We walk into the fields, these open spaces that were once the farms of pioneers, once great swaths of white oak savannah, once tall grasslands where elk and deer stepped lightly through volcanic dust.

The sky is big, here. You can see it all—the entire sweep of it, blue mixing into the pale, creaking grass, the clouds washing over the sun and then receding, the light coming down in short flashes.

There are no paths, here, none that are marked, but there are indents in the grass, places where footsteps have matted it down, and so we follow that, going up the hill, the world feeling as open and aimless as it must have a thousand years before.

We pass gnarled hawthorns, their rosebud fruits dried like winter gourds, and a row of sickly sequoias and shore pines, out of place and stunted by closeness, most likely planted as a wood lot.

On the fringe of things we can hear the birds, even though we can’t see them. It’s the red-winged blackbird who calls the loudest, its round-toned whistle pressed sweetly into the wind.

We walk for a long while, moving slowly, and in the dip of the hill we find a madrone, a native tree whose bark is smooth and orange underneath, like the peeling bark of a eucalyptus. This one is a relic, left here, a vestige of what was, holding up the edge of a world that once spread wider than the continent could hold.