On August 4, 2013, I crawled out of the tent and built a fire to sit by while reading from Rebecca Solnit's book The Faraway Nearby. It was a perfect chilly morning with clear blue skies in the town where I grew up as a child. As I read, the quiet morning filled with loud pops from the old Douglas fir tree in the campsite next to us. At first, I thought it was the warmth of the morning sun warming the tree, but then I realized it was a tree squirrel enjoying breakfast in the top branches. The squirrel was inadvertantly dropping green sap filled pine cones onto the forest floor below. The loud pops came from the pine cones hitting the roof of our neighbor's RV.