Mt. McLoughlin.

CENTRAL POINT, OR

My sister and I have reached the summit of this peak twice - both times on the Fourth of July. It sits roughly halfway between Medford and Klamath Falls with about 4500' of prominence. 

This sign sits near the boundary line between the cities of Gold Hill and Central Point. My aunt used to have  a house on Tolo Road (which crosses I-5 at an overpass barely visible in the distance in this photo, as the road curves out of view). This sign means I'm back in the Rogue Valley. It means I'm home. 

Also notable for being COMPLETELY INVISIBLE on clear summer days.

Firestorm.

SUNNY VALLEY, OR

This is between Glendale and Grants Pass on I-5. I've never been this close to a wildfire before. At least three other cars pulled over to the shoulder to take photos. The colors were incredible: browns, oranges, purples, even light yellows and greens. The sunlight through the the canopy of smoke was like a garish real-life Instagram filter.

Speaking of Instagram...

Close to the source.

From the median.

From the shoulder.

Infused with Luck.

COTTAGE GROVE, OR

Stopped at Buster's Main Street Cafe in this little burg just south of Eugene for lunch. They carry over 200 flavors of craft soda, and are apparently the only place on the west coast retailing Cheerwine, which is otherwise mostly a North Carolina thing. I had a monte cristo and a MacFuddy's pepper elixir. Tasty.

Dr. Pepper with waaaay more kick.

Special K.

BOISE, ID

"Do you want to rave with us, man?"

I'm a little mystified. "What, here in the car?"

"Uh huh, hyeah!" The kid is Beavis and Butt-Head rolled into one, with a top knot and fuzzy pink terrycloth socks... or are they shoes? Whatever they are, they're disgusting. I figure 'rave' in this instance is colorful slang for hijacking the aux cable to listen to shitty EDM.

"Sure. Let's rave." I surrender my stereo to his favorite DJ, praying it will be marginally less insufferable than having a conversation with him.

I've been riding with and giving rides to people for at least six or seven years. The worst thing that's happened to me in that time is personalities not clicking and spending the ride in silence. I'm selective (it's Craigslist) and can usually weed out the obvious basket cases. If it came down to it, I would have no problem kicking a troublemaker out of my car. So I feel pretty safe about it.

These kids were 19 (him) and 22 (her), going to party in Portland for the weekend. After a rest stop near the border, the guy claims shotgun and starts getting weird.

"Where are we?"

We've just passed a sign: Portland 258 miles.

"Did you see the sign?"

"Yeah but where are we?" He's bobble-heading, eyes glazed. His girlfriend is quiet in the back. "Where are we, man? Where are we?" He asks me some variation on this only 827 more times throughout the trip.

He asks me if I like ketamine. I think he's talking about some dumb band and continue ignoring him. He asks me if I'm actually driving. He points to the Wallowas and wonders aloud if they are, in fact, mountains. He points to a wheat field as we crest a hill and asks if it's the ocean. He tries to ruffle my hair playfully. I slap his hand away.

I'm long onto them by now and beyond annoyed. I consider dumping them by the side of the road and keeping their $50 gas contribution for the hassle. But I don't. Why, I'm not sure. I don't even bother lecturing them about their dumbassery. But the miles to Portland are the loooooongest I've driven on this trip so far.

Ketamine, it turns out, is used as a horse tranquilizer, among other things. Weed is an understandable vice. Tripping balls on "Special K" in a stranger's car is unacceptably bad etiquette and just stupid as fuck. If I were a sick bastard so inclined, I could have driven them off to a barn somewhere and easily had my way. Stupid.

Didn't spend much more than an hour in Boise before I had to pick these jokers up, but I ate at the Parilla Grill in Hyde Park and tried the Outlaw IPA from Payette Brewing. Pretty hoppy, but refreshing in the 103 degree heat.

No Man's Land.

WESTERN KANSAS

It's late. There's constant cloud-to-cloud lightning everywhere and gas stations nowhere. Nobody lives out here. It's terrifying.

