Instead it’s a place where the peat moss lays all out like shag carpeting in a 1970’s type of house. Where I sat each morning for some hours doing nothing really, just fiddling with the radio trying to get those pretty Quebecois women drawling the newscast from a foreign country of Frenchmen but instead it’s Ontario’s version of Rush Limbaugh. Where I’m sitting then, that’s where the porch slumps over, over the granite slabs we put there — the ones my cousin and I pitched down underneath one night when the porch was half-caved in and we thought ourselves to be just a bit too respectable for all that in spite of being drunk as fools and howling like monkeys. It was a half-assed job, like all jobs around here.

The milky way hangs over that spot — seems not to matter what time of year, really. It’s always there, pouring sweet cream down onto a scene that glistens strangely like a painting, and I do love it very, very much.

Sometimes at that spot, I receive a few letters from strangers, sent from elsewhere — men I don’t know, or sometimes nice old women. They ask: “Why do you live all the way out there?” And the truth is that my answer isn’t very enlightening. I’m here, I think, because I’m stupid. Stupid and bruised up. I had no business coming to this place, but then again — I’m not sure I had any business going anywhere else either. A stray dog needs a place to lie, and this place was what came up in the newspaper. A cheap place where the neighbors don’t bother calling you in — where no one’s watching. I got tired of being watched, frankly. Tired of people. Tired of all the guile and guff — I wanted a haven and I guess I got it. Once I got it, I learned to be lonesome properly, as a man like me ought to. My wife and daughter helped a lot with that; I wasn’t so lonesome owing to them.

And as far as I know that place stays warm on pinewood that gets burned by the flame I lit once — though I don’t exactly remember when I lit it, because I don’t really leave and it’s never really warm enough to snuff the stove-flame.

If I have boots, they don’t see asphalt hardly ever, except when I go to the village for Mass and to see old Dick to buy beans, bullets, and liquor. Dick knows I buy more than that of course, but so far as he ever tells it around town — that’s all I buy. He doesn’t mention the green tea (a suspect beverage in these parts) nor does he raise the issue of the special-ordered mineral waters and fancy cheeses from France (a homosexual nation, as I hear). If some of the people here found out I was living like that they might think I was a communist. Instead, Dick takes my money and keeps quiet — he knows me to be a man of taste, though whatever taste it is wouldn’t be one that’d suit him. I should have him over sometime, but then again, since the road washed out that there’s a big ask so I doubt he’d do it. Plus he doesn’t like that strange French cheese I’ve got.

Morning comes in that place, too. Though most often I’d say it comes so silently it wouldn’t register but in the eyes of real connoisseurs of the dawn — for it comes wrapped in the heavy woolen packaging of menacing overcast — when it comes I do notice, and I am glad. There are a handful of days there when it comes so bright and clear that I really just weep over it there alone. My wife knows I do that, she doesn’t mind. Knows I’m out of my cotton-picking gourd anyhow and if I asked her, I think she’d say the sunshine is medicinal for a nutcase like me.

We try to grow cabbages there but they die. And when they die the heads curl back like the lips of a sick old drunk, smiling and burning up in the acid of the bog, their heads lolling back such that any decent con-man would be compelled to ask whether anyone’d taken an insurance policy on them before they went belly up. If I answered “no” he’d say “too bad.” My baby thinks it’s funny — she puts those old stinking heads of cabbage up in my shirts, sitting them up in chairs, making them look like sad old men who’d come out here to die. I wonder if I’m one of them.

Then again, I suspect she likes it here, and her smile makes me feel anything but dead. She goes out where we’ve planted highbush blueberries and crans with the coal-black dirt on her face, chuckling at the birds that do come out for a rendezvous out here — they’re of the corvus clan; they come to laugh at the human beings foolish enough to settle in a desolate spot like this. She laughs with them, and I start laughing — the whole muddy little peninsula we’re on starts feeling like a funny farm of some kind. There’s mostly silence but when there’s laughing, we’re all feeling real good.

