As my first summer vacation from college approached at the end of my freshman year - lo, those many years ago - my parents each attemtped to impart a bit of wisdom of the elders to me. Hard labor during college summers, they advised, makes one appreciate the sheepskin much more.

This nugget, of course, I promptly took under advisement and instead moved to Ocean City, Maryland, where I surfed the days away and worked as a stand-up comedian at night. Good money for a college kid - all cash under the table and tons of fringe benefits - so, like swallows to Capistrano, I made my annual return until I was officially entitled to append "B.S." after my name. And then I went back for just one more summer before seeing what was out there in the real world.

Ocean City is a thin north-south strip of sand on Maryland's northern coast and separated from the mainland by the comically named Assawoman Bay. In order to leave Ocean City and return to the continent proper in that day, one had to pass over the bay via a bridge at the southerly end of Ocean City. There was only one road in and out of paradise.

This bridge is the eastern terminus of U.S. Route 50, which stretches across the nation and ends in Sacramento, California, passing through a dozen states en route. In the wild carefree days of its youth, Route 50 was the main transcontinental highway, but with the construction of the Interstate Highway System, its popularity declined and it became, for the most part, a secondary road. Large stretches of Route 50 run through the desert in the west, and this portion of the road has become known as "The Loneliest Road in America."

At the beginning of the bridge over Assawoman Bay (snicker), someone with a sense of humor at the Maryland Department of Transportation has placed a mileage sign:

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Years later, I learned that there is a similar sign on the western end of Route 50.

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One afternoon during my last few pre-real world days, I was headed inland and found myself stuck in traffic directly in front of the sign indicating the mileage to Sacramento. In my boredom, I did the math in my head and realized that if one were to travel roughly nine miles per day, one could cross America in exactly one year.

The wheels started turning, and I added the first item to my life's Bucket List. I vowed that I would, at some point in my life, take a year off, dip my right foot into the Atlantic Ocean, then hop on a motorcycle to drive nine miles per day across the country, and finally dip my left foot in the Pacific a year later. I vowed to catalog each stop along the way. I wanted to see the sights in each place and to meet the people who lived there. I wanted to watch their children's Little League games, go to church with them, buy the house a round of drinks, watch a 4th of July fireworks show in one of those rectangular states in the country's midsection. I wanted to engulf myself in their lives for a day. And then I'd move on.

And when the trip was through, I'd go home and write a book about it.

As the years have gone by, I've gone to law school, gotten married, had a kid, woke up one day with a conscience and quit practing law, and started my own internet website design company. My roots had grown deep and there was little chance I'd ever make that trip. The dream had largely faded. It was removed from my Bucket List and placed on my Things I'll Regret Never Doing list.

Then one day about two years ago, my wife told me she wanted a divorce. My life was about to be uprooted. That, I thought, was a bad thing.

When such news breaks, one spends a great amount of his time dwelling upon errors of the past and contemplating how things could've been done differently. Eventually, however, a healing process begins with the first hint of recognition that even if all the coulda-woulda-shoulda's were figured out, the knowledge would be purely academic and would never change things. Eventually, one begins to see the opportunities afforded by the future rather than bemoaning the mistakes in his history.

In some cases, this healing process is so slow and gradual as to go completely unnoticed. In other cases, it is a sudden "Eureka!" moment. Mine was the latter, a palpable moment during a conversation with my brother on the phone.

He said, "Think of it this way. If you'd stayed married, you'd have never gotten to play golf at St. Andrews. Now you can."

It hit me as a lightning flash. I was abruptly aware of all the things I could do, now that my roots were no longer entangled with Earth's core. The Bucket List was taken out, dusted off, and those items which had faded with time were re-inked, this time with the solemn promise that I'd do each and every one of them. Within a week, I'd crossed off the first item by traveling down to Florida to spend some time with my brother and watch a space shuttle launch.

Yesterday, I came one step closer to realizing the cross-country trip. I bought this:

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I'm reminded of Calvin's final words to his trusty sidekick on December 31, 1995, "It's a magical world. Hobbes, old buddy, let's go exploring."

Per request of a friend, this is the prologue to the first draft of my current writing project.

The moment John Barker Haden died, every wolf on the face of the Earth lifted its muzzle toward the heavens and howled.

