It takes longer than it should to clear the outer reaches of Phoenix but as I finally break free of the urban sprawl a sense of levity takes hold.

Over the last several days, an online flirtation has begun to turn into something more, and I think about the brawny, beautiful man with whom I am chatting as I drive north. My playlist—the Endless American Road (2026 Edition)—ticks away after months of careful curation. It’s a thousand songs long at this point and will steer me safely on this journey and back home. Dare I say I feel young again, hopeful like I did before too much life happened.

Landscapes shift as towns drift by: Flagstaff, Page, Kanab. Desert gives way to high desert, to pine forests, back to desert, and finally the Martian red rocks of southern Utah.

I reach the Valley of the Gods in the afternoon but still have some drive left in me, so I drive past the west entrance and enter Bears Ears National Monument.

A mile past the entrance, the pavement ends, and the long straight highway I’ve been following transforms into three miles or dirt switchbacks that climb straight up the side of the mesa, crookeder than a television preacher. I think about all the car chases along mesa roads in Edward Abbey’s 1970s novel The Monkeywrench Gang, and they make sense to me now. I drop the truck into low gear and ascend. This could end badly, but I’ve gotta know what’s on top of that mesa.

I make it to the top alive and the highway is paved again, speed limit lifting from 10 to 55 mph.

With a couple of hours of daylight remaining, we explore several dirt roads in search of a campsite. Most sites are either occupied or unremarkable. I stop at a closed BLM ranger station where an off-duty ranger kindly gives me a map and suggestions. We find a slide-rock road, barely discernible from the highway. I pull onto it and bring the truck to a stop, getting out to scout the “road” ahead. We discover a fire ring in the tree line, set along the slide-rock and below it a small valley with cottonwoods populates a dry desert wash. This is where we’re making camp. We explore, make camp, and build a fire.

The next morning we wake at dawn and enjoy a leisurely walk along the slide-rock as the sun rises. This is so much better than where I had planned to stop last night, and I embrace the reality that where we end up is often better than where we’d planned to go.

I consult the map the ranger gave me yesterday and estimate that I am two hours from Canyonlands National Park.

For a moment I consider leaving my tent here and using this spot as a base of operations for the long weekend, but I decide against it. This was a fortuitous decision, for I had no idea how much better the trip was about to become.

🐾🐾 🇺🇸 🐾🐾

Bonus: One of the things I like most about huskies is their closeness to nature, no matter how domesticated they become. Jones never misses a sunrise, and I love this little clip I took of him taking it in.

Welcome to the Endless American Road, where I write literary dispatches from the haunted American margins: long drives, books, grief, strange sightings, dogs, belief, and America beyond the interstates.

If you’re new here, let me explain the sections of the site and share a piece from each to start with:

American Arcana

America is a land where the haunted and the strange walk every road. In this section we explore ritual, signs, strange sightings in the sky, and the esoteric all through the lens of a psychedelic chaos magickian routed in Celtic and Western lore.

Campfire Curriculum

This is the section where we explore literature, film, music, the arts, and culture in a way that rejects the contemporary academic trends of the day. Our focus is on work that matters and why—sharing a working canon for working people trying to make sense along the way.

Mile Markers

Dispatches from the mythic American landscape—deserts, coasts, truck stops, and the liminal spaces in between that make this country great. Adventure is at the center of this project, and I plan to grow this section a lot in the coming year.

Signal Fire

Here I try to find the signal in the noise, sorting through culture, politics, and the culture of the moment. I try to write here through the lens of my own experience and understanding. I enjoy this writing, but it’s also the most divisive. Start here:

If you’re still here, here are two more of my favorites:

As this Substack continues to gain momentum, look forward to more regular posts and multimedia experiments.

But for now, I thank you kindly for being here and look forward to crossing paths out there on the Endless American Road.

🌵🌅 🇺🇸 🐕🥾

Utah, Ostara

I find myself on this final cool breezy weekend of Spring (Ostara) here in Arizona, thinking about Utah. This is fitting since I’m planning a trip there next today. On Beltane, I’ll be somewhere in southern Utah with the dogs, camping, exploring, and hopefully taking some time to read.

It’s fitting also that I finally got around to finishing Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage today, the third entry in my “Beyond the Western Edge” Curriculum.

When I pulled my tarot cards for the year (more on that in a future post), I pulled the Five of Wands for Ostara, this Spring season now at its end. This card in the Thoth tarot deck means something like clashing wills, or the pulling of action into too many directions. It’s a card of conflict but not unwinnable conflict; conflict that is part of the struggle to actualization.

And so this season has been. It’s been a struggle, though hard to put my finger on why that struggle has persisted. Instead of Spring cleaning, my home devolved. The dishes piled up, notes went unanswered, I slid then plummeted off of my diet plan, I did cut back on alcohol and intoxicants but this led to relapses and excess, and in my reading and writing life—I found little joy. Even writing this feels heavy, laborious.

That has been my Spring and my lack of productivity in posting here shows it. In a culture where we make believe that we’re supposed to be productive all of the time, what does it mean to say—I failed. I couldn’t do it. I feel like I’ve wasted my time. Everything felt like a chore.

I picked the books for this curriculum from books I hadn’t read yet with the assistance of AI, so what does it mean to come to you now and say—yeah, I didn’t really like these two books. I’m making revisions to the curri, so here I am today, with my report and my revisions.

Below, I’m going to look at the two books for the curriculum that I read this season. Then I’m going to make some revisions to the curriculum before stepping away to begin packing.

Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey

I had heard the name Zane Grey before but I didn’t know anything about him when I came upon a leather-bound copy of five of his novels for $2. It wasn’t until I put the book on this curriculum that I did some background research and learned what a giant Grey is in western literature.

During his life, Grey sold 20 million books, with that many more sold posthumously. Even in the 20th century, when reading was still a widespread common pastime, Grey reached a level of popularity few writers can dream of. His reach within the western genre is second only to Louis L’Amour—and L’Amour can be found in nearly every middle-school literature textbook (I once had a job at a publishing house putting these books together, so I can attest to this!). So why have I, with two advanced English degrees focused largely on 20th-century American lit, never read Zane Grey? Is this one of the forgotten masters I’ve been looking for?

While Grey’s prose is rich and his imagining of the western landscape a nice complement to the books in this series, I have to be honest that I really disliked this book. Though it was published in 1912, it feels older and deeply out of sync with modern sensibilities.

That Riders of the Purple Sage had a huge influence on the Western film genre is certain; you can find here all of the tropes and ideas that would play out in the western films of the early 20th century.

Grey was writing about the myth of the frontier, which had officially closed a few decades before the book was written. The novel takes place in Utah, and Grey’s impression of the Mormon settlers who live there is dated and, well, complicated.

A heroine of the novel is a Mormon woman dedicated to her faith—rich, successful, but under pressure to engage in polygamy. She is an outcast on the western frontier, and in this respect the novel seems ahead of its time.

Simultaneously, though, the book is full of stereotypes and an old prejudice toward Mormons that I’ve encountered many times from people who grew up in the West. Frankly, it’s an odd heritage that no one talks about. Yet it’s worth noting that the Bundys as well as Senator Mike Lee from Utah are all Mormons and have all been in open rebellion against the federal government and its allocation of western lands to the public. So, as odd as these prejudices seem to the modern reader, there may also be some historical reality to them that is still playing out. It’s a nest of stereotypes, prejudice, and conspiracy that I just, frankly, don’t care enough to untangle. The Mormons I’ve known in my time out West seem nothing like the dubious ones in this novel.

The best part of this novel is the landscape and the mystical tone Grey takes when he writes about it. The purple sage of the western plains, which is mesmerizing when first encountered, feels like a bardo space—a last remaining piece of frontier that is still wild, where a rider can escape the encroaching civilization. The characters in the novel retreat into the sage throughout the story.

The value of this novel is that it wrestles with one of the many groups who found a home on the western frontier. The Mormons as presented here are largely unlikeable people, particularly the elders of the church, but in fairness are they really so different from the protagonists of Lonesome Dove? In both novels, groups (men) took what they wanted, claimed land from the frontier, and asserted ownership with brute force and coercion. I would certainly be cautious in recommending this book to a modern reader, but as a snapshot that captures the making of the American western frontier, it is interesting.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Let me begin this section by saying that Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote two of my favorite novels—A Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. I would put both of these novels on any list of the world’s finest novels. But the remainder of his vast canon—10 novels, 4 short story collections, and 8 works of nonfiction—is a mixed bag. That he is a master capable of elegant passages even in stories I don’t connect to is undeniable, but I often find myself longing for the connection to character that is present in his two masterworks.

And that is the problem with Chronicle: it is interesting, yes—mythical and strange in its exploration of a South America that, like the western landscape of America, lives in myth and memory as much as reality. But try as I might, I just don’t care about the characters in this book.

I was about 20 pages into the slim novel when I realized that I had, in fact, read it at least twice before. And yet, I couldn’t remember it. Santiago Nasar, the young man whose death is traced in the book, is a womanizer, a young playboy, and it is his reputation more than his actions that leads to his demise. But he floats through the book like a ghost. Maybe this is because we know he’s going to die from the beginning, but I would say he also lacks the depth required to carry the story.

Chronicle is perhaps best understood as a bold experiment. Where most books hold their central action until at least the third act, this one gives it away right up front. The novel is less about plot than it is about investigation—this is the story, but how did it happen? The plot is reconstructed through interviews and recollection, and like all of Marquez’s work the thin line between “truth” and rumor, story, and memory is a hazy one. Ultimately, the novel doesn’t do much to advance the central questions this curriculum seeks to explore, and it’s not one of Marquez’s works I would recommend to a new reader.

Revisions

And so it is with making a curriculum, you pan for gold. Sometimes you find gold but more often you just find shiny pretty objects that just aren’t what you’re looking for. So, thinking about the curriculum as a whole, I’m making some revisions. Below are the original 17 novels I’d selected but with these revisions: where there are multiple books by a single author I’m choosing one, I’m cutting those books that don’t seem to fit the central theme, and I’m picking a different book by one author. Here are the changes:

• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

• Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez

• Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey

• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

• Wolf by Jim Harrison

• Light in August by William Faulkner

• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

• Dalva by Jim Harrison

• American Pastoral by Philip Roth

• Joe by Larry Brown

• Streets of Laredo by Larry McMurtry

• So Much for That by Lionel Shriver

  • Revision: A Better Life by Lionel Shriver

• Bad Country by C.B. McKenzie

• Deep South by Paul Theroux

• Wild by Amy Jeffs

• Stalking the Wild Pendulum by Itzhak Bentov

• Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth

From seventeen, ten novels are left standing. Let’s see where the curriculum takes us by the end.

The End of the Season

At the end of Ostara, I’m feeling like the season got away from me but as I sit here tonight with a clean house and a five day camping trip to Southern Utah taking shape, I take a minute to reflect on all that did happen this season.

I saw two great concerts—Pusicfer and Interpol—both of which were remarkably good, I spent time with friends, made some new connections, had my first real victories at my current job, planted two raised beds, bought tickets for a trip home to Kentucky in June, explored the southern Arizona border, and spent some time in the vast desert near the Arizona/California/Mexico border. I didn’t do everything I set out to do, life often felt like a burden, but looking back—I did better than it seemed when I sat down to write this.

Now it’s Beltane and the red rocks of Utah are calling, and I’ll let you know how things are out there on the Road. Maybe I’ll see you out there. Maybe we’ll pass in the night. Maybe we’ll take some time for black coffee and cherry pie together.

Whatever happens, there is a frontier waiting to be explored, and nine more novels to be read before this project concludes.

Join me for our next novel: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. This one has been on my list for years. Pick up your own copy at this link.

See you out there! 🚙 🐶🐺🌄 🇺🇸

I have a working theory about the novel Lonesome Dove, but to get there requires knowing the poem Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Here’s a refresher if you need it:

That Lonesome Dove bears striking parallels to Homer’s The Odyssey could be the entire angle of this post (and a longer essay), so I’ll try to make my case brief: the heroes of the novel, Call and Gus, are former decorated Texas Rangers who spent decades fighting Indians and outlaws to make the borderlands of Texas safe for settlement. When the novel opens, the two older men operate a cattle company in the sleepy town of Lonesome Dove, Texas, and the first third of the book takes place in this tiny border town. In the slow unfolding of Part I, not much happens, and what the reader gains is a sense of the restlessness, the boredom, and the drift of two heroes whose great trials are behind them. They are like Odysseus once he finally returns to Ithaca after twenty years of being lost at sea.

In such a circumstance such men will do what such men have always done; they will create a new adventure. And so it is that Call, Gus, and company find themselves on a cattle drive from the southern border of Texas and Mexico to the northern border of Montana and Canada—all on horseback (and foot).

There’s so much to take away from this book but here’s the angle I keep mulling over: The novel is set somewhere around the years 1876–1878 (the Battle of Little Bighorn is the only firm historical anchor to ground us). For context, the Civil War had ended little more than a decade earlier, Texas had become a state when Call and Gus were young men, Montana and most of the western states were still territories, the Oregon Trail and California Gold Rush were recent memories, and indigenous tribes still controlled much of the Great Plains.

We often like to talk about our own age as though the technological changes we are living through are novel in all of human history, but consider that in the world of Lonesome Dove barbed wire, an invention few think about these days but one that transformed the open plains into settled ranches, had just been invented but not yet widely adopted. The railroad boom had barely started, the Homesteading Act would soon push settlers from the “crowded” east all the way to the Pacific shore in the migration we now call manifest destiny. Thirty years after the novel’s setting, the automobile was invented, the Wright brothers took their first flight, and the United States entered the first World War and slowly emerged as a superpower. The young men of the novel died in a world that bore little resemblance to the one in which they were born.

What we are seeing here is the archetype of the Cowboy at its peak, and within a few decades that archetype would pass from reality to myth.

There is so much more to this book—so much to say about gender roles, the most loved character being an emancipated black man, the Indians who are at times brutal, at times peaceful, at times desperate, at times wise. It’s an America that is hard to imagine today because it feels so long ago, but my oldest grandparent was born in 1900, so this would have been the world of his father—only four generations back.

Lonesome Dove is a behemoth of a book at over 850 pages in its most recent edition, but the novel never feels slow even when not much happens. That’s the subtle mastery of McMurtry’s work. There’s no heavy-handed symbolism in his writing, no long soliloquies, no gestures toward grand literary conventions—there is just a story, steeped in complex characters and a landscape that is fully imagined. Each chapter feels like its own short story with a distinct mood, theme, and resolution, and it’s this simple, subtle trick that keeps the novel moving from beginning to end.

