Long before I traveled the meandering roads of the American West or rode a tuk-tuk in Peru into the Amazon, I traveled a road captured in the pictures below. This road is not famous; you will not find it on travel blogs or on YouTube channels. It is not a particularly scenic or important road, yet it remains central to my origin story. This road runs from the house where I grew up—and where my parents still live—to the fields and woods of the farm my family has worked for forty years this fall. In other words, it is home.

There’s so much I have to say about Kentucky, family, and my constantly evolving relationship to this land, but my focus today is simply to share a bit about my recent visit along with some photos of home.

After three years in the desert, Kentucky in the summer is a deep sigh of relief. The first thing I notice when I step out of the airport in Nashville is the humidity and the abundance of greenery.

All along the drive from Nashville to home, I marvel at how green the land is. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of this when I lived in Kentucky, but after so many years in hotter, drier climates the contrast is startling.

In popular culture Kentucky, and Eastern Kentucky specifically, is still spoken about as a land of deficit—the Hatfields and the McCoys, coal mining, bootlegging and snake-handling—but there is, and always has been, so much more to the land than these tired old tropes. There may still be gaps in the region relative to other parts of the country, but from the vantage of middle age what I see when I go back there today is not deficit, but abundance. Kentucky is doing a lot better than certain West Coast cities I’ll refrain from discussing today.

How many people got to grow up on 200 acres of land? How many people get to see their parents become great-grandparents actively engaged with their great-grandchildren? Yes, there were hard times and we didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but this is the reality of my life in Appalachia. This is my Kentucky, a place with generational roots, home-cooked meals, and fields to walk in the summer sun.

The grass under my feet is wet with dew, and fireflies are abundant as Venus and Jupiter slide into conjunction opposite a full moon rising. Scenes like this happen all the time, and for so many years I took them for granted, but I will not take them for granted anymore. I’ll savor all of these moments as long as I have them.

When you live far away and your parents cross the threshold into old age, you start to realize there are only so many trips home remaining. One day this house will pass to someone else, someone else will tend these hills, my parents will pass from this land, and when they do, a part of me I’ll never be able to replace will go with them. So for whatever time remains, I’m going to take it all in—the sunrise, the sunset, the neighbors’ geese and guineas squawking at night. Don’t take any of it for granted.

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The Family

As much as I love the land, and as grateful as I am to be here, the real reason for being here is of course to be with my family. I cherish watching my parents settle into the gentle rhythms of old age. My dad dotes on his great-grandson, showing a tenderness and affection for him that I wish he had discovered sooner. Time is funny that way; you go away and expect to come back to the home you left thirty years ago, but everyone has gotten older, and it’s only in photographs that the reality that you’ve gotten older too sets in. The hair is gray and receding, the young man’s body is gone, and the little kids you left behind there are adults with kids of their own. The wheel keeps turning.

On the last day at home my family gathers at the hunting cabin my father built by hand at the back of the farm. My dad and I target practice and after several rounds I manage a few respectable shots. I congratulate my father for finally having a master marksman in the family, but he ain’t buying it.

As night falls we grill on the open fire and my sister sneaks me some whiskey for my soda. It’s not long before it becomes evident that it ain’t just Coke I’m drinking as my rowdy side starts to come out.

The next day we have a fish fry, one last meal before I head back to the oppressive heat of Phoenix in summer and leave my family a thousand miles behind, which weighs on me more the older I get. My life is in the west, but part of me will always be at the head of that holler, up a dusty farm road.

🚜 🦌 🇺🇸🚜 🦌

Saturday morning, I watch the sunrise again from camp knowing that I’m leaving today, but before we go the dogs and I take our longest hike along the canyon rim. The walk is slow and deliberate, and I feel no anxiety or lingering burdens from the workaday world. There is only this cliffside and this environment, this walk, me and my dogs, and the grandeur of all we are among. I am fully present without effort—funny how some time in nature can do that.

Previously on the Endless American Road:

After the walk we break camp and I set out to the Valley of the Gods to camp for our last night, and by taking the highway rather than the backroads I shave a good hour off my time. By early afternoon, I am sitting in a decent campsite at Valley of the Gods, which is full of RVs for the weekend, but the site offers no real privacy or shade.

