Henry David Thoreau was the Pied Piper for loners, we who are skilled for the socially distanced times we’re living in.

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time,” he wrote in his instructional “Walden.”

“To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

Agreed. The first time I knew this about myself was a summer day when I was about 10 years old. I struck out alone pedaling my bicycle from a banana seat 15 miles to buy a grilled cheese sandwich with a side of independence. I didn’t have much money, so I drank from a hose on the side of a house. When you’re 10, you make do.

That’s why it’s counterintuitive that we’re keeping up the barriers between Coloradans and the great outdoors, where wide open spaces can put meaningful distance into social distancing.

Yet, when Gov. Jared Polis relaxed the state’s stay-at-home law to a “safer-at-home” phase, his office sent out guidelines. 

“The Safer-at-Home phase is not … going to the mountains to spend the weekend.”

Let’s hope that’s overly broad to mean gathering in bundles, rather than keeping your city contagions out of the backcountry.

About the same time as Polis was making his announcement, President Trump was planting a tree, you could say, on the White House Lawn to honor Earth Day, when he said he was ready to reopen national parks. Opening up Old Faithful and Havasu Falls might be too much too soon, though it doesn’t need to be like a Tennessee Walmart on Saturday morning.

Phil Francis, chairman of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, pushed back for a variety of reasons, including the risk to gateway communities, such as Estes Park, Grand Lake and Cortez.

“And not before we have the necessary capacity to protect our resources,” he said. “This includes adequate staff, personal protective equipment and employee training. There must be system-wide and individual park plans in place, made available to the public, that can be executed prior to reopening.”

It might take more time, but getting back to normal in Colorado should be led by getting back to nature. There are too many upsides, inwardly and outwardly.

It’s as true in the outdoors as it is anywhere else: We have to be apart for awhile, so we can get back together sooner when we figure out how the new normal works. 

People who love nature need to also love the people who live and work there, said Jessica Wahl, the executive director of the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable, an association of associations from the Boat Owners Association to American Trails. Jessica formerly directed the Boulder-based Outdoor Industry Association’s outdoor recreation portfolio in Washington, D.C.

“I think this is the Colorado worry: the avalanches they saw of people triggered a month ago,” she told me, speaking of the crowded parking lots at trailheads, the early warning signs of cabin fever.

Small mountain communities can handle their own cases, but they can’t shoulder the sickness of the world flowing through for vacation, importing and exporting the infection.

Spreading the virus isn’t the only risk, though. 

“If you do something stupid on a normal day, search-and-rescue comes, you go to the hospital — there’s room, there’s space, there’s time, there’s people to help you,” Jessica said. “If you do something stupid today, there’s not, and you could be taking an emergency or medical professional off the COVID-19 response. You’re taking somebody’s bed in that hospital.”

It’s hard to see a walk in the woods as ever being a bad idea. It’s transformative. I’ve been to the woods in northern Minnesota on a brisk Sunday morning in November, the occasional crackle of a distant rifle on the first day of hunting season. That’s where the Mississippi River I know so well gathers from a marsh to a lake for the long trip to New Orleans.

Thoreau went to the woods five years after authoring “Civil Disobedience,” based on his opposition to President James K. Polk, a Democrat whose administration hunted down slaves and returned them to the South, cut a shady deal with England for the Oregon territory and crushed Santa Anna in the Mexican-American War, while the opposing Whig Party alleged treason.

From there Thoreau originated, “That government is best which governs least.”

I read a Thoreau quote in college, one of the best schools in the South I won’t embarrass by naming here, because then I misquoted him for 30 years. “None are free as those who see a vast horizon,” I misrecited a thousand times in my head as I weighed my options about things like a new job, an old girlfriend or whether to do something funky with my hair; freedom in the guise of opportunity.

Thoreau had paraphrased a Hindu god, “There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon.”

As certainly as Thoreau borrowed an ax to chop down the trees to build his cabin on Walden Pond, I think he would approve of me making his borrowed quote my own. Solitude gives us the latitude to see who we really are.