Luxagraf: Topographical Writings

Autumn Light

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 07:32:16 -0500

Every place has its season. Spring in the South. Summer in the Rockies. Winter on a tropical isle. Here in the north our season is Autumn. The color in the leaves is part of it, that's what outsiders come for, but there's more to it.

The Autumn air is crisper, lighter, clearer. The sun's rays seem to pass through easier, and they're warmer in tone, the light too is clear and crisp. It's a season of contrasts, warm oranges and reds stand out against crisp blue skies, deep green grass lingering in meadows, and sullen blue gray storm clouds.

Gray-white frost trims wrinkled fallen leaves at dawn. The smell of wood smoke mingles with the earthy damp of the forest floor after a cold rain. The dry warmth of the wood stove crackling in the morning melts the archipelago of ice crystals that spent the night climbing the window in front of my desk.

While the calendar might have fixed dates, in reality Autumn is fleeting, a four to six week span, depending on the year. Around Halloween, the cold deepens and the first snows come. The kids have had to adjust their choice of costumes to heavier, warmer clothing to brave Halloween's chill.

The first snow arrived on November 11. A few inches to play in and then it melted away during a week of warmer temperatures. But something changes after the first snow, the light grows colder, it loses the warm tones of autumn and becomes harsher, sharper. You can see it at sunset and sunrise, the division of color, blue and orange is starker.

With the second snow winter settles in, calendar be damned. The color drains out of the land, lingering only in the sky at dawn and dusk, which come earlier and earlier as the march to the solstice deepens. It's in these depths of winter that the maps come out and plans are laid. It is time to go. Where? Anywhere. Everywhere.

The North Shore, Part II

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 09:51:49 -0500

A couple weeks after Olivia and I went to the north shore, Lilah decided she wanted to do a similar trip. The weather had turned much colder by then, reminding me why we used to head south long before now. I dug out the heavy sleeping bags and we bundled up for what was likely the last camping trip of the year. Even if we were willing to brave the snow and cold, all the campgrounds would soon be closed.

It was a bright clear day, at least when we started out. The air was crisp but it was warm in the golden early morning light.

We skipped Hawk Ridge and Duluth entirely this time and went straight to a pie shop, which is about the only place around Gooseberry Falls to get lunch. Betty’s Pies in Two Harbors claims to be world famous for its titular pies.

I like tiny shops in out of the way places that call themselves world famous. I've always found it amusing that in many European countries you can't claim to be world famous, that would be false advertising (potentially, most likely anyway). It's funny because, well of course these places aren't world famous. Betty's is a little pie shop on the remote northern shore of Minnesota, the vast majority of the world doesn't even realize there's a state in America called Minnesota, let alone that it has a pie shop somewhere. But here in states there's no one telling you can't claim to be world famous if you want to. I guess we just have bigger grains of salt in these parts.

World famous or not, Betty's was packed on a rainy, overcast day in late October. We waited 45 minutes for a table. We ended up with salads since there wasn't much else on the menu we could eat. We followed those up with some slices of pie. The pie wasn't half bad. I bet someone up the road in Canada has heard of Betty's, so world famous it is (hey, if it counts for the World Series, it counts for pies). Later we learned that the Rustic Inn Cafe apparently has better pies. Future exploration is warranted.

Somewhere between salad and pie the sky clouded over and what little warmth there had been in the day disappeared. Our plan to hike around Gooseberry Falls sounded rather cold and forlorn. After debating what to do for a bit, we decided to abandon the lakeshore and drive up into the north woods. Just outside of Ely (pronounced Elee, should you ever find yourself in the area) there's a wolf sanctuary that Lilah had been wanting to visit for as long as we've been coming up here. For one reason or another we'd never made it, but after making some phone calls to ensure it was still open, we headed north.

The land north of the lake quickly changes from the red iron of the shoreline area to rougher, rockier terrain with granite outcrops and boulder fields where the glaciers long ago laid down stones like a child emptying a pocket full of pebbles. This area has a more alpine feel to it, which reminded me of the Sierra Nevada. It's rugged, rough landscape that's hard to drive though -- you want to get out and explore, no matter how cold it might be. I can see why people love the boundary waters, which begins not far north of Ely.

There were a disconcerting number of what looked like dying pine trees on the drive, all turned yellow. But there are a lot of dead pines around these days so I didn't think much of it at first. Then the forest became thick with these yellow trees. I'd never seen anything like it before. We stopped to check them out and realized they weren't dying, they were changing color. I'm not sure why, but a word popped in my head: Larch.

I still don't know how or where I came up with Larch. Most Americans would call them Tamarack if they know of them at all, but most of us don't because they only really grow in Northern Minnesota and a few spots in the very northern Rockies and New England. There are two species in the U.S., the ones around here are Larix laricina.