It's said that when each of the Wright brothers died, every bird in the world stopped singing and observed a moment of silence. It's said that when Jacques Cousteau died, every whale in the world simultaneously breached the ocean surfaces and belly-flopped back to their watery homes. It's also said that when Eva Gabor died, every mink in the world laughed its ass off. Whether there is any truth to these claims is speculative.

But the wolves howled.

They howled from the heights of sugar-frosted mountains in Alaska and from beneath the dark canopy of the Belarussian Bialowieza Forest. They howled from within their dens in the Sawtooth Mountains, from the sun-sizzled Arizona desert, and from the steppes of Russian Siberia. No matter where they were, no matter what they were doing, they all stopped and howled.

Not many people noticed, however. Most wolves make their homes far from humans, so their plaintive cries went largely unheard. The howls of those who did live in close proximity to civilization were simply ignored, their human neighbors too busy to take notice.

Only a few, those whose lives were closely intertwined with the wolves', noticed anything peculiar. A zookeeper in New Zealand stopped in the middle of making his feeding rounds and scratched his head when the wolves simultaneously paused suddenly in mid-meal to howl in unison. A group of Inuit hunters tracking game along a deer path were startled by the holy chorus echoing from the surrounding hills. Game wardens and park rangers hiking through the lands they tended hesitated briefly in their tracks when they heard the sad cries sounding through the woods around them. None would attach any significance to the odd phenomenon, however, and they each returned to their tasks.

Many theories exist as to the reason wolves howl. Folklore holds that wolves howl at the full moon. Some of these full-moon folk tales hold that the moon exerts some supernatural force upon wolves. Others believe that wolves are so attracted by the moon's beauty that they howl in defeat because they cannot fly. Still others hold that wolves howl at the moon in a futile, dogged attempt to make it move.

Scientists offer more reasonable theories. It is widely held among the scientific community that the wolves' howl is not tied to the moon's appearance at all, but rather that it is a form of communication, a means to hold the pack together during times when seasonal scarcity causes them to roam far from one another in search of food. Others hold that howling may be one of the many idiosyncratic social behaviors by which wolves attain rank within their packs.

None of these hypotheses, whether of science or superstition, of fact or fiction, is accurate, however.

The truth lies in the fact that there exists a common thread running throughout the rough fabric from which all living things are cut, a connection fed by the collective unconscious which joins all creatures, regardless of genus or species. When a single creature is in distress, all others feel it, though the degree to which they do varies widely. Some feel a moment of discomfort - a passing sense of dizziness or disorientation which they may attribute to a lack of sleep or having eaten something disagreeable - while others are much more profoundly affected, suffering nightmares or bouts of insomnia, falling into depression or illness, or, at its extreme, even dying.

When one creature suffers, all others experience a momentary flex and twist of some unmapped chromosomal strand deep in the primitive portions of their genetic makeup. In most cases, once stretched, it never quite returns completely to its original shape.

It is this connection of commonality which explains how a mother can instantly sense that her child hundreds of miles away has died suddenly. It is this connection of morphic knowledge which explains how prehistoric societies separated by vast expanses of ocean and time all suddenly and simultaneously reached significant milestones in their cultural evolution - harnessing fire, developing language, decorating their cave walls with paintings. It is this connection which explains the befuddling discovery by English settlers and Australian aboriginal tribes, when they first encountered one another, that each of their languages had the same word for "dog."

It is this same connection which explains why all the wolves howled when John Barker Haden died. Though his death may have sent ripples throughout the entire pond of creation, most creatures were too far from the epicenter of the splash to be affected by it.

To the wolves, however, it was stark and painful.

Forget all the fables claiming that wolves howl at the moon. Forget the scientific journals suggesting that wolves howl in order to keep in touch with one another. Forget all that mankind has claimed to know of the way of the wolves, for that matter. None of it is even remotely accurate.

The wolves felt John Barker Haden's death so sharply because he was born of the wolf spirit. They cried out because they knew the instant he died that they had lost one of their own. They cried out for the real reason wolves howl.

It's how they pray.

One of the many benefits of being a chronic insomniac is that I have, through the years, been fortunate enough to witness the manner by which numerous living things on this planet create more of their own. For this, I owe a great deal of thanks to the 1:00 - 4:00 a.m. documentary programming schedules on the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, the Playboy Channel, Animal Planet, and similar networks.

