At that time I’d only vaguely heard the phrase “hot yoga class” around town. It conjured a charming picture in my mind of thoughtful people concerned about declining yak populations and freeing Tibet and other such noble enterprises, sitting peacefully après group meditation in a peace circle on a warehouse floor or a redwood log in the forest, drinking organic hot cocoa or maybe green tea, sharing cleansing quiet.

Then again, I’m a 60-year-old broken-down golfer with a dodgy right knee from football donkey years ago who still limps around the golf course carrying his own bag for exercise and sometimes, weather permitting, walks to work.

“Happy to get you up,” I said. “Hot yoga sounds like fun, especially if they give you hot cocoa.”

She stared at me incredulously, as if I’d made an impolite yak mating noise. “Dad, they don’t give you hot cocoa. And I wouldn’t exactly call hot yoga fun, though it is fabulous. I’m totally addicted to it — go twice a week back in New York. It’s what keeps me sane.”

“No hot cocoa?”

“No. But you really should try it. Seriously. The stretching alone would be great for that old athlete’s body of yours. You’ll feel so wonderful after you finish a session. And the place I’m going to here is such a beautiful space. They play gorgeous meditation music and place a lavender-scented cloth on your head and massage your neck with relaxing oils at the end.”

“Sounds great,” I agreed. “I guess I can always buy my own hot cocoa afterward.”

“So you’ll go?”

“Absolutely.”

“Wonderful. You’ll thank me!”

But, alas, I didn’t go. Over the next year, in the interest of exercising more and improving my health, I limped around the golf course a little more than usual and steadfastly avoided setting foot in the Taj Mahal of a health club where we belonged, simply because the multitudes of people exercising there — especially the old ones — were so frightening in their dedication to physical fitness.

They wore headphones and huffed along on computerized treadmills and other machines that required a basic engineering degree to operate until they looked half-dead, at which point they mopped their brows and sauntered past flabby sometimers like me wearing a look of pure Teutonic smugness. And this was just the old ladies!

Back in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when I blew out my right knee from idiotically stepping on a kicking tee while playing football, nobody except guys who pissed off the coach by sitting on their helmets during games or lonely aces who couldn’t get a date if their own sisters invited them out went to the gym to actually exercise. The gymnasium wasn’t at all cool except with bodybuilder types who shaved their armpits and actually dated their sisters.

In the ’80s, I played a great deal of pick-up basketball with college dudes 10 years my junior, plus shortstop on two different fast-pitch softball teams. I also hiked in the mountains and ran a couple of 10K road races with a crazy girlfriend who ate tofu by the crate and planned to live forever. Trying to keep up with a skinny girlfriend with the approximate body fat of a Serengeti cheetah, I learned, is no fun at all. She literally left me somewhere around mile five and that was that — for romance and road racing.

In the ’90s, I built my own house on a hilltop in coastal Maine, rebuilt old stone walls, planted stuff, chopped and stacked wood endlessly, and shoveled more snow than one man should probably have to shovel unless he’s in a Soviet gulag in Siberia.

I walked a golf course twice a week and even joined my first gym, which I belonged to for about three weeks, until I realized the people reading “The Bridges of Madison County” on the Stairmaster machine and taking their own pulses actually liked going to the gym. Also, I didn’t like being naked with strangers who loved to admire their toned bodies in full-length mirrors. Had the strangers been female, well, that might have been a different story.

Anyway, flash ahead 20 years — lots of chopping and walking and working like a convict in a garden, keeping me more or less in what I called “farmer shape” — to the winter day I finally took my daughter’s advice and showed up at the yoga studio for something called “Warm Flow Yoga.”

I was the first to arrive for class on the appointed Saturday morning and discovered the instructor was an attractive young gal named Lisa, who was so charming and blessedly fit, I was tempted to turn and bolt for the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts.

Lisa quickly put my qualms to rest, placed me on a rented yoga mat, and explained that the purpose of yoga is to achieve a proper balance between the body and the spirit through various timeless meditational poses meant to exercise the body and liberate the dude within.

