Mistakes Were Made

Sometimes you have to start with a pause.

Mistakes were made: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing meaningful can come of the story I am going to relate.

I’m not even supposed to be here yet, in your email telling you what happened. I’m supposed to be deep in the North Woods fending off marauding moose and subsisting on stale beef jerky and inadvertently swallowed blackflies. But instead Mica and I are back home on Peaks Island temporarily. It’s not the end, it’s just a brief setback. Whatever Stoppard’s Birdboot claims, sometimes you have to begin with a pause. As I said: mistakes were made.

But fortunately for us the mistakes in questions are an instructive combination of errors of inexperience and errors of overconfidence, so I’ll point them out as we go. Here’s what happened.

But First: I have said all along that once we started hiking, the majority of these posts would be for paid members. So here we are, at the paywall. Subscription is one-time-only for the entire run of the newsletter, however long it lasts. No renewal, no further cost, it never expires, and you’ll never see another paywall.

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