We're 20-30 miles from empty. The little orange dash light comes on. Should have filled up in Salina after all.

Depeche Mode's Violator album thrums out of my Spotify app. It fits the apocalyptic hellscape perfectly.

We pull into a Sunmart travel plaza in Bunker Hill around one in the morning. It's an oasis of light and gas and caffeine amid the bleak, interminable nocturnal plains. The lightning has died down and now it's just dark. 

The cashier greets me with "Howdee do, kangaroo?" I don't know what to make of that, I'm feel so dead.

There are crappy porcelain Wizard of Oz knickknacks on the shelves everywhere, because oh yeah, Kansas. 

I'm spent. Nikita drives the last leg to Denver and I ride shotgun, sleeplessly.

A second bite of the Little Apple.

MANHATTAN, KS

Of all places, I never thought I'd come back here again. In 2009, my boss sent me to the Kansas Building Science Institute here to get a home energy rating certification. Weird.

We drove into Manhattan to say farewell to our German backpackers, one of whom had a cousin here who works at Ft. Riley. We got him to take this photo before we went our separate ways.

Nikita, me, Kara, and the Germans.

So. Much. Stuff.

So much better than Creep World.

ROCKY MOUNT, NC

Ryan and I spent two days out here while he did clinical nurse stuff at the local hospital. It's an entirely nondescript small town in eastern NC... but it does have Crepe World!

Crepe World is a gem of a local breakfast joint. I had the Savannah crepe with peaches and cream for under $5 made by the friendliest dude ever. So good. Go there.

First in Flight.

KILL DEVIL HILLS, NC

Today, I made a bucket list pilgrimage, and I can't help but share my all-time favorite dialogue from The Simpsons, when Sideshow Bob hijacks the Wright Flyer with Bart and attempts to kill Krusty.

Bob: "Ah, for the days when aviation was a gentleman's pursuit... before any Joe Sweatsock could wedge himself behind a lunch tray and jet off to Raleigh-Durham!"

Bart: "Are you getting lots of bugs in your mouth, too?"

Bob: "...Yes."

One of my first books described the exploits of the aviation greats, opening with a captivating chapter on the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. I wish I could remember the title. It was a well-worn volume with sparse black-and-white illustrations that must have been printed in the 60s, because the last person mentioned in it was Chuck Yeager. I loved that book.

Ryan and I rode to Rocky Mount in his car, which I took out to the Outer Banks, another 3 hours away. In 1903, they must have been desolate; now, the towns of Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills are touristy, at least during the summer. The Wright Brothers National Memorial particularly is brimming with tourists of the worst description: fat, sweaty, entitled shitheads unappreciative of a feat that ushered in the age of crossing the country in five miraculous hours. But fuck 'em. Maybe I'll come back in December. 

"Kill devil", by the way, was slang for rum in the late 19th century, when shipwrecks were more common. The sand dunes nearby, the same used by the Wrights to launch their gliders, proved useful for hiding salvaged casks. Hence the name.

Enter the Bull: Part One.

DURHAM, NC

Durham could be Portland circa 1991.

"Five years ago, you didn't go to Durham," a Couchsurfer named Elaine tells me.

I'm sitting at Cantina 18 in Raleigh with her, Ben, Annas, and Luis, core members of a local CS group that meets for weekly brunches.

"Unless you wanted to get shot," Ben adds.

Durham was synonymous with tobacco and textiles through the middle of the 20th century. Plaques and place names around town pay homage to that history. There's the American Tobacco redevelopment district, the Lucky Strike water tower, etc. Today, there are boutique donuts, a high-end whiskey bar, breweries, food trucks, and chefs approaching rock star status.

I got into town around 10pm on Friday night, taking state route 49 to avoid 12 miles of congestion on I-77 near Charlotte. The combination of my late departure from Columbia and the detour adds several hours to my original ETA. Route 49 runs through the Piedmont, some of the most bucolic scenery I've ever seen. Rolling hills, tranquil ponds, quaint barns. It could be the English countryside, and if it's what made James Taylor homesick, then I totally get it.