It’s these qualities that also made the book a rarity in the American canon—it won both the praises of the literary world and had wide-spread popular appeal. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1986 and has sold some 4 million copies over its forty-year lifespan (the newest edition alone sold 56,000 copies last year, which in this age is very rare). McMurtry himself was perplexed by the book’s popularity and often felt it was misunderstood; in interviews he referred to it as “a pretty good book” and “a good try.”

Well, with all due respect to the late author, I’ll politely disagree. This is the second book by McMurtry I’ve read—with more slated for later this year—and both have made a lasting impression. Lonesome Dove captures a moment in our history and the nature of the men and women who forged our national character at its best. The world they inhabited was brutal, justice was often administered in small packs, and many mistakes were made. Yet, if you walk away from this book without admiration for the men and women who inhabit it, then there’s truly something profound you are missing about what it means to be an American.

I am tired of post-colonialism, tired of white guilt and critical race theory, tired of reductionist postmodern theories that seek to eradicate characters like these by diminishing them with original sin and “privilege.” No one in this novel led an easy life, and virtue is more challenging to understand than what young people see on TikTok. I am resentful of movements that only seek to dismantle the past rather than to understand it in its own context—virtues and sins alike.

Lonesome Dove is a reminder of how far we have come and what it cost our ancestors to get here. We’d do damn well to show some gratitude for their journey.

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Grab a copy of Lonesome Dove at my affiliated bookstore, and while you’re there pick up my next selection Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

This novel pairs well with the following cocktail and records:

• Ranch Water
  2 oz tequila, juice of 1 lime, 4–6 oz sparkling mineral water. ( I also like to add salt to the rim and think of this as a weekday Margarita. Lighter, refreshing). Pour over ice, stir gently.

• Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams

• The Lonesome Crowded West by Modest Mouse

• Stardust by Willie Nelson

That’s why road trips to lonesome places have become such a big part of my story in this era of living in a major city. I take every opportunity I can to throw my gear in the truck, rally the dogs, and head out to some less-traveled corner of the desert. Because of this, I spend a lot of time looking up at the sky far from the light pollution of an urban core.

Having spent so much time staring at the sky, I’ve had some experiences I can’t explain—three of them, to be exact.

I divide these experiences into two categories. The first was something I saw in 2015 over the Oregon coast, which I wrote about in the article below.

I won’t recap that experience here since I’ve already written about it on the Endless American Road, but that it forever changed how I see reality is unquestionable. Whatever model I had of the universe prior to that night in 2015 was insufficient for what I experienced, and whatever worldview I cobble together now must be broad enough to encompass that anomalous event.

The next two sightings fall into a second category. The first occurred in May 2025, and the second happened just a few weeks ago in February 2026. My sighting over the Oregon coast in 2015 was truly alien—unexplainable by any material rationale we currently have for how the world works. It shattered my previous understanding of reality.

The more recent experiences in Arizona that I’m writing about today are more pedestrian but no less mysterious. They are weird, yes, but they also come with context that can satisfy even the more skeptical among us. Both are documented—unlike that night in Oregon. I’m sharing that documentation here, now, for your consideration.

Last May I took a trip to the town of Portal, Arizona and from there drove a bumpy forest road many miles up into the Chiricahua Mountains close to the intersection of Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico. Here’s a map of exactly where I was:

I made camp around 8,000 feet and walked around the area with the dogs, catching a beautiful sunset over the distant mountains of New Mexico (and maybe Mexico?). Then I built a fire and put the dogs in the truck. That night I was camping simply—instead of a tent, I chose to string up my hammock between two trees, which is my preferred way to sleep. I was hanging out by the campfire, and around 8:22 pm on May 1, 2025, I was staring up at the full moon when I saw something in the sky.

It was a second moon, as bright and full as the one I had been looking at. As the light came over the mountain and began to move, I knew I was seeing something anomalous. It was happening again—a second sighting almost exactly ten years after my experience on the Oregon coast—but unlike that first night, this time I had my cellphone on me. The video is below (please mute it or forgive my swearing in advance):

Okay, so seriously, what the fuck was that? I’m not claiming this sighting was alien (though I’m also not ruling it out). For context, there are plenty of things that point toward a more terrestrial explanation. First, this video is from May 2025, just a few months after the mass reports of sightings that the media labeled “drones” over New Jersey and several other parts of the United States in December 2024. When Trump took office, he promised to disclose to the American people what was behind all of these sightings. His Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt had this to say in her first press conference:

When you consider that my little video—high in the remote mountains of southeast Arizona—happened just three months after this press conference, the possibility that what I was seeing was a military craft seems plausible. There are also two more facts to consider: 1) There is a military base about 75 miles away from where I was camped. 2) I’m roughly the same distance from the US/Mexico border, at a time when the US was clamping down hard on border security. These two facts lend credence to the idea that what I saw could have been a military (or even cartel?) craft.

Still, the way the light shoots straight up as I’m filming it defies what we know about conventional aircraft. I leave the interpretation of this sighting to the reader; my mission here is simply to share what I saw and to present the evidence I have.

My third anomalous sighting happened on February 28th, 2026 near sundown in the Kofa Wilderness Area about 70 miles north of Yuma, Arizona along the Arizona/California/Mexico border. The location is below:

That night, February 28th, 2026, I parked my truck along King Canyon Road and spent the afternoon walking the washes and desert. Near sundown, I was admiring the sunset and taking photographs when I noticed something peculiar. These photos are below:

Do you see it? Look closer along the ridgeline of the highest peak and zoom in on the area about 45 degrees to the left of that tallest peak. What you’ll see—and what I saw that night—is something hovering in the air, large and completely stationary. In fact, there’s a 10-minute gap between the first and last photograph in the gallery above, but in all of them the object is there—hovering, unlike anything officially acknowledged to exist.

In total, I estimate I watched the craft for at least 45 minutes, and it was still there as the sun set. But once it got dark, I just couldn’t see it anymore. It emitted no light (unlike a commercial aircraft) and it didn’t move at all. The next morning, it was gone.

Here’s a video as well (please mute this one):

Now the disclaimers: Like the second sighting, this one also took place near a military zone. The Yuma Proving Ground (a U.S. Army missile and weapons testing site) is just 20–30 miles south of here (and the southern edge of the Kofa Refuge actually borders it in places). I’m also about 70 miles from the US/Mexico border. The possibility that this was an undisclosed military craft is certainly plausible, though the object I saw behaved differently than what we know about conventional aircraft.

I present these sighting as evidence; I am not asking you to draw a particular conclusion from them. But that something unconventional is happening over the skies of Arizona (as others have also observed) is well documented.

So I encourage you, fellow travelers, get away from the city to somewhere dark. Start a fire, pour some bourbon, and look up at the sky. You never know what you might see.

From the Arizona desert, this is your sky-watcher JohnnyAppleseedX, looking up at the sky and signing off.

🫡🛸🇺🇸🌵

Required texts: Pick up your copies here.

Even in Arizona, the winter can be dreary though it’s hard to complain about cool weather in a state where half of the year is in the triple digits. Still, I am feeling the profound restlessness of winter–too many weekends in town, too much traffic, too many people, too long spent staring at home projects I know I ought to get started on but don’t.

In this season, I long for some time in nature but it’s more than that—it’s a longing for the person I am when I’m on the road. When I’m camping on the edges of spring, a typical day at camp goes something like this: I wake in the predawn hours and watch the last of the stars fade. It’s hard to get out of bed, even when your bed is a camping mat in the bed of a pickup. But eventually I hear the dogs start to stir, so I get up and let them out. They are drowsy at first but quickly find their vigor and start to play. Their energy in the morning is enviable.

I make coffee and am grateful for the steam rising from my cup as the first rays of sun breach the horizon. I wander aimlessly through the desert letting the dogs play. If I’m lucky we’ll scare up a jack rabbit or two, and hopefully nothing more menacing since the desert is full of both plants and animals that want to hurt you. As morning breaks, we head back to camp, I feed the dogs, eat some snacks, and pick up a book.

I read until the morning warms enough to shed some layers. I pick a destination from my list and load up the truck to go on an adventure. The playlist picks up where it left off when we parked the night before, and I ride with the windows down and the music blaring feeling happy to kick up dust. I feel free out here—connected to a lineage of explorers from the old world to now. Travel is much easier now, but no less awe-inspiring and no less essential.

We find a trail and hike so that by the time midday comes and the temperature starts to rise, we are ready head back to camp where there will be much roaming and reading, the dogs play until they don’t want to play anymore. Sometimes there’s a second adventure, sometimes I drive to the closest town to chat with the locals and explore, but on my happiest days we just stay at camp–watching the landscape wear the drag of the passing day.

As the sun starts to set I remake camp and fix a modest dinner after building a small fire. Once upon a time I sat up late into the night by the fire drinking, but these days I’m in bed not long after the first stars come out. The dogs settle back in the truck freeing me to wake throughout the night to watch both the Milky Way and Moon travel across the sky. The next day, I wake just before dawn and think about the adventure that the day holds.

Lately I’ve been reading literary works by male authors very deliberately. Particularly, I’ve been trying to reclaim a certain kind of literature that has fallen out of fashion. Not so long ago the writers I’m reading sold enough books to make an honest living at writing, something few male writers today (who don’t play into the identity politics and political agendas of the cultural elites) can do.

I am at the age where a man starts to realize that if you’re not who you want to be yet, then it’s time to get to work on the pieces you can control.

One of the areas where I have gotten lazy in recent year is in my reading. Despite being a slow reader, I still read more than nearly all the men I know but for a while now it has felt aimless. I choose books haphazardly and sometimes find myself reading low caliber books when there are still so many classics and great American writers sitting on my shelf waiting to be discovered. So this year I’m choosing a more deliberate approach.

One of the things I miss most about teaching is writing a great syllabus. A syllabus, when done well, should tell a story–something like: “these are the questions I’m pondering and here are some materials I’ve found that have made me wonder about those questions in a variety of ways. I’m inviting you to take part in the conversation with me.”

I decided that this year I would build a curriculum for myself. My goal–it’ll be deep, it’ll be thematic, it’ll focus on a lot of those “forgotten” writers I’m trying to reclaim, and most important of all–it’ll be fun.

But how do you build a curriculum for yourself from books you haven’t read? One thing students failed to appreciate was that anything I assigned them, I had already read. I read again as they read it, and if it remained on the syllabus I read it anew term after term. But in designing a curriculum for myself, I don’t have that luxury.

To get around this, I decided to use a custom built version of Grok. I sat down last week and took a stack of books I keep “meaning to read”, sorted them into a sort of order, and put them into the program. I told the AI how many hours a week I had to read and that these were the books I was interested in reading. I fed a bunch of other information in as well–personality assessments, horoscopes, all of my writing here, my larger ambitions for the year–and through much back-and-forth Grok and I culled that pile of books (around 50) down to 17, grouped around a common theme.

The end result is a self-directed curriculum for the year called “Beyond The Western Edge: Virtue, Sin, and the Closing Frontier.”1 It’s a syllabus for a class I would like to have taught had I ever been granted the freedom to do so. It is rugged, mostly American, unapologetically male, uninterested in identity politics or “inclusion,” contemporary in the sense that all of the books are from the 20th and 21st centuries but completely uninterested in postmodernism or any of the “-isms” that have driven conservative and blue collar men away from reading in droves2.3

Not forgetting the fun part, I also fed my record collection into AI and asked it to select a few records to soundtrack each book. Rounding out the curriculum, I also asked the AI to select a simple cocktail recipe inspired by each book. The results are impressive.

The final curriculum is below, and I hope to share the experience of reading each of these works—and maybe some reflections on the tunes and tonics that go with them—here on the Endless American Road.

The goal of this project, if I have one, is to discipline myself but also to encourage others–particularly men who have largely dropped out of the fiction market–to reengage. Log off, take some time to yourself, wrestle with a great book, learn to mix a stellar cocktail, listen to jazz while reciting moving passages for your dogs who are curious about—but unimpressed by—your recitations, go to bed a bit tipsy but wondering why the characters you’re reading made the choices they made. Let them, and the language used to render them, haunt you. It’s better than anything happening on Instagram.

I start this series with Larry McMurtry’s western epic Lonesome Dove. It’s a doozy of a read, I’m through about 300 of the novel’s 850 pages, and with any luck I’ll soon finish it by a campfire while listening to coyotes in the distance. It’s the start of a good year in reading that I plan to share with you, and a small step toward claiming some fundamental aspect of the life I want.

This syllabus explores America’s—and humanity’s—enduring preoccupation with frontiers, rooted in the nation’s founding virtues of self-reliance, moral courage, and ordered liberty. It traces the frontier spirit from outward conquest to inward reckoning, reminding us that true progress respects permanent things: the moral order, human limits, and the wisdom of tradition.

1

Beyond The Western Edge Curriculum

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2

WSJ Free Expression

No Boyz Aloud on BookTok

By Kyle Smith…

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3 months ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · WSJ Free Expression

3

The Republic of Letters

Vanishing Male Writers: What The Data Shows

Dear Republic…

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a year ago · 106 likes · 74 comments · The Republic of Letters and Michael Mohr

This is the best and worst time to be born an information junkie.

A hundred years ago, if I had been fortunate enough, I might have purchased a collection of World Book Encyclopedias from a traveling salesman—probably on a payment plan as encyclopedias were one of the first broadly available consumer goods that could be purchased on credit (a practice dating back to just after the Civil War).

In such an age I might have woken before dawn, completed my chores and made coffee just as the sun started to burn off the winter frost, then sat at the kitchen table reading from my encyclopedia before the day demanded more from me. Cracking the volume I might have wondered, “Let’s see what wonders the letter ‘Q’ has to offer us today.” The encyclopedia, as I would have understood it, contained snippets of nearly all the world’s knowledge and by learning what was in those volumes, I could have known more than Dr. Faustus and it wouldn’t even have cost me my eternal soul.

But it’s not a hundred years ago, and instead I have to deal with an information stream that is fragmented, siloed, constantly spinning, impossible to wrap one’s head around, and turning us all into angry, bitter mobs who live in different realities. This is the very worst version of Robert Anton Wilson’s fiction come true.

As a nation we are so divided, and have allowed politics to so thoroughly seep into every facet of our lived lives, that this year there are even two Super Bowl Half Time shows—one for those who want to see the shallow pandering of “Queer” representation by a guy in a dress who constantly disparages the country that has made him rich without even bothering to learn its language (one more example of why it’s time to let Puerto Rico have its independence), and another halftime show headlined by an aging rockstar whose most notorious artistic statement in recent years has been shooting rounds of ammunition into stacks of Bud Light. Oh, joy. I choose neither.

As I dipped my toe into the shark infested waters of “The Feed” yesterday morning, the story that dominated was “DONALD TRUMP POSTS RACIST MEME OF THE OBAMAS,” along with the cartoon image of Barack and Michelle as apes. Oh, boy, at first glance this certainly does not look good. I support the President, but sometimes I just wish he’d be more “presidential” and times like these are challenging.

