This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMayo. If you walk out from the visitor center at Silver

Falls State Park in Oregon, set out on the 10 Falls Trail down the rain-dark path, following the

sound through the trees to the first of those falls, silver as advertised, crashing perpetually as it has for unknown millennia,

in front of a grotto hung with a beard of emerald ferns, below the overhang over which the falls flow,

and you walk along the path and the white noise roar of the white silver falls till you are behind them,

and then beyond them and on your

way down the trail toward other wonders. If you walk up from the dry canyon and the brassy bronze

grass and the river that's hardly a river there in New Mexico in the summer heat and you take the

path along the cliffside, stepping carefully

up the stairs of hewn stone, steading yourself with the iron railing when the trail gets steep

as you make your way up from Fruehola's canyon into the rooms hollowed out of the rock face

a thousand years or so ago by people of the Cochiti Pueblo, maybe help your child up the wooden ladder into one of those rooms,

ask them to pose for a picture as they sit in the cool of the shade.

If you climb up on the rocks in perpendicular trail, in Acadia, in Maine,

use the wrought iron rungs hammered into the granite of the taller boulders to help you on your way to stand up in the very top of the hill, to look out across the bay and the cranberry aisles, each shaded by spruce and balsam.

If you climb to look out over Zion Canyon, from a cliffside, narrow and intimidating, but made safe, made possible at all by

a chain that's run like a railing through metal posts set into stone.

Or you walk through the soft needle path on Orca's Island, fog hung, cool, breeze through

the tall trees off the sailor sea. Maybe you are walking there now as you listen to this.

Maybe this is one of the great coincidences of your life.

Those happen sometimes.

And are listening to it as dew glints on cobwebs on low ferns,

...