I stayed with my friend Ryan, who I met in Portland several years back and who is currently undergoing the crucible of Duke's nurse anesthesia program. So, he's learning the ins and outs of all sorts of compounds and gases that make you feel nothing. (Good friend to have.)

Saturday we go to Only Burger. I get this thing, which had fried green tomatoes and an egg. An egg! Nomnom, and so forth.

Carpe Durham.

After absorbing our meals, we played a tennis match at Oval Park. I handed Ryan a breadstick in the first set (6-1) but came closer in the second (7-5). Not to take anything from his victory, but it's the South. In July. SO. MUCH. SWEAT.

Sunday night, I met my friend Megan at the James Joyce. We worked together in Oregon until last July, when she returned here after the job didn't pan out as she envisioned. (We discovered the emoji below was suitable shorthand for a certain manager...)

We had a lot of catching up to do, and new exciting things to talk about. Megan is like the unofficial mayor of Durham; she knows where all the cool music and fattening food happens. She even has friends in a band called Bombadil... BOMBADIL! I remember getting really excited when she told me this a couple years ago. Because I'm a dork.

Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow;
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow!

 Forget about explaining Tom Bombadil to someone who's never read The Lord of the Rings. Or anyone who has, for that matter.

Wadmalaw is South Carolinian for "heart attack".

COLUMBIA, SC

One of my favorite things about travel is the way an arbitrary dot on the map takes on an identity once you get there. There is no going back, either. Once you see and touch its landmarks, eat its food, and talk to its people, it takes on a dimension of permanent familiarity and will never, ever feel as distant again.

The choice of Columbia was pure logistics, the last stopping point before Durham. Originally I'd planned to spend the previous night in Meridian, MS, which is about 500 miles from Columbia. When Joshua agreed to host me at his home near Jackson, I failed to note that it was 90 minutes west of Meridian, so an 8-hour drive I budgeted for the penultimate leg of my trip turned into 10+ hours, including with three major stoppages for road construction along the way.

The rain continued from Mississippi pretty much nonstop through Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. It was POURING as I approached my accommodation for the evening, a family home on a forested semi-rural route a couple miles outside the city. If Kelly and her husband hadn't come so highly recommended on the CS community, I might have found the setting and atmosphere daunting; raindrops the size of golf balls hammered Sebastian's windshield as buildings and streetlights became fewer and further in between. I passed a number of modest country churches and an ornate LDS temple that seemed to levitate out of the dark trees in its own glow. I finally reached my destination, a postcard scene of Southern charm: a yellow two-story home with friendly dormers and an inviting front porch with white balustrades.

There was warm light inside, and Kelly practically dragged me in the front door out of the rain while I muttered something about mud on my shoes. While I sat and talked with her son, she brought me a bowl of her homemade corn chowder with thick bacon crumbled on top with a glass of tea and a dish of peach cobbler. It was truly one of the best meals I've ever had on the road (maybe ever?). Her warmth and openness to others reminded me a lot of my own mom. She prepared the pullout sofa in the family room for me where I was joined later by Luna the Weimaraner.

The next morning I had a toasted croissant with homemade jam and scrambled eggs fresh from the chickens. Kelly told me more about her adventures with hosting couchsurfers. Many of them are family members of Army recruits graduating from boot camp at Ft. Jackson nearby - and a recent guest was from my hometown.

When I told her I was stopping to visit my cousin in St. Louis on my return trip west, she lit up. Having lived in St. Louis for three years, she had a lot of inside knowledge to share. She admitted that she dreaded living in the Midwest at first, and that initially lowered expectations might have at least partly contributed to her eventual enthusiastic admiration of the city. She recommended the City Museum (curated by a friend of hers), the Cahokia Mounds, and of course the Arch while I'm there.

