I was thinking of how much more special and dear America was becoming to me in these last miles and months of the worldwalk. And not just because it was my home. But, rather, because it held the most stunning scenery, the most abundant wildlife, and some of the freest people I had met anywhere in the world...While following the old Lewis and Clark Trail across southern Washington, Idaho, and Montana, my eyes and my soul had feasted on rugged whitewater rivers and thickly-forested mountain ranges still virtually unchanged from the time the first trappers and mountain men had passed that way two hundred years before. "Life consists with wilderness," wrote Henry David Thoreau of his beloved outdoors in the early part of the last century. "The most alive is the wildest." I still got goose bumps when I thought back to that Fourth of July night in Seattle when I'd gazed from high above the harbor at the hundreds of white-hulled sailboats gathering below, then gasped in delight again, and again, and again, as a fantasia of fireworks blossomed above my head, only to be multiplied a thousand times over in the mirrored windows of that futuristic city's skyscrapers. It was two hundred years since the signing of America's Constitution, and she was still the world's major stronghold of personal freedoms and opportunities. -- Worldwalk book, pgs. 507-08