If you’ve spent any time at your local state park, your local body of water, or your local abandoned granite quarry turned rock climbing haven, then I’m sure you’ve seen me. I was probably leading a hiking group, a kayaking expedition, or belaying a group of high school students on one YMCA-sponsored after-school outing. If so, then you saw me in my element, because I’m a guy in a Patagonia UV hoodie and I’ve never been inside.

I was born in the crisp autumn air to a mushroom foraging father and a reiki healing mother. My parents opted for an open water birth, and I was born in a storage tank on an organic farm where my parents spent the year WWOOF-ing.

Shortly after I was born, my parents embarked on a three-year RV excursion along the entire Pan-American Highway from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Tierra del Fuego. At fourteen months I took my first steps on top of Machu Picchu and a year later I climbed my first mountain in Patagonia (the region, not the store).

Growing up, I spent my days camping with my family, camping with my scout troop, or camping at a summer camp. The Montessori school my parents sent me to was in a tree house built by my classmates and me. That was our kindergarten project. In ninth grade we knew how to fell a ponderosa pine and spent quarters sawing it like lumber with nothing but hand tools.

After high school, I studied environmental science at one of those colleges in California where classes are held outdoors and all the professors have dreadlocks. The only “building” was the dean’s office. And it was less of a building and more of a canvas yurt.

Since then I have had different professions. I was a park ranger at Zion, a whitewater rafting instructor on the Snake River, and a logger in West Virginia. Each time I lived in a tent right next to my workplace. I refuse to do work that requires me to travel more than twenty steps.

The closest I ever came to an indoor life was the six months I spent on a sailboat while teaching scuba diving in the Keys. But that doesn’t count. Because on a boat a door is called a ‘hatch’.

I’ve worked with many women, but my only long-term relationship is my torrid, lifelong affair with Mother Nature. I make love on the tops of lighthouses, behind waterfalls and nowhere else. “Beds” are for gardens and rivers.

My hobbies are abseiling, lead climbing, soloing and caving. If there’s a rock and a rope, I’m there.

I hiked the AT on hard mode: August in Georgia, December in Maine. You haven’t lived until you’ve done the Knife Edge Trail at the top of Katahdin, while it is forty meters lower.

I don’t go to the doctor because if you walk sixty thousand steps a day, you don’t need health care.

I always know which way is north, which local plants are edible, and where to find the nearest rock shelter in case of a shower. Yes, I know what a ‘mood’ is. Not everyone?

I grow my own weed. I make my own soap. I know the difference between the call of a Carolina wren and the call of a northern mockingbird that imitates a Carolina wren.

I’ve never used a toilet that flushes.

The sound of the forest is my white noise machine. The only blanket I need is a blanket of stars. The only cushion I need is moss.

I’ve never been inside. Unless you count my annual trip to Patagonia (the store, not the region) to buy UV hoodies.

Do you really think I’m the kind of guy who wears sunscreen?