I departed around eleven for the Five Points district in Columbia and Pawley's Front Porch, another of Kelly's recommendations. Pawley's was featured on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives and really doesn't fuck around when it comes to their burgers.

I sat at the bar and ordered a pale ale recommended by the bartender from a Charlotte brewery whose name I can't remember. I then sampled an essay in the same craft from Conquest, a local Columbia brewery that was drinkable if a little uneven. It was while I was sitting there, chatting with the awesomely bearded bartender and luxuriating in having plenty of time to take in my surroundings, that I was approached out of left field by a Southern beauty who left me all but speechless...

Introducing: the Wadmalaw.

Eating it was all a blur, really. A whirlwind of chipotle and bacon and cheese and something that might have been fried pickles? Between bites I struck up conversation with an attractive girl beside me who I noticed was tapping away in frustration at a broken iPhone screen. I asked her what happened and she nonchalantly said she threw it out the window of a car.

She threw it... out of the window... of a moving vehicle. 

It was an impulsive action and, she conceded, an ultimately futile gesture against technology. If nothing else, I admired the symbolism and the balls it took to go through with it.

We spent over three hours talking. Light stuff, heavy stuff. Some really heavy stuff. It made the world feel ten times smaller (and a little tipsier). She ordered me a breakfast shot, Jameson's and Buttershots chased by OJ. It tasted just like a pancake. A friend of hers came by on his lunch break and the three of us talked for another hour. It was one of most rewarding afternoons I've ever spent in a bar. Day drinking rules.

The Help.

JACKSON, MS

We pass a street in Jackson my host, Joshua, won't take me down at night. "That's where most of the maids lived in The Help," he informs me. Even by day, he says, the neighborhood is dodgy at best. Fifty years, a best-selling book and its Disney film adaption have done nothing to raise it out of dereliction.

We've just left Hal and Mal's, a timeworn brick eatery that seems lodged just as stubbornly in the past. Dim incandescent lights hang from those inverted pie pan fixtures. The live jazz band is comprised of men well into their 60s and perhaps 70s. Most of the other patrons skew towards middle and late-middle age, but you get the sense this was the haunt of their youth. The place has all the ingredients of a modern hipster venue: atmosphere, craft beer, obscurity from outsiders (it's difficult to spot if you don't know what you're looking for) -- but Jackson doesn't have any hipsters. (Probably.) I order the whole order of red beans and rice with smoked sausage washed down with a draught of Abita Restoration Pale Ale.

Joshua is a grad student from Minnesota who works part-time at the only Apple store in Mississippi. He's approaching the end of his clinical hours quota and plans to move back to the Twin Cities to find a job in marriage and family therapy soon. He takes me past the Mississippi state capitol and up to the affluent white suburb of Madison, notable for having the longest-serving mayor in the United States. "Mayor Mary" Hawkins Butler is in her eighth consecutive four-year term and has had enormous influence on the Madison's architectural design, requiring each building to conform to her Neoclassical vision for the city. Everything from the post office to the municipal building to what is possibly the most ornate Shell station I've ever seen is replete with stuccoed Corinthian pillars, modillioned cornices, parapets, cupolas (and other features I'm going to pretend I know all about). The cumulative effect is an imposing if somewhat affected stateliness.

The next morning, we sit down for a cup of coffee and bowl of oatmeal before I hit the road. Joshua's hosted dozens of travelers from all over the world and has the hospitality game down pat. He is also a coffee connoisseur (seriously, did I luck out or what?) who made this cool wall art from java jackets collected during his travels.

Truer facts never spoken.

Wish I could have contributed a Dutch Bros. sleeve to the cause!

It's drizzling lightly when I leave Jackson, and further east the rains begin in earnest. And it just does. Not. Stop. I get a National Weather Service alert - a feature I didn't even knew my phone had - warning me to avoid "flood areas," a term I'm soon to learn is roughly applicable to the entire Southeast this week.

Uriah the Hittite.