We’re so far out that strangers do not come around. The law does not come around. When an ambulance driver might have to come out here he says “holy shit” right aloud when he gets here and we all laugh. Nobody comes to visit either except people just as foolish as we are — and so by that metric, we know we’ll like them if they do make it here, and they tend to stay a week or more. And I try to give them land. Hell I have so many old lots in this place that I offer them to visitors like an old woman pushes candy on her grandkids — “here, I’ll sign it over to you right now, we could use a good neighbor!” But so far I haven’t found any takers and if I’m honest I doubt I will. A theoretical prospective neighbor is probably a lot nicer than a real one anyway, if I were to guess.

By the time we arrived in this place, so far as I can remember, we were so shriveled up that we couldn’t go another mile. Something came up into us like saltwater; we came to look like members of a clan who boiled their own cheeks in caustic soda in some kind of somber shamanic rite. Our eyes looked like big, swollen, GMO grapes grown in a part of California where all the fruit gets painted in the same sad sorry factory. I began having panic attacks in those days — certain that I’d gotten “the sugar” or was soon to succumb to the mighty, mighty gout. I was convinced I’d gotten cancerous lesions in my innards; that death was on its way for me. None of it was true of course — I’d just run the track a few too many times. Same track as anyone else walks, I guess; I was just weaker than them and for it, desolation out in this bog was my grand prize.

Yes, it’s that place where I cut my toenails, my legs hanging down like the great big haunches of a sleeping mutt over the rough old hemlock boards I’ve come to call a porch. It’s where I do drink my tea, read my books, mutter to myself, and wander around chinking out the chunks of spruce gum from the tired old midget-trees. I’ve now got over five-hundred pounds of it I’ll someday make into original-style Adirondack chewing gum to sell to the ragtag few who come to visit.

I’ll never do it, of course — I’m far too busy. Some will ask: “Busy with what?” and frankly, I can’t answer. Many a man who came before me in my bloodline would lie about how busy he was but I learned they were liars myself — I figure it’s better to tell the truth. And the truth is that I’m a do-nothing, a bum, a guy too broken and stunted to do much else but sit in the woods like a muskrat, grinning like a fool, surveying the splendorous riches of a man who sided out into the woods like a busted old truck in a bad crash and nary a tow. Instead of calling for help, I only smiled and got drunk — and the crows blessed me with a good bout of cackling. Somehow, my wife thought that was the right thing to do, and my baby wasn’t the wiser anyhow.

Now I haven’t actually been to this place yet. Far as I know it does not exist but in my own mind. But I suspect it’s real, and lately, I’m only focused on going there. I’ll go there and it’ll be a real hoot — and then years will pass like seconds, one after the other real fast, until I keel over in the swamp and die happy, running my race ever upward to (I hope) meet Christ Himself. When I see Him I’ll thank Him for giving me a good swamp to grow old in, and a nice family to enjoy it with.

So anyway, I’ve got to set out on my journey because I’m going there. My baby’s been telling me I ought to just get over to that place. My wife accedes in her quiet way, too. Those two girls aren’t like other girls; they’re not of the disposition that everyone all my life told me all girls are of. They seem to crave the swamp, too — the thicket, the cedar brush, the place so choked with blackflies that nobody’ll go there except us. Like kids building a blanket fort, they push me to buy sheets of tin and rolls of tarpaper, woodstoves, axes, big barrels of syrup, a propane freezer. I hardly have a clue what I’m doing but I’m doing it and smiling as I go. In our minds we’re already building that old place; they’re already both staring at me daily with eyes that seem hungry for veering off from that big strange sorrow we all came up in. They don’t want us to all wake up one day trapped in some kind of a nightmare, and they’re right to worry about that at least a little.

For that reason, the iced-over gravel is now underneath me and I’m traveling at a considerable speed. Big tracts of land await me like carmels for a big fat boy — I’ll take my goodies to some dreary little law office in Watertown and sign over the check for a paltry sum. The clerk’ll laugh because the sum I pay will be so small. She’ll say “hell my husband paid that for an ATV just three weeks ago — you’re buying a house for that!” My wife will give that little smile she gives, a knowing type of smile, and the lawyer will dribble his glassy eyes all over the paperwork like some kind of sun-bleached lizard, coughing as he dryly says “sign here.” When he sees what we paid, his eyebrows will go up so high his head’ll be looking like those dead dry cabbages out back that my baby laughs at. But we’ll remember him — we’ll invite him over, though he’ll never come.