But I’ve seen enough fake outrage in the past month alone to know that the headline is seldom the story, so without caring about this story at all I know I’ve got to do some digging to figure out what actually happened.

For those fortunate enough to be living under a rock, here seems to be what happened: On Thursday Trump’s account on TruthSocial shared a 62 second video about vulnerabilities in voting machines used in the 2020 election. At the end of the clip, the video transitioned to an animated segment satirizing “The Lion King” which showed former President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as cartoon apes. Then, immediately, the video switched back to the clip about voting fraud.

Once the Trump camp was made aware of the video, they pulled it down. Trump himself condemned the clip but also asserted that it was a mistake made by a staffer. He was not aware that “the Lion King” clip was at the end. Of course if you watch the “offensive” clip in question, you’ll see that it’s more AI generated slop and that Democratic politicians are superimposed on various animals and Trump is, of course, the lion as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” plays. In the way of political commentary, it’s not deep or insightful, but in the age of slop it has gone viral.

It’s unfortunate that the clip received more attention because of this latest “controversy,” but anyone not beset by full blown Trump Derangement Syndrome can clearly see what happened. The clip is a screen recording of an X video captured on a mobile phone, and on X’s mobile video feed the next video auto-starts before the video you’re watching finishes. If you want to return to the initial video you simply swipe back up which is clearly what happened here. This is the “infinite scroll” format that all social media platforms now use thanks to the popularity of TikTok and that this model was created by Demons In Hell is incontrovertible, scientific fact.

The mistake that was made here is obvious, but since I’m a white GenX male I am not allowed to say such things. So here, for those who need it, is a black Gen Z female to explain it to you. Take it away Amala:

But, of course, this is not a version of the story you’re willing to hear if your personalized version of “The Feed” is tuned to leftist outrage. Here is just a sampling of how the story has been covered in the last 24 hours (summary compliments of Grok and edited by me):

• The (post) has been framed overwhelmingly as a racist depiction, drawing on a long historical trope of dehumanizing Black people by comparing them to apes/monkeys — a stereotype rooted in centuries of racism, slavery justification, and segregation-era propaganda.

• The incident has been covered in: The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, BBC, Reuters, The Guardian and others.

A sampling of statements about the incident includes these:

• House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries: “Fuck Donald Trump” in response to the “racist Truth Social video post,” describing it as “racist and bigoted.”(Source: MSNBC article by Charles F. Coleman Jr., February 6, 2026; also covered in The Washington Post.)

• Color of Change: “This is white supremacy expressed from the Oval Office.” They argued Trump “resents what the Obamas represent: a Black family that is accomplished, respected, and widely admired,” calling him a promoter of views that “contradict the worldview he has spent years promoting—from birther conspiracies... to now circulating imagery rooted in centuries of racial dehumanization used to justify slavery, lynching, and violence.” (Sources: Color of Change Facebook post, February 6, 2026; quoted in CNN, PBS NewsHour, and The Guardian articles on February 6-7, 2026.)

• Devout anti-white Racist and former MSNBC host Joy Reid stated: “Donald Trump... is racist?! Our hater in chief recently made a disturbing post depicting former President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama as apes. Classy.” (Sources: The Joy Reid Show LIVE! on Facebook and YouTube, February 6, 2026; also on her website joyannreid.com and X post by @June4th.)

• “Journalist” Don Lemon: “That is just plain old racism. Karoline Leavitt had the nerve to say this is just a joke. Are you out of your fucking mind Karoline Leavitt? No, no, no. There is nothing funny about depicting anybody as apes or monkeys. It is revolting. So Karoline Leavitt, fuck off.” (Sources: Don Lemon’s Facebook videos and reels, February 6-7, 2026; National Today article, February 7, 2026)

If such fake outrage remained in the margins, spoken by those hungry for likes and clicks to maintain their insatiable egos as their viewership and relevance fades, then the rest of us could easily go about our days and ignore the noise. The problem, however, is that these echo chambers have infected our friends, family, and co-workers and puts the rest of us who don’t hop on the outrage bandwagon in uncomfortable positions.

Among the many outrage posts I’ve tried to step around in the last 36 hours, here is one that stood out:

“If you stand by and still support Donald Trump after the racist garbage that he posted today, please delete me as a friend on FB and in real life. Please and thank you.”

This post comes from someone I have known since I was four, an old dear friend and distant cousin who I rarely see as an adult but who I have deep and abiding affection for. For years we sat on the same side of the political aisle and our interactions on social media were warm and affable. But I decided to change seats so now here we are.

Do I take my friend at their word? Should I unfriend them? Should I let this person that I have known since 1984, someone who stood up to the bullies for me on the playground when they harassed me, someone I genuinely care about, do I take them at their word and unfriend them because a junior staffer at the White House made a dumb mistake when posting a meme? No, I am not going to do that and hopefully my friend will simmer down and realize that they don’t want that either, but increasingly this unfollowing and unfriending is becoming the norm.

Our information silos online are reshaping our real communities in the material world, and for many tolerating even moderate differences of political opinions are now lines in the sand.

In my own life, I have talked too much about the dozens of people who have unfriended and blocked me over the past year for expressing my political beliefs that no longer align with theirs. What I have not been honest with you about is that those dozens of people include a few people I really loved—a college roommate who had been a good friend since 1996, and a member of my nuclear family who was, until the election in 2024, my closest family member.

The hurt and betrayal that I feel from these people is deep, and none of those who have walked away will even do me the decency of returning a text message to try to talk it out. I am now poisonous to them for simply expressing views that even a decade ago would have made me a centrist Democrat.

That is how deep and broken we’ve allowed our relationships to become over politics that we, ultimately, have virtually no control over.

I don’t know what the solution to any of this is, and I certainly don’t believe for a moment that I am immune to the faux outrage and constant amplification of slop that the internet has become.

For now, I am trying to turn down the noise, to commit to not argue with friends and loved ones online, and to turn to Substack and my own private writing to try to work out what I think and why. To ramble in long form rather than to flame out and burn bridges via social media seems like the best of limited options here. To be outrageous and inflammatory would probably get more eyes on my work, but I just have no interest in that. (For anyone who is reading with views different than mine, thank you. You are my ideal audience).

Without a solution, all I know how to do now is turn off the computer and go sit in the sun for a few hours to read a novel as my dogs frolic and play around me.

This era of online connection and the isolation that it breeds concerns and depresses me, but I’ve had my say for today, I don’t care about Donald Trump and his memes right now, I don’t care about outrage real and empty, and the best of all available options for the rest of the weekend seems to be to turn off the noise and go literally touch grass.

I hope you might do the same, but whatever you do stay safe out there—and thank you for being here.

3. Here Comes the Flood

Before we turn our attention to all the various groups harmed by illegal immigration, there is one more piece of context to establish: Just how large was the surge of illegal immigration during the ‘Joe Biden’ Administration? Surely in this age of mass surveillance our government must have an accurate estimate of how many people have entered, and are living in, our country illegally, right?

It turns out that not only is the number highly debated, but the estimates that you are led to believe vary wildly depending on your political leanings and where you get your news. Let’s dive in.

That the Biden Administration enabled mass immigration is incontrovertible, though both Biden and later Harris would try to run from the border during the campaign. The Administration claimed not only that the crossings at the border were not a crisis, but that they were powerless to stop them. Trump, through Executive Order, made closing the border a priority on his first day back in office. The results were immediate:

Anyone looking at the situation fairly must scratch their head and wonder, how did the US Southern Border become so chaotic during the Biden/Harris Administration? The answer to that lies in public policy, beginning with the Executive Orders Biden passed on his first day in office:

• January 20, 2021: Biden terminated the national emergency declaration at the southern border and halted construction of the border wall.

• January 20, 2021: Biden issues an executive order revising civil immigration enforcement policies and priorities, revoking Trump-era orders that prioritized removal of criminal aliens.

• January 20, 2021: Biden issued a memorandum pausing most deportations for 100 days, with exceptions for national security threats and recent arrivals.

• January 20, 2021: Biden issued a memorandum to preserve and fortify Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), directing actions to protect “Dreamers.”

• January 20, 2021: Biden suspended new enrollments in the policy known as Remain in Mexico, allowing migrants to pour into the United States as they awaited asylum hearings (more on that later).

All of these first day priorities made immigration enforcement more difficult, they also signaled to the world that America’s borders were open. But it didn’t stop there:

• February 2, 2021: Biden rescinded Trump-era memorandum aimed at ending “catch and release” policies. This meant that those caught entering the country could now legally claim “asylum” and be released into the United States awaiting their court dates–which due to the flood of migrants this policy created could take from several months up to six years. This policy was among many that created confusion around legal status and flooded the immigration courts.

• February 18, 2021: Biden narrowed deportation focus to national security threats, public safety risks, and recent border crossers. Once you were in, your illegally crossing was essentially forgiven.

• March 9, 2021: Biden announced the government would no longer defend the Trump-era public charge rule, which considered immigrants’ use of public benefits in admissibility decisions. Not only were illegals welcome in the country, they could now use the social safety net paid for by the tax dollars of US citizens without consequences.

• 2021-2023: Extended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to approximately 1.7 million potential new beneficiaries from various countries, providing work authorization and deportation protection.

• January 2023: Announced humanitarian parole programs for nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela which allowed up to 30,000 people per month to enter legally.

• January 2023: Launched the CBP One app to allow migrants to schedule asylum appointments at ports of entry. Illegal immigration was now as simple as completing some forms on an app, booking a ticket, and entering the country on an asylum claim—the vast majority of which were false.

That’s a lot of policy to digest, but I lay it out to make clear that what happened next is not just the way things are, it was a flood of illegal immigration that came from policy decisions—Democrat policy decisions. Not so long ago, the Democratic party vocally opposed all of these policies.

Still, we haven’t yet answered the question of just how many people took advantage of these policies and entered our country illegally.

Below is a range of estimates depending on who you choose to trust:

• The Department of Homeland Security puts the number prior to 2025 at 14 million, with numbers currently around 11 million after deportations and self-deportations since Trump’s second term began.

• The 11 million number is also reached by the Migration Policy Institute (a non partisan research organization) which estimates 11.3 million entered.

• The Center for Migration Students–a liberal think tank–puts the number at 11.7 million.

• In 2024, the Pew Research Center placed the number around 14 million (confirming DHS estimates).

• On the campaign trails, Trump put the number at 20 million which has been repeated by cabinet members. I cannot substantiate this claim with available data.

Such numbers are hard to visualize, so I took a look at US population by State to help make sense of them.

If we were to add together the total population of US states from least to most dense, we would need to add the populations of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, Montana, Maine, New Hampshire, and Hawaii to reach 11 million people.

To get to 20 million, we will need to take those 11 states and add the populations of five more states–West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, New Mexico, and Mississippi. When you consider that very few of these illegal aliens come from Europe, then suddenly a conspiracy like the “Great Replacement Theory” starts to have legs (more on this later when we discuss England).

In less than two years, the Biden administration let in illegal aliens totaling over three times the one-year US population growth of native-born citizens–and that’s just counting the ones that we’re aware of. Illegal aliens are no longer a small, hard working invisible class confined to cities and agriculture, they are now a sizable underclass with few legal rights and protections, that draw down public resources, that alter the cultural fabric of our nation when they resist assimilation, and who have the ability to swing elections permanently in the favor of the political party that buys their favor with free social services.

A Note about Asylum Seekers

Like the phrase “illegal alien,” the phrase “asylum seeker” has also been muddied in recent years by those who want to obscure language to push their political agenda. True asylum has always been reserved for those facing genuine persecution: the Afghan interpreter who aided American forces against the Taliban, the Cuban dissident defying a communist regime, or the individual targeted for political beliefs or protected characteristics. Political asylum was never meant to include economic refugees. According to the world banks as recently as Fall 2025, nearly a billion people in the world live on $3.00 a day or less. How many of those people are US tax payers responsible for, and why is admitting them into our nation as an invisible underclass the most responsible way to support them?

Under the Biden administration illegal migrants were able to cross the border, assert asylum claims, and then be released into the United States without further vetting pending a court date. By 2025, there were around 2.4 million formal asylum filings waiting to be heard. Many who claimed asylum never showed for the court dates they were given, and with interior enforcement effectively dismantled, some 4.8 million individuals with final deportation orders are now living in the country.

Another change that has occurred recently is in the demographics of those coming into the country. When most people think of illegals, they picture those from Mexico and neighboring Latin American countries (our “hemispheric neighbors” so to speak). But while traditional hemispheric migration continued under Biden, the country also saw a surge of non-hemispheric nationals surge to 10–15% of all encounters.

Human trafficking into the United States was now a thriving global industry for nefarious actors willing to take advantage of the situation. Panama reported a 450% overall increase in those crossing the Darién Gap during this period–the most inhospitable portion of Latin America to cross where untold numbers of migrants lost their lives or were brutalized by thugs looking to take advantage of their poverty and powerlessness.

Politically, the surge ignited widespread discontent domestically. Polls consistently ranked immigration among top voter concerns, with majorities (often 70%+) favoring reduce immigration both legally and illegally. What is a nation without sovereignty and security? If anyone can come here, and no normalization or enforcement of our language or culture occurs, then how can we still be country?

Collectively, all of these Biden era policies taken together represents a deliberate abandonment of border security, creating a humanitarian, fiscal, and security crisis. That crisis is what Trump inherited one year ago, a reality that few currently rioting in Minneapolis are willing to grapple with.

The impact of these failed policies on human suffering was brutal, the focus of the remainder of this essay.

This is a multipart essay. Previously: Part One.

2. Engineered Reality

We live in an age of information silos and psyops, a reality that grows clearer with each new crisis. Not long ago, I stood in front of students teaching media literacy, unaware that even though I was more media-savvy than most, I was still the victim of so many false narratives fed to me by dishonest sources. “All media has a bias; it’s a lie to say otherwise,” I told my students but it wasn’t until the Biden administration pushed its allies in corporate media so far as to become farcical that I truly began to grapple with just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

The fabled “red pill” (a reference to the choice Morpheus offers Neo in The Matrix to awaken from a false reality) that so many independents and right-wingers talk about today isn’t about adopting conservative views or opinions; rather, it’s about waking up to your own sovereignty. Once you do this, you’ll start to question every mainstream narrative. It’s a maddening enterprise and it spins many into chaos, but for those of us who survive, we develop a grounded distrust of nearly every institution that we once believed told us the truth.

These false narratives are psyops, engineered realities, that have been working on us since the day we were born.

Psyops work in many deep and complex ways, but one of the most common tactics they use is to create confusion around common language so that we lose the ability to speak clearly about a problem at hand.

