I knew a reporter once who decided to walk from one end of a big Florida county to the other, reporting what he saw. Homeless camps. Roadside bars. Mile-wide citrus groves. Downtown neighborhoods. Beaches wave-kissed in the moonlight. Cypress hammocks. Gators in the canals.

If you’re not walking you can’t fully understand a place, because you can’t discover it fully, through all your senses. Want to know what Florida really is? Pick a few places. Go to them one at a time. Get out of the car and walk for a few hours. See. Smell. Hear. Taste. Touch. At a walking pace.

Life got in the way of that reporter’s ambition, but he would have done it. And he was a fine writer, too, a man able to harness words to footsteps to journeys to understanding the way some people can harness ambitions to dollars, for example, a skill that has eluded me in large part.

I want a house on the New Hampshire coastline north of Boston. I want a house in Pineland overlooking Pine Island Sound in Lee County where the kingdom of the Calusa once existed, ruled by a king, a military commander and a head priest. They headquartered atop Mound Key in Estero Bay, 125 acres the Calusa constructed almost entirely of conch and oyster shells, to a height of more than 30 feet.

I doubt those kings ever saw a hurricane that worried them. They dispensed justice from a community house on top of Mound Key that could hold 2,000 people, the 16th century Spanish reported.

I don’t need to see Mound Key every day. All I want is the former Pineland home of the New York Times best-selling author, adventure traveler, fishing guide and former newspaper reporter Randy Wayne White.

And that’s not all. I want a house on Jupiter Island with a good pair of mounted binoculars on the deck overlooking the sea, so I can stare 4,000 miles east across the great Atlantic, where the gray sea pounds in cold and I can pretend that Ireland is somehow a greener, more precious place than the Sunshine State.

I’ve been on a Pacific beach in a small community in southern California tucked into a place exactly 99 steps above the sand, and that was nice. But I don’t want that. I want New England beaches. I want Florida beaches.

But I don’t have the money because I didn’t earn it and nobody gave it to me. I didn’t steal it, either. Not enough ambition.

The very good reporter who got sidetracked in his own ambition and never walked a big sprawling coastal county did a couple other things, instead. He got married, moved to the top of Colorado to work for a small paper there, then took profound offense when his adopted country, the United States, got hammered by some murderous haters one day in 2001.

So he tried to join the U.S. Army, which said he was too old. But he insisted, and did finally, and spent the next 20 years in a career that, I think, probably involved some significant walking.

My youngest son has the right idea, in my view. Every so often he heads out on a solo expedition, when no one else can join him. Not long ago, he drove to the Ocala National Forest of almost 388,000 acres. There, he left the car, and walked in some miles with a backpack.

A variety of creatures came out to chat with him, possibly about politics and religion, certainly my favorite subjects, but more likely about his intentions on their property.

A scrub jay, one of the most amicable creatures in nature, landed beside him. A black bear stood up out of scrub and pines within about 100 feet, gave him a long cool look, and shuffled off without too much worry.

Randy Wayne White would have called that “adventure-travel…any activity used as a conduit to observe, share, enjoy, suffer, encounter, or experience that which is outside the boundaries of one’s own day-to-day life. You don’t have to go to Thailand or Central America to be an adventurer traveler, but you can.”

Right. You can also go to Pine Island Sound or the Ocala National Forest or the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve — 77,000 Collier County acres of the biggest state park in Florida — or you can drive to Martin County Road 714, a transformative 12-mile stretch known as the Martin Grade Scenic Highway.

Here in the state’s largest tree tunnel, the canopy above you forms a light-stained tapestry of ancient oaks, maples and cabbage palms. If you walk a ways into them, you’ll have no boundaries.

“‘Boundaries’ is the operative word here,” explains White; “real, implied, or imagined, if your body or mind crosses a boundary, you are doing it.”

Not just walking, but adventure traveling.

I say get up now with August rolling toward us, and get to it. ¦