"For a moment I am everywhere and nowhere . . . " begins a short story I wrote in the early years of my marriage, " . . . the brief miracle of displacement one experiences looking out at the blue Pacific four thousand miles from home." As I recall these words more than two decades later, I am nowhere near the ocean. I am on a hiking trail through the Konza Prairie just south of Manhattan, Kansas, perhaps five or six miles, as the crow flies, from the house on 14th Street where I lived most of those years with Mary and, ultimately, our four children.

I've never been further from home.

Words tell us where and who we are. The trail guide corresponding to Marker #1 informs me: "Konza Prairie Research Natural Area is an 8,600 acre tract of native tall grass prairie set aside for long-term ecological research." The Konza lies in the midst of the Flint Hills, a swelling sea of gentle slopes and steep ridges formed by tilted layers of limestone that have broken off after thrusting as high as four hundred feet above the surrounding surface of the prairie. Along the top edge of most ridges, limestone outcroppings stand out like rows of worn yellow teeth. Already I can see one of these rows glistening in the midday sun at the top of a bluff half a mile or so north of the trail.

On this unseasonably warm winter day at the dawn of the new millennium, I'm all alone on the prairie, accompanied by everyone in my life. For nearly a year now, ever since Mary and I separated for the last time (the divorce was final in September), the people of my former life, my married life, have haunted my new one. They visit me unannounced, at any given moment of the day. Sometimes they pop into my head as memories, in scenes precisely as I recall them from real life. Sudden recollections. But just as often, it seems, they come to me as phantasms, daydream figures, and the scenes that unfold in my conscious mind are composites of various conversations from various times and places. Reformed conversations: What was said. What was unsaid. What still needs to be said.

Today I walk this trail literally as well as in my mind's eye. I was here, am here, on the Konza. The people I will encounter on the trail today have spoken to me in the same ways every day of my new life. I am taking this walk deliberately to let them all have their say. As many of them, and their words, as I can bear.

Only a few days ago I asked Daniel if he'd like to hike the Konza with me. Daniel is twelve now, officially classified as learning disabled in Mr. Gelroth's sixth grade class at Eugene Field School. I'd rather go to the mall, Dad. And so we did. At the arcade we shot hoops, spending token after token, firing ball after ball at the moving basket inside the cage as fast as we possibly could--shoot, clank, shoot, swish, shoot-shoot-shoot--until finally there were no more tokens, no more balls, and sweat soaked through our matching purple KSU Wildcat T-shirts in patches, the tape of prize tickets curling out of the machine, overlapping itself like a double hula-hoop, a dozen feet from end to end. At the counter we stared through the glass case containing clear plastic drawers filled with candy bracelets (12 points), black rubber spiders (2 points), Dipper Lickers (50 points), stacks of Star Wars light sabers (1000 points), and dozens of other prizes. How many points do we have? I asked. Whenever it's just the two of us at the counter, it's Daniel's job to add up our points and select prizes that don't exceed our total. The stringy-haired clerk with a three-day beard watched impatiently while Daniel fed the tickets between his thumb and forefinger like a stock market ticker-tape, counting off two points per ticket. Two hundred twenty, he declared. I nodded. So what do you want? Daniel scanned the drawers once more, then laid both hands on the glass counter, palms down, and began to count on his fingers. At the sight of this, the clerk's shoulders visibly sank. When he turned to help a younger boy who already knew what he wanted, it took effort to resist the urge to tell the clerk to get a life of his own. The gold ring, the blue race car, a Sucker Swirl, and the magic thing that cuts off your finger, Daniel announced when he had finished. I checked the respective drawers, then smiled. Ten points to spare.

At Marker #3 the trail dips into a line of trees along a meandering stream, and I come to a narrow free-standing boardwalk bridge.

3. Kings Creek is one of two major streams on Konza Prairie. Like many streams that begin in the tallgrass prairie, its lower reaches are forested in a narrow strip, called a gallery forest. This forest community of oak, elm, hackberry, walnut, and hickory trees lends a greater variety of habitats to the Konza Prairie landscape, increasing the diversity of species found here.

Community. That's something Mary and I had sought when we moved to Manhattan in August, 1981, her belly already swollen to capacity with the burgeoning cargo of our first child. Family, friends, career, community: We found all these things in Manhattan. Other things, more difficult to place on a list, we never found, though the community cannot be faulted for this. For almost twenty-seven years Mary and I talked about hiking the Konza together, but we never managed to actually do it.

"And whose fault is that, Dad?"

I halt in the middle of the narrow bridge, and gaze at the specter before me: My oldest son, David, standing at the far end, arms folded across his chest, glaring at me, his brow clinched tighter than the lean muscles in his bare forearms. Confronting me.

This is the way it happens, every day of my new life. David is merely the first, today. Understand: I know this is not real. This is memory and imagination working together, the way they do in conscious dreams, when we try to remake our life, comprehend it and take control of it, by making it into a story. I can stop this process, make the vision vanish, like anyone waking from a dream or simply turning his attention to something else. But I let the vision of David linger, come alive. For David is alive in my new life. His feet straddle the final plank, blocking my path. His face is pained as well as grim. He's eighteen now, more than an inch taller than I. Next fall he'll be a freshman at K-State, majoring in theater and pre-med. Although he has a gorgeous basement apartment with a pool table and his own private entrance to the house on 14th Street, last weekend I took him on a tour of the campus dorms. He loves the house he grew up in, but realizes it's time for him to get out on his own.