Being a yoga rookie, I was advised to watch others as they performed the various traditional asanas (postures) and warm-ups and to “listen to my body” by doing only what I felt my old body could handle.

“There’s no right or wrong here,” she emphasized. “Yoga is a learning process, you must do at your own speed.”

Seven women and one guy joined the class and immediately began stretching out. I started stretching out too, pretending I knew what I was doing, which I didn’t, but rather liked doing anyway, greatly enjoyed in fact, especially watching all these fit middle-aged women in skimpy outfits warming up all around me in the candle-lit room with serene flute music coming from a Tibetan mountaintop.

I vaguely wondered if this might be why they call it “hot yoga,” but then the class started and all such worldly distractions disappeared as Lisa led the class though a host of flowing postures and breathing exercises meant to still the monkey in the mind, to free our spirits from past and present concerns, to find peace and sacredness of the moment, the simple act of being.

Truthfully, Warm Yoga nearly killed me at several points, especially when my dodgy right knee refused to cooperate on a difficult one-legged pose. But somehow, with Lisa’s gentle guidance, I even got through most of the challenging poses. By the time I was lying flat on my back during the final recovery period, breathing deeply and covered with sweat and relaxed as a steamed lasagna noodle, I truly realized why Maggie and 30 million other Americans find this ancient form of exercise so completely and utterly beguiling.

I’d completely forgotten about that final glorious touch — a soothing cool cloth smelling like my old lavender garden back in Maine, placed over the eyes. For a few lovely moments I was back in my old Maine garden, and in a bit of heaven.

I left the studio feeling like a new man with an old body that was eager to return as soon as possible. With or without the hot cocoa at the end.

Then there are the athletes who limp. One of the greatest moments in the history of baseball — the best performance by a limping athlete, if you will — happened in the World Series of 1988 when an injured Kirk Gibson, nursing a bum left knee exactly like mine, startled fans by limping out of the dugout to pinch hit for the L.A. Dodgers, down 4-3 with two out in the bottom of the ninth in the first game of the series against the mighty Oakland A’s. Ace Dennis Eckersley was on the mound throwing smoke. Gibson somehow worked a full count and then swatted a home run to win the game over the right field fence.

My limping, on the other hand, is downright embarrassing. I look nothing like Kirk Gibson limping around the bases while the crowd in L.A. loses their minds and the great Curt Gowdy hollers in disbelief, “It’s a miracle, I tell you! A miracle.”

A bum knee, in short, needs a dramatic narrative. But my limp looks like a grocery cart missing a front wheel or an old pirate who lost part of his peg leg in a tavern brawl.

People who see me limping along like an old pirate pushing a broken grocery cart feel so sorry for me. I can see it in their faces — pure, undisguised limping pity.

“Oh, dear, are you all right?” a tender-hearted granny-sort asked me the other evening as I limped through Harris Teeter to buy my first quart of seasonal egg nog.

“Yes ma’am,” I said truthfully. “It only hurts when I walk.”

“Oh, sweetie, how did you injure it?” she wondered, the picture of deep granny-type concern.

I told her the truth. “If you must know, I recently leapt out of a helicopter into a raging flooded river to save a litter of golden retriever puppies about to go over a waterfall in a washtub.”

She was so moved she could hardly speak.

“That is so brave,” she finally managed, wiping a tear and hugging me.

“Yes ma’am. The best thing is, every one of the puppies survived. Now I’m finding them all good homes for Christmas.”

True, I lied. You probably guessed that by now. But having a bum knee and a sorry limp with no narrative at Christmas can change you in ways that make Dr. Strangelove look like a Boy Scout selling homemade brownies.

How could I possibly tell that sweet little granny-like person with an honest face that I simply hurt it while playing golf on a rainy afternoon back in May? That all I did was make a sorry swing with a sand wedge and feel the sand shift beneath my left foot and something in my knee twist. What kind of silly injury is that?