FORT WORTH, TX

Whenever I feel resentful of my upbringing, I'll have to remember that I'm the guy who comes through in the clutch with answers like "Uriah the Hittite" at trivia night. 

I'm never going to get back those hours of Bible studies or weekends of Jehovah's Witness conventions in packed sports arenas, so I might as well inform you that Uriah was a soldier and the husband of Bathsheba, the hottie coveted by King David referenced in the second verse of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah". 

Your faith was strong but you needed proof 

You saw her bathing from your roof 

Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you

Basically the biblical equivalent of creeping up her Facebook. David had Uriah moved to the front line of his army where he promptly got his face smashed in by the Ammonites. Which makes David kind of a douche.

You know who's not, though? Everyone I met for trivia at the Flying Saucer in downtown Fort Worth. This was my second CouchSurfing meetup after the San Diego event at Hamilton's the week before. I got to chat with a lovely couple, Chris and Rebecca, who told me about their food cart called Dr. Dogs that you should totally check out and tell them I sent you, though sadly I didn't get the opportunity to patronize it myself. My inaugural CS host, Lonnie, was also the event organizer and a really cool guy. We didn't get to hang much since he had to leave early for work the next day, but he put me up in comfort in his guest room in Euless and set a great tone for the rest of my trip. 

I had planned to pick up a bottle or growler of the highly recommended Velvet Hammer by the Peticolas Brewing Co. in Dallas, but their brewery in the design district wasn't open and it would have cost me too dearly in terms of time and sanity scrambling around Dallas trying to find a place that sold it. The upshot? I'm more enlightened about the brewing scene here than I was a week ago and my car still has AC. 

Is that relevant to the beer quest? No. Relevant to the weather in Texas? ABSO-102-LUTELY.

The Great Divide.

RUIDOSO, NM

Let's talk about time travel for a minute. Eighty miles an hour through the desert without even trying means you can give someone an ETA of without factoring in the switch from Pacific to Mountain Time and still remain true to your word. From a gas and lunch stop in Holbrook, AZ I sped along desolate state highways, stopping only once more in Pie Town, NM.

Realty and reality.

With hosts arranged through CouchSurfing.org on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I only had part of an evening and morning to spend with my uncle Liam in Ruidoso, a ski town about an hour west of Roswell. Luckily, he's one of those guys who makes every minute count. We cracked open the growler I brought from Prescott and drank it along with his lady Jen's amazing chiles relleno on his deck with a view of the pine woods. Afterwards, we indulged each other trading lead and rhythm guitar roles on some of our recent original compositions, both of which make use of the evocative F major/ C major seventh chord pairing (I think I picked this idea up from hearing him play a couple years ago, actually).

The next morning, we went down to his law office. I burned him a CD with some of my favorite recent tunes, heavy on Blitzen Trapper and Dawes (these guys write the shit out of the undomesticated male worldview) and we spent a couple of hours talking about people's varying modes of political expression and the nature of professionalism. He shared a story about a bellhop at a hotel in Sante Fe years ago who got completely flustered when a power outage interrupted his routine of showing the suite's amenities. In Liam's words, professionals aren't distinguished from others in their field by their adeptness at a task they perform day in and day out (unless maybe they work on an assembly line), but by their ability to adapt to disruptive events. 

There is a lot of emphasis on credentials in my industry (which I'm reconsidering, along with many things at the moment). Credentials are the easy part though, and they really are a terrible substitute for interpersonal and leadership skills. Compassion, empathy, respectability, judgment and salesmanship are pretty much universally desired traits, and I feel like any time spent developing those will be well spent. In that light, this trip is as much about personal development through experiencing diverse people and places as it is a reprieve from the past two years in the corporate world.

Apart from my grandmother, who spent April in Ruidoso helping set it up, I'm privileged to be one of the first in the family to see Liam's office in Ruidoso. It's the kind of place you really enjoy hanging around. He was scheduled to take delivery of a wooden sign for his front yard Tuesday afternoon. I wish I could have stayed to help him install it, but I was shooting for an 8pm arrival time in Ft. Worth, so I had to say adios to Ruidoso that morning. 