"It's my fault, son. But not just mine."

As I speak, the bridge bends and groans beneath me, weighing each word, just as David himself appears to. His jaw is set hard as the tilting tables of limestone that hold up these hills. But his eyes, a brilliant blue in this light, bob up and down, mirroring the prose rhythm of the bridge. People say David looks a lot like me. I wonder if this is the expression I wore whenever I judged my own father.

"Yeah," he says finally. "I know it's not just your fault."

I nod. The first several dozen times we had this conversation--in automobiles, coffee shops, my office, at different points on this very same trail--David was not nearly so generous:

You lied, Dad. You LIED.

Yes, I did. To your mother. Never to you.

I can feel you leaving my life. I can feel you leaving every single day. And you know what? I don't care.

Well, I do. I intend to stay in your life. And in Michael's and Daniel's and Rachael's. No matter what, I'm still your father.

My father? How can you say that? . . . She's twenty years old.

Twenty-one.

And you're FIFTY!

Yes, I am.

It just can't work, Dad.

It is working.

Six months. I give it six months, tops.

It's already been longer than that.

It doesn't matter. I won't ever be around her. Ever.

But ever is a long time. The David on the bridge has become more thoughtful.

"You know what makes me the angriest?"

The flexible bridge has settled beneath my still feet, and David regards me evenly in the hushed air.

"What?"

"You were my best friend, Dad. My very best friend. I shared everything with you, every single thing that happened to me. I'm mad at you for making me stay mad at you."

David's eyes are moist as he says this. A breeze picks up, stirring bare limbs of slumbering trees high above the creek bank, waving their slender fingers in front of the midday sun, making the blue in David's eyes flicker.

"I understand."

His voice hardens again. "Do you have any idea how much the divorce has hurt Mom?"

The steady murmur of water trickling over rock rises around the silent planks of the bridge. I might as well be floating in midair. "Of course I do. It's hurt me too, David. More than anything else in my life ever has, or probably ever will. But I'll admit it's hurt your mother even more."

David's arms remain folded as he takes this in. He's not merely more thoughtful now, but stronger. In the past months he has grown years. Finally, he says: "Do you miss living with us?"

Around us the breeze dies, the trees stiffen. The planks supporting my feet are absolutely still; the only sound is the tinkling burble of the creek. I am so perfectly balanced, David's next breath could blow me over the edge.

"I miss living with you and Rachael and your brothers. I see each of you, and miss each of you, everyday."

"Then give her up."

The words collapse on me like a wave of surf. I close my eyes and wait for them to carry me away. Somewhere . . . anywhere . . . But when the light finally returns I am still standing on the bridge.

"It wouldn't help, son, even if I weren't in love with her. It wouldn't bring me back. Your mother actually said it best: Sheyene was a symptom of our problems, not the cause."

David looks away from me, staring downstream at light rippling on water. He knows this is true. He saw and heard, his entire life.

When he faces me again, his eyes have softened. "I have to ask you something, Dad."

"Anything."

"Was there ever anyone else besides her?"

"Never."

He draws a deep breath and lets it out slowly. The rest of his body is motionless, dumbly blocking my path across the bridge. But I can see his mind working, laboring to see exactly where we are.

"I want you to give her up anyway."

Breath seeps from my lungs. "I can't, son."

"Give her up, Dad. Do it for us. Do it for all the friends you've lost, for everybody who still cares about you. Do it for yourself."

I do not respond. I am ice standing in air.

"Give her up."

Neither of us says anything further. The sky above holds its breath; the stream below is the only moving object on the prairie . . .

Then all at once the bridge beneath me undulates and begins to creak. I am walking again, straight toward David. As I approach, he tenses, unfolds his arms, makes his hands into fists. His expression says Don't. Please don't make me do this. And I want to tell him: Yes, don't. Remember what I told you about the day I hit your grampa Heller. Nothing will be the same afterward. You can never take it back. When I am almost upon him, David drops his fists to his sides, but does not give way. I walk right through him, through my vision of him, the atoms of his lean, hard teenage body dissolving like a hologram as I pass. I keep on walking: up the bank, around a bend, across a second bridge, and up the next rise. I do not look back.

11. From this point you can look down on Kings Creek, formed by the junction of two branches. The South Fork lies in the 2,400 acre Native Grazer Area, surrounded by a tall fence. Konza Prairie currently has a herd of more than 200 bison, and long term plans call for the reintroduction of elk. The North Fork is ungrazed, providing a necessary comparison for studying the effects of grazing by these large native herbivores.

I'm standing atop the first major ridge on the self-guided Nature Trail Loop, the shortest of the three looping paths across the prairie. Everyone who hikes the Konza knows this spot: the first high, open vista, at the end of the first long, steep climb. From here the land declines sharply in all directions except to the northeast along the curving ridge line. To the south you can see King's Creek cutting through the Flint Hills, curling back toward the northwest and the wooded area I just hiked through. To the southwest, near the distant horizon, lies the small complex of buildings that house the scientists, docents, and other keepers of the nature preserve. I've never seen bison from this lookout, but deer and wild turkeys are plentiful.

