I've been on the road again. This time to the Berkshires of Massachusetts.

Half my life was spent under the Berkshire pines of Lake Buel. We have a little cabin on top of a piney wood hill there. My father built it, my brother rebuilt it, and now I'm fixing it up. Not much larger than Henry's cabin at Walden Pond outside of Concord. Maybe that's why my wife Lorry and I wrote A Mind with Wings: The Story of Henry David Thoreau. Cabin kinship.

Well, I am calling this piece "lost and found" because whenever I travel somewhere to give a talk or tell stories, I start out feeling lost. Travel does that to me. To most of us, I think. You're at swim in the big sea wishing somehow that you were back in your little pond. That sense of lostness lasts only as long as you want it to. For me, it goes away as soon as I am "home."

Home is where the heart is. But where is the heart? It's all over the place when we travel. I was with my cousin Kyle one day and we went to the old Monterey Dump and I looked at the neat landfill with its bins and receptacles, and my mind was lost.

Lost in memory. Twenty-five years ago the Lord of the Landfill was Mr. Kisselbrock and his faithful Dump Dog. I looked forward to seeing them whenever I went dumpwards. But twenty-five years before that, the dump had no attendant. It was just a huge empty space full of garbage. We went there at night with our twenty-two rifles and hunted rats. Sometimes I believe the rats hunted us. They were large enough and red-eyed and they could sneak up behind you and run up your pant leg. Or so I seem to remember thinking when I was twelve.

This lost and found moment came to me at the Monterey Dump. I felt right at home with my memories. Inside the shed where giveaway books were shelved and cast-off clothes were hangered, I felt home again -- I picked up a book. Crow Killer by Dr. Robert Bunker. In the 1970s it was made into the film Jeremiah Johnson starring Robert Redford.

The character of the novel and film was mountain man Liver-Eating Johnson. He got that name, the story goes, after a Crow raiding party killed his wife and child. From that point on, Johnson turned madman. Declaring a personal war on the Crow nation, he tracked and killed one warrior after another. He was lost to himself and his heart was home to a devil named Revenge.

The story of Crow Killer is at least partly true. Bunker's writing authenticated it for me in 1967 when I read the book in a hospital bed after being run over by a motorcyclist with no headlight. This hit-and-run accident took me years to overcome, mentally and physically.

For a long while I was on one leg. My own lostness was so vast I couldn't see across it. I had to find the faith in myself that enabled me to be a writer like Dr. Bunker. I wrote him. And he actually phoned me when I was in the hospital. Then he sent his daughter Susan to visit me and she brought a personal signed copy of her father's book to my bedside.

I'll never forget him, her, the book, Johnson, or what it felt like to be lost in the vagaries of vengeance. Took me years to learn how to walk (I still have a slight limp and wear my shoes unevenly). Took me longer to forgive the drunken man who'd nearly killed me.

All these things flickered through my mind as I glanced at the old, dilapidated paperback of Crow Killer.

I looked up from my revery and there,tacked on the wall of the dump shed was this --

For my
mom she pass
away last Tuesday
if anybody want
to go serve it is
Otis Church big white
one 6:00 Thursday
If anybody want to donate come see
me it will help.

This note of lost-and-foundness touched me deeply. The writing of it, just the words themselves, crying out for help, were a kind of prayer encapsuled in hope.

I wanted to serve, in my way, so I am posting the heartfelt plea here. There's a message for all of us. More than one. You don't know what you lose until you lose it. You don't know your friends until you're down and out. I found that out when I was in the hospital. There was a prayer circle of Navajos sitting in chairs when I opened my eyes after my operation. After 40 years I am still writing to them. More than anything else, they cleared my mind of any violent action in my heart.

Home is where the heart is.

But you can be at home, anywhere, if your heart's at ease.

As we drove back to the little cabin on the ridge, I thought about how connected I was to the pine-needle place in the hills of western Massachusetts. How I'd seen Norman Rockwell often when I was a boy. How my grandfather knew W.E.B. Du Bois. How Hal Borland, just down the road in the 60s, helped me write about American Indians. How all of these people, and so many more made me feel connected to this Berkshire place that is never lost and ever found.

Coming home to Lake Buel, I was greeted by my cousin's cat Oscar.

Oscar was lost on the Lake Buel Boat Ramp.

And found by my cousin Kyle.

Oscar the Grouch lives not in a garbage can but a nice box where he can look out at the world and know that his heart is home.