Here is just one example: it’s now common for medical offices to use phrases like “birthing person,” which is meant to obscure the hard-wired biological fact that only humans of the female sex give birth. This is obvious to rational people but simple questions like “can men give birth” or “what is a woman” have recently stumped both doctors and supreme court justices alike before Congress.

Of course only females give birth, but if we assert this indisputable fact as truth then slogans like “trans women are women” fall apart. Radical ideology, like that of gender ideology, cannot withstand such scrutiny so immune responses like obscuring language are deployed—reinforced by media, colleges, HR departments, nonprofit foundations and think-tanks, and online mobs.

In such a world, any “cis gendered” individual who makes a common sense statement like “only women can give birth” becomes “transphobic” whether they are or not. Few want to be on the wrong side of the next great civil rights movement, and most of us can’t afford to jeopardize our jobs and reputations for issues that seem to not directly impact us, so we go along with the lies. We accept the “re-education” seminars from HR. We comply. Yes, Bob from accounting is now Belinda and she always has been.

This example is not meant to open the trans debate in this essay, but rather to provide a clear example of why language matters. The moment we cede ground to terms like “chest feeding,” we open the flood gates. If swimmer Lia Thomas is actually a woman, then any critique of her competing in women’s sports can be dismissed as transphobic. But if you speak honestly about Will Thomas, an unremarkable male swimmer who ‘transitioned’ and then dominated the female category the next year, then the conversation about Will Thomas and the unfairness of him competing in women’s sports becomes clear.

When you control language you not only control what people say, you control how they think. This is why Freedom of Speech is the first of the inalienable rights articulated in the US Constitution; it is also why I am (nearly) a free speech absolutist.

The same linguistic operation at play in the trans examples above is at play with illegal immigration. Perhaps you grew up hearing the 1984 single Illegal Alien by the band Genesis on the radio. It surely didn’t trigger you, did it? That’s because, until recently, the meaning of “illegal alien” was clear–something like: “a person residing in a country without legal authorization, such as through unauthorized entry or overstaying a visa.” The term “illegal alien” was easy to understand.

But today that phrase is considered outdated and offensive, and the words that have replaced it are unclear. Since “illegal alien” is now a ‘trigger word’, cut from the AP style guide in 2013, it has disappeared from corporate media and is now on the invisible list of words and phrases wielded by those who use censorship as a tool for power. Political correctness asserts that illegal aliens might be referred to as any of the following terms: undocumented immigrant, unauthorized immigrants, undocumented noncitizens, noncitizens, or migrants. These words are not intended to describe but rather to obfuscate meaning. If no human is illegal then the line that differentiates a “migrant” and an “immigrant” is confusing.

In fact, the distinctions between the two very different groups of people in our country disappears completely. “No human is illegal” and “we are a nation of immigrants” spoken in the same sentence erases legal immigrants completely. This combination of phrases, heard routinely in discourse around immigration, omits so much. We are a nation of immigrants, yes, but those immigrants came here through a legal vetting and naturalization process. “Migrants” did not. It’s not clear to that casual listener that a “migrant” is just an illegal alien with no legal right to be in our country, period.

For the first century of our nation’s history immigration was largely unrestricted because we needed bodies on the frontier, but by 1882 restrictions were put in place to discern who had the right to become a US citizen and who would be denied citizenship. The Immigration Act of 1882 excluded convicts, lunatics, and paupers; an 1891 expansion added polygamists and the diseased to this list. By the start of the 20th century a framework for deportation was in place. By 1917 illiteracy tests were imposed, and by 1921 immigration was capped at 3% of each nationality’s 1910 U.S. census count. This was also the decade where Immigration and Border Control was formalized as an office of the federal government.

So in broad strokes the first 100 years of our history allowed unrestricted migration, but for the last century and a half the United States has had a tightly controlled, if imperfect, legal immigration and naturalization process. Never in the lifetime of anyone currently living would rational US citizens advocate for unvetted immigration or open borders, but all of that changed this decade when the Democratic Party under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris turned this ludicrous idea into policy. The turmoil we see in the United States today, in 2026, is a direct consequence of these disastrous policies. The turmoil we have seen in the past year in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland, and other “sanctuary cities” is solely the fault of Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris.

In the 1960s, the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education created tension as some Southern states refused to integrate schools. In 1962 Alabama Governor George Wallace famously tried to block two black students from registering at the University of Alabama. As the situation intensified, President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and dispersed them to the University to enforce desegregation. This event showed that the Federal government could lawfully use military force to uphold federal law even when states refused to do so. Today, few would argue that Kennedy’s use of force to bring segregation to an end was wrong. The left celebrated this historic action as a grand victory in the Civil Rights Movement.

Yet today, the same Left, refuses to acknowledge that ICE officers enforcing federal law are simply doing what democracy demands as a result of the 2024 election. Of all the promises Trump made in that election cycle, mass deportations and closing the border were the issues that had the highest approval among both the Republicans and Independents who voted for him. As much as the left might hate, or believe they hate, these policies, that they are lawful is irrefutable. (Note: I say “believe they hate” because few of these same people protested President Obama’s mass deportation of 3 million people, 60% of whom had no criminal record other than entering the country illegally, over the eight years of his presidency). “Sanctuary cities” today are as unlawful as segregationist were in the 1960s, yet the left routinely calls the enforcement of these policies “fascist” and the enforcers of these laws “gestapo” and “Nazis.”

Down is up; up is down.

The left has every right to protest and to work through the political system to change federal law should they gain the political capital to do so, but to impede lawful, active law enforcement operations is illegal. If Kennedy was correct to force desegregation in the 1960s, then Trump is equally justified in enforcing federal immigration law in Minneapolis in 2026. That many don’t like it is beside the point.

Supplemental viewing:

The border has become a monument to our failures. A failure to secure our citizens’ safety. A failure to protect our great nation’s sovereignty…A failure to our assurance that our republic endures for future American generations.

—J.J. Carrell, retired Border Patrol Agent of 24 years

Note: This is a multipart series

1. Wrestling with Complexity

I am sitting at my desk during office hours at the community college where I teach, wondering if any of my students will come by when our administrative assistant pops around the corner to tell me that a student is here to see me. I am surprised to see behind her a former student whom we’ll call him Jose. I thank our admin and invite Jose to have a seat.

Jose had not been my student for a couple of semesters, and he is not the type of student to casually drop by for a social visit, so I assume he is here for a letter of recommendation—the most common reason for such unexpected visits. Jose is a veteran who served multiple tours in Afghanistan. He was the type of student that was deferential but skeptical of your authority until you earned his respect (a quality I recognize in myself). Having just one student like Jose in a classroom completely alters the nature of the class for the better. Jose had been shot at, seen kids blown up, had his brothers in arms killed in front of him, and yet he bore it all with a quiet gravitas that the entitled 18-year-olds in the classroom simply couldn’t compete with. When he spoke, which was not often, they listened. To say that I admired him is an understatement. He was an excellent student who wrote complex, if imperfect, responses to our readings. That he thought deeply about my curriculum was evident, and that he respected me and the discussions I tried to have was the type of affirmation that made the job worth doing.

After some brief catching up, Jose got to the point of his visit. He stated explicitly, “I need help and I didn’t know who else to come to.” Then he told me his story. Jose is an American citizen through birthright citizenship; his parents, however, are not citizens. They came to this country illegally from Mexico before he was born. His father eventually found work as a landscaper and over the years earned enough money to raise his family in the comfortable middle-class suburbs east of Portland. Eventually Jose’s father would start his own landscaping business that employed a handful of people, including Jose.

A few months prior, Jose’s father had been returning from a job in Beaverton in his work truck when he failed to signal a turn and was pulled over by a cop driving behind him. This simple traffic error led to a cascade of events that would alter the life of Jose’s father, and his family, forever.

During the stop the cop discovered that Jose’s father did not have a license, nor any of the legal paperwork required to be in the country. He was arrested and eventually turned over to federal agents. Deported to Mexico, his father appealed and had a court date set but a family emergency led him to make a dumb mistake. Jose’s father paid a mule to smuggle him back over the border in Texas, but he was apprehended by federal agents and was now being held in federal custody. He was also permanently barred from re-entering the United States.

Jose had dropped out of college to take over the family business and try to keep it, and his family, afloat. He came to see me because I was the person in his life who might know how to help.

One of the things that happens as a community college instructor is that when your students come to trust you they can also believe that you have more power and authority than you do. I was heartbroken by Jose’s story but didn’t know what I could do to help. We talked over some possible options, I took down some notes along with his email address, spent the next several days gathering the resources that I could find, and sent him an email by the week’s end. I had hoped that the VA office could help since Jose was a veteran who had honorably served his country during wartime, but they, like all of the other resources I found, offered little in the way of support. Jose and I had a few email exchanges over the next few months and then the line went quiet. I never heard from Jose again and do not know what became of him and his father. I remember him sometimes and am still haunted by it.

Several years later I had left Portland and was living in Central Oregon. During my time there I befriended a man who was my opposite in many ways–he was a father, had a manual labor job, drove a giant truck, loved guns, and was a proud Trump-supporting Republican. The friendship was unlikely but in my time in Bend it was one of the most meaningful connections I made. When Dave (not his real name) would come to visit, politics always came up. What I valued about him was that he was an Oregon conservative, which broadly means that he was socially liberal but conservative on matters of fiscal policies, defense, and law enforcement. He, mostly, just wanted to live in a safe country and to be left the fuck alone, which I respected. We would debate vociferously about politics without ever reaching consensus but it didn’t matter. Dave and I had the type of friendship where each of us would say our piece, allow the other to say his piece, and then move on–as it should be. Because of this, I learned more from him than from any of the debates I’ve ever had online.

One day the issue of illegal immigration came up and I told Dave the story of Jose and his father thinking that the details of the story might soften Dave’s position. Jose was a veteran, deeply patriotic, his father was hard working and blue collar, a business owner who started with nothing but managed to start a business and raise a family all while skirting the law. Surely a random and inconsequential traffic violation shouldn’t ruin his life and the lives of his children?

But Dave was not moved. “It’s a sad story, but he shouldn’t have been here in the first place.” It was the one time that Dave and I nearly got into a real argument before I let it go and changed the subject.

I thought about that interaction a lot afterwards. How could Dave, a patriotic blue-blooded American, not see the similarities between himself and Jose? Jose and his family had done everything we ask immigrants to this country to do–they learned the language, they worked hard, they built a business, they raised a family, and the son even went on to serve multiple tours of duty during wartime. While I do believe in law and borders, surely Jose’s story proves that there is a human element here, an ambiguity, an injustice that only wisdom and compromise could set right. Surely Jose and his father were exceptions. But Dave was not moved, and I struggled to make peace with that.

Now, many years later, I wake up to the news that there has been a second shooting in Minnesota by ICE agents in 2026. My social media feed is flooded with messages calling federal officials Nazis and criminals, calling for the abolishment of ICE, saying that anyone who supports the efforts of law enforcement to deport violent criminals from the country is on the wrong side of history. My head swims as I sip my coffee and log on YouTube to try to make sense of what has happened.

I feel nauseous and uneasy. At this early hour it isn’t clear what happened with Alex Pretti and the facts of the case, as we understand them at this moment, are difficult. Pretti had a weapon with two fully loaded magazines and he was interfering in an active law enforcement operation, but he also, it seems, was not threatening officers when he was shot.

To make matters worse, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi ‘Where’s My Camera’ Noem, has chosen to play fast and loose with facts in a tone that is adding fuel to the fire. (For the record, Noem is the member of Trump’s cabinet I most disapprove of. Her dubious relationship with the truth and the story of her poor puppy Checkers alone are enough to disqualify her from public life in my view. )

But my intention here is not to get in the weeds about Pretti or Renee Good (whose case seems far less ambiguous to me), but rather to aim at something more challenging: what is the morally right and compassionate position? What do you do when any position you take will lead to human suffering?

In 2014 when Jose came to my office to ask for help and in 2022 when Dave and I were having a heated debate about illegal immigration and amnesty, I would have been certain that I knew what was right. I would have been on the side of the protestors in Minneapolis, I would have joined in with the chorus of leftist online calling Trump and his officers fascists, I would have been repeating empty slogans like “No Human is Illegal” without ever really thinking through all the implications of what that means. But this is not where I am today.

Over the last few years many of my political positions and affiliations have changed, which I have documented here on Substack, and the issue of illegal immigration and what to do about it has been one of the issues that brought about this change.

It’s not that I don’t have compassion for the world’s poor or for those who came to this country illegally in search of a better life, I most certainly do. I think about Jose and his father, along with all of the other people I have known well as students, coworkers, friends, and lovers when I contemplate this question. Yet, I hold to the belief that the most compassionate response to the question of illegal immigration in the United States today is to enforce the laws of our nation, to deport nearly all of the illegal migrants who are currently here, and only once this is done to begin a conversation about centrist compromises.

In the parts of this essay, I will look at all of the groups harmed by illegal immigration. I will use my research into the matter to buttress my opinions as best I can, and I will attempt to do so in a way that is informed by both the liberal and conservative parts of myself. I will discuss parts of the debate that my liberal friends never discuss on social media, and my hope is that by doing this compassionately I can attempt to clarify how a conservative can embody compassion while also asserting that the illegal immigrants to this country need to go. While it is generally unwise for a writer to state their intentions so bluntly, in this case it feels appropriate.

I know that I will inevitably lose more people I believed to be friends for posting this but so be it. The moment we stop staying what we believe to be true for fear of the reaction of the mob is the moment we lose our democracy collectively, and our souls individually.

I am not a white nationalist nor do I hate illegal aliens. I have great compassion for those who came to the United States in search of a better life, as my ancestors once did, but these are not the 1700s, America is not an unsettled frontier, and the issue of migration is vastly more complex today than it was then.

Age and wisdom have also taught me that sometimes doing the right thing means doing what is difficult, unpopular, and unlikely to be understood by others at the time.

History still knows of Montaigne’s self-seclusion because the book he birthed during his decade in the tower merged autobiography, research, literary and spiritual reflection, and the mundane activities of domestic life into a new hybrid form that today we call “the essay.” It will be my contention in this post that the essay is among our most noble literary forms, but that much of what are called “essays” today degrade the form.

The essay genre in its highest form will show you its structure as you create it. It will move like a symphony, or maybe a Jackson Pollock painting. You will not know until far along the composition process what you are even writing about. At some point in revision, disparate parts may find harmony, adjacent sections may move together, the need for connecting tissue may be revealed, and most often that original idea you sat down to capture will fade entirely. At the end of writing an essay, the writer will step back and realize that what they’ve written could not have been planned ahead of time, that essay writing allows the author to find a form born from circling a subject, exploring the tangents, and allowing an organic vision to be born. You will attempt to say one thing but say another entirely and this is the beauty of the form. It’s something that LLMs cannot, yet, do.