From here you can begin to see the history of this place--in the rolling waves of its ridges and valleys, in the broad patches of brown, tan, and gold that mark where different watersheds have been deliberately burned at varying intervals to study the effects of fire on prairie plants and animals. When I close my eyes for a moment, I can see my own history here: from the window of a Frontier Airlines 737, soaring over these very same hills at the end of another unusually warm winter day almost two decades ago, as we made a slow, wide turn toward Kansas City and my connecting flight back to Toledo, Ohio, where later that same night I would inform Mary, three months pregnant with David, that the interview had gone well. From my window above the Konza, the sun had already dipped well below the western horizon; a bank of clouds cut off the afterglow, casting an early night on the prairie. As the left wing of the 737 dipped, rotating the dark planet below, a startling sight loomed into view: slow-moving waves of fire, rippling red across black earth. I'd heard of prairie-burning, but never seen it with my own eyes. From the window of the 737 the world appeared to be erasing itself, burning the pages of its own history, making room for the future, for Mary and me and our children to come.

I reopen my eyes and squint at the dry, balding landscape falling away from the lookout. The yellow guide in my hand informs me that different watersheds are burned at intervals of 1, 2, 4, 10, and 20 years. The lighter patches of prairie have been burned more recently. As I analyze the shades of dead grass, I realize I am looking not only at the past but the future.

"So tell me ours."

I turn to find a short Tomboyish figure in sneakers, faded blue jeans, red and black checkered woolen overshirt, black sunglasses, and a thick black headband. Strawberry blond hair sweeps over each side of the band and curls in toward the point of her chin, framing her face in a color that, in this clear winter light, resembles a burnished peach. Peppermint Patty. Cayenne Pepper. Shy Imposter. None of the nicknames I've tried out begins to capture the complex personality of the twenty-one-year-old misfit who has transformed my life--though the responsibility for that, as I've admitted again and again, is my own. I'm not surprised to find her here. Though she is not really here, now. When I finally hiked this trail for the first time, just last summer, after I had finally let go of one life and was stumbling headlong into another, she was by my side.

"So tell me our future," she repeats.

So tell me is a phrase I hear often. If I point this out, she will immediately ask: Is that a bad thing? And when I reply no, not at all, she will nevertheless immediately delete it from her daily vocabulary. She will do this in a wholly unnecessary effort to make herself less predictable, more interesting to a man who sometimes can't help but regard her from a perspective of years piled so high he surely appears out of reach. But we both know the pile is not solid; the years crumble easier than the dry sod of these hills. The man has been toppled from his heady heights more times than either of us can count.

"So?" she insists.

She's always been insistent, one of the main reasons why I walk this trail today with living ghosts. The first time Sheyene and I walked it together, she insisted on knowing when I would finally demand that the people who still love me accept her presence in my life:

How long, Steve? How long is this going to take?

Daniel and Rachael are ready to accept you now. I'm sure of it. You'll see it as soon as we start having them over.

And when will that be?

Just as soon as the attorneys work out the final settlement. I promise. I don't want to complicate things further before then. Mary knows this is coming; it won't be a problem.

What about the older boys?

They're going to take longer. It's more difficult for them. You have to imagine how they feel.

How do you think I feel? How do you think it makes me feel for you to have a loving relationship with people you allow to hate me?

They're my children. I'm going to be their father, no matter what.

Do you think my mother would maintain a relationship with me if I refused to accept Jamie?

In the midst of our own crisis, Sheyene's mother, who is seven years younger than I, left her stepfather, whom Sheyene dearly loves, for a 30-year-old unemployed construction worker named Jamie. When the four of us go out to dinner together, waitresses are extremely confused.

There's a difference: Despite evidence to the contrary, you're a grownup.

So you're just going to let them all hate me?

All of the children hate what's happened, but only David hates you. In time, he'll get over it.

Why?

Because he has to. David loves me. To remain a part of my life in the long run, he's going to have to learn to accept the fact of you, to accept being around you sometimes. He and I have talked about this many times already.

Yes, I'm sure he had lots of nice things to say about "that bitch."

David doesn't curse you. Not anymore. I don't allow it.

Well, I guess that's progress.

Atop the lookout, I find myself staring at my own blurry reflection in the dark lenses of the insistent Tomboy's sunglasses.

"Hello?" the voice behind the glasses says. "Looking for an answer here . . . Any answer will do . . . as long as it's the truth."

Even in daydreams, she presses me.

"The future's more difficult to envision," I finally reply, struggling with the obvious. "I can see only one part of it clearly: you and me together."

The corners of her lips curl upward for just an instant, then flatten out again. "Don't get all gooey on me," she says, and takes my hand. "Let's walk."

We follow a stone-marked path a quarter mile along the top of the ridge, past a tall radio tower, until at last the river and beyond it the university and the town of Manhattan all come into view, a few miles to the northwest.

14. To your left stretches the Kansas River valley. The rich, deep soils of the floodplain have been intensively cultivated since settlement times, and were also used by the Kansa Indians, for whom Konza Prairie is named, to grow crops like corn and squash. Here on the ridge, however, you can see why most of Konza Prairie has remained untouched by the plow. The limestone rocks of the Flint Hills contain bands of chert (flint), and the weathering of the rocks leaves behind a soil containing flinty gravel.

The truth is I know little about any of this, little about the natural or cultural history of the place that has been my home for two decades. Almost always, my gaze has been turned elsewhere: toward the red Oklahoma earth of my youth, toward the blue Pacific of my daydreams, toward the dark interior spaces of the house on 14th Street.