The striking feature of the Larch is that it's a deciduous conifer, its needles turns yellow every fall and then drop off when the first snows arrive.

The wolves proved less striking than the Larch, opting to remain in their den sleeping for the duration of our visit. We still haven't seen the wolves at the wolf sanctuary. Afterward we wandered around Ely for a little while, marveling at the massive stacks of canoes in winter storage, which seem to be piled all over town. After a stop at a disappointing bookstore we decided it was time to find somewhere to camp.

Car camping this time of year in these parts is challenging. Very little is open. We tried to ask at the forest service center in Ely, but it was closed for a government shutdown or something of that nature. Not having a ton of options, we set out for a campground a little ways out of town which should have still been open, according to the map anyway.

Why would you close something at the end of a road like this? What is the point?

Things started out promising. The road quickly turned to dirt, then to more of a double track through the woods, before finally ending at a campground on a lake. Which was closed.

I considered camping their anyway. It was unlikely anyone would be checking up on the place on a Sunday night in October, and we didn't need anything more than a parking spot for the night. But in the end we decided to drive back down to Gooseberry Falls, not so much because we were worried about camping in a closed campground, but because it was supposed to be about 10-15 degrees warmer down by the lake.

An hour later we were back at Lake Superior in a campsite at Gooseberry Falls. It was moderately warmer. We made a small fire and cooked some steak and potatoes. Later we sat around the fire, talking and staring up at the stars. But it wasn't long before we hit the familiar point every cold weather camper knows, where your front is warm from the fire, but your back is cold. Soon you're to shivering on one side, sweating on the other. The only real solution is to crawl in your sleeping bag and dream of summer.

The North Shore

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 12:22:29 -0400

This year marks the year I have now spent more of my life out of California than in it. Still when someone says, "the north shore," I think, as anyone from California does, of Hawaii, Oahu, surfing, Pipeline. Old habits die hard.

Where I live now "the north shore" means something very different -- the north shore of Lake Superior. Most of Superior's northern shore is in Canada, but there is a stretch in Minnesota, which is typically what people here mean when they say they went to "the north shore".

In these parts that phrase has nothing to do with surfing, evoking instead images of summer cottages, hunting lodges, canoe trips, and ice caves in the winter. Technically there are some surfers over there. A hardy few. Poor bastards.

I made a series of trips up to the north shore this fall with my daughters. Separate trips to make up for a longer bikebacking adventure that didn't happen. I've been interested in returning to the north shore since we came up here briefly back in 2018. I wish we'd had more time to explore back then, but we had to head south to catch a plane to Mexico.

The north shore is a funny little place, a midwestern tourist playground frozen in time. Much of what we saw back int 2018 looked as I imagine it did in the 1970s and 80s, and nothing much as changed since.

Both trips started in Duluth, the first at Hawk Ridge, which sits on the hill above the city.

The name comes from the migrating raptors that pass by every fall, on their way from the Arctic to South America. Raptors aren't big fans of flying over large bodies of water (nothing to eat). When they head south from the Arctic, rather than cross Lake Superior like smaller birds do, the raptors go around, skirting along the north shore until they get to Duluth. At the end of the lake they find dry land and turn south again, flying over Hawk Ridge in the process. At the peak of fall migration, thousands of hawks, eagles, falcons, and other raptors pass over Hawk ridge every day.

The day Olivia and I were there was dull and overcast, but there was enough wind that we saw a few dozen birds in the hour we were there, including a somewhat rare (in these parts) peregrine falcon. It was fun to see the birds, but it was surprisingly crowded and weirdly commercial, completely with a trailer selling souvenirs. I'm sure the money helps do good things to preserve the place, but it still felt like seeing money changers in the temple. I think in our heads the phrase "hawk ridge" implied someplace a little more quiet and wild, which it is not. After about an hour, we hit the road, headed north again.

The drive out of Duluth very quickly leaves the current world behind and slips back into something that still looks like the middle of the 20th century, which was the last time the area was heavily developed. That's not to say that it's a pristine wilderness up here. It's not, but the tourism is of that older, less all-consuming form.

It's definitely got a history of it though. Tourism in these parts dates back to the end of the Civil War, when the locks at the other end of Superior were built. That allowed steamships onto the lake, which brought a flood of people from the east. They'd come on holiday to Duluth by steamship, and then go by canoe up the North Shore, staying in hunting lodges and cottage resorts. Many of those resorts and lodges are still here, remodeled, but very similar to what they once were. In the 1920s the road came, which opened up the area to the automobile, but also inspired the creation of several state parks, including where we spent the weekend, Gooseberry Falls State Park.