I started writing this Substack one year ago this month because I had a couple of motivations at the time. The first motivation was that in the run-up to the 2024 Presidential election I was shockingly inspired and without knowing what it was I wanted to say I gave myself the assignment to write an entry a week about the election. I found myself, for the first time in my life, siding with the right wing party in the United States–a position that, as someone who championed Bernie Sanders in the classroom and even gave my students bonus points if they attended an Occupy Wall Street gathering in 2011, was as surprising to me as it would turn out to be to those who knew me. I never expected to lose so many friends for following my curiosity and exploring my shifting opinions and beliefs, but as Vonnegut said “and so it goes.” By asking myself the “how did I get here” question, my thinking broadened in multiple ways, I began to piece together a more formal worldview, and the essay form came back to me.

My second motivation for starting down the Endless American Road without a clear destination in mind, was that I had spent years stymied as a writer. In life, I find that whenever the feeling that others call depression comes creeping up the answer for me is always to plan some time in nature with my dogs far from the bustling city lights as quickly as possible. Similarly, I figure that by getting moving here I might free myself of what some call “Writer’s Block,” but is not. There is only the attempt, ever, and you either do it or you don’t.

I am proud of the work I’ve done here over the past year if for no reason other than that I have done it. After so many years of being frozen in place, I have written and self-published 16 pieces over the last year and that feels boast-worthy. The length and quality of this work varies, but that it is mine, in my voice, circling my reflections and obsessions is true.

Despite many years of being an early tech adopter, I am now finding that the pace of innovation online is outpacing me and it’s not because I can’t see or understand the evolution, it’s simply that I do not care. I am tired of X posts, TikToks, and irrational clickbait Facebook posts. I am tired of trying to fit into the Feed–a place where opinions must be biting, sardonic, and rage or fear inducing, where all information is meant to be consumed quickly and forgotten—a place where scenes of war and videos of dogs doing silly things sit side-by-side. The Essay has a hard time competing for attention in such a world, but nothing on social media has ever moved me as much as Annie Dillard’s “Total Eclipse”.

Yet, all I want to do is to write essays and novels, to navigate the vast complexity of what it means to be human in a world that is moving so quickly, and I’ve wasted too much time already. Maybe, as so many messages tell me, there is no place for independent-minded white men in the literary landscape today. With reading among all age groups falling off a cliff and the elites asserting monolithic ideological control over what is published, what is prized, and what is promoted, I would feel truly futile if I didn’t love the process of writing itself.

Yet, as I was reviewing the 16 pieces I have written this year and began to reflect on the year behind me and envision what I can see for the year ahead, something emerged that I wasn’t expecting.

The second piece of writing I published here was a reflection on the loss of my dog Maxwell. I didn’t know when I published it that a few months later I would lose my first dog, Daphne, as well. Of those 16 pieces published here four of them were written about these two dogs. I began to realize that in writing about the loss of my dogs, so much more was coming up–the changes in myself, the magic that holds my world together, the sense of adventure that gives my life color. In my dogs, I found the world again, and in writing about losing them I found my way, slowly, over the course of a year, back to the essay form.

Looking at the four pieces about my dogs I had the sense that something larger was emerging from them, but how they fit together was not clear. So, I did what every college student today would do; I fed it all into Grok with very specific instructions to re-arrange the form without altering the writing. The LLM version allowed me to see a blueprint for how to move ahead. I printed that version along with the original version and with scissors and tape put together an essay. Many drafts later, I am sitting on a finished, polished essay that needs one more revision before I send it out for publication. What strikes me about this experiment is that I realize that the key to writing an essay, for me, is just to write–a lot. To write as well as I can, to keep turning a stone over until I have said all that I have to say, then to put all the pieces together, ruthlessly cut and paste, and turn and turn until something original emerges. This is the essence of an essay.

The final product, “One of the Pack”, is the first complete piece of long form writing that I have finished in years and it feels really, really good to have finished it.

So, in the year ahead, I will keep writing here in short form. I will follow the muse wherever it takes me, and offline I will work to see how all of this fits together. My goal is to write in longer forms, with discipline, curiosity, and purpose. I will try to send things out for publication because I need this audience to grow, and I will see if there is any hunger in the market for the musings of a middle aged white guy, but regardless of whether or not the market accepts me, I will write.

I will write because my dogs inspired me to, because it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, because I have to believe that in this era of disposable information and short attention spans there will one day come a return to meaning, to longer forms. I envision a generation so turned off and bored by AI and social media that they pick up books again and start reading (the raw dogging plane trend gives me hope, though what a waste of time when one could be reading!). When that generation emerges, I hope to have plenty to offer them as an elder of the pre-internet world.

And if this doesn’t happen, I’ll be happier knowing that I cancelled Netflix and turned off Youtube. That I sat down with my second generation of dogs napping at my feet, and tried to make sense of the world as I see it.

I don’t have a castle and can’t afford to withdraw from the world, but in the time that I have I will create. That, anyway, will be my attempt.

Thank you for coming down the road with me. There’s a lot to see out here!

🐾🇺🇸 🐾

Buy me a coffee

Somewhere around 5 am the husky rises from the bathroom floor where he sleeps in with his head wrapped around the cool porcelain toilet, shakes off slumber, walks into my bedroom, collapses onto the floor, and sighs. This is his sometimes subtle/sometimes not so subtle signal that he is ready to get up.

I, his “master”, still don’t enjoy getting up before the sun, but here in Arizona one does so out of necessity. When the days stretch into the 100’s for months on end and it’s often above 90 well before 8 am, beating the sun becomes a way of life.

But it is not summer, and we are in the long fall leading to a very short, intense winter before the heat cycle begins again.

I snooze for another 30 minutes phasing in and out of intense dreams, then roll over, say a prayer for the day ahead, and plant my feet on the floor.

The husky is already at the back door.

To have the morning I want, the barrier to entry must be low. The coffee should be ready to brew, the toiletries need to stand in attention on the shelf in the order I need them, the kindle should be on its charger or my book on the counter by the back door with my reading glasses neatly folded on top.

If I have navigated these treacherous and vital first minutes successfully, by the time the coffee is made the husky is napping outside and I sit the french press on the table, walk over to give the husky a belly rub, stretch and check the status of the sun, then walk back to my patio table, put on my glasses, and sit down to read. If I am lucky, I have exactly 55 minutes of uninterrupted time to do dedicate to this most sacred of tasks. I must be vigilant if I am to preserve the engagement with that I hold most dear.

There are some who wake from sleep heavily medicated, in rooms with blackout curtains, to the metallic alarm screeching out the start of the day like a sadistic foreman on a production line. They hit snooze several times before eventually waking up enough to reach for their phones and begin the endless death scroll of narcissism, simulacra, and despair that will consume much of their day. There’s no need for judgement day when these folks die. They’re not bound for hell; they are already living it.

Morning is a sacred time, a time between the realm of dreams and the obligations of our hectic, capitalist lives. We do not milk the cows, we do not listen to the call of the rooster, we do not watch deer graze in the field. We do not sip coffee in a rocking chair on the front porch and welcome the sun to its daily chores.

None of the farmers I have known wake up to an alarm clock, and if I am living correctly neither will I.

By 6:10 I am deep into the world of the book I am reading. Today it happens to be the autobiography of poet and fiction writer Jim Harrison, most famously known for his novella Legends of the Fall because it was the best movie adapted from his work. But Jim wrote many great works, and working through them is my current literary project. In this early hours, his phrases zing with life:

“The natural world would always be there to save me from suffocating in my human problems.”

“Educated circles are shot through with a fungoid self-righteousness about matters with which they haven’t had a filament of experience.”

These are not particularly his best quotes, just a random sampling I encounter this morning.

I am in the flow and the ebb of words, someone else’s understanding of life, someone else’s inner monologue. On a good morning, I might even be inspired to grab my pen and notebook and sacrifice some minutes of reading to get my own thoughts down on the page, but I have to weigh whether the thoughts in my head are worth sacrificing my sacred reading time for. A writer knows there is never a guarantee that a line will go anywhere.

No essay will express the brilliant ideas in your head that you sat down to capture. You will have to wait for another time to lament the decline of reading in America—tying it to all sorts of other social ills. You wait for another time to try to respond artfully to the inspiration you take from the autobiography you’re reading. You’ll even fail to capture the thrill of the Phoenix sun rising through a prism of cloud layer. You will find, after some many minutes of writing, that all you’ve managed to do is capture this little slice of your morning routine and hope that you’ve conveyed how important it is to a sense of living to find a love of literature within yourself and to set about the arduous work of securing the time to read and understand it.

Whatever your writing might or might not convey doesn’t matter now. It is 6:55 am and time to leave the work that sustains you to do the work society mandates you do to make a living.

It would be intolerable without the sanctuary you have made of your morning.

It’s an overcast weekday on the Oregon Coast in September and it’s after Labor Day, so the few summer crowds that come here have already dispersed. I’ve been camping for seven days, and in the morning I will have to begin the long, arduous drive back to Phoenix. I don’t want to go, not yet, maybe not ever, but I try to put all of that out of my mind because today is my last day on the Oregon Coast for at least a year and my mission is to make the most of it: to relish every sensation, to dive into the freezing water, to lick the salt from my lips, and to perform a ritual I have driven 1,500 miles to perform.

I know where the ritual will take place, I know my intentions, I know some of the materials that will be involved, but the rest I will discover when I am there.

Lately I’ve been stripping back the layers of my spiritual life, letting go of practices and west coast new ago mumbo jumbo I’ve picked up along the way. My distant Celtic ancestors practiced with little more than poems, songs, some folktales, and nature. By choosing to find the tools I need in the environment itself, I am becoming closer to them.

I park along the tree-lined cliff overlooking the Pacific, just as I have many times over the last fifteen years I’ve been coming to this part of the southern Oregon coast. All of Oregon’s coastline was designated state parks at the turn of the 20th century, offering 363 miles of publicly accessible beach to explore, but of all that coastline, this particular Cape is my favorite.

Sure, there are more dramatic vistas along that coastline, but what draws me here is the isolation—it’s rare that I ever encounter more than a handful of people on my hike down to the beach. Most often, I have both the trail and the beach below to myself. The descent down to the beach winds through dense Sitka spruce forest, and at the end a dangling rope which you must use to scale down the last fifty feet to the sand. I come here for the beauty and solitude, but also because it was the favorite beach of my dogs Maxwell and Daphne who have both passed.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Daphne today, as this is my first time back here without her. She was a puppy when I first came to this area in 2011, and she was an old lady on the cusp of 14 when we visited for the last time a year ago this week. She was an adult when we came here with Maxwell as a puppy, an older dog when we came here the first time after Maxwell had passed, and a senior when we came here with my third dog, Jones, for the first time. Today, I have carried a small vile of ashes—hers and Maxwell’s together—all the way from Phoenix. On my last day in Oregon, leaving their ashes on this beach is the ritual I have come to perform.

Jones and I set out on the trail. He runs ahead, nosing through the hedges and catching the scent of the ocean. We pass only one couple before reaching the rope, where the Pacific crashes against the shore and the brine fills the air.

Jones scrambles down first and I clumsily follow behind him. Intermittent flashes of sun make it warm enough to take off my sweatshirt. We walk the beach for a while and I try to get into the headspace to perform the ritual, but first, I need to just to be here now.

I see Daphne follow me into the tide and bark when I dive beneath an incoming wave. I am grateful for the memory. I strip down to my swim trunks and wade in, not looking forward to what I know I must do next. The Pacific is cold but I make my way out, far enough to watch the tide come in. I spot my wave in the distance and when it approaches, I dive under.

The cold is easier once you surrender. There is no place in the world I am happier than beneath a breaking wave. I dive several more times before returning to shore.

On the beach now, I walk the shore and gather items that catch my attention—smooth polished stones, bits of driftwood, crab shells, sand dollars, kelp. The ocean is a bounty. I make a pile and keep gathering. When I have enough, I begin the work.

I bathe myself in Abre Camino and Agua de Florida, ingesting the latter and spitting it over the space where I am going to work as I learned from the shaman in Peru.

I take out my staff, found not far from here at the start of my practice many years ago, and draw a circle in the sand. I use driftwood to define its edges, then arrange the sea’s treasures inside in an artful way. I try to spell out “Daphne” and “Maxwell” with stones, but it proves to be too difficult so I settle for “M” and “D”. I form a small mound of stones and hollow its center. From my bag, I pull the vial of ashes. I hold the ashes in one hand and my staff in the other, I douse myself with the flower waters, say a prayer, then an evocation, turning to the four directions and asking the ocean to accept the remains of my dogs to its care.

The full sun breaks free of the clouds as I do this, which I take as a sign. I pour the ashes into the center of the stones and place an orange candle for remembrance. It’s then that I realize I’ve forgotten a lighter, but it doesn’t matter for the sun will melt the wax and wash it out to sea. A stone bracelet I’ve worn during ceremonial work for several years snaps in the course of my preparation, spilling beads onto the sand. This is the offering I will leave here along with their ashes.

As I say incantations and walk the circle, I am flooded with memories of both dogs, running free on this very beach. For a moment, I am overcome with grief. I feel Daphne’s head, the height it always was when she sought my hand, and I rub the air as if she were there. Maybe she is.

The spell is ending. I close the circle and say, “Amen” and “So Mote it Be.” I step out of the circle, leaving the ashes to bask in the sun and the tide, soon to be carried out into the mighty Pacific. These beautiful creatures are no longer in my care.

Coming fully back into the material present, I realize Jones is gone. I call, but he doesn’t answer. I finally spot him napping under a log far down the beach, his black-and-white coat blending perfectly into the scenery.

I am done feeling sad about my dogs who are no longer here. Today was not meant to be mournful, but rather a celebration. I remember this and shake off the sadness as I see both dogs, now just memories, chasing one another in the waves.

I smile then laugh then run to play with Jones. He is the dog who is here now, and he deserves all of me. The dead have had their time; we must live for the living.

As I walk the shore, I face some hard truths. I see the ways I’ve allowed my external world to become small when my inner life is enormous. I see all of the times I stay silent to keep the peace. I remember how I was when I first got Daphne—when I had the confidence and charisma to light up a room. I see that light and I call it back, promising to make some necessary changes when I get home. This is what I will take away from this ritual.

Jones and I spend a few more hours on the ocean before heading back. This will be our last walk on the beach for at least a year, and I don’t want to leave but we must.

I take one last look at the organic alter and I thank Daphne and Maxwell again for all that they gave me. I nuzzle Jones’ head and take a single photograph; it will be the only record of today.