The dogs crawl under the truck to escape the sun, and watching them hide gets me thinking about the top of the mesa where we spent our first night. It is at least 10 degrees cooler up there, and since I spend so much time in the desert as a resident of Phoenix, the thought of sleeping in the shade of juniper trees seduces me. I rally the dogs and soon we’re back on the road, backtracking to where our journey began.

In less than an hour we’re pulling back into our first campsite only to find that someone has taken it. I recall that the intersection of State Road 95 is a short drive north and that there were signs for Natural Bridges National Monument and Bears Ears. With a few hours of daylight remaining, there’s still time for one more new scene.

I turn onto the forest service road for Natural Bridges and, almost immediately, onto Elk Mountain Road. The road quickly becomes switchbacks leading to a beautiful cliffside spot overlooking Natural Bridges.

I gather wood and have a quiet night watching the sunset; I feel lucky to have experienced so much beauty in the last four days. The sun goes down and I let the fire burn out. The next day we drive past the mass of people on Forrest Gump Hill, through Monument Valley, across the Navajo Nation, then through Flagstaff, and eventually to Phoenix. I am grateful when the shower at home finally washes five days of stink from me.

We all go through stale periods in life, and my soul needed this adventure in Utah on Beltane 2026. I needed mostly to remember who I am and why I’m still out here in the West after all of these years drifting like a vagabond.

My mother, who turned 70 this year, came to visit me in the West for the first time in 2023. At that point, she had never flown, crossed the Mississippi, or ventured far from where she had been her whole life in Eastern Kentucky. On that first trip, I got to see this land not through my own eyes but through hers. When she came again in 2025, I watched as she walked out along the edge of the Grand Canyon to peer over in wonder. I saw the sense of adventure awaken in her and felt proud that I got to share it with her.

Sitting by the fire the last night in Bears Ears, I wrote: Let it be known that he lived a life of adventure. That he sought truth and beauty and found both often. But let it be known that above all he was always, always, grateful.

Whatever adventure looks like for you, I sincerely hope you go out there and find it. The world is beautiful and we are gifted this short time to appreciate it. It would be a tragedy if you let the opportunity to explore go to waste.

Until next time!

❤️ 🛻🇺🇸 🏜️

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I wake up before dawn on Beltane optimistic for the day ahead. It’s chilly and the full moon is still visible as the sun begins to rise. I walk to the cliffside with my dogs to watch the daybreak. The canyons are covered in shadow but as the sun rises a veil lifts to reveal the wonder of the red rock. I make coffee and kindle a fire from last night’s coals. I tend to the dogs and by the time the sun is fully risen we are packed and ready to meander to Moab.

In my mind, Moab is much farther north than I’ve drifted on this trip but mental maps are made to be redrawn and after consulting a physical map I am grateful for my miscalculation. Arches National Park is less than an hour and a half north.

Previously on the Endless American Road:

I first passed through Moab almost a decade ago, but I wasn’t able to stay long as it was just a pit stop on the way from Santa Fe to southeastern Oregon. For the last 10 years Moab has remained one of those places I want to get back to but realistically wasn’t sure that I ever would. Despite its beauty, Moab was just never on the way to any place I was going, until today.

We stop in town to refuel and I’ve been around these types of towns enough to spot patterns—a generation ago Moab was a typical sleepy western town where rural parents could safely raise their children surrounded by God’s beauty. But today, the town has been “discovered”—first by outdoor enthusiasts, then tourists, and now the horrid hordes of Instagram influencers.

The town clearly swells seasonally and the locals bear that weathered look of people who spend half the year trying to keep their heads above water economically only to become the indentured servants of the vacationing masses during the busy season. It’s an irony that all across the West such places are becoming beacons for remote workers and the outdoor elites who move in, drive up the costs of real estate, vote to change the culture, then complain about the locals from whom they stole the town while claiming self-righteously that no one is illegal on stolen land (see also: Bend, Santa Fe, and every small town in Colorado).