Last night, I added a new species to the list of strange animal porn I have witnessed. After waking up around 1:00 a.m. and being unable to get back to sleep, I padded down the hall to add to my encyclopedic knowledge of animal mating habits and learned a great deal about the life cycle of the lowly Sea Squirt.

Sea Squirts, I learned, are one of the numerous creatures which live most of their lives anchored in one place at the bottom of the ocean. They derived their name from the fact that when they're disturbed, they squirt water out of the two openings - one of which is a mouth-like thing, and the other of which is another mouth-like thing - on their bodies.

Since they're immobile and live in an environment where stuff floats around them, they've developed the same reproductive method as most other such creatures, namely that they squirt sperm out into the water around them in the hopes that they'll land on another member of their species and make little Sea Squirt babies. In fact, it's amazing how many species breed this way.

As an aside, during my nocturnal sex ed sessions, I've learned that there are so many undersea species that breed this way, I often wonder how shallow the ocean would be if all the wiggly little seedlings were removed. My guess is that it wouldn't be too hard to skip a stone from Brazil to Africa. The ocean's so full of little fishy sperm swimming hither and yon that even if there were no waves, it would still jiggle like Jell-O. I mention this solely in case any of my readers planning a beach vacation are particularly squeamish about swimming in this kind of stuff. Or are particularly fertile, for that matter. Be safe and go to the mountains instead.

Last night's educational foray into the life cycles of the Sea Squirt made me aware of many similarities to our own mating rituals.

Think about it.

Human families are really just groups of people who have ended up living together as a result of squirting stuff into and out of each other.

There are many variants to this, but in the traditional situation, two humans who decide they want to squirt exclusively with one another will have a ceremony to solemnize that decision. Many of them - though they're not supposed to - squirt with each other prior to the ceremony, and many even squirt with a lot of people before settling on one person with whom they wish to keep squirting exclusively.

At this ceremony, someone whom God put in charge of hooking up squirting couples will read some stuff from a book called The Holy Bible and then ask each, in essence, "Do you want to squirt with him/her exclusively?" If each answers affirmatively, the divine appointee will declare them bound to one another and then say to the male, again in essence, "You may squirt your bride, but only with your mouth on hers for now because, you know, God's looking and it would be a little rude to do much more at this point."

Then they go off to a big party where the female will toss a grouping of flowers - an organism with its own brand of squirting - into a crowd of other females as a superstitious gesture of good fortune that the one who catches it will be the next to find someone with whom to exclusively squirt. Then the male and female (the two involved in the ceremony) will smear cake all over each other's faces while many of the people who were watching the ceremony get intoxicated as a prelude to flirting and eventually pairing off and surreptitiously finding a place to unofficially squirt with one another.

Afterwards, the ceremonial male and female will retire to a hotel room somewhere where they will begin squirting for the first (at least official) time. The next day, they will awaken and travel to some distant place and enjoy squirting with each other for a few weeks, then return to the place where, like the Sea Squirt, they'll be anchored for the rest of their lives.

They'll continue to squirt with one another until finally, one day, the stuff squirted will end up being squirted on a thing that makes other humans when squirted. Roughly nine months after that happens, the female will then squirt out another human.

They are allowed to do this more than once. In fact, each human female will squirt out approximately two and a half new humans during her lifetime. No one's quite sure what happens to the other half of the last one, though.

And there you have it. From the lowly Sea Squirt to the infinitely more complex human being, creatures everywhere have their own way of squirting out more of their kind.

Some, though, don't make more of themselves by squirting. Instead, they just split, which is what human couples do when one of them discovers the other squirting with someone they're not supposed to, but that's a different topic for a different day.

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The breeder said he couldn't be taught. He was incorrigible, stubborn, and stupid, so I got a steal of a deal on him. I thought he might at least make a good house dog if he couldn't be taught to hunt, so I bought him.

I worked with him, got him used to the sudden shock of gunfire, and spent weeks trying to get him to listen to commands in the field. Try as I might, though, I started to think the breeder was correct, despite the fact that the dog came from a long line of great gun dogs. I'm not sure whether there's a canine equivalent of ADHD, but if there is, I was convinced that the dog was certainly a classic case.

Then, right when my frustrations were on the brink of leading me to give up on him, something happened. He got his first scent of a quail.

