I first encountered freedom in the rolling golden hills around my childhood home.
Inside the house, at school, at church, I listened. Perhaps this was because I was the third child of four. Perhaps my father’s diatribes on Calvinist theology and the fury of a God who was perpetually aggrieved at the state of humanity made me hesitate to speak. Or perhaps it was a more tangible fear of my father himself, one moment blowing raspberries in my belly while I shrieked with laughter, only to see his face curdle with menace the next when I shrieked a little too loud for an obedient son.
Whatever the reason, I never felt it was possible, in the presence of other people, to be both wrong and worth a damn. I listened because I was careful. I was careful to understand what I didn’t understand: what was happening behind the changing eyes of other people?
But outside, I was a prince among the twisting oaks, straight pines and peeling dogwoods that dotted my hills of rural Sonoma County. There were no fences marking the limit of my family’s one acre, so when I climbed the hill behind our house I kept going through a dense copse of magnolias, crossing an open glade where the five or six white-tailed deer who ate our fruit trees often foraged. Beyond that lay a tiny (in retrospect) ravine where a stream rushed through.
After crossing the stream, I walked with care; the neighbors on that side kept a doberman pinscher that patroled their land. More than a once I heard its low growl out of sight, then a high stacatto bark as it tore after me. I learned that my body could fly, barely touching the ground, if I pumped my arms when I ran. I cleared the stream with a bound and turned, heart in my throat, to see the doberman, shiny black and brown, standing on the other bank with its ears sharp in warning. I never felt more alive.
This freedom has come back to me again and again when I needed it. Before I left college in Chicago for Washington DC with no contacts, no job and no savings, I spent a summer in the Upper Peninsula, on the shores of Lake Superior. One sun-soaked day in late August 2002, with a few friends who had led canoe trips for campers that summer, we swam out to a small island near the shore of the vast, frigid lake. At that point, none of us knew that climbing was a sport, but we deep water soloed up the rock face, dripping wet, gripping the rock with shaking limbs. I remember looking down at the uneven face, and knowing that a fall could be a catasrophe. I was afraid–and I was thrilled. I was really alive.
That is probably why, when I felt my life dissolving around me following the sale of my company, I moved from San Francisco to a small house on the outskirts of Boulder Colorado, where the only thing between me and the mountains was a grassy, golden hill that rolled up and up into the pines.
new gods 