I was so obsessed with My Side of the Mountain that I ran away from home at age nine with only a Wham-O boomerang, fully intending to live in a hollow tree in the woods and hunt with a hawk like Sam Gribley did. Around one o’clock in the morning, the state police found me six miles from home in a patch of woods near Springfield Mall and hauled me back for a parental smackdown that was epic enough to put an end to any future walkabouts.