The namesake falls are one of many rivers that flow into Superior from the north, cascading over the weirdly red iron rock of the north shore. I did not bring a compass to test it, but navigation by magnet is tough in these parts. A few miles north of here is another state park preserving Split Rock lighthouse, which exists in part to help with problems caused by compass deflection from all the iron in the rock. From what I've read, the magnet deflection from the ore could throw off compasses by as much as 8 degrees -- not good if you're on a ship, trying to avoid the shore.

It was strange to drive into a campground and not be in the bus. For seven years this was our life on the road: show up somewhere new, pull into a campground, dump the tanks, find a good spot, and head out to explore that niche of the world. This time we drove right on by the dump station and never once had to check to see if we were going to hit the trees overhead. It was a bittersweet reminder that this isn't what we do anymore.

We set up camp and ate ice cream while listening to a baseball game on the radio. Later in the evening, when the dinner fire had burned down and before we started a fire for the night, we went for a walk along the rocky shore of the lake. It was cool, but not cold and breeze felt strangely tropical. If you squinted in the low light the distant trees took on a tropical appearance and you could almost believe you were on the volcanic shores of some south pacific isle.

The next day we were up early. Sleeping in the back of a modern vehicle leaves much to be desired, especially if your frame of reference is a much larger vehicle. That said, it was nice not to have to pack up a wet tent on what turned out to be a foggy morning. And some of these plush luxury camping pads they make these days really do feel almost like sleeping at home in your bed. At least that's what they tell me, it's been many years since I slept in anything resembling what most people call a bed.

Some things remain true from the very beginning of our seven year long odyssey and will continue to be true for ever after: the best thing to do first thing out of bed is go outside, breakfast is better when you cook it over an open fire, and the worst part of any trip is still going "home" -- a word that has a very different meaning for me than most people perhaps. After all this time, home for me really is out here, in the land. Where Olivia and I went later on, after the fog burned off and the midday sun glinted off the deep Autumn blue of the lake, where we went is just another campsite on one of many long journeys around the sun.

In the Time of The Juncos

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 09:42:10 -0400

Autumn comes in on the coattails of a storm, a cool wind chasing clouds. Humidity breaks, there's a colder edge to mornings and evenings. Yellow and red leaves sprout in clusters, and a gradual panorama of color sweeps across the horizon of trees.

It's a time of contrasts and colors, red set against green, yellow leaves, blue sky. Around here it's a time of storms as well. One day it's warm air with a thunderstorm, the next bitter cold and drizzling rain. The wind comes in and doesn't stop for days, knocking down the leaves as quick as they change color.

The original inhabitants of this area did not use a calendar as such, but they did name moons. I don't know all the names, but if I were following their lead, I would name this October moon for the dark-eyed juncos that start to arrive in great flocks. Dark-eyed juncos are grayish birds this time of year, having traded their flashier summer feathers for a muted winter look. They invade the grassy fields around town, flashing white tail feathers as they dart and hover, picking food off the ground.

You see them most often at the side of the road, a startled flock sent into flight by the approaching rush of your car. A spray of white tail feathers darting away into the cover of trees.

For several weeks a flock of 30 or 40 juncos inhabits the small stretch of grass in front of the large windows where I sit in the mornings, drinking coffee, watching the sunrise.

In the past we've followed the juncos south to where their migration stops, around North Carolina in the east. This year autumn rolled around and we had no way to leave. The school bus sits, still unfinished. The Travco sits, needing brakes, and a new exhaust manifold (among other things). There are only so many hours in the day, so many days in the summer.

This summer the focus was making the somewhat ramshackle house we bought, less ramshackle. That's a slow process, though I did get a new room added for my daughter.

I knocked down walls, moved doors, re-routed wires, built walls and added doors. I even learned how to hang drywall and have it look halfway decent (thanks VancouverCarpenter). All of which was fun -- I like building things -- but none of which gave us a vehicle to travel in this fall.

And even that small room is not done. There is still trim and molding to add, a ceiling fan to hang. And that's just one room. There are whole other rooms to finish. It's a big project, stretching many years into the future, and nowhere in the process will we end up with a vehicle to travel in. That will take a separate effort, which will require carving out time to do it.

I wanted to be here, with the juncos. Sitting in the dunes, digging my toes in warm sand:

Instead I sit by the big windows in the morning, drinking my coffee, sketching plans, watching the juncos in the grass. Everyday there are fewer until one day I get up and there are none, just the wind sweeping through the empty trees, the rattle of dry leaves dragging across the ground.

Regatta

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 07:58:22 -0400

My daughter Olivia spent the vast majority of her summer sailing on Lake Superior. Roughly eight hours a day, five days a week for seven weeks, she taught kids from eight to eighteen how to sail.