Back in my early teens and twenties, after all, my own mother used to call me Hurricane Jimmy because I displayed a talent for injuring myself in all kinds of interesting ways: falling off my bike or out of trees, tripping into open holes, coming home with a bloody nose or flesh wound after every sort of neighborhood game. I never cried and healed fast. Getting injured was my thing.

For example, I nearly put out my right eye by sliding home in a Little League baseball game and colliding with the catcher, a moment that briefly gained me the admiration of classmates and the attention of the elusive Della Hockaday. I got to wear an eye patch to school for a week and was thus encouraged to present Della a mood ring from Woolworths, which she wore for almost two whole weeks before giving it back in order to go steady with Woody C. Ham, who had a more interesting injury than mine, having broken his arm by falling down the bus steps. He had a big honking cast on his arm that the whole school got to sign, making him an instant celebrity. By then my eye patch was gone, my heroic baseball injury forgotten, and so was any hope of romance with Della Hockaday —my first hard lesson in love and personal injury.

That next winter, while skiing in western Maryland, I crashed through a snow fence and wound up spending New Year’s Eve with my right leg in a sling at a Catholic hospital where the nuns made a big fuss over me. I believe this might be where I had my first sip of eggnog — straight nog, of course. So I owe the nuns that. But it just wasn’t the same as Della Hockaday.

Rather disappointingly, I played two years of organized football but never had a decent injury to speak of until college, where I foolishly attempted to make the university’s team as an invited walk on and tore apart my dodgy ski bum knee and required surgery. I spent a month hobbling on crutches with a leg cast that made Woody C. Ham’s look like a cheap trick just to get Della Hockaday in the mood.

Later, I crashed gloriously headlong into the bleachers during a heated intramural basketball game that required a dozen stitches in my forehead, but made me look more like a son of Frankenstein than Hurricane Jimmy. On the plus side, that very next summer, working on a crew putting up lightning rods on barns, I drove a steel rod threw my hand and wound up being the head usher at my college roomie’s wedding with a right hand swaddled up like baby Jesus. I was a big hit with the bridesmaids.

In my twenties I played on three different softball teams in Atlanta and wound up having that same bum right knee seriously operated on twice more, each time milking my injury for all it was worth.

Then something strange and totally out of character happened. I moved to New England, got married, became a father, built my own a house on a forested hill and became a crazed landscape gardener. During those two decades I traveled the world walking golf courses and rebuilt the ancient stone walls that surrounded our property, with plenty of cuts and bruises, but no major injuries worth mentioning. I even spent six weeks in Africa chasing crazy plant hunters though some of the scariest terrains on earth with nothing more to show than a bad tick bite and a few gouges. I was informed by our guide that the tick bite might cause a terrible case of jungle fever and I might wake up in the dead of night shouting out for Kim Bassinger or at least Della Hockaday. But sadly, it just never happened.

Where had Hurricane Jimmy gone? Life is so bittersweet and short when you’re living from one injury to the next.

All of which makes the silly little injury to my “good” knee in a sand trap last May so embarrassing — maybe even a true sign of age and creeping decrepitude. All it took was a little twist in the sand and I’ve been limping like Chester on Gunsmoke ever since.

The orthopedic specialist who examined the pathetic knee in question pointed out that I’m too young for new artificial knees and suggested I simply shut up and give my sissified injury time to heal on its own, which I more or less have — except for the shutting up part.

At the risk of sounding like that sixth grade Lothario Woody C. Ham, since every other person you meet here in the Sandhills can boast of either a new artificial hip or pair of new knees and is more than happy to show off with a brief tango or tell you about their advanced aerobics class at First Health, I’ve created my own dramatic narrative to explain my pathetic limp in grocery stores.

True, six months has officially come and gone and — yes — the sissy knee feels better and my limp seems to be finally fading a bit. But this ordeal is so unworthy of my happy Hurricane Jimmy days, I’ve had to resort to bold narrative measures.