Arches National Park sits on the northern edge of Moab and as I pull into the park I’m crestfallen by the line of cars waiting to get in. I recognize that National Parks are essential to preserving the best of our public lands, but I also loathe the tourism and the crowds. I resolve to make the most of this day even if solitude will have to wait until I’m back at my campsite this evening.

I feel some relief when I stop at the visitor’s center and it’s still a modest single building whose aesthetics speak to an earlier time. There’s a small gift shop but it’s nothing like the atrocity of Yosemite Valley.

At the visitor’s station I talk to a ranger, telling him my dogs are with me and I know this limits what I can see. Yet, together, we plot a route for the day. I’m about to walk away when I say: One more thing and I don’t expect you to know this because it’s kind of random but can you point me to any spots relevant to Ed Abbey’s time here?

The ranger’s demeanor brightens and then I’m not just another tourist but rather someone who knows something more about this place. Not only does he show me on the map where Abbey lived while he was a park ranger here in the 1950s, but he also tells me how to spot remnants of the septic tank his trailer was hooked up to. This is so random but I thank him mightily and head off to explore the park.

If you don’t know, Edward Abbey was a writer and godfather of the modern environmental movement (though whether he would go along with the agenda of the elites around climate today is a question for open debate). Abbey died in 1989 before global warming became the divisive issue of our time. Abbey’s focus was not climate but conservation—he cared about man’s soul in relation to wilderness and the natural world. I don’t think he would have been so easily persuaded by those who fly private planes to Davos.

Several years ago, in another life when I was a college professor with summers off to exercise, hike, and read books in my garden, I spent a summer break reading all seven of Abbey’s novels including two with scenes set in Arches. It’s not that I love all of them, though a few are very good, it’s that I loved his sensibility and his view of the land. He was a pragmatist who understood honest work with land but also expressed deep spiritual union with it. He wrote with reverence for nature and irreverence for the bullshit of our culture. To Abbey, the land in the Western United States was so valuable that sabotaging construction equipment and bombing dams (practices he called “monkey wrenching”) was not only noble, it was a game. He is also one of my heroes.

I follow the ranger’s instructions and turn away from the crowds, stopping to park where he instructed. I never do find the cover for the septic tank, but I take some time to sit and take in the view that Edward Abbey had every day that he worked here, seventy years ago in an Airstream trailer before the roads were paved, back when the National Park was still a National Monument, back when foreign visitors didn’t come from all over the world to visit here.

I know it’s not in the ethos of National Parks, but I also know what I have to do next. I go back to the truck and rummage through my camping gear until I find an enamelware bowl. I go back out to the desert, down an embankment where the tourists can’t see me, and I cut an ear off a prickly pear cactus with my pocket knife. I place it in the bowl then cover it with the red soil of Utah. Back in Phoenix, I will plant the cactus in a pot with its native soil and name it Hayduke after Abbey’s most famous fictional character.

The rest of the day is amicable and friendly. I make peace with the Instagramers though there are fewer of them here than at other parks I have visited. Mostly the park is full of foreign visitors, obnoxious groups of mountain bikers, and retirees.

I get in a range of conversations throughout the day—one woman and I walk a few minutes and have a spiraling conversation that shifts from climate change to grammar to AI to Finnegans Wake in a matter of minutes. Another time, I engage with a couple who bring up God often but seem to have the sort of off-road adventurer’s spirit that bonds so many of us when we encounter one another. I tell them the location of my secret campsite on the promise that they will not tell others.

These two conversations alone could not be more different, and I would be willing to wager that the three people I mentioned above have very different voting records. But out here, in the best of America, there is still a sense of camaraderie lacking online and in day-to-day life. There is still some residual sense that we are one nation and that these lands are the best of what our ancestors fought to secure for us and we must do the same for future generations in turn.

By the time the afternoon comes, I am ready to leave Arches to drive back to my little home on the cliff for another two nights. It is Beltane, and a ritual is about to begin, and today has been a bucket list adventure.

These days are rare and precious, and it’s always good to savor them as fully and slowly as possible, so I do.