Technically she helped teach. There are adults in charge. Her sister helped as well, though not the whole time. She also loves sailing, but is less fond of younger kids who don't listen. All my children have a low tolerance for people who lack self-discipline, something juijitsu and wrestling instilled in them from such a young age that to lack it is mystifying to them.

Olivia is only 13, so she can't actually work in the state of Wisconsin. She is a volunteer, all she gets out of the experience is time out on the water, and, this year, the other instructors invited her to sail in the annual end of summer regatta.

The regatta is a triangular race around the upper portion of Chequamegon Bay. It starts at the beach by Thompson's West End boat launch, where she teaches, crosses the bay to the lighthouse, then comes back to a smokestack rock south of Washburn, and then back up to the start line. All total it's usually about 4-5 hours, depending on the wind. Last year I believe it was more like 10-11 hours owing to a lack of wind.

This year the morning of the race the wind was blowing so hard at our place up on the hill I was worried they might cancel the race. Luckily down by the shore there was less wind, but enough to make for a lively race. The same person has won the race the last three years because, well, he's a very good sailor and he has a fast boat (Laser). Olivia wasn't much interested in racing, she just wanted to spend another beautiful day on the water, which she got.

It was one of those gorgeous end-of-summer days we get around here, when the high tops out at about 80, and even that's only for an hour. The rest of the time it's 75 and sunny, with no humidity, and a little cloud cover to make sure you don't get baked in an open boat. I went down and watched them launch but regattas really aren't a good spectator sport.

Lilah and I went for a bike ride along the lake shore for a while, stopping every now and then to put our binoculars on the far shore of the bay, trying to figure out which boat was which. The orange foresail on Olivia's boat was visible from a surprising distance, but eventually we lost it against the far shoreline. We gave up and retreated to the coffeeshop for refreshments.

It was after noon when we headed back down and found that the very same Laser was once again on shore, having beat everyone by a good half hour. Olivia's boat came in third, just barely missing second.

The race marks the end of the sailing program that the girls helped out at, but they've joined Sea Scouts, so they're still sailing, just on a much bigger boat.

This year's regatta was a little bittersweet for me. Typically this has marked the end of summer for us, where we start making last minute repairs and getting the bus ready for the road. This year there was none of that. The school bus didn't get done this summer. Too many house projects got in the way. Our plans to head to the Outer Banks had to be shelved again.

I found myself later that day, after the boats from the regatta were packed away on a trailer, headed for winter storage, sitting down at the beach with the girls, staring out at the lake, wondering what comes next.

How I Develop Photos With Darktable

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 11:59:37 -0400

There are several tools out there to develop camera RAW files into printable images, some of them are shockingly expensive. Fortunately, I have found I get the best image results using Darktable to process my RAW files. Darktable is free and open source, but it can be overwhelming at first. I've been using it to process my RAW files for 10 years now, and I thought I'd put together a short guide to how I do it. Before we dive in, make sure you have read the first tutorial on how Darktable works and how I set it up.

I hate staring at a computer screen, so much of my workflow is focused on speed. As I noted in the first tutorial, there are many ways to do things in Darktable. This is not the right way to develop your RAW images, it's just my way of developing RAW images.

Note that Darktable is updated twice a year and things do change. I find new tricks from time to time too so this is a continuously evolving workflow. I will keep this guide updated to reflect both changes in Darktable and changes in my own workflow.

Step 1: Crop, Rotate, and Lens Correction

The first thing I do is turn on the Lens Correction module. This will fix any vignetting and lens distortion. I shoot with adapted lenses occasionally though, so sometimes there's no profile to correct. Sometimes if something is real bad I'll mess with it by hand, but usually if there's no profile for my lens I just skip this step.

Next up I do any cropping I want to do with the Crop module, and fix crooked horizons with the Rotate and Perspective module. When it makes sense anyway. Sometimes a tilted horizon is part of the story, so don't just do this stuff without thinking about it first.

Step 2: Exposure and White Balance

I tend to underexpose when shooting digital. It's easier to bring up the dark areas than recover blown highlights. Unless I am trying to blow the highlights, I underexpose my images by at least a stop. My first step then is to use the Exposure module to increase the exposure. I never touch anything else in this module, just slide the exposure up until I get the image where I want it.

Move the exposure slider until you have the overall image brightness where you want it.

Once exposure is dialed in how I want it, I move to the Color Correction module to work on white balance. I start by hitting the little eyedropper, which looks at the image, runs some kind of algorithm and makes a stab at adjusting the white balance. I am almost never happy with the results of the eyedropper, so I tweak the chroma slider to where I want it, usually warmer than what the algorithm picked. Occasionally I mess with the hue slider, but not very often.

If there is something in the image that you know is pure white then you can hit the eyedropper and select just that portion of the image.

