Complete Archive
The Road—Places, people, and what turned up along the way.
A Year Late to Kuwohi
From a hospital bed, waiting on a donor heart, I promised myself the climb to the top of the Smokies. I got there a year late, by way of a campground with no signal, a ranger’s warning about bears, and a joke my dad told on that same summit when I was a teenager.
Watch Your Step: East Fork State Park
Four brown posts in the grass with a wire strung between them. I photographed them on the first morning, photographed the horse warning signs a little farther along, and still needed three actual horses standing in it before any of it connected.
The Day After Yellow Springs
Thirty thousand people had filled these streets the day before. I couldn’t find a single trace of them—no wreckage, no litter, just swept brick and open parking. It took two strangers and a sold-out appetizer to convince me the Street Fair had happened at all.
The Abbey of Gethsemani
Vigils is at 3:15 in the morning. Seven offices a day, silence in most of the halls, and Thomas Merton buried out back in a plain row with no marker pointing the way. Several days at a Trappist monastery in central Kentucky.
Not the Miles
Sunday morning at Big Bone Lick, a 1974 Volkswagen Westfalia stopped me cold—restored down to the plaid upholstery. The couple who owned it had been driving it for decades. What they said about the mileage wasn’t what I expected.
The Life—How this actually works, under real constraints.
Built for a World That No Longer Exists
A guy in a borrowed basement in Cincinnati, eighteen months out from a heart transplant, with a career and a marriage and an address all recently in the past tense. The plan he’d built his life around was designed for conditions that no longer exist.
The Reckoning—The interior work, and the questions that don't resolve.
No Inventory
The woman at the camp store didn’t believe the card was mine; she said I didn’t look old enough. I qualified under the other half of the rule. I’d come back to camping after most of a lifetime away, not at all sure I’d still want it.
Still Here
Weeks of lists, gear videos, and a spreadsheet I kept telling myself was almost done. I finally packed what I actually had instead of what I still meant to buy, and left. I had gloves. I had sanitizing wipes. I did not have pillows.
