Our tent is pitched on the edge of a campground under the dark, green boughs of maple trees, just above an embankment that drops down to the Delaware River. In the settling darkness of twilight, as the shapes of trees and boulders grows more indistinct, the murmur of the river in its ceaseless flow to the sea from the mountains is reassuring, refreshing. It is like a voice from nature itself, evidence that beyond the world of automobiles, television sets, refrigerators and air conditioners, this raw, natural force still exists. Somehow we find that exciting.

We are a couple of hundred miles northwest of New York City. It felt good to drive up to this place from the civilization of the suburbs, with the windows of the car open to let in the fresh air. Only the car and its license plates seem a tenuous, stretched connection to those suburbs. That too is a cause for exhilaration. The fact that there is no television up here to entertain us means that we have had to rely on a pack of old playing cards. No stove means that we had to cook our burgers and corn on the cob over an open fire. No beds means sleeping bags, rolled out over air mattresses in our tent. All these things are for us, also a cause for celebration.

The fire is dying down, crackling the dried up sticks and logs we have tossed into it, flickering in the darkness so that our hunched shadows loom and shrink against the dappled, wild leaves of the trees; a ghostly pantomime. We laugh at them nervously. We listen to an unseen chorus of crickets and katy-dids calling to each other from their mysterious places in the woods. It is good to be close to this, we think.

In the light of an old oil lamp we play cards, and the simple figures of spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds, the braces of kings and queens, jacks and aces, seem to be yet another connection to the past, something handed down to us from generation to generation like chess, or English itself. For one night at least, we're almost like the characters in the Outlaw Josie Wales. Vagabonds with thin ties to civilization, in the middle of nowhere.