Hit the eyedropper and see how it does, adjust the chroma slider as needed.

As an aside, I never shoot with my camera set to Auto White Balance. I always shoot at about 6500-7000K for white balance. I don't want to record an abstractly correct color rendering, I want to record what I saw, and this generally matches what I see. Consequently I often just leave the white balance where the camera set it (the default in Darktable).

Step 3: Color and Contrast

The next place I go is the AgX module, which was added in Darktable 5.4. It has largely replaced three modules for me and sped up my workflow quite a bit.

I generally only need to tweak a couple of things in the AgX panel (which is quite large and somewhat complex -- most of it I ignore). The main sliders I adjust are the contrast and shoulder power. The first handles overall contrast and second increases contrast in the lighter parts of the image. Sometimes I use a little toe power, which handles contrast in the dark parts of the image, but generally I just need the first two. Then I bump the saturation a little, I find about 115% is good.

A typical use of the AgX module, slight increase to contrast, shoulder and toe power, along with a little saturation.

That's usually enough to get what I want. Occasionally, for some images I will play with the dynamic range scaling slider, but that's been rare so far.

By now the exposure, white balance and basic color look should be roughly as I want them. 90 percent of the time, I am done. I almost never sharpen images (are you kidding me? Digital sensors are so sharp already I don't need anything sharper),

AgX has largely eliminated what I used to do with color contrast, but sometimes I do use the Color Balance RGB module to increase color contrast or desaturate a sky. Head to the bottom of the first tab, to the perceptual brilliance grading, and slightly increase the highlights slider and decrease the shadows to add some color contrast. That's all I do here.

Rarely used anymore, but this is how I tweak things in the Color Balance RGB module.

If you'd like a greater understanding of how AgX works and some of the color theory that's going on, as well as more practical examples of how to use it, check out Boris Hajdukovic's excellent overview video.

Step 4: Touch Up

Once I have the image looking more or less the way I want it, I use the retouch module to fix any sensor spots or other blemishes (I change lenses a fair bit so dust gets on the sensor). I'll also toggle Denoise (profiled) at this point, and if there are any chromatic issues, Chromatic Aberrations. Most of the time I leave these at the default, but sometimes I back off the Preserve Shadows slider in Denoise.

The last thing I do, on the rare image that needs it, is sharpen with the Diffuse or Sharpen module. I use a couple presets, the main one you can see in the screenshot below.

And that's it. I then export a JPG and either post it here on luxagraf or, more often, print it in some way shape or form (lately I've been making more books).

Step 5: Other Things I Sometimes Do

While that covers the 90 percent use case, sometimes I do use the Tone Equalizer module to lift shadows. Tone Equalizer can be confusing. Here's what I do. Go to the middle tab, Advanced, and click the wand next to Mask Exposure Compensation. This will shift the mask so that the tones are centered and easier to work with. A good bit of the time the wand alone is enough, but if you have clipping (it'll show as orange over on the highlight side), just decrease the mask exposure compensation slider to bring it back away from that edge. Now you can adjust the linear curve to raise the shadows. You can also move your cursor over the parts of the image you want to change and use the scroll wheel to lighten that area directly from the image (the cursor changes to a target symbol and shows you the current exposure setting).

Note the mask adjustments I've made and the way the cursor show the exposure. Scroll your mouse to change the exposure of that tone, or use the graph to adjust.

The only other modules I use are the LUT module when I want to get a specific film look, Negadoctor when I am working with film scans, and finally, if I am making a black and white image, I usually do that using a combination of the Color Calibration module and some LUTs, but that's complicated enough that it deserves its own post.

There you have it then. I would say on average this process takes me 30 seconds to 2 minutes per image, heavily weighted toward the 30 second side of the scale. It's still a bit of work, and there are plenty of times that I use JPGs straight out of the camera (especially from my Fujifilm x70), but when an image needs a little work, this is how I do it. I hope maybe this can help other people get going with Darktable. If you have questions drop a comment below.

Change of Pace

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 09:36:40 -0400

The first year we lived in the Travco we criss-crossed the country, covering almost 8,000 miles in just over eighteen months. That kind of pace is only possible when you are 100 percent traveling. Trying to work and move that fast is unsustainable. At least with my job.

I've been thinking about this lately because for over a year now we have covered exactly zero miles, which is also unsustainable. We've tried many points in between, which I've written about before, but to my mind, never quite found a pace that suited us.

As much as I loved traveling in the Travco, I was always haunted by a line from Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire: "You can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe."

I've found this to be more or less literally true. The speed at which you move through the world determines what you see in it. And that you must suffer to really understand.