On a deeply granular and blow-by-blow level, the fictional future they describe is one in which Artificial Intelligence has sparked a recursive economic death-loop: AI makes human intelligence redundant, white collar layoffs ensue, companies reinvest the money they save from the layoffs back into AI development and from it — more layoffs ensue. At every stage, AI’s abilities to masterfully and efficiently slash through tasks that human beings find tedious proves to make every single facet of the economy cheaper, more efficient, and faster. But at the cost of countless high-paying jobs, the wider economy permanently contracts — and the benefits of this Brave New World are dubious, as everyone is forced to downshift into lower and lower tax brackets with every improvement that AI pushes through. Instability, unrest, and overburdened public coffers seem to be the result.

A response to this piece would warrant a whole essay unto itself (an essay that I would imagine others are far more qualified to write than I am). But one word the authors continually used stuck out to me in a decidedly haunting and ominous way. The word was friction. As I read and meditated on their unique usage of this word, I realized how apt it was — and how now that I’d seen it used in this way, I might never think about the techno-economic precursors to human culture the same again. Here’s a quote:

“Even places we thought insulated by the value of human relationships proved fragile. Real estate, where buyers had tolerated 5-6% commissions for decades because of information asymmetry between agent and consumer, crumbled once AI agents equipped with MLS access and decades of transaction data could replicate the knowledge base instantly. A sell-side piece from March 2027 titled it “agent on agent violence”. The median buy-side commission in major metros had compressed from 2.5-3% to under 1%, and a growing share of transactions were closing with no human agent on the buy side at all.

We had overestimated the value of “human relationships”. Turns out that a lot of what people called relationships was simply friction with a friendly face.”

[emphasis mine]

This specific physical metaphor landed beautifully the way they wrote it. Friction. Sandpaper on oak, skis on gravel. Dragging a boat out of the water and onto the muck. Two surfaces rubbed together under force and pressure, generating heat, requiring more and more power to force across. Of course this is a useful economic metaphor — how else can we describe doing our taxes, or researching which car to buy? How else can we think of the exhaustion inculcated by a day of shopping? So much of that kind of stuff is what most of us sardonically refer to as “a drag.”

Or in another case, if I wish to buy some maple syrup from my neighbor, it doesn’t appear in my cupboard the moment I decide that I want to buy it. I can’t DoorDash it either. I must call him, put on my boots, brush the snow off the car, start the car, drive to his house, talk to him (maybe for two hours, since he’s a real ‘talker’), and then drive back home to put the syrup in the cupboard.

Moreover, the price of the syrup reflects the “friction” that he must slog through in order to produce the syrup. He’s got to buy the fittings for the sap run — he’s got to run to the hardware store to get some gaskets for the woodstove he boils the sap with (no doubt talking to Gerald down there at the store for an hour as he checks out). It all takes time, costs money, involves relying on often fickle and unreliable human beings and their businesses. Whoever manufactures whatever he buys, too, they also have their own “friction.” At every single level of the economy, there are tasks that must be completed that are not necessarily convenient — they’re time-consuming, costly, and many of them involve interacting with and relying upon other human beings.

Artificial Intelligence can cut all this down, at least in theory. It can source cheaper materials for the manufacturer and refine his process such that he can reduce his biggest expenditure — human labor. It can orchestrate strange backdoor cryptocurrency transactions that evade the fees of major credit card companies, even for mundane purchases. It can “vibe code” apps that compete with DoorDash, draft legal contracts offering the syrup-maker access to a low-fee, automated digital marketplace. It can contract with the syrup-maker’s hardware store such that autonomous vehicles deliver whatever he needs, when he needs it, at practically no extra costs.

Again — I say all of this in theory. The jury’s out regarding whether any of this could actually pan out in the manner the AI gurus lately describe, but certainly, the plausible overlap between science fiction and real life does seem to be increasing dramatically.

To repeat the Citrini article again: “Turns out that a lot of what people called relationships was simply friction with a friendly face.” Reduce the friction and the relationship may end or fizzle out. Decrease the number of requisite interactions required for daily life and doing business — and the webs of relationships we call “communities” will naturally die.