🏜️ 🌵 🐾 🇺🇸 🔧 🐾 🌵 🏜️

Bonus:

Beltane happens annually on May 1st, which is the subject of this post, but I am writing this two weeks later and while I want to be true to the spirit of these posts, I’m choosing to break the fourth wall for a moment by acknowledging that I am writing this in the shadow of Gordon White’s passing this week. I never met Gordon, so I want to be respectful of those who actually knew him well and not grift onto his memory as so many others have done, but Gordon was a monumental influence on my occult life (for a fitting in-memoriam by someone who did know Gordon well, read the piece I’m linking below by Peter Grey whose books are a wonder in their own right).

The Adder in the Churchyard Wall

What is it that is ours to do?

I guess it had to start in a cocktail bar, in a long lost London. Media had entered its death spiral in 2011, and we were both writing magical texts in the empty hours of corporate collapse. The blog was in its ascendancy and the witty, combative and insightful…

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a month ago · 467 likes · 143 comments · Peter Grey

I found Gordon’s work early in his ascent to prominence in the weird and insular world of contemporary magick. I read his books and listened to hours upon hours of Rune Soup over the years, even taking a few of his deep and challenging courses in the premium section of the site. He led me to many other thinkers, podcasters, authors, and schools of thought over the years. Other than Disinfo and Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, no other source has affected me so much.

It’s not that Gordon and I followed the same path, and as the years went by, I found his path harder to relate to; it was that Gordon was not the typical magickian that drew me in. He was sardonic and funny, charming, and deeply studied without ever lapsing into the dusty ways of so many in this field. His teachings lived in the contemporary world and sought to bring re-enchantment and sovereignty to it for those brave enough to chart their own way. He was not a guru or a preacher, he was merely a scholar and practitioner who instructed by example and always had something to say you had not heard before.

I rarely talk about my spiritual path publicly though I feel that changing in these strange times where chaos magick provides a way of knowing that many need to hear. My own path is deep and strange and there are few who would understand it. Hell, even I don’t understand it sometimes. But that it is real, that it is an undercurrent to my life, and a practice that I’ve engaged in deeply since at least 2013 is true. That it has led me out of dark times and given me structure and meaning when I have needed it most is also true. Like Gordon, I have no desire to convert, to proselytize, or to engage in the petty arguments that consumes so much of the online esoteric world. My desire is only to know thyself and to move in right relation to all the forces of nature and the divine. If I can stay on this path, and find my way back when I go astray, then I will have done all I can do live a good life and eventually to welcome a good death.

And so it is that I write about the Beltane portion of my Utah 2026 journey with a heavy heart for the passing of Gordon White but also with deep appreciate for the quiet path I walk and for the role that Gordon played in showing me the way. I am speaking of my practice now more openly than I ever have publicly with the intention of allowing those who know me to understand that there are other ways of being than the ones given to us by our modern culture; there is a self-directed spiritual path for those who seek it, and freedom and direction for those who follow the course. There is also assistance, both in this world and in others we do not see.

And so it is. To Gordon, wherever he may be. And to the fire of Beltane.

The dogs and I are back at our campsite after a day of exploring Arches National Park, and I look to the sky to see the sun moving toward the western horizon. I eat some snacks and tend to the dogs—the last tasks I need to complete before the ritual begins.

Tonight, after the Sun goes down, I will perform a ritual for Beltane that I constructed before coming here, before this amazing cliffside campsite was a reality. That ritual was my excuse for this mini vacation and I try, as often as I can, to spend every cross-quarter in nature. But the plans I made back in Phoenix are just a blueprint—ceremony, for me, is always a combination of what I have planned, what I find, and what happens. It will unfold as it should.

We are not ready for the fire yet. First, the wood must be gathered. Rheya and I walk a good radius from the campsite, gathering woods from various spots—a bit here, a bit there, never so much that I disrupt the natural ecosystem and never from a living tree. When performing ritual, being sensitive to the natural order is law.

After I carry three armloads of wood to the fire ring, I know I have enough for the work ahead. It is time to build the altar. From my truck I pull the small bag made by Mama Rosa—matriarch of a lineage of shamans I worked with in Peru—and a few other items I have brought from home for this working: some incense, three precious stones, some Agua de Florida (flower water), a hand-carved tiki god who lives in my truck and has traveled with me since 2014, and a piece of driftwood spirit gifted to me in 2014 that I have used in all of my magickal workings as my staff. Other than these items, everything else I need is right here, on the land.