When I feel Sheyene release my hand--and I do feel it; what's happening seems that real--I turn and see she has removed her sunglasses. Her eyes look nearly turquoise in the midday light, and the sassy smirk that gets me every time has returned to her lips. "What's that thing on your head?" she asks.

Then I feel something else: a sagging weight on my skull, neck, and shoulders. Before I can lift a hand to examine it, the weight shifts forward, and I have to adjust my stance to keep from toppling over onto my face. All at once another face is staring into my own--upside down.

"It's ME!" the face squeals. Simultaneously, I thrust my palms upward to keep the face from somersaulting right over me onto the ground. I needn't bother, though. The body attached to the upside down grin has a tight grip on me.

"Ow! Don't pull Daddy's hair, Rachael."

"Not too hard," Sheyene adds. "You don't want to hurt your daddy too much."

"Yes I do!" Rachael assures her with delight, and gives the hair above my ears another tug before yanking herself back up out of view, making me drop my hands and grab onto her ankles so she doesn't tumble off my back. She settles herself on my shoulders once again and begins to sing a nonsense song, mouthing the same syllables over and over--"bleah, bleah, BLEAH, bleah, bleah." To keep time, she claps my ears like a pair of cymbals. I let her pummel me with the happy, deafening beat, and wonder how I'm ever going to hold onto her in the years ahead . . .

On the desk in my half of the study sit two pictures of Rachael at age two and a half. One was taken by her mother, the other by me. In the first, Rachael is dressed like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz: ruby slippers, blue and white gingham jumper, blue bow nestled atop her fluffy Buster Brown haircut. Beside her feet Clifford the Red Dog sleeps in a wicker basket. Rachael wears her sweetest smile, and her blue eyes, bluer than blue bow and the gingham jumper, gleam with an awareness of the moment that makes her seem older than her years. The perfect little lady.

In the other picture, she wears only a pair of white training pants and a look-what-I-did grin. She stands in the middle of a dry bathtub: her face, hands, and the entire right side of her torso smeared with red, as if she'd been joyfully butchering hogs. I got Mommy's lipstick, she'd informed me moments earlier. Please don't take a picture of her like that, Mary urged. But when the results came back from Photo-Mat, she loved it.

We both thought Rachael would save us.

The thunderclap beat of her nonsense song spanks my ears and pounds my brain--and I ask myself once again what I can possibly do to hold onto such a wild, wondrous spirit in the years ahead, when no vinyl porcelain tub will confine her. Even now, at the age of three, her truth-telling is a challenge.

Mommy doesn't love you anymore.

That's right. But it's OK, sweetie, because we both still love you.

Everybody loves me.

Yes. I love you, and Mommy loves you, and David and Michael and Daniel love you. Sheyene loves you too.

I love you. And I love Sheyene too.

It's true. As I recall these words, the deafening rhythm abruptly ceases, and Rachael reaches her arms toward Sheyene, preferring to ride the trail on her softer shoulders. Only a week or two after I finally brought Sheyene into Rachael and Daniel's lives--the four of us riding the merry-go-round at Sojourner Truth Park, grocery shopping at the Eastside Dillon's, watching cartoons and playing hide and seek in the basement apartment, Sheyene and Rachael reading Harry the Dirty Dog and If You Give a Pig a Pancake while I helped Daniel with his homework--it was obvious Rachael and Sheyene were going to be great friends.

Mommy says if you marry Sheyene she'll be my stepmother.

That's right, but Mommy will always be your mommy. Sheyene is your friend.

And Daniel's?

Yes, Sheyene is your friend and Daniel's too. For life.

This is also true, a truth that everyone in Daniel's life especially will learn to value as the years pass. But Daniel does not yet love Sheyene, even though he has already said the words to her. Daniel will take longer. He remembers more.

As I lift Rachael over my head and hand her to Sheyene, I discover Daniel standing beside us. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch him regard Sheyene as she sets Rachael's squirming bottom on her own shoulders. His expression is placid. Daniel is comfortable with Rachael and Sheyene's affection for each other, but not always with Sheyene's affection for me. Occasionally, when Daniel and I are busy with spelling or math and Sheyene stops to give me a hug on her way to the kitchen, I'll notice him wince or sigh. Daniel is happiest when all four of us are racking around on the floor together, playing the tickle game, hide and seek, or Dad the Chugga-Chugga-Choo-Choo Monster. At twelve Daniel still likes to play those games with his baby sister. He's small for his age, and as skinny as any healthy boy I've ever seen. He looks even more like me than David.

While I'm thinking all this, Daniel turns and gives me a quizzical but patient look. That's Daniel: Waiting curiously for life to instruct him.

I slap him lightly on the back. "How you doin', buddy?"

"Good."

When Rachael is finally settled on Sheyene's shoulders, chin resting snug on Sheyene's skull like the top of a totem pole, we all start walking again. Daniel and I lead the way. Daniel glances up at me, then rolls his eyes when behind us Rachael and Sheyene begin a traveling duet: "Bleah, bleah, BLEAH, bleah, BLEAH, bleah, bleah . . ."

I lean over and whisper in Daniel's ear: "Those two sing like Porky Pig."

"What's that?" Sheyene interjects, pausing in mid-bleah.

