The Internet was mysteriously down this weekend. Logging on to anything seemed impossible, yet all the bells and whistles that indicate that things are in order seemed to be OK.

I bent over the side of my desk and followed the wires. Sure enough, something was unplugged.

“What happened?” I asked a boy.

He leaned into me and whispered into my ear. “I didn’t want Charlie to play on the computer anymore. I wanted him to play with us.”

Charlie is their cousin. He’s seven and an only child. He’s used to playing alone, mostly on the computer.

My boys can be just as bad about the computer unless we insist they “X off” the screen. And we do insist and minutes later they’re doing something like reading or running amok in the yard.

So was Charlie. He ran and played and jumped and screamed and the boys all were, well, boys.

Charlie and his mother went home Sunday morning and my boys went back to the computer. I insisted that they “X off,” we were going for a walk in the fields.

Their sister wanted to come, too, but one boy decided he would stay behind. So we all grabbed walking sticks and began to make our way over dead and fallen trees toward the field.

We walked a ways down a dirt road until a turn off pointing into the woods grabbed our attention. And then from behind, a boy who had changed his mind came bounding across the field to join us.

We walked into the woods. The air was cool but the sun shone through the canopy of branches, illuminating the muddy puddles that each of us would stomp through on our way to nowhere in particular.

This is the way one should walk through the woods, after all. No agenda, just a random meandering over trails well trodden by beasts, and perhaps less by man. The boys had just finished an afternoon at Port Discover learning about animal prints. Their sister could boast similar lessons through Girl Scouts. They all put their noses toward the ground, revealing the nature of an imprint stamped in fresh mud.

“It’s a raccoon,” one said, and they all agreed.

“There’s a dog print,” another said, pointing next to the raccoon print.

And there were deer hooves and perhaps fox prints. And there were more trails, and fallen trees bridging watery gaps where dead leaves covered trickles of creek beds; perfect for crossing if your feet are small and agile.

The trails meandered, going on and on and all the while I kept the field and the dirt road at my back or to my left, knowing just when to depart our woods. And knowing that, well I wasn’t popular when I took that left turn, out of the woods and onto the road.

Yet there was a satisfaction in our journey that drove one boy to jump and declare that he would turn off a computer for this sort of adventure any day. He would rather be here, with them, me, just us.