I am more alive, more open, more aware that if I simply pass time forever, eventually time will pass me by. Mourning takes as long as it needs to, but eventually the rest of life needs you and you must come back.

As I drive back to the desert, I wonder about my dogs’ ashes. Will they be scattered by a bird? Will they sink into the beach? Will they blow away with the wind and become part of the forest? Will they be carried all the way to Japan or Russia? Will they sink to the bottom of the Pacific? I will never know, but whatever happens they will not sit in a urn on my shelf collecting dust—they will be out in the grand swell of the world, churning and turning in the great belly of the ocean along with all the elements of creation.

This summer David Lynch’s Twin Peaks has been on my mind. After Lynch died in January, I revisited much of his work but it’s the final hour of Twin Peaks: The Return—released eight years ago this month—that haunts me now.

For the uninitiated, Twin Peaks is ostensibly the story of FBI agent Dale Cooper, sent to the small town of Twin Peaks, Washington to investigate the murder of a high school sweetheart, Laura Palmer. Right away, we learn that Laura Palmer is more than just a girl; she is a character who seems to be everything to everyone—a loyal friend, a devoted girlfriend, a dutiful daughter, a beauty queen, a Meals on Wheels volunteer, a caretaker to her disabled brother, the fantasy of her therapist, solace for a reclusive shut-in. Laura is pure Americana—as symbolic as damn fine coffee and cherry pie.

But as the series unfolds, we also see how she leads a double life of prostitution, drugs, cheating, and that an otherworldly darkness follows her. This duality echoes throughout the series, as most of the characters in this quirky Pacific Northwest town are revealed to live double lives.

The town itself is an axis mundi, a center in which two masonic lodges—the Black Lodge and the White Lodge and the intra-dimensional characters who inhabit both—are locked in an eternal war. At a time when most tv shows were episodic and veered away from the philosophical and numinous, Twin Peaks was a revelation. I have explored the series for nearly 40 years, and I am still nowhere near mapping all of its mysteries.

For this essay, I’ll assume you’re familiar with Twin Peaks; I won’t try to sum up all 47+ hours of the mythology here. If you have not seen it and your tastes veer to the unusual or esoteric, stop reading now and report back after you’re taken the dive.

The release of Twin Peaks: The Return, 25 years after the end of the original series, coincided with a pivotal period in my own life, creating a synchronistic relationship to The Return on a deeply felt personal level. For the last decade of my life, I have wrestled with being existentially untethered. In 2016. I went through a brutal divorce from a man in the throes of a severe psychotic break. After the divorce, I embarked on a year-long road trip with him, a desperate and ill-fated attempt to save our relationship. Twin Peaks: The Return debuted at the trip’s disastrous end, as I settled in Bend, Oregon to rebuild my life. I watched the first episodes during the last week I ever saw him, and my own trauma fused with the show in ways I am still unpacking.

The past decade has been one of starting over: building new relationships, forging new friendships, shifting careers, moving, and trying to regain the stability of the home I once had but lost. There have been many adventures and much good work, but elements remain missing—like having a family, a deeper sense of purpose, and most of all, knowing a place that feels like home in every fiber of my being. To quote Edgar Alan Poe, there has been “a demon in my view.”

Any attempt to discuss the “meaning” of the final episode of Twin Peak: The Return becomes too cerebral and misses the mark entirely. Throughout his career, Lynch refused any discussion of what his art “means.” Ever the artist, he understood that a work’s meaning lives in the unique relationship forged between creator and viewer.

In that final episode, Agent Dale Cooper returns to the White Lodge and travels back to the night of Laura Palmer’s murder. He meets Laura in the woods and she recalls seeing him in her dreams. He leads her by the hand through the dark forest, and for a moment, it seems that Laura might be saved. Then a a blood-curdling scream erupts from her, and she vanishes, undoing the original narrative arc of the series.

Passing through a portal into an alternative timeline (skipping a lot of detail here), Cooper makes his way to Odessa, Texas and knocks on a door. A middle-aged Laura Palmer answers—except she isn’t Laura. She introduces herself as Carrie Page, but Cooper, undeterred, asks her to come with him to Twin Peaks, Washington—the scene of Laura Palmer’s murder 25 years earlier, a place Carrie has never been. She agrees and slips back into the house to gather her things. There, a man slumps dead on the couch from a self-inflicted gunshot, a porcelain white horse figurine perches on the mantle (a symbol of the black lodge), an assault rifle is discarded on the floor. Neither mentions the horrific scene, and the series never returns to it—save for an offhand remark in the car from Carrie: “In Odessa, I tried to keep a clean house.”

Obviously she failed, and the darkness that plagued Laura Palmer seems to have found Carrie in this timeline as well.

Cooper and Carrie drive all night, arriving in Twin Peaks before dawn. Carrie registers nothing; the place is alien to her. Cooper drives to the Palmer house where he and Carrie knock on the door, and a stranger answers. She knows nothing of Sarah Palmer (Laura’s mother) or Laura. The entire ethos of the series, the cosmic battle between light and dark, played out in the provincial murder of a beloved but troubled high school girl, has been erased.

In the final scene, Cooper and Carrie/Laura stand in the driveway and a bewildered Cooper murmurs despondent, “What year is this?”

Carrie turns toward the house, and from within Sarah Palmer’s agonized wail echoes: “Laura!”, a flashback to the first episode in 1990 when Sarah realizes that Laura has not come home that night. Starring up at the dark house, Carrie begins to shake with an existential terror and seemingly from nowhere unleashes a guttural scream—long, visceral, terrified. Electricity flickers and the house fades to black. It is one of the most disturbing endings ever committed to film.

II. The Past Dictates the Future

I moved to Phoenix, Arizona at the start of 2023, optimistic for a fresh start but starting over in my 40s has proven to be much harder than it was in my 30s or 20s. Suddenly, I’m the oldest one at the bar, the dating pool is shallow and polluted, and I am out of sync and out of time with the surrounding culture. If not for my road trips, my dogs, and a good book always close by, I don’t know how I’d endure with my family three time zones away and my friendships scattered to the wind after too many moves over too many years.

When I moved to Arizona, I was fortunate to be able to keep my Oregon house as a rental, so every summer I drive back to Central Oregon to check in on it. The trip is a personal pilgrimage, reconnecting me to a life I left behind—one I built on my own, far from the chaos of my ex-husband.

In the summer of 2024, I had one of my best trips back to Oregon. I was between jobs, so I had 14 days to make the trip. This allowed me to see old friends, to leisurely camp by the Deschutes River, to spend a full day reading a novel, drinking beer, and jumping in the river as my old and new dogs frolicked and played.

For the end of the trip, I drove to my favorite spot on the Southern Oregon coast and the two dogs and I had the best adventure. The weather was perfect, I found a remote camping spot that was too good to tell anyone about, and at night I ate at a friendly local bar with sassy bartenders where the locals gather to watch sports and catch up. For my old dog, Daphne, it was the last time I saw her genuinely youthful. As she chased waves, sea birds, and swam in the ocean with me, she seemed as vibrant as she had when I first brought her to this area 14 years before. On the long drive home, I crossed into three national parks and slept the last night under a huge Nevada sky near Area 51 where I scanned the sky all night for aliens (they didn’t show up).

The trip was so good that when it came time to make the journey up again this year, I decided that I would do what I rarely do—I would try to make the exact same trip but this time in 10 days.

The first afternoon, we stopped between Tonopah and Austin, Nevada, at what I thought was the same site from the year before. I pulled off the highway onto the gravel road after a long day’s drive, just as I had then. I passed some houses I vaguely remembered, but something felt off, different. At the campsite, I realized this was a proper campground with about 14 dispersed sites in a loop. The spot I’d stayed at previously was three isolated pitches, none visible to the others. It was late, so I had to stay, but this was an entirely different place from the year before and I rarely like staying in campgrounds as busy as this one. Already, the reality that the past cannot be recreated so easily was settling in.

Undeterred, Jones and I turned in early and slept soundly in the brisk mountain air. We rose at sunrise for a walk before breaking camp and the walk was gorgeous. Nevada mountains in the early morning possess a uniquely warm and lonesome character. Back on the highway, I check my map and realize I’d driven farther on day one than anticipated—likely passing last year’s site—and could easily reach Central Oregon in a day. I texted my friend Nancy who lives in the desert on the Nevada/Oregon border, whom I’d planned to stay with that night, to say I’d visit at trip’s end instead, that I was pressing on to Central Oregon.

From the Nevada state line to my final destination outside La Pine, Oregon, is a long, wide-open, and very lonely drive. I’ve driven this highway dozens of times, but each time feels like the first. The landscape just doesn’t make sense: the lonely trek east along Hwy 140 to Lakeview is nearly void of people and climbs several steep peaks via switch backs before descending into vast deserts. Then, the long haul up Highway 395 outside of Lakeview winds through open high desert, desert lakes, vast ranches, and towns frozen in time. It doesn’t seem right that there could be this much desert in this part of Oregon, but there is, and the four-hour drive from the state line to Central Oregon tests even the seasoned traveler.

Once in La Pine, I head to the Deschutes River camp spot from the year before, but I can’t find it. One forest road is closed; another leads down a narrow forest path I know is wrong, so a mile in I make a tight U-turn and head back to the highway. I’ve driven all day and daylight is fading. Just as I’m about to give up, I spot a dirt forest road on my right that I’d initially missed—and as soon as I turn onto it, I know I’m where I’m supposed to be. It’s Labor Day weekend, and as I make my way down the road, I see that all the first sites are taken. It’s not a good sign. Then I see the last one, with its carefully concealed turnoff, and it is empty. Miraculously, I secure the same spot from the year before and make camp by moonlight as the day fades.

The next morning, I drive out to the main road for cell reception and start messaging friends. Most are busy or scattered elsewhere, and with little notice of my arrival, my hopes of connecting today begins to fade. I decide to head to Bend and my favorite dog park, where you can hike for miles and let your dog swim in the river. But when we arrive, access to the river is severely restricted; the park district has closed most of the river entry for “restoration,” changing the whole feel of the place. It’s my birthday, and I try not to feel sad about the possibility that I will spend it alone.

I do eventually connect with friends and share good times with them, though we are all changing. My rental property is deteriorating, and the tenants just don’t care for it the way I did. Pulling up, I’m struck by how worn it looks after just three years away. I meet with a contractor to discuss projects large and small. The house needs a lot of work, and I have to decide if it’s work I’m willing to pour into a home in a town I’ll probably never live in again.

My mood lightens as I drive to the coast on Tuesday, escaping the smoke I’ve camped in for two days and the responsibilities of being a landlord. We arrive in the late afternoon, but the coast is socked in with fog. We try for a sunset, but clouds obscure the sun aside from few stray orange rays. Last year’s golden hours evade Jones and I, Daphne having departed across the rainbow bridge earlier in the year.

I head to my secret campsite, but as we pull into the site I notice red signs posted all round stating not to go through gates, that this land belongs to a local timber mill, and that permission to enter must be obtained from the land owner in writing. The site I had planned to camp at is not behind a gate and I still believe is technically on national forest land, or so the maps says, and since it’s late I take my chances and set up my tent for the night.

Well before dawn, I hear large trucks rumbling nearby. My pickup is a bit hidden, so they pass without noticing me, but then comes the distant roar of big machinery and chainsaws. My beautiful camp spot, it seems, has become the victim of another round of Oregon clear-cutting. I know I am not welcome here, so before trouble finds me, I break camp and set out to find another spot.

For the remainder of my time on the coast, the cloud layer never lifts. Jones and I hike many miles on the beaches and the friendly local bar is still friendly and local. But there is a different crowd in town this year, a crowd of “campers” who are not camping but rather living in broken down trucks and RVs.

After six days of actual camping, I know I must look and smell suspicious to the locals. I feel the need to spend money to show that I’m a customer and to wash off in the ocean and make myself as presentable as I can. Still, the nature of the town is changing, there’s a distrust in the air, and a worrisome element that has always been there is multiplying. Camping, for the first time, feels not so distant from homelessness.

On Friday, Jones and I drive all day and get to Nancy’s late in the evening. A thunderstorm moves across the Nevada desert but we find comfort in food, coffee, cigarettes, and conversation that runs late into the night. Of all the parts of my journey, this is the place that feels most familiar and I’m glad that I saved it for the end. Nancy’s kitchen table feels a lot like the counter at the R&R in Twin Peaks.

I wake up on the last morning still a full day’s drive from Phoenix. I watch the sun rise from a natural hot spring where we have camped on our eighth night and wild burros come to the tank to drink which torments Jones. This morning is entirely unfamiliar, and for an hour I’m relieved of the burden of carrying the past.

III. There’s Fire Where You Are Going

I drive back through Nevada, past the small tourist towns outside of Death Valley, through the hustle and bustle of Las Vegas, I cross the Hoover Dam, then descend into the deep canyons of northern Arizona. Phoenix is still several hours ahead, and I’m nearing the end of my 1200-song playlist.

It doesn’t feel like I’m coming home. The thought of going to work in my cube the next day on the 14th floor of a sterile, brutalist, government building makes me sad. After so many nights of sleeping under the stars, of being in perfect easy rhythm with the sun and moon, of breathing fresh air, and sleeping in a tent with my dog right beside me, the thought of waking up in the muggy morning knowing that the temperature will still reach above one hundred for several more weeks is exhausting. I am tired of desert and air conditioning. I want to be where the trees and rivers sustain me.

The deep unease, the lack of place, that I have felt for the last decade follows me still. If Arizona doesn’t feel like home, and Oregon doesn’t feel like home, then where, exactly, is home?

I think of Laura Palmer and Agent Dale Cooper arriving at the Palmer house after driving all night through a landscape much like this one. They hoped for recognition, for closure, but found the people changed. The features of the land remained the same, yet everything else had shifted. Then, with the realization that all familiarity is lost, something otherworldly breaks through: a recognition of that which follows us no matter where we go.

Perhaps there are forces that trail you through life, forces you can never outrun. You go to a new place, and the emptiness finds you. You return to the last spot that felt like home, but the people are different; no one remembers you as you were, or recognizes who you were in who you’ve become. There is a terror, deep and wide, and it follows you.

You are living, yet you are already experiencing your erasure from this Earth. You try to hold on to something solid, but that which you hope to grasp is fading, ephemeral.

In the end, you have only yourself and the deep, terrible void staring back at you. When the void catches you, when its presence consumes you, you shake in the presence of its terror and do what any animal would do: you scream.

They speak now of robots picking fruit and cutting wheat.

They speak of robots making films and writing stories.

But tell me–have you ever compared a strawberry grown in a lab to the one your grandmother snuck you with a wink as she filled a bowl from her garden?

Has a robot ever stood in a field, the sweat of a Kentucky summer beading on its forehead, smelled a distant summer storm, and reconsidered the timing of its harvest?

