Big Bone Lick State Park sits in northern Kentucky, named for the mammoth and mastodon bones early settlers pulled out of the salt springs there. I’d been camped since Friday. Sunday morning I went out for a walk and came across a van that stopped me cold—a 1974 Volkswagen Custom Westfalia, restored down to the […]

I’m sitting at a picnic table right now, and I still don’t quite believe how quiet it is. That’s not a metaphor. I mean it literally—I keep pausing to listen for something, some hum or rumble that isn’t there, the way your tongue keeps finding the socket where a tooth used to be. There’s nothing

Something just occurred to me while I was sitting here writing today. I could get in my car right now and drive to the Smokies. Today. This afternoon. There is nothing and no one stopping me from doing exactly that. And my reaction—the one I was not expecting—was: yeah, so? As in: obviously. Of course I could.

There’s a guy sitting in a borrowed basement in Cincinnati. He’s 57. He’s a heart transplant recipient—eighteen months out, managing a complex medication regimen, immunosuppressed for life. He spent thirty-five years in houses. He had a career, a marriage, a life that looked, from the outside, like the standard American version of having made it.