as soon as I did something like that, very quickly I’d long for the safety of the old church sill where I could still see the lights inside my yellow house, and I could walk home, close the door, turn off the lights and lay in bed thinking about somewhere else.

I was always thinking about somewhere else back then. It wasn’t dissatisfaction with the here and now; it was—is—a restless spirit that I’ve finally recognized has the dubious role of only being truly at peace if it keeps moving.

Like in Spain. Or Siberia. Or Mexico. Or…

I sometimes think about places I’ve been more in terms of time than location, as if I really were to drive to that reservoir, the old stone church would still be overgrown and abandoned, and my house would still have a light on waiting for me to come home and turn in for the night. When one leaves a place and doesn’t return for many, many years, it leaves the last visit hanging there in the air between back then and now, as a mirage, like water on a desert highway, and the closer you come the more you realize there’s nothing there anymore.

A can hear a truck crossing the bridge tonight, heading north toward Maryland perhaps. Further. By the time I walk home and get ready for bed it will be crossing the Potomac, heading up 301 toward Baltimore. The world is small at night, more navigable. I can stand here at the river and believe I can almost see that desert highway reaching across the Sonoran toward Tucson, and at this hour when the world has no sound at all, I can hear two young friends sitting along another river, talking about other dreams in other times.

I love the night for its limitlessness, its clarity despite the darkness, perhaps even the result of the darkness.