I place some wood at the base of the fire ring and center my tiki god among it. I take some wood and form the altar around him. I gather stones and set them around the altar—eight stones representing the passing of the wheel of the year with the largest stone representing tonight’s season, Beltane.

I lay the precious stones I’ve brought from home on the altar and set up some incense to burn. There must be an offering. I walk the canyon side and cut some flowers and branches from the plants, saying to each as I cut—”thank you for your sacrifice. I honor you in tonight’s working.” Once the bouquet is added to the altar, I step back and examine my work. It’s perfect—temporal, natural, an alter I will burn at the end of the night—just for me, just here, just for me and the spirits who walk with me tonight, as it is, as it should be, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

With the prep work finished, I crack a beer and slip into ritual attire with my heavy sweatshirt to fight off the cold over it. I use the flower water to cleanse my hands. It’s the best I can do here on a cliffside at dusk. I put up my camping gear and arrange what I need so that it’s all easily accessible. From here on out, there should be no more logistics—only ceremony, so tending to these pragmatic matters and thinking through what I need and how I will move when the sun goes down is part of the ceremony. It is all part of the ceremony—deciding to come here, packing my gear, the two day drive, researching ritual options, printing ritual instructions, gathering wood. In a magickal mindset, all the preparation becomes ritual.

With the truck packed, I crack another beer and call the dogs. We climb to the top of a rock and sit as close to the side of the cliff as we can. We’re around 6500 feet above sea level and below us, nothing but air for 1,600 feet before the red rocks of the valley floor. The air is crisp and cold, the wind picks up as the sun moves majestically behind a distant mesa—slowly.

I am so grateful for my life and for getting to experience all of this. I am so grateful. When I do stupid shit like drugs with someone with whom I have a connection but with whom nothing serious is ever going to happen, I am denying myself the best possible life which is the one I am experiencing right now. Right now. Sitting on this cliffside with my two dogs beside me and the sun setting, solitude, a good book to read in the morning, a ceremony to perform tonight, a worthy man who is thinking about me on the other side of the country. What a life! What a beautiful life.

I am overwhelmed by the beauty and the solitude as it dawns on me how many times I have seen this scene since childhood—in photographs, on posters, in documentaries—but this is real. The sun setting over the red mesas of Utah is a real place I didn’t know if I would ever get to see, but it is right there. And I am watching the sky turn the color of a 1970’s advertisement for the southwest. It is real, and I am alive, and I am experiencing this moment in all of its untranslatable wonder.

The sun sets. A long quiet settles over the valley and the chill is suddenly intense. I stand, stretch, and jump up and down to warm myself as I call for the dogs and we descend the rock in the fading light and move back to the fire ring. It is time to build a fire, and for the ceremony to begin.

Once the fire is roaring, I circle the space singing plant songs I learned in Peru, then I tuck the dogs into the tent so that they feel safe and my attention can be where I need it—which is fully present in ceremony.

I circle and feed the fire, staff in hand, and feel the elements. I face each of the four directions and call to the guardians of each gate by name. I ask for protection and guidance in my workings tonight.

I circle and circle the fire, allowing myself to drop out of the consensus consciousness that governs my days—the one that makes grocery lists and gets to work on time, the one that thinks about branding and reach, the one that remembers to call home on holidays. There is a deeper mind beneath all of these domestic things. It is the mind that led humans to carve shamanic figures onto red rock walls in this land thousands of years ago.

I circle. I commune. I circle. The fire. My feet find way on bare cold rock, I circle, forget who I am. I circle. I light a cigarette, the closest form of sacred tobacco I have with me here, I blow smoke and chant and I circle. I circle until I come to forget how long I’ve been circling.

Then it’s time for Evocation:

 “By staff and stone and red-rock bone, I cast this circle”

“Cernunnos, Horned Lord of the Wild, guardian of hound and hunter, master of the green fire that forges strength from stone—hear me in this place of cliffs and open sky.