There’s no reason to speak speculatively about this, nor to necessarily assume that AI is the sole purview in which this principle operates. Well before AI was even conceived, dramatic reductions in friction have happened, and if their track record is any gauge — communities have flopped and faltered following each friction-reducing technological revolution. It was not so long ago that to “call on” someone meant physically traveling to their house and knocking on the door. As the telegraph and later telephone liberated callers from this difficulty, “just dropping by” became rarer and rarer until, as is now the case, many young ‘digital natives’ are downright afraid of any social interaction involving door knocking of any kind. That old, antiquarian practice is now irrelevant — and as a result, our homes feel less like living, breathing organisms full of friends coming and going and more like anesthetized tombs or secure-perimeter pods in which we sleep and scroll.

Telephones are only a very elementary example — of course the internet’s arrival hit a hundred times harder. Practically everywhere you look in the internet era, some old, annoyingly difficult, tedious, or awkward chance for human interaction has been reduced to a few motions of a warm finger on a smartphone screen. Courtship is now a bygone memory; now there is Tinder, internet pornography, or even AI-based “girlfriend chatbots.” Where once friends gathered to play football, they now may never gather — and may instead sit alone at home, gambling on the outcomes of televised football games. The handwritten letter has all but died, too; now a brief text message will do. And in the public market, the brick and mortar store as well as the sit-down restaurant have waned considerably: InstaCart and UberEats do the job instead.

The results of this revolution are obvious to most. Now, for the first time in human history, human interaction is more or less optional in practically every domain of life. Consequently, I think, it does not seem like a spurious correlation that we are now lonelier than ever.

Yet, as a general rule, each time a technological revolution has increased the ease with which human beings conduct their social, commercial, or private affairs, we’ve simply gone along with it on the whole. To forego the use of a smartphone or AI might be, for now at least, a vaguely (if awkwardly) acceptable choice for a minority of people to make — but to forego the use of telephones entirely is essentially unthinkable. Likewise with the internet; one may, like the great August Lamm, choose to skip owning a computer at all — but even far-flung renegades like her do find that you’ve got to log in to check emails at the library at least once in a blue moon.

Moreover, the Luddite urge is, in our era, a lonesome urge in so many cases. In so many cases where communities have atrophied upon the advent of advanced information technologies, atomized people have found a surrogate for real community online — and the idea of actually, really, permanently logging off is a form of genuine social suicide. Without any obvious venue for real human interaction in real life, logging off only means adopting the life of a hermit, which is untenable for the great majority of people.

So we find ourselves in a Faustian bargain with “frictionlessness.” Perhaps we’re too far along to turn back now. There’s not any obvious answer to the question of where this train lets off — or if it even does let off at all. At very best, I suspect a tiny minority of offline ‘aristocrats of the soul’ may rise here and there; what few bona fide refuseniks there are may huddle together at the odd pub or library in certain metropolitan areas or eccentric off-grid hubs. But will their techno-skepticism translate to their children? It’s too early to tell, and frankly, by what we are seeing now — it’d be dangerous to assume that that will be the default. So far, tech-skeptical subcultures seem only to flourish when they’re religious, as with the Amish. Perhaps the Catholic Land Movement could prove to be a suitable catalyst for the rest of us — it’s too early to tell.

Perhaps our era is an era in which those who wish to live will find themselves being tasked with the impossible: perhaps now is the finest hour for ardent defenders of human culture and community to buck the trends, to insist upon running contrary to what have until now appeared to be iron laws of the history of technology. If this is to be the case, what will it look like? How will some semblance of “high-friction” human culture be preserved and allowed to flourish in an era when it looks like the great mass of humanity is enthusiastically going the other way?

The answer is not one that most will really like to hear: the answer is that it will be difficult. It will require friction, limitless awkwardness, sacrifice, even relocation. It will require knocking on friends’ doors (and receiving them kindly when they knock) — it will require once again working up the gumption to walk up to a nice young lady and ask her out on a date. And it may require a Renaissance of the physical trades; of bricklaying and of lamb-slaughtering, or even scythe-swinging and making wine by hand. I heartily doubt that there can be any return to the original sociality of all of our pre-internet forebears without an accompanying return to a ‘world made by hand.’

