Where I’ve been and what I found there—parks, towns, monasteries, back roads, and the people who turned up along the way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