As Beltane’s flame rises, I stand before you. Come, walk with me and my pack.”

“By flower and water I bless this body, this staff, these stones, and this pack.

May tenderness temper strength, and may abundance flow.”

I pour Agua de Florida on my hands and chest, and smear it on my face. The smell helps remind me of why I’m here, helps me slide completely into deep mind.

With staff in one hand, I take a few incense in the other and squat down to the fire remembering that it is the most primal animal, alive. I have two requests from others I am asking for tonight. I speak them aloud and receive an answer I will convey by text in the morning to my spirit sister a thousand miles away.

I move to the three stones I have brought from home and drop Agua de Florida on each— moving between them I incant: “For building strength and shedding what no longer serves—weight falls, vitality rises, the body becomes a worthy vessel.” “For safe travel home to Kentucky kin, for family bonds renewed, for social circles that nourish and expand.” “For the book that waits—words flow, discipline holds, abundance in creation and in completion.”

I place the stones in a triangle formation and move on to the Spell. This ceremony is brief, and the Spell is its central element. Woven into it are traditional rites and passages along with my hopes for the season. Creating these lines involved a lot of personal magick I am not yet ready to reveal, but the product of that work I now speak boldly to the heavens—

"Cernunnos, Lord of the wild,
In Indian Creek’s red rock I call you down.
Grant me the strength that breaks old chains,
The body lightened, the fire unchained.
Open the roads that lead back home,
Let happiness bloom and abundance take root,
Let friendships gather and joy fruit.
Ignite the first page of the book I will write,
Words disciplined, clear, and bright.
By staff and stone and flower and flame,
These goals are sealed in Cernunnos’ name.
As the 10 of Cups now comes to bear,
Harmony, home, and harvest I declare.”

The fire now lashes at my face, alive, embodied. I have sat too close and the flame nearly burns me. I jump back and raise my staff commanding the fire: “Down!” The fire pulls back but burns strong. We dance for a while, it leaping forward, I pulling back but not retreating. I hold my ground and tell it to behave, then feed it more wood when it complies. But the fire is still hungry and I feel Cernunnos near, the god of the hunt, of the forge, of prosperity, he must be fed. The fire lashes toward my tiki and for a moment I consider the request, but this is not a sacrifice I am willing to make so I spit Agua de Florida into the fire and watch it leap. Fire is not satiated; it wants more. I tell it that it cannot have my tiki but I hurl the reminder of the bottle of flower water into the fire and a bright green flame jumps high.

“To the land, to the dogs, to the Horned Lord—gratitude given, reciprocity received.”

SO MOTE IT BE! The Fire leaps. SO MOTE IT BE! The Fire retreats.

A ball of energy runs from the Earth through my body and into to my outstretched hands, staff held tight, the energy releases into the fire and the ceremony closes.

so mote it be. I breathe.

One more time, I say, so mote it be feeling the working complete and my requests settle into the vast and unknowable energetic web that binds all things.

This celebration of the passing of the season from Ostara to Beltane and soon to the peak of the Summer Solstice celebrates the maturation of life and the coming abundance of the light. Winter is behind us, the dark recends, and as the spell closes the memory settles in me that all over the world there are people of different backgrounds, religions, and languages celebrating this very transition in their own ways tonight, each carrying forth a fragment of the old ways, keeping them alive for another generation.

My ancestors practiced these customs with fire, though their incantations and the workings of their holy men the Druids are lost to time, their wishes granted or not, their harvests fruitful or not, my ancestors survived, or else I would not be here, and these customs were essential to their survival. These nearly forgotten ways found a fragmented path through books and oral traditions down through time to me, a descendent, and to the others who choose to practice the Old Ways.

The work is sealed. A full moon rises to the east. I let the fire burn down and a welcoming dark moves across this wild, enchanted land. Inside the tent, I slip into my sleeping bag and into another real of dreams which come fast and strong all night long.

Another Beltane has come and I have done my part to honor it. As it is, as it was, as it ever shall be. So mote it be.