On these fronts, the outlook is not exactly promising, if I am to be frank. There is no obvious “mecca” for those with such interests to congregate around; there is no clear “thing” one who thinks this way must obviously do if they are to live in a manner that is resonant with their analysis and principles. A great many of the efforts at this sort of thing one sees are tainted by the all-seeing eye of social media or with various iterations of a self-conscious mentality — God forbid anyone involved be accused of “LARPing.”

Yet I do suspect that a fair few oddballs may persist in their attempts nonetheless. Somewhat ironically, our present access to information networks like the internet puts us in a solid position to form communities online — which can then later be transposed onto the offline world, at least in theory. At the core of any such effort, I’d think, a sizable proportion of those with any conviction on these matters probably have to be willing to ‘cluster’ together somewhere. We might need to be willing to pull up the stakes and move house in order to establish the all-important networks we’ll need to live a fulfilling and resilient offline life. As AI’s proliferation speeds along, we may find those bonds eventually become crucial not only to our social-emotional welfare but to our material welfare; it’s a fact that when protracted economic crises strike hard, those with solid face-to-face communities are far better equipped to survive than those whose communities are either weak or nonexistent.

However we may try to resist these trends, or to prepare for the worst of what they may produce, I do believe there is still time. There are still possibilities to hold onto the ‘friction’ that makes human culture vibrant and fulfilling. Those who manage to produce serious and durable responses to this crisis may, in so doing, manage to save at least a few viable seeds of genuine human culture worthy of the name. However they do it, I should think that no part of it whatsoever will be convenient — that much is certain.

One of many problems for [the] American Right: Quality of life, on the whole, is still far better in coastal blue metros than anywhere else. Are these expensive? Yes. But they’re expensive for a reason. Traditional conservative policies for the most part don’t actually make life better for most people. Life in Texas is cheaper than California but it’s basically worse by every other metric, etc. American hinterland completely burned out and borderline unlivable pretty much everywhere with the exception of maybe a few tourist towns. If you’re single, you’re better off in a major blue metro; if you have a family, the suburbs of one.

It made a great deal of sense that this reader of mine would tag me in the way he did — I do, after all, run a publication that is at least loosely focused on the subject of rural America. Moreover, though I may have a penchant for writing decidedly somber polemics about America’s hinterlands (and believe I’ve earned my right to do so), my overall tone is essentially celebratory, and my conclusions about the rural US are, at day’s end, at least moderately hopeful. Naturally, then, I’d be a well-qualified “defender of rural America” against anyone who would dare to say that our way of life is stultifying, parochial, boring, or generally inferior to the way of life offered by this country’s Manhattans, Big Surs, Topanga Canyons, Lincoln Parks, Nantuckets, and so on.

One small problem, however: I can’t actually make such a defense.

I can’t actually argue that those who love the world’s most luxurious, left-leaning, moneyed metropoles are wrong in the slightest when they so arrogantly declare (as Mr. Cioran did in another comment) that America’s “interior swamps” and “sweaty dustbowls” aren’t remotely paradisical. To my eye, life actually kinda sucks in the vast majority of the American hinterlands by any universal metric — speaking strictly as a general rule. And though it’s difficult to speak so broadly about such a massive land area, the simple fact is that in most of America’s rural areas, when you’re not sweating, you’re freezing — and unless you’re related to your neighbors, your social life is not liable to be especially titillating. In fact, your social life may or may not exist at all.

The most snide and high-brow commentators at magazines like The New Yorker and The Atlantic may string words together in a manner that offends many of us ruralites — yet, in a turn that quite frankly agonizes me, I can’t argue they’re wrong. Everywhere I go where I live, people read far less (a majority seem not to read at all), travel less, are less open-minded and curious, are more obese, are generally more clannish and in some cases, are even more consumeristic than those living in the so-called “real places.” The topics of conversation at our local watering holes seem to remain narrowly fixed between the weather, the local drama, The Big Game, and which $40,000+ All-Terrain Vehicle the various patrons are considering going into usurious levels of debt over. Occasionally, too, there are some very frank discussions about “the blacks,” “the welfare mutts,” and “the woke liberals” added in for spice — but this usually feels forced and at this stage, is basically driven by Facebook ‘boomer-slop’ memes.