However, I don't think this means that you don't see anything when you move fast. You see differently -- snapshots, glimpses, like reflections in a passing window, a skimmer dipping its beak in the water. Moving slower you see more detail perhaps, but you lose those fleeting, half-caught moments of magic that are difficult to put in words. It is good to do both, though lately, being stuck in one place for the summer, I've been focused on the slower end of the spectrum. When you're not moving at all, everything seems fast, even moving slowly.

It might be a disappointment to Edward Abbey, but I haven't been walking. I've been riding a bike. The more I ride, the more I think, this is a really great speed to see the world. Perhaps the perfect speed if you've got the time.

It's not so fast that everything rushes by, but it's fast enough that you can cover, 40, 60, 80 miles a day, depending on terrain and elevation change, and physical capability. Perhaps not coincidentally, it's often about the same speed as sailing, although alas you cannot ride you bike at night while sleeping. Sailing has its advantages. The best speed might be sailing with a bike when in port... but we're not there yet.

In the mean time I've been exploring the dirt roads of the peninsula around us.

The more riding I've done with the kids, and we haven't done much, just some exploratory afternoons, testing bikes, testing gear, testing ourselves, but the more we do it the more I think maybe I should never have stopped traveling by bike. I mean as a kid. I would never have phrased it that way, but when I think about my childhood, I realize that a lot of it revolved around going places on a bike.

From as early as I can remember, going anywhere meant riding my bike. When I was my son's age I'd ride my bike down to the Castaways, a local tract of vacant land in my neck of suburbia. It had a cluster of Eucalyptus trees that offered shade in the summer, and from mid way up, a view of the sea. The surrounding field was full of gophers, lizards and snakes, and plenty of jumps for our BMX bikes. It's all houses now. That's how childhoods in California go.

I started going farther and farther afield as I got a little older, got a bigger bike. By the time I was my daughters' age my friends and I would ride down to the beach and body surf, or surf if we could find someone with a board. When I was a little older I started going alone. I learned a lot from these journeys. I learned how to be comfortable alone, surrounded by strangers. I learned most people are helpful. I learned to bring snacks.

Then I got a car and stopped using the bike to explore.

Damn it Ed, you're right. You've got to get out of the contraption. I don't think I even thought of riding my bike anywhere after I had the car.

I don't think I thought much about riding a bike again until my kids got bikes and I had to keep up somehow. A friend of mine gave me an old Diamond Back mountain bike from the 90s when we were out at the cabin in South Carolina and I started riding it with the kids when we hit the road again in 2021. It's a heavy thing, the gears are rusted out. It's slow. In the beginning that was good, it meant I wasn't much faster than the kids. But now they're faster than me, and certainly have better bikes.

When I had a chance to test a fancy Specialized hardtail mountain bike for work, I jumped on it. What a bike that was. Having 29+ wheels was a revelation. I understand how people ride these things all day. And while I only had 2.4 tires on it, it wasn't hard to imagine how comfortable and nice it would be to have some 2.6 or even 3.0 tires. I was sold. Not really on the Specialized. It was too fancy for me, but on the idea of riding a bike again.

One day Elliott and I road out to a local lake where we stopped for a swim. I lay on the beach watching him out in the water thinking, this is really the perfect pace for travel, slow enough that you can stop and enjoy the land you're moving through, fast enough to be able to cover large distances.

You're also much closer to the reality of the world on a bike -- the weather, nature, whatever you want to call it. When you're on a bike, there's nowhere to hide, no shelter, you're much more in it. The heat, the sun, the rain, the dirt, the cold. You're closer to the raw parts of life. Sometimes you suffer. Sometimes it is hard, but Ed is right, you have to crawl through the thornbush and cactus to really see anything. Life isn't supposed to be easy.

These are the animal parts of life, the parts you can't control, the parts that force you to endure, to adapt, to change your plans, the parts that remind you that you are a tiny thing in an immense universe. Tiny, but still a part of it. In it. Remembering that to exist at all is a miracle. These are the moments that remind you you are alive.

We came home and started looking into how to travel by bike. This is always how things start. Curiosity. How do you.... And then there are evenings spent staring at the edges of the map. That little dirt road, where does it go...? There's only one way to find out.

Fireworks

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 13:35:10 -0400

Midsummer heat with no air conditioning. Cars packed full of paddleboards and floats. Sunscreen slicks trail swimmers through the shallows.

Afternoons are a haze of Canadian wildfire skies, a world seen through gauze, prematurely pink and orange in the evenings.

Summer here starts on the 4th. Tourists descend in minivans pulling trailers far exceeding sane weight capacities. Beaches swell with sunburnt bodies. Every left turn is a trial of patience.