"Yeah, what's that?" Rachael echoes.

"Nothing, dears."

When the duet behind us picks up again, the corners of Daniel's mouth ripple; his shoulders bend with silent laughter.

Soon the trail skirts the north edge of the ridge where the limestone table has broken off. I spot a wispy chain of clouds drifting over the river, and recall another scene. "Daniel, remember when we hiked the trail around the volcano on the Big Island? All that smoke and steam by the edge of the crater?"

"Yes."

"Right here, this trail kind of looks like the volcano trail, doesn't it."

Daniel takes in the view. "Yep."

"I wanna walk," Rachael demands.

"OK, honey," Sheyene replies as I glance back to see Rachael scuttling off her shoulders like a monkey. "Just hold my hand," Sheyene says. And they stroll along the path behind us, chattering away, two girl friends making girltalk.

A moment later, the trail swings away from the north edge and begins to decline toward a cleft in the ridge. As we make our way down the twisting path, I notice Daniel's smooth brow wrinkle above his round wire rim glasses, meaning a question is on the way.

"Dad?"

"Yeah?"

"Remember the lava tube?"

"I sure do. Remember how dark and cold and scary it was? And long. We couldn't see the end, and didn't know where we'd come out. I had to hold your hand when we walked through it, just like Sheyene's holding Rachael's. Now you're big, and we can walk together like men."

Daniel rolls back his shoulders, walks straighter.

The sight makes me want to smile, but I hold it back. "Remember what you said when we walked through the lava tube, how you described it?"

"No."

"You said it was like walking through the moon."

Daniel does not respond to this. We take a few more steps, and suddenly he is crying.

"Hey," I say softly, and loop my arm around him. He buries his head against my chest and begins to heave. "It's all right," I murmur. "It's all right."

"What's the matter with Daniel?" Rachael asks, big-eyed in her plum-colored jacket, as her brother and I stop in the middle of the trail.

"Daniel's just upset about something," I assure her. "He'll be all right in a minute."

"Yes, Daniel's OK," Sheyene confirms, but raises her eyebrows at me.

We all stand there for a moment to allow Daniel to collect himself, but he keeps sobbing. Silently: great soundless sobs shuddering through my chest, down my torso, legs, and feet into the flint-speckled ridge beneath us. I hold him just tight enough not to make a big deal out of it, and whisper: "You're OK."

As my mouth forms these words, I gaze out over the top of Daniel's head--and suddenly everything is strange.

All the familiar landmarks have changed; I can't recognize anything. Where are we? In the Flint Hills or Thurston Lava Tube? Or the pasta aisle of the Eastside Dillon's? Everything looks like everything else.

I cling to Daniel and close my eyes to reorient myself. But all I see now is black. The air on my face and neck is cold and clammy. "What's the matter, son?" I ask, trying to get a grip again. "What's bothering you?"

"You."

Blood contracts in my chest; I keep my eyes shut tight. Soft footsteps (Sheyene and Rachael? Other hikers? Tourists? Shoppers?) tread past us in the clammy darkness before I can bring myself to ask: "What about me?"

"You don't live in the house anymore."

The ground beneath us, whatever we're standing on, begins to move. Around us the darkness seems to rotate. As if he can feel this phenomenon himself, Daniel stops heaving and grips me hard around the waist. I lean on his stillness for a long moment, then take a slow, steadying breath and say: "You mean you miss me."

"Yes."

I reopen my eyes--and in a flash of winter light the world I know and do not know returns: Choppy hills. Dead prairie grass. The Kansas River Valley. A jagged V of geese in the silver blue sky overhead. Sheyene has led Rachael further down the trail, just out of earshot, to give us privacy.

"I miss living with you too, Daniel. I miss it every day. That's why I see you and your sister and brothers every single day, if I possibly can." I feel his grip relax a little. "You know you can call me anytime you need to talk, don't you, son?"

"I know." Daniel releases me and lifts his glasses above his brow, drying his eyes on the sleeve of the gray sweatshirt I bought him a few weeks ago at Wal-Mart.

"Ready to walk?" I ask when he's finished.

In reply, he leads me down the slope toward a fork in the trail, where Sheyene and Rachael are waiting, Rachael spinning round and round like a pixie in her plum-colored jacket. I catch up with Daniel, and we stride down the hill side-by-side like two men who know where they're going. The woman and the girl wait for us between two brown signs. One points south, indicating the continuation of the Nature Trail Loop, which at this point begins to circle back toward the parking lot, a total hike of 2.8 miles. The other sign points east, up the next steep rise to the top of the next ridge, marking the beginning of the Kings Creek Loop, which circles another two miles deeper into the prairie.

"Which way?" Sheyene asks.

"Well, let's think about this," I reply, and turn to ask Daniel whether he prefers the shorter or longer trail this time.

But Daniel is gone.

When I turn back to the fork, Rachael and Sheyene are also gone, vanished into the clear prairie light.

I've let them go, of course, though I didn't know I would. The truth is I could call all three of them back right now and continue the dream, if I chose to. But it wouldn't be the same somehow. Not in this life.

Instead, alone again, I take a moment, right here, and ask myself: What use is it to walk and think and remember? What difference to feel and dream and wonder?

The prairie's answer is the distant, monotonous, mawking of a crow.