In that instant, something clicked. Some strand of DNA hidden deep in his genetic makeup stretched and flexed and was suddenly activated. Two thousand years of breeding rose abruptly to the surface of his consciousness. He stopped dead in his tracks and hit a point, head lowered to the ground, tail extended straight behind him, and he stood still as a statue and held the point. So solid was his stance that it earned him a new name - Rock.

He held the point until I moved in behind him, and when I tapped his hip, he stalked in as steady and soft as a cat toward the clump of brush where the bird was hidden. When I flushed the bird, Rock took off in pursuit, and when I fired and the bird fluttered to the ground, Rock picked it up, brought it back to me, and dropped it at my feet as if he'd been hunting for years.

From that moment on, Rock became one of the best gun dogs I've owned. He was friendly and had a gentle demeanor, but as soon as the Jeep door opened and he jumped into the field, he was instantly serious. He was so focused when he hunted that he was completely impervious to pain, not caring whether briars were ripping his flesh as he dove into the brush in pursuit of a quail, not seeming to notice even when a few pellets of birdshot ended up hitting him. It was a rare hunt when he didn't have pink streaks of blood tinting his white fur at the end of the day.

He filled out until he was a stocky 70 pounds - very large for a Brittany - and every vet who saw him first commented that he needed to lose some weight, until they started to examine him and realized that the weight was all dog. His weight didn't slow him down, though. He was just as fast and nimble in the field as any other dogs in the hunt, and his endurance was remarkable. He'd hunt until he collapsed. The hunt was such unbridled joy for him that he never tired.

About ten years ago, I decided to give him a vacation. I took him with me when I spent a few weeks hiking a nearby spur of the Appalachian Trail, and he loved it. The mountains were full of new scents and wildlife he'd never encountered before, and he was systematic about surveying the new country and reporting back to me every thing he'd found. He chased deer, jumped a few grouse, rolled in the creeks, wallowed in the mud, and thoroughly enjoyed himself. At night, he'd snuggle next to me in my sleeping bag to share his warmth against the chill that settles on the mountain at night.

In keeping with Appalachian Trail tradition, we needed trail names. Since he was so much more serious about scouting the countryside than I, he became known as "Order" and I became "Chaos," and the trip was one of the most memorable of my life. We were a team.

In the past few years, Rock had slowed. Arthritis settled in his front legs and his stamina had waned. At fourteen years, he was approaching his seniority and I had begun to realize he would soon need to be retired, to be moved from his kennel at the hunt club and given a warm and comfortable indoor life to live out his remaining years in contentment, with the occasional hunt to allow him to savor his youth. This year, I had decided, would be his last before he'd get his gold watch and going away party.

This morning, I was planning on my first hunt of Rock's final year. I awoke early, stuffed my shotgun in its case, grabbed my shell bag, and headed out to the hunt club.

When I opened Rock's kennel and called him, however, he didn't come out of his doghouse. I looked inside and he was curled up asleep, and when I woke him, he had none of his usual enthusiasm. Instead, he gave a halfhearted wag of his tail and tried to stand, but wobbled and fell. I helped him out of his kennel, and he could barely walk. His legs creaked with every movement, and he was in obvious pain.

With a great deal of assistance from me, he managed to get into the car, but when we got out to the field, he wouldn't budge. I cut the hunt short and called the vet.

Forty-five minutes later, the vet met me at his office, looked Rock over, and declared that his arthritis was so severe that Rock was essentially an invalid. He'd developed hip dysplasia on top of that, and the vet described the degree of Rock's pain as excruciating.

We discussed his prognosis and the likely progression of the arthritis and dysplasia, and the vet finally informed me that he thought the best course was euthanasia, and that's what we ultimately did.

And now, here I am without my teammate. Here I am without my hunting buddy. Here I am alone in the field.

Now, here I am...

Chaos. Without Order.

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Whenever I see someone with a gold ring protruding from a pierced bellybutton, it reminds me of a character from a Thomas Pynchon novel who, born without a navel but with a golden screw in its place, lived with it for years, until one day, in a fit of curiosity and possessing a screwdriver, he unscrewed the thing.

When he did, his ass fell off.

Pablo Picasso once said, "Every act of creation is first an act of destruction."

I wonder, sometimes, whether there is some design behind the fact that God created light on the first day and waited until the third to create trees upon which to shine it. I have a hunch, nevertheless, that God's act of creation was carried out in autumn - just in time for Earth to die - so He could paint creation with His brightest brush.