Locals skip the 4th. Skip the crowds, go for the fireworks show across the peninsula, on the 5th. I'm a stranger here myself, but over the hills and through the woods to another beach we go. And on the 5th, a reprieve from the smoke. The skies clear a little. The smoke we smell is from fires you can see and roast marshmallows beside, no more flood tide of bad forestry policy choking the air -- at least for a day.

Waning light, cold water. The sun slowly sinks away behind the horizon. Children come in shivering, keep going back out, unable to waste the warmth of summer evenings.

Sticks On Dirt

Wed, 21 May 2025 16:59:15 -0400

I think we've always know that if we got ourselves another patch of dirt with some sticks on it, it'd be in one of a handful of very small places. The short list was, in the order we visited them: Apalachicola FL, Mancos CO, Washburn WI, and the Outer Banks NC (especially Okracoke Island).

These places all share one thing: they're at the fringes of the world, a bit off the map and outside the collective consciousness of the country. Life in all of these places is distinctly different than anywhere else, and it takes a certain kind of person to live in them. When you do the land stamps itself on you.

These places all have routine hardship. Mancos and Washburn have long, hard winters¹, Apalachicola and the Outer Banks have the ever-present threat of hurricanes. Hardships like these make life more interesting. They make you feel alive.

In the end, we landed in Washburn. This is where the kids made friends and that was the deciding factor. If I were picking for myself, I might have chosen Apalachicola. Maybe Mancos. Well, truth be told, I would keep traveling, but Corrinne and the kids wanted to stay in one place for a while, have something more stable.

I think we were all finally tired of living in the bus. Last spring, after crawling out from under the bus, soaked in gasoline, having changed the fuel pump for the 4th time in 8 years, I found myself thinking, is this really an adventure or has it become more of a routine pain in the ass?

You could say that's a small price to pay for being able to live on the road, and in some ways that's true, but in others it isn't. No matter how good I get at fixing the bus -- and I'm not very good at it -- I'm never going to stop needing to fix it. And I was tired of fixing it. When you're fixing the same things over and over again, that's not fun, that's the kind of routine that travel is supposed to free you from.

That was only my experience though. For everyone else the problem was that the big blue bus had become the small blue bus. Living in such cramp quarters just wasn't fun anymore. It was no hardship to live in a small space with five people when three of them were under the age of 6. Now that there are two teenagers and a 10-year-old boy it just wasn't big enough for us.

We'd already decided to build out a school bus so we'd have more room. It has beds that we don't have to make and unmake everyday. There's a kitchen big enough for two to cook in, an oven that works, and 10 extra feet of storage. It's enough room for us. While getting Lyme slowed me down, the plan was still to move into it this summer, right up until the end of April when we found the house we ended up buying.

From a few months ago, starting on the kitchen and bathroom.

We still have the school bus, we can continue to travel, but when we're in the Washburn area, we'll have a house rather than having to stay in Memorial Park or rent a cabin. As the one member of the family who has never liked camping in Memorial Park, I might be the happiest about that part.

It just doesn't make sense to live in an RV if you aren't traveling in it. They're small and cramped, you always have to fill and empty the tanks. The payoff is when you end up somewhere new all the time. If you aren't doing that, and we haven't been, at least not in the summer for the past three years, then it makes more sense to live in a house in the place you want to be.

One day this spring Corrinne was out walking and saw a house for sale that fit just about everything we wanted. It had a little land (5 acres, with some ponds), but was still only a 10 minute bike ride from the center of town, so the kids can have their independence.

It's the sort of house that really only we would like. It's oddly laid out, curiously half-finished, painted with murals and other oddities -- the last thing in the world retirees from the city would ever want (the main buyers up here). For us it's like a blank slate we can build to suit our needs. It needs some work for sure, but we're used to that. We found it, knew it was right for us, and made an offer the next day. It was accepted, and we moved in 45 days later.

We still plan to travel. Me especially, since travel is central to everything I enjoy doing: exploring the world and sharing my experiences in words and photos. The main difference is that now we'll have a home base, a place where my wife and kids can feel a bit more stable.

At least they used to. I suspect that is mostly a thing of the past, but we shall see. ↩

Fields of the Mind

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 13:05:09 -0400

[Baseball] is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. -- A. Bartlett Giamatti

I grew up a baseball fan. As a kid I both played and watched baseball. To this day I can name the entire LA Dodgers lineup from about 1982-1986. I don't play anymore, beyond throwing the ball with my son, but I still love to watch baseball, and he loves to play.

We went to a minor league game down in Florida a few years ago, the Blue Wahoos, and we stopped by the baseball hall of fame during our trip through upstate New York in 2023. Most of our baseball though has either been Elliott playing on the Washburn little league team or watching it on TV.