And frankly, I simply have to say that the social value proposition of being here or anywhere like it is abysmal from 98% of outsiders’ points of view (including my own). That moreover you may be censured, questioned, or held at arms length “because we don’t know you” or because you aren’t cousins with the right fellas makes it worse still. Add in ghastly weather, economic conditions bordering on collapse, high welfare use, drug problems on an incredible scale, dangerously failing infrastructure, mismanaged state resources, soaring median ages, and a general attitude of “managed decline” — yeah, a very large proportion of rural America kinda sucks, and I’m not kidding about that.

Though I’d never deny that there are exceptions to these trends, in general, I know what I am talking about.

Most far-flung locales of this country may be charming to pass through, beautiful to photograph, or are inhabited by fascinating old-timers — none could deny. Yet actually living in these places is hard. After a year or two, these places are overwhelmingly hard to love. So much so, in fact, that there’s a phenomenon around the rural Northeast known as the “two-year wonder.” This is a term somewhat derisively applied to out-of-towners who move here with romantic ambitions but who, after only two winters — move back to Boston, or Sacramento, or wherever they came from because the reality on the ground is simply not tenable for them.

And though many apply the term derisively, the simple fact is that I get it. I know why they come — and I know why they leave. The wisest among them view their two or three years here as a fascinating experiment that did not need to continue; but the most stubborn among them often burn many years here simply to “stick it out,” often bitterly and at the expense of their families and their sanity — and after so long, not a few of these leave after all, too.

Again: I get it.

THEN AGAIN, can I really say that the much-vaunted centers of ‘relevance’ and ‘kultur’ are all that and a bag of potato chips? Of course I can — with a massive caveat. The locales I listed above: Manhattan, Big Sur, Topanga Canyon, Lincoln Park, Nantucket — they’re all splendid. I’ve been to all of them, often multiple times. The manner of living in each of these places is (for the blessed few who can afford them) incomparable. To take one’s Cab Franc in Carmel-by-the-Sea as the California sunset sets the beachheads aglow in hues of nuclear neon: there is no comparison. Chelsea’s cobblestone and haut, frank, sexy brilliance — Topanga’s snarling vines and palms and Edenic private estates: these ooze with the essence of a beautiful, rich, romantic life.

Of course, I did say rich. Most of those who speak with intense derision about the American Hinterlands aren’t living in these places — they’re living on their fringes, which often suck just as much as the hinterlands can (albeit in other ways). They live in private-equity-owned buildings, shop in slick, phony-feeling corporate plazas, and pile into fetid train-cars on their commute to the long workdays they slog through in order to pay the punishing rents. It’s all a sacrifice made for PROXIMITY to the Full Monte they can’t actually afford. And so though I acknowledge that the Coastal Elites are right — I can only make such an acknowledgement with a massive caveat: you must be (very) rich, or else their argument essentially does not apply to you.

This is exactly how I arrived back in the Hinterlands myself. For though I’ve had the very weird and unexpected privilege of touring some of America’s poshest quarters (a series of experiences I don’t tend to write about so much) — I really can’t afford them. I have no reason to assume I ever will, either. I acknowledge that if I was rich, Santa Barbara would be obviously attractive; Taos would pique my interest — a private courtyard in Riverdale with Hudson River views might become my beloved nest.

But c’est la vie. I live off Substack donations — not oil dividends.

Interestingly, too, there is no scenario in which, by sheer force of policy alone, the Rest of America achieves anything resembling the quality of life found in these places. Each is a freakish anomaly of geography, climate, and history that cannot be imitated nor forced into existence. While yes, it would be nice if we legalized building “walkable, dense urbanism” (this being the very honorable rallying cry of so many New Urbanists) — the fact is, even if it were legal to build it, it would not replace the Lower East Side. Try as you may to build a carbon copy of LES in Galesburg, Illinois, it’s just not going to have the same je ne se quois as the genuine article for a long list of subtle and mostly esoteric reasons. The reality is: if you’re not rich, you’re not going to get to live on Martha’s Vineyard or Scarsdale — and the coastal views of Marin County are essentially off-limits. Such places are, for better or worse, “geographical luxury products” that cannot be replicated in this country’s “sweaty dustdowls.”