I gaze up at the longer, steeper, less-traveled path of Kings Creek Loop, and remember something Sheyene said a few days ago.

People have always misread that Frost poem about the road untaken.

How so?

Frost never said taking the less-traveled road made a difference.

He didn't? It's been a long time since I've read that one.

No, he didn't. In the poem he says only that in the future he will tell people his choice made all the difference. The paths were essentially the same, and they both led to the same place. The choice didn't make any real difference at all.

She's right, of course. But some choices do make a difference. Choosing Kings Creek means a longer journey that loops back on itself. Choosing Sheyene meant transforming my life into two separate lives: successive lives that nevertheless overlap and proceed together, each complicating the other, making each more difficult. Life One with Mary. Life Two with Sheyene.

My children live in both lives.

Because of the difference in our ages, Sheyene's own choice has a similar consequence for her: Life One with me. Life Two without. From the moment our choice first presented itself, we've talked and talked about the consequences for all the many lives affected. In the beginning, I argued vigorously--though not, I realize now, with full conviction--against choosing me:

I love my wife . . . I'll never leave my family . . . I can't cause the people I love such pain . . . I'm too old for you. One day you'll see this for yourself.

At the point I argued these things, we could still choose which lives to live. But once conceived, even if only in the mind, a new life is difficult to terminate. The more Sheyene and I talked, the more our new life together intervened. In the end, it wasn't her but the life we already shared that argued back with me:

Not enough; not for a long time . . . You can't believe it now, but in the end you will leave them . . . You have already caused such pain . . . She doesn't care how old you are; she's incapable of such seeing.

Long before Sheyene and I made our choices, I composed two lists: Reasons to Stay Married. Reasons to Divorce. The first list was long and devastating, its logic inexorable and compelling, its substance almost my entire history. The second list was extremely short. From time to time, I added new items to the second list: Better to show the children what really happens when a marriage has failed than to pretend it hasn't. But almost as soon as I listed such items, I crossed them off as self-justifying rationalizations. In the end, the second list contained only one item: Sheyene.

So what difference, here and now, to walk and think and dream and remember?

In search of the answer, I turn east and trudge up the slope of the longer, steeper trail.

At the top of the ridge, in an open field of tall prairie grass, a black mailbox with a red flag sits atop a four foot pole. The first time Sheyene and I took this route, she raced ahead and opened the box, which should have contained a new set of trail guides, colored blue, to identify landmarks along Kings Creek Loop. But on that occasion there were no guides, only an empty package of Camel cigarettes and several dull gray stones.

No problem, Sheyene assured me. We don't need a guide.

I was sure she was right. And, not for the first time, I found myself resisting the urge to cheat. But before we plunged ahead, I reached into my pants' pocket and withdrew the blue pamphlet I'd picked up with the yellow one, at the unmanned information booth at the trailhead parking lot, just in case.

Whooo-hooo! she joked at the sight of guide. Now we won't get lost.

This time I have no blue guide in my pocket, so I stop and open the mailbox myself, even though I have been this way before. And this time a stack of blue pamphlets is waiting. I pull one off the top and walk on. A few dozen paces further along the ridge, a new series of trail markers begins:

1. [Blue Guide] The limestone underneath the shallow soil on which you are standing was laid down under an ocean that covered Konza Prairie about 250 million years ago. You can trace this outcrop around the top of the ridge to the west and south. The soils of Konza were largely derived from weathered limestone, wind-blown dust during the Ice Age, and the organic remains of plants.

"Did you HAVE to do it, Steve?"

I raise my eyes from the pamphlet and the stones scattered around me, and face the familiar voice.

"You shouldn't be here, Mom."

I'm right about this. My mother is too old and sickly for this or any other hiking trail. She has a thyroid condition, high blood pressure, hammertoes, and unrelieved grief over two facts in her life: the death of my father five years ago and the dissolution of my marriage. Until Life Two, Mother had one unerring response to any news concerning her one and only child: pride. It's clear to me and everyone else who knows her that she had planned her own Life Two to be a memorial to Life One, her nearly fifty years with my father. She built her second life on two firmly placed cornerstones: her memories of her marriage and the confirming vision of my own. Now, with one stone removed, she balances precariously before my eyes like an aging, overweight ballerina trying to pirouette on the head of a pin. To me, her awkwardness is heroic. She has accepted Sheyene. I can see why you love her . . . I want you both to be happy. But she cannot accept the divorce, the sheer upheaval of it, the fact that for the rest of her life everything must be different.

"Did you HAVE to do it?" she repeats.

"No. I didn't have to . . . I chose."

Her expression does not change. She holds me in her steady, unblinking gaze, until at last I step forward and swallow her in a hug. Her body sags heavily against me as she returns the embrace.

"I'm sorry," she whispers. "I just can't get used to it."

"I know."

She will never get used to it. I know this as surely as I know the feel of the arms that have held me since the day I was born. I know this even now, as I let my own arms drop through the empty air that moments before was her. In the emptiness, her silence continues to speak to me, as it always has, giving me not permission nor even support, but the freedom I've had no choice but to accept since long before I was an adult. You go your own way, her silence tells me, as it always has. But this time, before I gather myself and move on, slogging further east along the high trail, her silence adds something new: I'm glad your father didn't live to see this.