Which explains why I’m drinking straight egg nog with both hands this Christmas and telling myself (and anyone else who will listen) that at least I saved those adorable puppies in the nick of time and found them a warm safe home for the holidays.

Wherever she’s gone, I hope Della — depending on her mood — might be proud.

The drive probably took an hour longer than necessary. But more and more these days I find it’s the back roads of this state that make the journey more appealing than the prospect of a timely arrival.

Besides, given a choice, part of me will always take the quieter road home or the forgotten highway wherever I’m bound because that’s where — with apologies to Chevrolet — you still see the beating heart of America.

When America’s Interstate Highway System debuted with much fanfare in 1956 — authorized by an act of Congress and officially called the Dwight. D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways — it was hailed not only as the most revolutionary innovation in modern times but the most ambitious public works project in human history.

The system proved to be every bit of that and more — shaping everything from the way America went on vacation to the way goods and services were delivered cheaply and in unprecedented time, a boon to big business and a nation suddenly in a hurry to get someplace else at the dawn of the modern automobile age.

Today, sixty years later, now boasting more than 46,800 miles of super highway with legal speeds in places topping 80 mph, our aging Interstate system is still adding roads and often held up as a model of America’s postwar engineering ingenuity, widely credited with bringing goods and services to rural portions of the country and spreading commerce — and popular culture — into the nation’s backwaters, creating prosperous towns and cities where there was formerly only prairie or small towns adrift in time. Some historians, in fact, go so far as to credit Interstate culture with narrowing the regional differences between formerly hostile sections of the nation — easing ethnic and racial tensions along the way, the theory goes, to say nothing of homogenizing the nature of modern car travel.

Maybe this is so.

Maybe, on the other hand, this homogeneity and national worship of speed and efficiency explains why I’m so naturally wary of Interstates in general and addicted to back roads and forgotten highways in particular — because I’m old enough to remember when there were no Interstates, per se, at least in the parts of the rural South where my family did most of its traveling. Going somewhere in a car was still an adventure in those days, still took time to do it and almost always offered something different and often surprising — a shaded historic picnic ground by a stream? An old-fashioned tent revival in progress? An old-timer in faded overalls selling watermelons from the bed of a rusted pickup? All . . . just around the next big curve or over the hill. Road travel then was magic.

By their very definition, Interstates don’t have much magic, big curves or even hills to speak of. By careful design, you see very little of the world at large from them. They carry travelers in starkly efficient straight lines from point A to point B, minimizing the need to toil anyplace along the way — the very reason, in fact, why every neon outpost with golden arches and motels where you briefly exit to gas up looks eerily like the ones you saw ten hours and two state lines ago.

Perhaps my first and most vivid memory of life was a road trip nobody in our family wished to take. It happened on a cool November evening in 1957 after my father said goodbye to a handful of employees who worked for him at the small weekly newspaper he owned for a while in Mississippi. Owing to a partner who’d cleaned out the company accounts and vanished to parts unknown, reportedly with a cigarette girl from a Gulfport hotel, the paper had been forced to close down.

My father’s dream was ashes and we were “starting over” someplace else, though I had no way of understanding where or what exactly this meant — merely that our furniture had been sent on a truck ahead of us and we were having to leave sleepy Gulfport in our family’s two-toned Pontiac Star Chief, heading east into the darkness to a place called Wilmington, where my father had a new job waiting at the newspaper.

Maybe I’ve heard this story so many times I simply see all of this playing in my head like an old home movie. I was almost five years old, after all. My brother Dickie was already six. We had a Cocker Spaniel named Amber. Our mother had just suffered a miscarriage. It was twilight and we watched from the back seat of the car as our father shook hands with the five or six folks who worked for him and slipped them a small white envelope. Inside — I learned this from my mother three decades later — was the last of his own personal savings. The elderly black man who worked on the paper’s loading dock — supposedly one of the best blues rhythm guitarists between Mobile and New Orleans — gave me a harmonica for the trip. Everyone called him “Pops.” I never knew his real name. He had a glass eye and a bright gold tooth.

