So at the end of each week, typically on a Saturday or Sunday evening, I look back on the past seven days and recall what new experience has just come into my life. It helps to fix more firmly in my mind the educational value of whatever it was.

Some weeks are pretty bland. I might try a recipe new to me, a new flavor of ice cream, or a new phone app. Others...well, it’s hard to forget the submarine act my friend and bowman Baird and I performed in the Hayes River in Nunavut, losing all the cooking gear and stoves in the process (Eric found ‘them somehow and heroically rescued them from the bottom of the river).

Or the time that my canoe partner Al and I, impatient with scouting doubtful rapids on the Coppermine River, launched out in faith that we’d make it through the next one somehow. It was a bit of a stretch. Halfway down, as we dropped over unexpected four-foot falls and bounced like bronc riders through big waves, I think I shouted, “Holy Toledo! Al, we’re gonna die!” Cool as a cucumber, he answered, shouting over the roar of the rapid, “I doubt it. Relax. We’re doing fine.”

There was the week I got married. I’d never done that before, and haven’t again since. The week in January Charlie Broe and I climbed Allen Mountain, the last of my Adirondack 46, in a heavy snowstorm. I never did that again. I couldn’t have.

So the weeks have streamed past, hundreds of them, some of them commemorated by a journal entry or a trip log, others simply absorbed into the bloodstream of a life, the way drugs melted under the tongue become part of a body.

And thus we came to last week. Nothing new was planned. It was too hot for an old guy to do anything but ruminate, and very gently, at that. I’d clean up around the house Friday morning, hit the road with Kiki in the back of the new hybrid RAV, and weave through increasingly heavy traffic to Bea’s place on the rocky eminence at the end of a long tombolo north of Boston. Preprandials on the porch above the wide sound, watching the flights from Europe coming into Logan Airport. Maybe watch a movie; we still have Norwegian Kitchen Stories on the agenda. Next day, breakfast at a new-found little restaurant in Swampscott and a round-trip ride on the swift catamaran ferry to and from the Long Wharf in Boston. Dinner out, leisurely breakfast next morning, and then a gradual extrication from Boston traffic to the bliss of I-89 in Vermont. What could go wrong?

I pulled out of the restaurant Friday evening into moderate traffic for the Lynnway, the sclerotic artery connecting Boston with the North Shore. It was after dark; there was nothing coming. Signaling for a left turn, I moved toward the left-hand lane to make a U-turn at the next light. A car horn blared right beside me, tires screeched on the pavement, and with a great whump! my door pushed me toward the console and the whole car violently forward. But we were still mobile. I pulled forward into the left-turn lane and parked. The other car, small and dark, followed and parked.

My door was jammed shut; no way I was going to get out. Instead, Bea got out on her side, and I began to appreciate my immense good fortune. The driver who hit us spoke no English; guess who speaks good Spanish. While chatting with the driver, she called the state troopers and when one arrived, explained why the man in our driver’s seat couldn’t get out, and helped with the accident report.

The trooper was another bright spot. Clearly he’d been through sensitivity training. When he came to the window to talk to me, Kiki, still shaking with fright, leaned out to give him a smooch. She liked him, too.

Home again to sleep with the windows wide to catch the sea breeze and the waxing crescent of a moon poking across the sky. Thoughts of having to crawl in and out of the car next day if I couldn’t open the door chased others about how much worse it could have been, and I couldn’t sleep for hours. This one was going into a journal, as well as a police report. And I have enough new things to fill several weeks.