3. [Blue Guide] Humans first entered this region 10 to 20 thousand years ago, settling in the Kansas River Valley below you. These first inhabitants took advantage of the rich, deep soils along the river to raise crops, as did the American and European settlers who followed in the 1800s. Behind you, the landscape has been little affected by our culture. This is virgin prairie first grazed by mastodons and mammoths during the Ice Age, then bison, then domestic cattle.

From this north ridge lookout it's easy to imagine the great beasts of the Ice Age moving in vast herds through the clefts in the stair-step prairie hills to the river valley below. And when I turn and gaze back to the south, toward the interior of the Konza, I see a landscape with no human landmarks at all: just one gold and russet hillside after another, rippling on over the horizon. The earth would have to erase many pages of its history to reveal a difference here.

As I walk on, I think about my own history. In its middle pages you'll find Michael, the middle son. Fifteen now, with natural brown hair once again, instead of dyed green or blue, and a restricted driver's license but no car yet. Michael's only wheels are made of rubberized plastic, the size of a child's fist. Skateboarding is his passion, and he has adopted not only the look and manners of its culture, but its language.

Dude, could you, like, buy me a new board?

The Toy Machine board I bought him two months ago is already broken. He smashed it deliberately, in a staged fit of mock anger in the driveway of the house on 14th Street, in front of his brothers and a few friends after the board had flipped up and struck him in the chin when he mistimed his landing after a trick. A small permanent scar, just like the one beneath my own lip, marks the spot on his chin where the cut was stitched.

Maybe. Talk to me after payday.

Dude, if you could do that, it would be great.

One condition, though.

What?

Don't call me "Dude." I'm your father, not the Big Labowski.

Of all my children, Michael has had the most instinctive grasp of what has happened, and why. That doesn't mean it hurts any less for him. Michael is the most inward of all the children, the most difficult for anyone, except his friends, to talk with. The counter-culture trajectory of Michael's life is partly a reaction to his older brother, David the straight arrow. David's natural peer group is composed of adults; he's always been more at ease talking with a teacher or a visiting poet than with a classmate. Although this, like everything else in all our lives, is changing. A few weeks ago, David threw his second monster party of the year. Three bands and two hundred people in the house on 14th Street. "Tons of food & pop--no alcohol," the invitation read, "parents will be home"--the last part an exaggeration few noticed. In front of his astonished peers, David flipped and spun on a sheet of linoleum spread over the silver living room carpet his mother and I had taken four months to select. The very next week, at my own mother's apartment, all four children showed their grandmother and me the party video of David and Michael and dozens of other teenagers rocking along to the thudding rhythm of Podstar. And I had no choice but to remember how things used to be. Before I left, David and Michael had been at war with each other for years. You're brothers and you love each other; start acting like it, I demanded more than once, with little success. Now, in the wake of my leaving, David and Michael have become close friends.

Best friends.

Though he hates what has happened with his mother and me, and surely always will, I can tell Michael wants to move on. Like David, Michael hasn't allowed himself to be around Sheyene. I kind of want to, but I don't want to hurt Mom, he's told me a couple of times. Whenever you're ready, I replied. When I told Michael about the new place Sheyene and I have rented out on Wildcat Ridge, he told me he wants to see our current place before we move. You can come over any time, I assured him, then watched his brown hawk wing eyebrows draw closer together as he thought about it. I'll let you know, he said.

I hike past a shallow depression in the prairie grass, which the guide informs me is an ancient bison wallow, but my mind remains on Michael. More amazing than David's blossoming social life (finally, he has a date to the prom) is the way Michael has begun to handle adult responsibilities. Much of the care of his baby sister has fallen to Michael on the afternoons or evenings when neither his mother nor I are available. Most striking, though, is his careful nurturing of Daniel. A few nights ago, I met Daniel and his mother at Eisenhower Middle School, the open house for next year's new middle schoolers. Mary and I see each other as little as possible, and communicate mostly by Email. But where the children's welfare is concerned, we present a united front. We're both deeply worried about how Daniel will make the transition from the sheltered environment of the self-contained sixth grade classroom to the brutal impersonality of middle school. Daniel's classmates at Eugene Field know and understand him, but the awful truth is Daniel has no friends his own age. He hasn't felt secure enough to return the friendly gestures of kids he has known his whole life. In middle school he will face the cruelty of strangers. To my surprise, Michael decided to accompany Daniel and his mother to the open house.

I met the three of them outside the building. As they approached, the second thing that surprised me was the way Mary was dressed: in blue jeans.

"And why should that surprise you?"

I pull up short on the trail. She's wearing blue jeans now as well. And a baby blue Hanauma Bay T-shirt I bought her in Local Motion on the windward side of O`ahu. Tucked in, as usual. I'm not really surprised to encounter her here, not today. Though the surprising truth is she haunts me less often than others. I don't know why. Except that, as I've said, a daydreamer can make visions disappear. But surely the reasons go deeper than that. In any case, it's hard for me to look directly at her, even the dream vision of her before me. Usually, it's even more difficult for her to look at me. But not here, not today.

"Well, why?"

Do I have enough strength left for this?

"You know why." I give the face I know better than my own a lengthy but sidelong glance. Her eyes--Rachael's eyes, only greener--burn back at me. "You're a professor of elementary education. I've never seen you walk into in a public school wearing anything but some kind of business suit."

