On my friend Howie's first visit to the Catskill Mountains, he couldn't sleep. Born and raised in Manhattan, Howie lived on Seventh Avenue in Chelsea, a rutted four- or five-lane thoroughfare jammed with cars and trucks honking and rumbling their way from the neighboring garment district to the Holland Tunnel, but those sounds intruded far less than the crickets and birds of upstate New York. He experienced the country as noisy and jumpy, couldn't write, and couldn't wait to get back to the city for some quiet solitude.

Some people crave the great outdoors, or at the very least, periods of interior stillness. Others can't stand to be alone or quiet for even a minute, and will use the steady hum of electronics (or din of traffic) to create a kind of white background noise, even if they're not actually watching TV or listening to music.

If the noise and activity around us never completely stops, it's impossible to hear that still, inner voice we sometimes call intuition. Even city-boy Howie, years after his first horrifying experience of the great outdoors, has opted for the New England countryside. But I'm a Pisces (great excuse, huh?) and never want to choose this over that. I want to experience everything on a semi-regular basis: wilderness, urban culture, loud concerts, mental challenges, foreign cultures, abundant shared laughter... have I covered it all?

I'm somewhat notorious for dragging friends off comfy couches and out among the trees, no matter how urban the setting or inclement the weather. Sometimes I'll head out alone if I'm having a serious jones for nature. I worry more about crazy city folk than wild animals, although there was a pretty big coyote staring me down last weekend in Topanga State Park.

Robert Kull, author of Solitude (New World Library), took it way further than I would even remotely consider. He had a boat drop him off at an improbable outpost in the Patagonia wilderness for an entire year. Unlike the hapless young man in Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, Kull was well-prepared in many ways, bringing food, lumber, nails, solar energy units and dozens of other items I'd have no clue how to implement, and managed to build a snug cabin and outhouse, capture energy, pull his own abscessed tooth, and send home monthly emails via a solar-charged computer. Even if this were all he'd done, I'd be in awe, but Kull did it all minus one foot. He'd lost it in a motorcycle accident, so this entire adventure took place with the use of a prosthetic. (The ghost of Flannery O'Connor asks, what if he had somehow lost the foot out in the wild? He never says if he brought a spare.)

To be fair, Kull laments that it was ear-numbingly noisy at times, what with the wind, rain and turbulent seas. Still, an entire year in the wild holds some appeal.

I'm envious of his solitude in Patagonia, and the connection he found with the sacred unspoken — some might say God — that seems to become more clear when we are one with nature, but I know I'll never do anything that extreme. I'll have to content myself with mountain hikes and ocean sails, and hopefully I'll be still enough to hear my own heartbeat and whatever else I really need to know.

Photo courtesy Robert Kull