I have mixed feelings about professional baseball, or at least Major League Baseball. On one hand it has become such a blatant money grabbing machine that whatever soul baseball might have once had, it seems to have left the MLB. The MLB seems to go out of its way to make going to a baseball game a truly horrendous experience, from the price of tickets to the ridiculous water seizures at the entrance. When we were at that minor league game there were signs all over the park apologizing because the MLB would not let them take cash anymore. I wrote then that only diehard fans would put up with the hassle and expensive of MLB games anymore.

I stand by that. And I think plenty of people agree. There's been a resurgence of independent leagues in the past decade, even as the MLB turns its back on more minor league teams. The MLB is more concerned with exclusive suites, ever higher ticket prices, and gambling, which together are its major sources of revenue. None of these should have anything to do with baseball.

We're lucky that there is an amateur baseball league in this area. Two of Elliott's coaches play and he goes to their games every chance he gets. I think that, combined with the games we've seen in our travels, everything from that minor league game in Florida to an Amish vs non-Amish game we stumbled on in Illinois, has given him a sense of the baseball magic that exists outside the money-driven, analytical game it has become in the MLB.

Still, if you're into baseball you want to see the best players in the world playing the game, and that's in the MLB.

For us, our "local" MLB team is about an even split between Minneapolis (Twins) and Milwaukee (Brewers), both about a four hour drive away. Since we've been to Milwaukee a couple of times, we decided to head down to explore Minneapolis and catch a Twins game.

We've been to Minneapolis twice, but all we ever did was spend the night at a hotel by the airport and fly out the next day. This time we drove all around the city, seeing the sights a little bit in between stops at all the hobby shops Elliott had discovered using Google Earth.

Prior to the game I couldn't have told you a single player on the Twins. Even now I only know one or two names. I'm not, and probably never will be, a Twins fan. If you put a Twins game on TV I wouldn't bother to watch, but that's the odd thing about going to the ballpark -- it doesn't really matter. The experience of baseball transcends that.

For all my misgivings about the MLB, baseball itself remains the only game I have ever cared about. It's the best game. For many reasons, but I think much of it lies with the rules, the constraints that surround it. Given the right constraints, artistry always emerges.

Consider the pace of baseball, which is perfect, not too fast, not to slow. The rules of the game are simple enough to grasp at a glance, and, perhaps most importantly, the outcome of a game is never certain until the final pitch.

Then there's the length of the baseball "season", which as Giamatti says in the quote above, is actually perfectly timed to three seasons. It starts, everyone full of hope, in the spring, really comes into its own in summer, and then, the cold reality of October rolls around. Only one team wins the world series.

The rules of baseball can be slightly arcane in their edge cases, complex enough to allow for deep baseball nerdry if that's your thing, but the basics are simple enough that anyone can follow it. The rules and the structure of the game also make baseball the fairest game you can play. There's no clock to run down. You can't hold the ball, or dribble off to the side and wait things out. You have to throw the ball over the plate and give the other team their chance just as they did for you, and every time the ball crosses the plate the fate of the game can change.

Baseball is also never a one-superstar game. No matter how many home runs your big slugger hits, he only comes to bat 4, maybe 5, times a game. No matter how many people your star pitcher can strike out, he only pitches once every 5 games. A single star player might be able to carry a game every now and then, but a single player cannot carry a team for a whole season. You have to have a team.

Perhaps my favorite thing about baseball though is that the most unlikely of players can win a ballgame. The guy who hasn't hit the ball in 25 games straight can nevertheless come to the plate in the bottom of the ninth and hit a home run that wins the game.

What really draws me in to baseball these days though, and I suspect this is true for most fans, is the narrative, the endless stories unfolding in real time. Every player has a story, which turns every game into a bigger story, which turns every series into a story, which turns every team into a story, and all these stories are constantly twisting and turning in unexpected ways as the season unfolds.

This, I think, is why listening on the radio is the best way to experience baseball if you can't make it to the game in person. The story comes across better on the radio, where there is no picture to distract you.

Baseball radio commentary is forever telling stories. In other sports commentators tend to use downtime, if there is any, to analyze plays. There might be some of that in a baseball broadcast, but it's always wrapped in stories -- about the players, about the game, about the team, even about the broadcasters¹. You get to know all these people, know their stories, good and bad. You know the story well enough to tell it yourself, and you do.

I also love that baseball doesn't take itself too seriously. If a team is down by 15 runs and doesn't want to waste its reserve pitchers on an obvious loss they might ask an infielder to pitch. The Dodgers did that earlier this year with Kiké Hernandez, who then proceeded to do impersonations of all the pitchers on his team, having a good time despite losing. Because at the end of the day, it is a game, the greatest of games perhaps, but still a game.

For people I have never met, I know an alarming amount about Vin Scully and Joe Castiglione. ↩