Three Retreats

Three times Kaag has run for the woods. At fifteen, a Latin teacher drove him to Walden Pond because he could see what Kaag's house was doing to him. At twenty, he walked into the Swiss mountains with no food and no map, and was lost for two days. At twenty-eight, his father died, and he went north and stayed. No chapter this time, just the question under every retreat: why does tragedy send people toward the wild? Thoreau went to the pond carrying a grief of his own, and Kaag thinks it sits beneath every page. The episode ends with the pilgrims who keep coming, and the stones they leave.