This Hobby Can Change Your Life

I have a hobby and it’s weird.

It started in a pretty normal way.

I’d always liked taking walks and then I had young kids.

Because it was often the only way I could get them to sleep–or to keep them out of the house so my wife could sleep–I would spend hours and hours walking on the rural country road that we live on.

It is unpaved and unmaintained by the county or the state, lined with trees, and more frequently crossed by deer and jack rabbits than people. We’d do miles and miles, first in the baby bjorn, then the single stroller and then the double stroller. We see the sun come up or the sun go down. We crunch the frost and the mud. We’d do it in the heat and the cold, on ordinary days, for the interminable months of the pandemic, weekdays and weekends, rain or shine.

It’s a throwback to an older, simpler way of life.

It’s also a throwback to a scene I’ve always remembered from Mad Men, where Don Draper and his family finish their roadside picnic and then nonchalantly throw all their trash into the grass below.

Only out here, because the police don’t seem to mind or our local government is non-existence, they dump tires and old mattresses. They dump debris from construction sites. They dump beer bottles and candy wrappers. They dump…