It’s the last wild place in the east, maybe. A sprawling 3.5 million acres of timber and mountain, stream and lake. A gnarled network of dirt roads, narrow and tangled up in the hills or wide as any four-lane, spreads out over the whole of it. This is the heart of the state’s timber industry, and massive, laden semis barrel down the main routes with abandon, an apocalyptic cloud of dust rising from their wheels. And there’s the sound; the roar and riot of metal and pine rattling off of each other over the pocked and rutted road. We’re five hours from Portland, but everything out our windows looks like the farthest, darkest acres of Alaska.

I haven’t said much about our truck. The Dodge is a glorious implement. A tool. And like any hammer or pick or spade, it does the task I’ve set before it. It has been a consumer of miles; if not a happy wanderer, then at least a dedicated one. The odometer glows at 310,000 miles and swells every day towards calamity or immortality.

There’s no preparing yourself for the simple beauty of Vermont. The state feels like some half-cousin of Norway and Virginia, bright and clean and impossibly green. Neat little houses and towering, double-bay barns sit back from the road looking buttoned up, their sides straight and proper. There are no frivolous columns or porches flaring out like laced hems. This is a place built to shoulder the burden of winter snow. We’re no further north than we have been for the past two weeks, but there’s no mistaking the change.

In another six months, our daughter will be two, and already her tantrums are growing, her cries twisting from an earnest wail to a pointed shriek that sets a rage in me. She has my temper, and what starts as some small frustration builds to a fresh fury as she finds herself unable to communicate with us. Beth is patient, talking to her in a calm, collected voice. I am not.

We lingered in the Adirondacks. Turned two days on the quiet banks of Horseshoe Lake into four. After weeks of filthy campsites wedged in the sticky heat of West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York forests, the upstate stillness was a gift. We walked, let kiddo chase frogs across the twisted roots at her feet, plopped pebbles into the smooth water and listened to her giggle at the splashes. Watched the sky for hawks and loons and herons. We stayed as long as we were allowed, and when we’d ran out our time, we pointed ourselves east again.

Somewhere north of Utica, the forests change their clothes, shifting from the soft, tender green of deciduous leaves to deeper, older conifer hues. The hills and ridges of the Adirondacks are darker, blue in the shadows. We work our way up through the tourist-trap town of Old Forge on 28, the road hugging close to wide, still water, dark as rippled slate in the pittering rain.

The lakes I grew up with were all TVA affairs. Mountain rivers brought to a halt and distended, blocked by the forward march of man and his thirst for electric light. Big ponds, really. There’s nothing pleasant about wading into that water, first tumbling down a shore that was once the lofty ridge side, then sinking to your knee in the muck and slime of the bottom, the lake still trying to digest the land beneath it. Branches and leaves and liquid clay all turned to a sucking mire beneath the opaque green of Norris or Loudon.

I pushed us to Niagara. I don’t know why. Our route had us running to Syracuse to visit with Beth’s brother, and the falls are on their way to nowhere—the breathing definition of "out of the way." I’d been once before, back in 2010. Beth has stood on the ragged edge of Victoria Falls and seen the wonder from the Zimbabwe side; America’s version was bound to seem small, crowded, and commercialized by comparison. Still, I dragged us up there. Planned a series of camps along the way, the last of which was no more than an hour from Buffalo.

It’s late by the time we work our way to the trailhead, the coolness of the morning already gone. Kiddo’s fussing, already tired, her red curls matted under the heavy heat and humidity of the late morning. The meltdown is coming.

We’re running out the Appalachians. Chasing the tender tails of the hills we love. So much of what we see in the far northwest corner of Pennsylvania feels familiar, like a shade of the Virginia home we knew in high school. The way the quiet isn’t a quiet at all, but the chorus of a breathing forest. The sigh and rustle of uncountable leaves, their silver bellies flashing at the sky.