We waved goodbye and turned on the two-lane state road leading out of town, eventually running out of street lights. Our mother, who was still pale from her stay in the hospital, leaned her head against our father’s shoulder. He tuned up a radio station out of Jackson playing Nat King Cole.

“You boys get comfortable,” he said quietly over his shoulder. “It’s a long ride. Maybe we’ll have breakfast in the Blue Ridge Mountains.”

I hated to leave Mississippi but I was eager to see mountains of any kind, especially if they were blue. The night felt oceanic, scary and thrilling. My brother had his side of the Star Chief’s big back seat and I had mine. He warned me not to play my harmonica or cross into his side of the seat.

My first glimpse of the mountains came at dawn, when we stopped for pancakes at a crowded diner somewhere outside Chattanooga next to a stand selling “Genuine Cherokee Indian moccasins.” The placemats were a map of the entire United States you could color, and our parents let my brother and me buy a pair of those moccasins. Later, we stopped for a picnic on an overlook somewhere around Asheville. In the distance, the hills were indeed a milky blue. The air, I remember, was crisp and cold.

Over the next ten or twelve hours the drive to the coast took us down a winding road from the mountains through smaller hills and on through the rolling Piedmont into much flatter country, through small towns with sleepy courthouse squares, past Esso and Sinclair stations, past harvested fields and sleeping barns and farm stands already closed up for the season, roadside churches, cemeteries, VFW halls, a drive-in theater, and a dairy bar or two, where we finally stopped in late afternoon for an ice cream cone.

When I think back to that pivotal road trip in the life of my family, I realize something potent must have gotten into my bloodstream about small towns and back roads.

For it’s the rarest of back roads I’ve happened upon in forty-plus years of driving that I didn’t seriously consider taking instead of the ubiquitous Interstate highways and even more ambitious super tollways that now cinch suburban America’s landscape like a corset. As urban America expands, highways and country lanes sometimes seem like an endangered species.

This is why, given the choice recently to get home before dark via a mindless Interstate or meander along a quieter road at the whim of nature and pure serendipity, I chose the road not taken much anymore.

And like Robert Frost in his golden wood where two roads diverged, one of the first poems I ever memorized, this once again made all the difference.

Passing through a green-gold swamp, I saw a pair of snowy egrets sitting on a fallen branch over a blackwater pool, discussing world affairs while they waited for their evening supper.

Through the open window of the car I caught whiffs of summer’s last honeysuckle, just-cut hayfields, the dank smell of woods and streams, and wood smoke from a woman burning raked-up magnolia leaves and sticks in her yard.

I saw the first chevron of geese heading south for the winter.

A farmer waved to me from the seat of his tractor, chatting on his mobile phone.

Somewhere around Spivey’s Corner I pulled off in a fierce thunderstorm to buy fresh-picked silver queen corn, vine-grown Big Boy tomatoes and a paper sack of what my late Southern grandmother called “Florida butter beans,” large creamy white affairs speckled with bits of burgundy.

On I rambled past a wooden freewill Baptist church with a sign out front that read “Forbidden Fruit Makes Many Jams.”

I saw a beautiful cemetery under ancient oaks, several fields of grazing cows, a spray of flowers attached to a banged-up tree, a high school athletic field where a football team was ending its first practice of the season.

Somewhere around Campbell College, where the sun was out again but sinking fast, I passed four teenagers in a long line at the Dairy Queen. Two were holding hands. The other two were eating sundaes and laughing. The girls were shockingly under-dressed — or so my late Granny Taylor would have said. Date night in the slow lanes of America.

“How was your drive?” my wife asked when I finally got home around nine. She was watching a movie.

“Just the way I like it,” I said.

“I figured that’s why you were late,” she said. “You took the back road home again.”

Reprinted with permission from the September issue of PineStraw Magazine.