The bear had a good answer: "Chesapeake. Have you read it?"
"No, but I love James Michener," I said. "When I was 12, I fell in love with Hawaii and vowed that if I ever had a daughter, I'd name her Jerusha after the heroine."
"Big book for a 12-year-old."
"We didn't have a TV. And I was a dork."
He laughed that broad baritone laugh again. "Literature: last refuge of the tragically uncool."
"Same could be said of bicycling in your ski gaiters."
The conversation ranged organically from books and theater to politics and our personal histories.
Having embraced the life of an artsy party girl, I was the black sheep of my conservative Midwestern family, thoroughly enjoying my freedom and a steady diet of wild oats.
He'd spent a dysfunctional childhood on the East Coast. A troubled path of drug and alcohol abuse had brought him to one of those legendary moments of clarity at which he made a hard right turn to an almost monkish existence in a tiny mountain cabin.
He'd built an ascetic life that was solitary but substantive, baking bread at a local restaurant, splitting wood for his heating stove, staying out of trouble.