Has a robot ever contemplated God in the roses? The thorns?

I am fortunate to have been born long enough ago in a corner far enough away from the glistening hum of Silicon Valley to have known the old ways, the pre-industrial ways, with plows pulled by mule rather than machine.

These men and women were far from perfect and I do not wish to idealize the past–there was often violence, resentment, alcoholism, abuse–but there was also a sense of purpose, a shape to their days drawn by the arcs of the sun and the moon, a shape of their years drawn by the seasons, and seasons to their lives mapped from the cradle to childhood, adolescence, children, grandkids, great-grandkids, and if you were lucky enough even time on a porch with warm coffee, memories, and some great-great-grandkids at your feet before the grave.

In the shape of such a life, how a man progresses from one age to another was no mystery, and 20 years olds with Youtube accounts held no sway for the wisdom they had to impart.

Every generation had its place and its order.

I buy strawberries the size of lemons from the grocery store. They are not as nature made them. I check myself out and the machine spits out a receipt. It does not tell me a story. It does not ask how my mother is doing, or wish me a good day.

I don’t fear technology, but I do fear the isolation it creates.

I drive home alone to eat genetically modified strawberries and watch 20-year-olds on Youtube tell me what I should believe.

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“All the while the world is turning to noise

Oh, the more that it's surrounding us

The more that it destroys

Turn up the signal, wipe out the noise”

–Peter Gabriel

From the crest of Mt. Graham in Arizona, the stars are fierce and clear. The dark here is deep enough that the Vatican built their sole observatory outside of Italy on this peak.

My first visit to the mountain came in 2023, when my wolf/dog Maxwell passed away without warning. That night in 2023, my senior dog Daphne and I camped at 7,000 feet as we processed the shock.  I had not been back to the mountain since then, but last month after nearly a two year gap Daphne, Jones (my third dog), and I camped here for a night after visiting the Chiricahua Mountains in the southern part of the state.  Within two days of our visit, Daphne followed Maxwell across the rainbow bridge.     

This afternoon, I make my way up the mountain for a third time with Jones—this time driving all the way to the summit.  The drive is a daunting 30 miles of steep switchbacks, the last 12 of which are unpaved and beaten from winter storms.  We crest the top where there is a lake with an established campground, but I take a fork before the lake and head off down the last stretch of forest service road instead.  

We’ve been on a four-day adventure with too much driving, and the top of Mt Graham is a peaceful respite.  To our east the view through the trees opens into a vast distance of desert and mountains we drove through earlier in the day. The stresses of the city seem far away.

For three days, I have fasted from the noise of our culture, dodging the constant outrage that so much media has become, but on the climb up the mountain gorge on some political podcasts.  

Jones and I play and explore then I make camp as night falls, foregoing dinner and setting up my hammock between two juniper trees after I secure Jones in the pickup for the night.  I sleep soundly but wake intermittently.  Each time I do, there is chatter in my head fueled by the podcast I listened to earlier. My attention is being pulled away from my immediate surroundings, the power of the night sky, the gentle sway of trees in the breeze.  I am trading direct experience for imaginary arguments over issues I have no control over even here on the top of this remote mountain, in the middle of the night.  I am allowing algorithms to win even here.

“Enough,” I say as I shut my eyes and the voices dissipate.  It takes an act of will to quell the chatter. I regret listening to those podcasts earlier and letting the culture back in before my four-day detox is over.  It dawns on me that this is the state I live in—overstimulated, spun out by arguments over issues removed from my daily life, trying to talk sense into an increasingly dull, partisan, and anti-intellectual void. I think about how much information I consume on a daily basis and am exhausted by it.  It’s a wonder I can still hear my own voice at all. 

The mountain air is crisp and cool, the hammock gently sways, and I am lulled back to sleep.  The milky way above me is wonderful and wide.  

Before dawn, a whippoorwill wakes me.  These birds were a constant on my family’s farm as a child and are a bridge to my earliest memories.  It’s rare that I hear them in the west, but tonight there is one nearby and I am comforted by its familiar call.  

Close to dawn, the indigo night turns pre-dawn blue.   The moon and Milky Way have both set and now Venus the Morning Star takes center stage.  It shimmers so bright it feels like an apparition.  

I watch Venus as I fumble through the reverie of waking dreams.  The veneer between worlds is thin and I phase between states.  I turn in the hammock, drift back to sleep.  

Later the call of my bladder forces me to my feet, so I stretch, rise, and let Jones out of the truck.  He likewise stretche then settles down under the hammock where we nap a while longer.  We linger there, half-dozing, until the sun’s first orange spears pierce the horizon.

We get up again and climb to a rocky outcrop near camp to take in the full glory of the sun’s rise.  Venus has faded to a pale white dot.  I finally glance at my phone and realize it’s only now 5:45 a.m.  

I am grateful for all I have witnessed this morning, grateful for a good night’s sleep under a storm of stars, and grateful that I got to see Venus in all of her pre-dawn glory.

For millennia the night sky was not flooded with light pollution, the call of birds was not drowned by freeway traffic.  Venus was revered as a symbol of love and beauty in the ancient world.  It became an object of myth and mysticism.  

There is so much signal in the world, but the civilization we’ve created separates us from it.  I wish I could spend several more days here, but I know we must leave today.  Right now, though, we have this moment.  I put my phone back in my pocket to block the noise a while longer.  I ask Jones if he wants to take a walk.

He happily complies and we wonder out, lost in the signal of creation. 

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Some people work so they can acquire fancy cars, designer clothes, or trips to Disneyworld; I work almost exclusively to afford leisure time in the wilderness. In an earlier age I like to believe I would have set out on my own to cross the continent, but in this age it’s just me, my trusty dog Jones, and a pickup that answers the call of adventure. That lust is not for a bucket list of destinations but rather for a feeling I’m chasing. As I prepare for a four-day adventure in late June and Phoenix crosses the 110-degree threshold, I know I need to be high in the mountains and far from crowds.

I settle on Greer, Arizona as my destination, an unincorporated community in the northeast part of the state I hadn’t visited yet. Jones and I pack up and leave on a Friday morning, with no need to be back until Monday evening.

I keep hoping to clear the traffic as Phoenix rescinds into my rearview, but there is more traffic than I would like. Still, I remain hopeful. Living in a city drains my soul, and I survive by finding these wild places where I can recharge and remember that life is more than the empty consumerism of the urban sprawl.

We pull into Greer mid-afternoon and the community is busy. The retiree/RV crowd seems to have found this place and that, coupled with recent forest fires that have closed many of the campgrounds on my list, lead me to do a U-turn at the end of town. Greer isn’t what I came all this way to find.

I survey my atlas and decide to head east to the town of Edgar on the Arizona/New Mexico border. From there, a vast wilderness area lies to the south. It’s getting late, so we need to move.

A few miles north of Alpine, a forest service road leads us along a creek for about a mile before forking up the side of a mountain. The campsites along the creek are taken, so we settle for an exposed, rocky campsite in a burned area for the night. The site is far from ideal, but the views are nice.

At sundown, Jones and I settle into our tent. When I wake an hour later my sleeping mat is completely deflated due to a tear I will discover the next morning, so I’m sleeping on the rocky ground. I toss and turn, upsetting the tired husky who is just trying to get some sleep.

Later that night, I’m jolted awake by a very loud sound near the tent. The sound seems metallic, like sonar or at least how sonar sounds in the movies. I imagine I hear footsteps nearby, a wild dog barks in the distance, and I am now fully alert. The mountain has come alive, and I feel vulnerable.

Despite sleeping alone in remote spots for years, that old feeling of fear and anxiety still creeps up sometimes. At night, alone in a tent, far from help in a wilderness area, you surrender to your own vulnerability.

Jones is visibly nervous, also on high alert, and I sit up with my arm around him as we listen to the sounds outside. I realize for the first, but not the last, time on this trip that I have left my pistol at home.

The sonar-like sounds continue, but as I shake off sleep and my rational mind takes over, I realize this is more likely some strange flock of desert birds than an alien abduction. All of this is amplified by the echoing in the canyons of the mountain where we are camped. I lie down, calm Jones, and try to get some sleep.

Strange birds aside, this portion of Eastern Arizona is full of wildlife. On our first day alone we saw elk, deer, turkey, rabbits, hawk, squirrel, and even three long horn sheep. I didn’t know then that our most shocking encounter was still ahead of us.

Still groggy from a terrible night’s sleep, Jones and I are up at dawn to watch the sun rise over the vast, remote mountains. As the sun intensifies, we break camp and resume our journey.

Near the ominously named Hangman’s Meadow (NOTE: It’s actually “Hannigan’s Meadow but I’m going to choose to remember it is as Hangman’s), an even smaller unincorporated community than Greer, we take a hike along a trail with “creek” in its name, though we never see water in that valley. As we hike, my mind wonders as it does and I find myself contemplating what it means to build a society on Christian ethics. It’s a random line of thinking sparked by some social issues I’ve been mulling over. Then I look up to see a carving in an aspen tree that reads, “Jesus Save my Soul.” Seeing a carving in a tree, evening a religious one, isn’t unusual, but seeing that particular carving on a trail this remote as you’re contemplating Christian ethics? That’s uncanny at least.

After our hike, we find a winding forest service road with a canyon drop-off on one side and wooded spots with occasional camp sites on the other. We drive for several miles, passing dispersed campsites but none of them feel quite right. Playfully, I visualize a ball of light and say: “perfect camping we will find.” I release the image as we round a corner where a secondary, less-developed forest service road splits off. We climb a short embankment, and at the top is a huge rock fire pit, a concrete slab supported by two tree stumps, in an open clearing with rock walls and trees all around. I have hit the dispersed camping jackpot.

By mid-afternoon the sun beats down on us and heats up the day considerably. We move to the campsite’s edge and sit under a tree. The tree we sit under is distinct because reflective materials are nailed to the front of it in the form of a small cross. It’s not clear who has done this or why, but I remember the carving from earlier in the day and notice the synchronicity.

Some light rain moves in eventually, so the husky and I retreat to the pickup to wait for it to pass. When it does, I set out my chair and read a book as the husky sleeps at my feet. It’s around 5:30 in the afternoon, and I’ll need to set up for the night soon. I’m contemplating whether I should set up a hammock in the woods, sleep in the back of the truck, or put my tent on top of the makeshift table. My lack of sleep is catching up to me and I know it’s going to be an early night whatever I decide.

I hear a loud huff, like a heavy exhale, so I look up from my book and across the tree with the cross that we were sitting under just an hour before. I see a brown mass under the trees and think, “oh, deer,” but then I notice the animals shoulder blades come close together the way only cats do.

For a split second I am astonished by what I see, then I evaluate my defense options and realize I have none–not even a stick. For the second time on this trip, I’m reminded that I forgot my gun. My fight-or-flight responses kick in. The cat hasn’t noticed us yet, so I choose flight.

I’m out of my chair and around the back of the truck calling to Jones quietly as I move. When he doesn’t respond right away, I shout and he bops around the truck with total obliviousness. I grab him by the collar, throw him into the backseat, then jump into the front never taking my eye off the cat. It isn’t until I’m safe inside that I sigh deeply and let myself admire the cat on the edge of the campsite, maybe 100 feet away. The cat is terrifying in its beauty. I’ve seen cougars in zoos before and even behind glass they are intimidating creatures, but seeing one so close by in the wild is an entirely different experience.

The cat sniffs where Jones and I had been sitting. It looks our way, then slips back into the forest and disappears.

When I am certain it is gone, I jump out of the truck, throw our possessions in the back and take off. Under no circumstances are we sleeping at that site tonight, 10 miles off the highway, with no cellphone reception, as a cougar prowls the parameter.

Back on the highway, we head south and find an established campsite. There’s only one site on each side of the road, and a man in a van is already set up across from us. He waves when I pull in, and this time I’m not resentful of the presence of other people.

Fish and Wildlife estimates that somewhere between 1,800-4,000 mountain lions live in Arizona, yet the number of attacks on people over the past five years can be counted on one hand. Still, none of this matters when a cougar is standing within striking distance of you and all you could do, should it choose to attack, is put up the fight of your life.

I come to the wild to remember that I am an animal when stripped of all my protective gear and technology. I am still a replica of the early humans who settled the wild and fought for their survival back before the night was tamed. I venture to the wild to remember, to reconnect, and today that message came back clearly: civilization is just a veneer. When confronted with an apex predator, no amount of education or achievement will aid you in a fight for your life. What matters then is what mattered to our ancestors, cunning and brute force.

When you enter the wild it pays to say a prayer, to ask whatever gods or guardians you pray to for protection, to be aware of your surroundings, and—yeah—to bring a gun.

Walking around my neighborhood near downtown Phoenix at sunset in early July, I notice that many Progress Pride flags still wave in the desert sun. Despite being “out” since the day after the wheel was invented, I don't identify with that flag or the political movements it represents. Those movements have strayed far from gay acceptance and assimilation, but no matter how garish or offensive I find these flags I still respect people's rights to fly them.

Continuing my walk, I pass by homes displaying the flags of Palestine and Ukraine. While I wish for an end to these conflicts and the safety of innocent civilians caught in the crossfire, I don't relate to these flags or what they stand for. These are not my battles to fight, but I appreciate the freedom people have to display these flags as symbols of their political beliefs and concerns.

It strikes me that the one flag I don't see in my neighborhood is the one that matters to me—the one that my relatives have fought under in its evolving forms during conflicts from Iraq to Vietnam, Korea, the War of 1812, and the revolution from England.

The American Flag, the red white and blue, the one we use to say a pledge of allegiance to at the start of every morning in school. The only variation of that flag I spot is the black-and-blue variation, symbolizing support for law enforcement, which emerged in 2020. While I support the police and our military, I don't pledge allegiance to this flag either.

Like many who came of age in the Bush/Cheney era, I became too comfortable with criticizing the American Empire. There was, after all, much to be critical of during a period of endless wars, bank bailouts, surveillance, uni-party control, and the erosion of civil liberties that continues to this day.

When I became a college professor, I used my classroom as a pulpit, and although I'd like to believe I presented viewpoint diversity in my classroom, looking back, I realize that I, like most college educators in the US today, taught from a leftist perspective. I had become accustomed to criticizing the nation that had given me so much, and without realizing it, I passed down that cynical view to the impressionable young minds in front of me.

America is far from perfect. Volumes have been written about the mistakes made over the past 249 years. This past year I’ve taken some dives into the deep history of our country, reading books about our founding and the brave and imperfect men and women who struck out in the wilderness and forged a civilization. The story is, as stories always are, vastly more nuanced and complex than the meta-narratives that dominate the adderall riddled minds of those who like to rant most online.

