Once, I ran away from college to go live in the woods.
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There was something about the staleness of the dormitories, the white-washed cinderblock and the mediocre wood cabinetry elevated eight stories above the ground that gnawed at me. It felt removed; from my window, I could see the expanse of the District?as a fury of red and orange November trees that rolled onward in waves toward Maryland. I could see the ground bulge with hills, and I could imagine the rivers that ran through them. I wanted to be a part of it.
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I felt, welling up in me, some kind of unique elation which took me, in that illuminating span of 15 minutes, from staring out of my dorm room window to scribbling a frantic note to my roommate and stuffing all the warm clothes I could fit into my backpack, possessed with absurd visions of hunkering down in the arms of a tree for the entire night. Outside, my hands numbly maneuvered the handlebars of my bicycle and I slipped like fog through the streets.

Rock Creek Park hits Connecticut Avenue in the middle of Washington and creeps up along its middle until it reaches the northernmost corner. It is a wilderness to anybody breaking free from the college trance for a few hours; it is large and forested and cleaved by Rock Creek, for which the park is named. When I arrived there, the sun was just tipping over the serrated brims of the trees, and long shadows slid across the quiet places on the trails.

I abandoned my bicycle and delved into the woods. I couldn’t have told you then what I was doing. Some animal part of me suppressed any cautious foresight, and in its place let loose a new rationality that logic was bound to the dirt and the bark of the trees.

There was one point in my walking where I stopped to look at the branches dangling leaves in my face, and I realized that I could not recall the last time I had really been outside. I could not recall the last time I’d really existed in the world, saw what was right in front of my face, felt and comprehended the roughness of the wood on my fingers and smelled the heavy loam of the earth.

I hiked along the trails until there was no more light, and then I found my way into a clearing. It was not very late, but the darkness gave the hours a finality, an absoluteness. When had I last felt true darkness? When last had a circle of wilderness struck into my heart such a deep and wholly natural fear? How long had it been since I was moved by the rich throb of the planet?

How long since I had lived not in some abstract social theory as dictated by professors, but in the world as it was happening in that snapshot of a second?
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I was floored by the pounding immediacy of the moment and?the overwhelming nowness of the rocks and the coldness and ecstatic with my privilege to be a part of all them, without hesitance, without the separation?that comes from viewing the world through the lens of abstract thought. It’s tiring to hold in your manic consciousness endless theologies and all the rest of the dualities that are dreamt of in our curriculum. I think we sometimes forget that we are learning these things to better exist in the world; yet, ironically, in dwelling only in theories, eight floors from the ground, we divorce ourselves from it. In that cold, in that night, the college became not a haven of growth but a Dostoevsky horror show.

Looking back, the entire escape to the forest seems a bit of a Thoreauesque mishap. I never even stayed the entire night. Later, I fell into the river and had to bike back to the dorms, rather than succumb to hypothermia. Nevertheless, I think it was a step in the right direction.
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The leaves are turning now. Underneath the hyperactive heartbeat of midterm week, I feel the lure of them, and I won’t resist. I’ve learned to see college as a necessary evil and to find a balance: I exult in the time I can spend holed up in Pius Library, making a world in my head of all the mad philosophies we’ve conjured through the centuries, but I also feel within me the need to purge myself, every so often, of those esoteric human ideas and exist, in all simplicity, with the earth.

Roberta Singer is a freshman in the College of Arts
and Sciences.