"Then you weren't paying attention." Her voice is full of strength drawn from deep within herself, reflected in the perfectly erect posture that masks her vulnerable areas with a cool, distant beauty. "The truth is you never paid attention to me. Not really, not our whole marriage."

I've heard this too often. The familiar electrical charge of it locks my eyes onto hers, and suddenly we could be anywhere, any time.

"I paid attention, all right. You were in a business suit every second of our lives, no matter what you happened to be wearing."

She regards me steadily for a moment. Her lip begins to quiver, then grows still again. Her jaw hardens. Then, all at once, her face shatters. Tears burst from her eyes, and I have to look away. When I turn back, she's vanished. I've let her go.

No . . . The truth is I have left her. Again.

I stare dumbly through a hole in the horizon that was my life.

Moments later, a cloudburst of guilt soaks me to the bone. Why did I say those words? Even silently, to a vision in my mind's eye? The war is over, the nation divided, the wounded laid up in their beds. What was the point?

How long has it been since there really was a point?

It's muscle memory rather than willpower that picks up my steps again. I stagger more than walk down the trail, which now turns away from the north ridge and continues along the flat upland. After a while, as my steps regain their rhythm, I think once again of Daniel: the determinedly hopeful look on his face as he strode toward the middle school with his mother and Michael.

How you doing, buddy?

Good.

Ready to meet your teachers and see what's here?

Yep.

A minute later I led everyone down the east wing hallway toward Mrs. Schnee's special ed. classroom. As we walked, I rested my hand on the back of Daniel's neck, a habit I've had with all my sons. Don't do that, Dad, Michael advised. Don't guide him along. Let him look at things for himself.

How does a father be a father from a distance?

The trail proceeds along the grassy upland until at last, in the middle of an open field, I reach the final fork. Here Kings Creek Loop turns south, where it descends the gentler slope of the ridge through a small gallery forest before finally circling back toward the trailhead along the northern bank of Kings Creek. The other fork, Godwin Hill Loop, continues east along a barbed wire fence up Godwin Hill, encompassing another mile and a half of prairie before it returns along the same creek. There is no guide to accompany the third and longest loop. No mailbox, no numbered trailmarkers, just a double-rutted path through the prairie grass, mashed out by the wheels of a jeep or some other four-wheel drive vehicle. The least traveled road.

Without stopping to consider why, I take the third loop. For perhaps another quarter mile, I hike along the barbed wire fence. On the other side of the fence is private land: the river valley, farms and ranches, the road back to Manhattan and all things familiar.

Then, without thinking, I do it.

Perhaps it's the fence, the clear and confining border, that provokes me. Or perhaps it's the trail itself, the path laid out for all to follow. Or maybe it's the knowledge that there are still so many people I haven't encountered yet on this walk, people whose faces haven't materialized in my mind's eye today, though I've felt their absence with every step. Whatever the reasons, I leave the trail. Just a few innocent steps away from the fence and twin-rutted jeep path, into the same prairie grassland the trail itself cuts through. But I already know the steps mean everything. Access to the prairie preserve is restricted to protect research. I already know something has been spoiled.

I keep walking. South, I think it's south, across the tall grass, away from the fence, away from the hill, down a slope and up again, until at the top of a low ridge at last I come to a vista I don't recognize. All around me, the landscape is the same as before, but different. Hill and stone, water and wood. No sign of any path to anywhere.

This is where I pause.

I'm not lost. The landmarks are unfamiliar, but I know I'll find my way back. Back to the trailhead and the road to town and, eventually, to the basement apartment in the student ghetto on the east side of campus, where the person who loves me more than any other is waiting. I don't deserve such devotion, nor such a clear and hopeful future, but I know I'll find my way back to both. That's not what this walk is about.

Last Friday Sheyene and I took Rachael and Daniel shopping at the Eastside Dillon's. On the way back, a week's groceries crammed beneath the broken hatchback of our aging Nissan Pulsar, Sheyene drove while Daniel sat beside her, unusually quiet in the front passenger bucket. In the back, Rachael rocked side to side in her child's car seat next to me, singing her traveling song--Bleah, bleah, bleah, bleah--in a charmed voice, as if each syllable were magic. And this time I recognized the melody: "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." So I sang with her: BLEAH-bleah, BLEAH-bleah, BLEAH-bleah, bleah . . . Soon Sheyene joined in, and when I glanced forward I saw Daniel's lips moving too. And we all rocked along happily to the nursery beat.

Or so I thought. Later that night, after I'd taken the children back to the house on 14th Street, Sheyene informed me Daniel had been singing something else--his own soft, determined tune: I'm going to be smart, I'm going to be smart, I'm going to be smart . . .

If I'd been close enough to make out the words to Daniel's private song, I would have told him right then and there: You ARE smart, son. One day you will know this.

Following Michael's lead, I would not have told him the secret he needs to discover for himself: that being smart doesn't always lead one to the answers.

How did I ever make my way to this place so far from what was once home?

How much of the journey have I taken on foot? How much of it in the mind?

How to be a father, a life-mate, and a stranger in a strange land?

As I stand here, I can honestly say I don't know the answers. Once one leaves the established trail, for whatever reason, there are no guides. Perhaps, at this unidentified point on the prairie, there are no answers. Only one thing is clear: From here I can see everywhere, except where I am. Everywhere a well-meaning man, perhaps once a good man, could reasonably go. Nowhere he would choose to.