Mother Nature dies this time each year, and the colors of her demise are always spectacular. Neither the most skilled playwright nor the most accomplished opera composer could conjure a death scene as gloriously dramatic, no matter what light is cast upon his players' stage.

And it is remarkable that Earth's death throes are made beautiful by appeal solely to one of our five senses. Earth dies in absolute silence, absent of any fragrance, taste, or touch.

I don't recall to whom this might be attributed, but it has been said that when we die, we each die alone. Watching Earth die in all her magnificence gives me a sense of holy solitude, a sense of completeness as a circle drawing back to its point of origin, a sense that something far greater than any man can comprehend is unfolding before me.

It's a sense of the Word becoming flesh.

And as I watch it today, all my senses overwhelmed by color, I can comprehend only one thing:

I am.

And that's all I need. The rest is gravy.

My new favorite song:

A year is a warm fuzzy measurement of time for us. We measure our age in years. We celebrate birthdays and anniversaries on the same day each year. When the number of years which have lapsed since we were deemed fully educated by some school somewhere are evenly divisible by five or ten, we get back together with the people who received their diplomas at the same time and make snide remarks about the ones who've gotten fat.

Somehow, we've grown sentimental about Earth being in exactly the same place in relation to the sun as it was at the time some memorable event in the past took place. On my daughter's birthday this year, for example, I happened to look at my watch at exactly the same time as the time she was born, and I thought, "Eight years ago at this exact minute, I was watching her be born." I was wrong, though, and I knew better.

Here's the stupid thing, the thing we forget. A year isn't really 365 days.

In reality, it takes the Earth 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 9.54 seconds - what's called a "sidereal year" - to make one complete trip around the sun.

The problem is that a sidereal year isn't evenly divisible by 24 hours. Earth's spin on its axis is about one-quarter turn away from true each year to be completely synchronous with one complete orbit of the sun. And that sucks if you're trying to create an accurate calendar that's useful to the common man.

So, we did what we humans do best when we can't figure something out. We fudged it.

The calendar we use today was first devised by an Italian named Aloysius Lilius. He came up with the idea of basing the calendar on daily rotations of the Earth, and then fudged it by declaring that an extra day should be stuck in there every four years to make up for the difference.

It made enough sense to the head guy in charge at the time, the Pope, that it became official. Of course, the Pope, being the head guy in charge, also decided that he'd name it after himself instead of the guy who thought it up, so it's now known as the Gregorian Calendar, after Pope Gregory XIII. Pissed at having someone take credit for his work, Lilius then proposed that they should stick an extra Pope in after every IV popes to make the Catholic church make sense, but that didn't fly.

I just made that last bit up.

So why in the world would I pick today to write a post like this?

It's sentimentality time, for me. Exactly one sidereal year before I started writing this - the last time the Earth was in this exact position in relation to the sun - I was climbing in my car for the ten hour drive to be with my brother, who had just been diagnosed with the cancer which would ultimately claim his life.

Rough day, here.

I hate it when I play inadvertent practical jokes on myself. The perils of an aging memory makes it happen more and more often.

I have a small magnetic whiteboard on my refrigerator. I use it for my To Do List and I update it every evening with the things I want to accomplish the next day. Unfortunately, the board is small enough that I tend to use abbreviations and shorthand to preserve space.

Occasionally, it backfires, as it did today. I have no idea what "Call Tony Re: Fzr Ins Hamp" is supposed to mean. If it weren't written in my own handwriting, I'd swear someone broke into Chez Fool and vandalized my To Do List. And to make it even weirder, I only know two people named Tony. One is a veterinarian and the other is a guy with whom I used to play golf.

The only critter residing at Chez Fool (besides me), is my healthy fish, Gilbert Short For Gill (his official name as given by my daughter), and the other Tony cheats too much at golf for my taste. I have no idea why I'd need to call either. Or why I'd need to contact either about Fzr Ins Hamp.

I certainly hope that Fzr Ins Hamp isn't something that needs to be hooked up to someone's life support system, needs to be installed on someone's car to keep the brakes from failing, or might be instrumental to averting nuclear war.

And I hope that this Tony, whoever he might be, didn't need a reminder about Fzr Ins Hamp and took care of it himself.