We have never been a perfect union, but that was never the vision. The vision was that each generation would renew the contract with liberty, ground themselves in the inalienable rights laid down in those sacred founding documents, and strive to create a "more perfect union" with each passing generation. We have fallen short of this goal many times, but we have also persevered. We were liberators of the world in the mid-20th century, and our progress and innovation spread across the globe, transforming it in our image for better and worse. We worked, we fought, and we rectified the mistakes of our forefathers because they were wise enough to give us the framework to do so.

With these thoughts swirling in my mind, I finish my walk and drive to the Home Depot in the working class part of town. There, Americans of all different races, faiths, nationalities, and beliefs, crowd the store on the eve of Independence Day to buy supplies for their day-off projects. I spot an American Flag near the door for sale and put it in my cart.

Today, on this 4th of July, that flag is mounted on my house, waving in the breeze for anyone who passes by to see on this unbearably hot 4th of July. I have never been particularly patriotic, but today, I feel pride standing under the first US Flag I've ever owned. Our nation is far from perfect, but at some point you have to believe in something and America is a better bet than the alternatives. Tomorrow, there will be one more flag waving in my neighborhood.

It's a flag worthy of pledging allegiance to.

The hum of freeway traffic cuts through my neighborhood, a relentless drone far removed from the rustling leaves and whip-poor-wills I knew as a child on a farm in Eastern Kentucky. Back then, the world was effortlessly enchanted. The forest was a living, breathing organism full of trails and trees I had intimate connections to.

Here is a poem that I started in high school and finished around my 20th year. I present it here as it was then, untouched for 25 years:

Unclaimed World

I wonder where the rain makes the day new, where fallen leaves mold and tangle into unfamiliar forms. I have come to the forest to hear my voice, with no human voice to guide it.

From the top of the ridge I see the Earth stretch out, highways hug the curved hills. My view free of bare branches, limbs lingering up, mounting the distance between the ground and auburn sky.

In the deep hollows there is only what the forest makes, a world burning, a world renewed, and I am captive of the stillness, drawn to the perfection of each rock and tree and leaf.

Tracing my way back home I become lost where light is cut by birches and pines scraping sky above me. And when the stream’s stream finally leads me home, I turn to look at the unclaimed world I leave, tangled behind me in the last light.

Reading back over the poem today, I smile at its youthfulness. There’s an earnestness in those lines that I have lost to age, experience, and education. What is raw and unvarnished here was polished out of me in graduate school, the high cost of advanced degrees in creative fields that no one warns you about. But the loss I sense when I read the poem now isn’t just for craft, it’s also for enchantment itself.

The teenager who wrote those lines didn’t have to chase wonder—it was there, in the land I worked with my family, in the forest where I hid, in the close communion I had with my deep self in the natural world. As I progressed through academia, the institutions beat out of me any remnants of mystery, wonder, or backwoods religion, a beating reinforced by every hot take in The Atlantic, The New York Times, by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and all the manifold proponents of materialism.

For a while, I was drawn to those gatekeepers like during the height of the New Atheist movement when I obnoxiously considered sending Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation to my evangelical parents for Christmas (fortunately, I did not).

I left the land where I grew up and the enchanted woods that were my home because I had to make a living, and like so many others I bought into the lie that “culture” could only be found in cities and in the cold, rational materialism of the intellectual class.

In graduate school, I read a bunch of fancy French theorists whose work depressed me.  I waded through postmodern novels I neither liked nor understood. The New Atheist movement was at its peak shortly after I graduated, and I aligned with it for a time, listening to skeptics’ podcasts that left me smug and cold. But there was a longing in me that no amount of Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins could quell.

In 2008, I moved to Oregon and reconnected with nature through hiking and camping after spending much of my 20s in Chicago. The more time I spent in nature, the deeper the mystery of existence became. It wasn’t hard to reconnect with that part of me that has always felt most at home in a forest, and after one hit of DMT in 2012, any remnants of the scientific materialist worldview that lingered in me was gone.  My world cracked open in the first of many ontological shifts that continue to this day. After experiencing “The Break” in 2015, I was living in a demon-haunted world again, a world where “The Mystery” intruded into my reality.

Today, I find myself in the fourth largest metro area in the U.S., having hopscotched across the country over the last 25 years. I used to sit by rivers to think, but now the only river that flows near me is the mechanical hum of the freeway. I’m boxed in by asphalt and lost in the digital notifications of machines we all swim in. To find enchantment in 2025 requires that I schedule time off, drive for hours, turn off my phone, and spend at least a day decompressing before I fall back into the deep rhythm of the natural world.

Yet there are some moments when it comes easier: like sometimes in the early mornings before the day heats up, before the water for coffee has boiled, when even the dog is lackadaisical with sleep, and I sit outside and listen to the birds and the hum of the freeway before my dreams have fully faded. That’s when I feel the presence of the Mystery most acutely, and I know that I am more than flesh and bone, career and social status.  I am a soul dropped here into this dense material world, on an adventure that ends with a return home once this human experience is over.

These moments tie me back to my past, to the Evangelical churches where revivals ran for weeks and often past midnight, where old women spoke in tongues and flailed their bodies up and down the pew aisles, where pastors sweated and shouted as they beat the podium with worn leather Bibles, where hands were laid on the sick and the sinful alike.

It was a world I was at odds with but one that, now in my 40s, I circle back to.  It’s not that I want to return to such churches or that I carry forward anything that resembles my mother or grandparent’s faith, it’s that I long for an enchantment that unifies the ancient and the modern.

I want a faith that reads Ezekiel's vision in the context of UFO/UAP disclosure. I want enchantment that builds a bridge between the connection that drew Druids to sacred circles on the Solstice and the wonder I experience when I use Grok (AI) to create Solstice rituals for Litha this year.

That wild, backwoods faith I experienced in my youth is a deep part of the American psyche; it helped settlers persevere in a dark and inhospitable frontier, and it’s a fire that runs all the way back to the old world where the Romans and their church tried to tame the wild pagan heart of the Celts but failed. My distant ancestors may have accepted Jesus as their savior, but they did so in a context where Brighid, Cernunnos, the Green Man, and all the other gods, leprechauns, and fairies of the old world still held sway in forest glens.

The enchantment that I long for is a reinvention and a restoration.

A couple of weeks ago, I stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon with my mother and aunt, both in their 70s, when I overheard my mom say to my aunt, “Do you think this is where God flung the angels out of heaven?”

We’d spent an hour earlier that day walking through the Yavapi Geology Museum, where the canyon’s formation over a couple of billion years is explained in elaborate detail with maps and diagrams, and I felt that old rationalist urge rise in me as I opened my mouth to challenge my mother, but then I stopped. In the last two years, I’ve come back around to so much I dismissed in my 20s and 30s during this weird period of inversion in my life. Though I’ll never believe the Grand Canyon was formed by angels being flung from heaven during Satan’s war with the Creator, I know arguing with my mother about it will just entrench her beliefs. Worse, it’ll cast a shadow of judgement over this preciously short time we have together, and that’s the opposite of what I set out to do on this roadtrip with my aunt and mother.  At this stage in our lives, showing her that I love her as she is matters more than proving I’m right. I close my mouth and picture for a moment an angel crashing to Earth from the Heavens and creating the Grand Canyon.  It’s a powerful image, as nonsensical as it might seem, and I appreciate that I stay quiet and share this view with my mother, letting her take in the wonder in whatever way suits her best. 

The idea of angels and heavenly war creating the Grand Canyon may sound crazy to educated folks, but the Big Bang’s “one free miracle” of all existence squeezed into a speck, then bam, infinite universe—is just as wild.  I’m sure in time, our descendents will read about our belief in the Big Bang and they will laugh at our foolish naivety.  

We are living on the precipice of profound change with AI, nano-computing, UAP/UFO Disclosure, and studies in the DMT realms racing to dismantle all we think we understand of the modern world. Anyone who believes they understand all that is going on in this reality is clearly not paying attention. We are all feeling our way in the darkness.

Here, in my 40s, I look back on a childhood forged in forests and the backwoods fundamentalism of American Evangelicals, trying to blend it with all I’ve learned from two fancy college degrees, a decade in academia, thousands of books and articles read, an intuitive mysticism, magickal practice, four decades of “lived experience”, and my choice to live in an enchanted world. 

I want the mystery to touch me and to understand it, knowing I never can and never will. Accepting that, while still striving to understand, sounds like a rich human experience to me. At this point, I am content to stand back, watch and learn, and to stop trying to put labels on all of creation like Adam.

When I stand in the garden I think I’ll just let the mystery breathe. 

(Bonus 1: My inspiration for this post’s title which is also featured in the opening credits of Season 2 and 3 of the show The Leftovers)

(Bonus 2: A fantastic podcast episode that helped me sort through what I was trying to say in this post Back from the Borderline)

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Hungover on Saturday morning, I get a text message that my dog Daphne’s ashes are ready to be picked up from the emergency veterinary hospital where she was put to sleep a few days before. For a 10-minute emergency exam, the hospital charged me $1200. There were no last-minute heroics, no emergency operations to save her life, there was simply a diagnosis and a hard coming to terms with reality. Trust me, as someone who dreaded this day for 14 years, she’d still be here if any other option had been viable. For 10 minutes of their time, I walked away with a bill that will take months to pay off. The vet looked bored as she scrolled through social media when I left the room where I petted Daphne’s body for the last time. In the parking lot, there was a Mercedes parked in one staff spot and a Tesla in the other.

Back at the hospital days later, I stand in the waiting room wrecked with emotion but stoically holding it together as the receptionist gathers Daphne’s ashes and brings them to me. It takes much longer than it should and later I realize that the delay was them scrambling to sign a generic condolence card they stuffed in the bag, along with a clay paw print—Daphne’s name misspelled. They didn’t even bother to verify my dog’s name with me before they sent her off for cremation, pressing her paw into the clay.

When they hand me her ashes, the composure I’ve been struggling to hold together crumbles. I’m pretty sure I said thank you—southern manners reflexively kick in at times like these—but I don’t recall. I just know I have to get outside fast before the sobs hit, clutching the bag of what’s left of Daphne to my chest. Even in my grief, I have certain feelings about how much a grown man should cry in public for his dog.

Driving home across town, I weave through construction zones—the whole goddamn city’s a stuttering, spastic mess of lane switches, flashing lights, and steam. A young man in a white Cadillac tailgates me, then zooms around me at an intersection, flipping me off as he cuts back in front of me.  My crime—driving the speed limit.

The next morning, I’m having coffee outside when a bum on a bike with a cart piled high with garbage rides by blasting the most hideous, vulgar “music” at 6:30 in the morning—stupid bass laced with swear words that no barbarian could call “music.”  The point of such sound is to denigrate.

My brief moment of serenity broken, I decide to walk my husky Jones, my remaining dog, to the dog park before it gets hot out. The route takes us over a highway overpass littered with discarded food, styrofoam cups, fentanyl foil, and needles. Behind a wire fence surrounding an elementary school, plastic bags, fast food wrappers, and sales-papers hang in cacti.

At the park, another bum rides by, blasting equally offensive noise while people try to enjoy the morning with their dogs. Last fall, at this same park, a woman had stood outside the fence screaming insults at everyone in the park as we played with our dogs in the grass. I had caught an elder millennial’s eye who seemed as annoyed with it as I was. “A lovely day at the park,” I had said. Seasoned, he replied, “Welcome to Phoenix.” 

What happens to a culture with no compassion? No taste? No care for the common good? A culture where professionals exploit the desperate without a second thought? Where the random jerk on the street hates you, your kids, your neighborhood—spreading garbage, feces, and drug paraphernalia like it’s their right to do so before asking you for money? What happens to such people, to a world like this?

I know I am taking my Daphne’s death hard and that it is dragging out my jaded, hostile side.  It’s worse because I’ve got no one close—I am 45 and single, my close friends are in other places, and there’s no one to call up here that I can just go hang out with and lean on. 

On the rare off night when I do log on to the dating apps, the majority of people online are either partnered or just looking for “fun.”  Filter those out, then ditch the ones who you know will ghost you for saying something rational like—maybe comparing the president to an actual Nazi is a bit hysterical—and there’s nobody left. I log off, throw on a record, mix a cocktail, and sit on the floor rubbing Jones’ belly.

The world feels too ugly, stupid, greedy, and loud–and within a few weeks it’ll be hotter than actual hell here.   I moved to Downtown Phoenix just over two years ago looking for fun, a career change, some culture, some adventure, maybe even love. Instead, I wake up to zombies from the Walking Dead shitting on sidewalks and raiding trash cans. At work, I’m in a beige cube where nobody does much but fakes being busy so we can all be left alone. There are no responsible adults anywhere to fix this mess. We all just keep our heads down, avert our eyes, take prescription drugs, and watch hours of Netflix as our neighborhoods, cities, and country crumble.

I drink too many beers, listen to Fleetwood Mac, and scroll through a year’s worth of dog photos and videos on my laptop. I stop on some clips from last summer, sunset on the beach along the southern Oregon coast.  It was the last time that I saw Daphne be genuinely youthful—she’s running in the sand, chasing the tide and her husky brother, stopping to stare up at me with those big beautiful brown eyes and that wonderful smile.  With the setting sun, it was the type of beauty that makes these vulgar days worth living. 

As I left the beach that day, a young man came running up to me as I started my car. He introduced himself and said he was a photographer and that he’d taken some photographs of me with the dogs that he wanted to send me.  We traded numbers and he said, “Life’s beautiful and should be shared.” 

I thanked him but honestly didn’t expect to hear back from him, but once I was back in Phoenix he sent me the photographs.  They were stunning.  That was September, and I had a dreadful feeling that it was the last time I would get to stand on the beach with Daphne, that place that we had loved more than any other in our travels.  It turned out that my fear was right.

This morning, I’m up early and the sunrise is stunning. It’ll get hot soon, and Phoenix will turn into its ugly, drab summer self. But right now, right now it’s peaceful, quiet. I light a candle, pray for Daphne, for my loved ones, for the health of the natural world—a private ritual I’ll do every morning for 49 days.

I sip coffee, go over to Jones—who is waiting patiently—and rub his chin and back. He flips over for  belly rubs and smiles.  How can I say no?  After a few minutes of this, I breathe in another deep moment of sunrise and go to the outdoor table where I spend an hour reading before I have to get ready for work.  

In this moment, there is no trash on the street, no vulgar ugly people with boomboxes, no one profiting off my heartbreak.  Beauty is a choice—a choice that is hardest to make in times like these, but with prayer and a little grace it is a choice I remember to make.  

In a culture that is ugly, stupid, greedy, and loud—being beautiful, contemplative, charitable, and reserved is as punk as it gets.  I think about Daphne’s smile and make that choice. Fuck the rest of it.