A day too beautiful to resist: the sky’s persuasive blue, the cold, dry air rouging cheeks. The old-style Meindl hiking boots I bought a dozen years ago are finally starting to feel broken in. Layering: two pairs of socks, Goretex shell over heavy sweater over long-sleeved T. A few essentials thrown into a daypack (thermos of hot chocolate, a Clif bar, something to read) and I’m off, before the impulse fades.

It’s a 40-minute walk from our front door to the Quarry Rock lookout point, along the first section of the Baden Powell trail that runs from Deep Cove to Horseshoe Bay. I’d wondered if the storms which recently devastated Stanley Park had done any damage in the forests behind the Cove, but I saw little evidence from the trail itself: a few hemlocks down, some small branches scattered here and there. The forest floor like frozen iron, tree trunks almost black against the thin coat of snow which had sifted down through the canopy, roots gripping the trail in icy knuckles underfoot. The creeks still tumble downhill over boulders capped in crystal — Panorama Creek, Cove Creek — before the trail finally breaks out of shadow into winter sunlight, and I step out — for the first time this year — onto that familiar granite shelf with its amazing view down and down and out towards the west.

A small square of foam to sit on; a steaming cup of hot chocolate to sip; a pair of inquisitive crows flap overhead as a small runabout scrawls its sinuous V across the Cove.

Reading Paul Theroux’s recent editorial in the New York Times in which he wistfully recalls an earlier time when America was

a country of enormous silence and ordinariness — empty spaces [and suburbs that were] citified on one margin and thinning to woods on the other. That roomier and simpler America shaped me by giving me and others of my generation a love for space and a taste for solitude.

I’m not normally a fan of Paul Theroux — he tends to complain too much for my reading taste — but this brief piece was perfect for that setting, with a lovely elegiac tone, and a reference that will send me now in search of a copy of Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son.