🔥 🪄🔥

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Previously, on the Endless American Road:

After two hours I exit Highway 191 and take the Canyonland “Highway” thirty miles to the park’s entrance. On the way there, the landscape becomes more interesting and a few ranches speckle the landscape—I’m guessing these were cutouts grandfathered in to the National Park System but there is a single three hundred acre parcel for sale. I wonder if the brawny guy I’ve been talking to would be interested in ranching and raising a gaggle of kids among the red rock canyons of Utah, but this is a nonsensical line of thinking that I chuckle off as I bring my attention back to the road right in time to see a sign for petroglyphs up ahead. (I will write about these in more detail in a future post).

I stop to admire the 2,000-year-old petroglyphs carved onto the red rock and just seeing these carvings drops me into deep time—the time we culturally can’t remember but has shaped so much of our physiology.

When traveling with dogs, National Parks can be tricky to navigate. With the dogs, you trade the back country scrambles for the more pedestrian and tourist-addled places as dogs are restricted to paved trails, roads, and parking lots. In The Needles, this essentially means that the dogs are in the truck for most of the day and my visit to the park is restricted to a six-mile driving tour and a few short hikes I can take as the dogs wait patiently in the backseat. Fortunately, they are well exercised from our morning excursion and the temperature is mild.

Even from the roadside, the canyons of Utah are extraordinary. I stop at nearly every stop along that six-mile drive and take as many short hikes as I can with the dogs in the car. We spend several hours in the park driving, taking photographs, and sitting in the abundance of beauty and silence. I am deeply moved by all I have seen when we eventually exit the park in the early afternoon.

The day is still young and I have scoped out, with the assistance of a very attractive young Park Ranger, several spots of interest including a large chunk of BLM land just north of the park. I asked the enthusiastic (and did I mention handsome? Yes, I did, but it’s worth mentioning again) young ranger about the area and he gave it a solid recommendation. BLM land has no restrictions on dogs and few on camping, so we set out to The Needles Overlook which is another 20 mile drive off Highway 191.

The road to the Overlook was not very impressive, mostly sweeping grassland, though there was a gradual incline that only became evident in the last few miles of the drive. I began to spot canyon views near the end of the drive and scouted several campsites but they were all taken. Once we got to the Overlook, a stone structure built on the cliffside with expansive views in all directions, there was only one other person there. I leashed the dogs and got out to see what we could see. And, oh wow, were the views ever stunning.

The scale of this land became evident from here and it was truly massive. On the highway, in the middle of all that land, it’s hard to grasp just how vast the wilderness around you truly is. You need to get some elevation to really appreciate the views and from the overlook the view was one of the most remarkable I’ve experienced.

One thing that all contemporary explorers will tell you in the West is that if you find one of those amazing, beautiful places that has managed to stay hidden from the crowds, you best keep it to yourself. In the age of Instagram, these places have gotten fewer and farther between, so out of respect for that principle I will not tell you where we ventured, and camped, next. Instead, I’ll show you some of the views and tell you that what we found was a campsite, on the side of a high cliff, with views that rival if not surpass those of the Grand Canyon. The best part was, the rock road leading to the campsite kept people away. That night after making camp we walked a mile in both directions from the camp without seeing another soul. Mine was the only fire that lit the mesa that night. The view was extraordinary, and even in twenty years of traveling the West, it genuinely surprised and delighted me.

After an exquisite sunset, I put the dogs to bed in the tent and had a few beers by the fire looking up at the night sky. By the time I turn in, I am exhausted from the heat and the hikes and the driving. In the dark of my tent I smile, realizing that this has been one of the very best days of travel I’ve experienced. Tomorrow, I’d be content just to stay at the site all day and read and take in the view, but tomorrow is also Beltane and another idea is brewing.

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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 of dirt switchbacks that climb straight up the side of the mesa, crookeder than a televangelist. 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 but most of the 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, and I pull onto it and bring the truck to a stop to scout the “road” ahead. We discover a fire ring in the tree line, set along the slide-rock, and below the rocks a small valley where cottonwoods populate a dry desert wash. This is where we’re making camp.

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 is a fortuitous decision, for I have no idea how much better the trip is about to become.

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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.

Turn Signal

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.

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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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4 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 Peaks: 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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