Family special: the first DUI in Ruidoso is free!

Ruidoso is close to the Continental Divide. All the condensate dripping from Sebastian's AC runs into the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico from here on.

Independence.

PRESCOTT, AZ

Go ahead and tell me we haven't stumbled into the Emyn Muil.

I arrived at my brother's house here late on the 3rd via Phoenix and I-17; the more direct highway through the mountains was closed by the blaze that killed 19 firefighters on Sunday. Flags remain at half mast, local business' marquees pledge eternal remembrance, signs in the supermarkets solicit donations for the families. You can help out here.

We spent most of the day exploring Jerome and Sedona. Jerome is a touristy quasi-ghost town clinging precariously to the face of a cliff. (If an earthquake ever hits the area, it'll be a full-blown ghost town.) Sedona is beautiful, a pueblo enclave fenced in by rose-red canyons and ridges. We checked out the Chapel of the Holy Cross, a functioning Catholic church with a gift shop in the basement. Ben bought what I can only describe as an outsize novelty rosary, with lacquered wooden "beads" the approaching the diameter of the solar system's lesser moons. He brandished it the rest of the day, successfully keeping evil (and subtlety) at bay.

The view from inside the Chapel.

Prescott is not what I expected of Arizona. It's a rodeo town situated in the northwestern mountains, amid pines and rocky dells. The high desert atmosphere reminds me of Central Oregon. Ben's yard is routinely invaded by foraging peccaries, wild pig-like creatures that city ordinance forbids you to feed unless they make a really cute face. This pack even had a couple of babies with them scarcely bigger than cats so we pretty much had to toss them a few apples.

On Friday, the weather was cool enough to surmount a few of the striking granite formations north of town along Highway 89. None of them rise particularly high, but their labyrinthine folds pose a formidable bouldering challenge. I imagine the more exposed cliffs are popular with climbers as well.

Ben overlooking Prescott Valley. There's actually some water down there!

Taking the scenery for granite.

Top of the rock.

The same move that makes me so popular on the dance floor.

The airport where Ben is enrolled in helicopter flight school (courtesy of the G.I. Bill) is called Ernest Love Field and sits a mile above sea level. That plus the summer temperatures in Arizona means consistently high density altitudes, which make lift-producing surfaces such as wings, rotors and propellers less efficient. Airplanes therefore require a longer takeoff run to get airborne at a hot, high elevation; I guess helicopters need more ... cyclic? collective? I got to try my hand at one of the simulators and was in a world of completely foreign terminology, but I got the ship (they actually call them ships, it's cute) off the ground and, after spinning around like Tony Hawk a few times, managed to settle it back down without crashing.

The school's insurance policy unfortunately prohibited me from riding along in the back during Ben's flight lesson, much less acting out this scene from True Lies. So I settled for posing for this photo in the cockpit of a machine I'll never fully understand and flipping random switches (just to keep him on his toes, you know).

Better duck, kids...

Let's go! I'm sure that family of kittens in the engine won't hurt anything.

The man, the myth, the legend..

The last day of my stay, Sunday, we broke into the tennis courts at Prescott High (who locks a tennis court?) and played a match. Ben has a powerful serve, good directional control, and knows how to use my age and the Arizona sun against me, but I held my own and managed to claw my way to victory in two sets. No small feat against an ex-Marine and natural athlete like my brother. I've been training with my dad, a tennis instructor in Orange County, for the past two months, and the work has begun to show. I like to think Andy Murray and I both kind of achieved something this weekend.

BEER ME

I bought a growler of Thumb Butte Brown Ale from Granite Mountain Brewing after sampling it alongside an IPA and what I want to say was a blonde ale? It might not be the most suitable draught for summer but it was the tastiest and most complex of the three. Roasty, yet drinkable. I picked up a growler.

A few more shots from around Prescott....

Downtown.

19 flags.

Fire station.