This being what it is, the Hinterlands offer something that the rest of America abjectly lacks: it’s cheap here. Like, really, really, really cheap. I seriously do not think I can spend more than $2k/mo on ALL expenses for a family of three even if I try extremely hard. Most months, we’re actually below $1,000 USD for all that we buy and pay for. This is often far less than expats pay to live overseas in literal third-world countries.

If I insisted upon elbowing my way into the metropole — so that I could pay dearly for the very comforting feeling of being only 30+ subway stops from where the Real Action Happens — I’d be broke, overworked, and essentially unable to write for a living. And so it is that by virtue of my incorrigibly low station in this world, I must confine myself to wherever’s dirt cheap — and that, my friends, is the hinterlands.

It comes at a cost, of course. The isolation is extreme; it’s distressing that 100% of my intellectual life has to happen online. The winters are brutal. Pollen season is a nightmare. The summers are sweaty. My neighbors watch me — they’ll never really accept me even though I grew up just two counties away. We are a long way from Santa Barbara here.

But what makes Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara? What makes a Manhattan? And why will there never be a hub of elite culture in Guymon, Oklahoma?

I suppose I am a bit of a “hard geographical determinist.” It seems to me that, so far as we are speaking broadly and with an eye toward recognizing patterns, there are only a handful of “place genres” out there, and each is generally produced by geography above all. Allow me to get very nerdy for a second and describe these ‘geographical genres’:

1. Areas that are well-positioned with regards to trade and power. That Manhattan Island exists at the mouth of the navigable Hudson (and the lowlands that would eventually connect that river to the American West via the Erie Canal) poised it for massive success. That it was navigationally convenient to Europe by ship, and situated fairly near other burgeoning centers of power, agriculture, and industry nearly predetermined that island to become an immensely powerful place — in spite of hot summers, freezing winters, and other ‘less-than-desirable’ climatic features. Other examples: Singapore, St Petersburg Russia, New Orleans, Tokyo.

2. Areas within “goldilocks zones” — places perfectly suited to human habitation. These kinds of places are generally temperate, sunny with dry weather (but with sufficient water for irrigation), minimal bugs, and anything resembling a Mediteranean climate, usually (but not always) coastal or high elevation. Some are tropical-humid as well. These are the places that, given the choice, a majority of humans would prefer to live simply because they are so extremely pleasant. Examples include coastal California, the South of France, coastal Italy, Santa Fe and Taos New Mexico, Cape Town, the Portuguese Algarve. Note that when such places are also geographically well-sited so far as the interests of power and money are concerned, they become even more important (as with Rome).

   1. Note must be made here regarding seasonality. Many places, such as the Hamptons, Nantucket, or Aspen have attained a strong position amongst elites on a seasonal basis. Though through some portion of the year their climates are non-ideal, during another part of it, conditions are perfect, and many powerful people flock there.

3. Artificial areas. Places that have managed, in spite of any number of unfavorable geographical conditions, to attain a place of relevance and power in the global system, usually by means of technological intervention (e.g, A/C), favorable tax laws, minimal regulation, commercial airline access, or some other factor modifiable by policy or practice. Dubai is the example par excellence here; Switzerland also feels relevant as it’s a landlocked country with rough winters and very little arable land, yet banking and tax laws make it a haven for many of the world’s richest.

4. Rural hinterlands. Rural places that are not only geographically inconvenient to commerce and political power — but also are situated within challenging or unpleasant climates, are isolated from major centers of cultural relevance, and have a natural-resource-based economy (or, in post-industrial nations, an economy that is either in ruins or is based on government and healthcare jobs). Examples include southern West Virginia, rural Moldova, Newfoundland, rural Coahuila, Chubut, rural Angola, deep Upstate New York.

5. Urban hinterlands. Cities with unfavorable climates and substantial (non-commutable) distance from major centers of power and relevance. These are economically-unimportant urban environments where, frankly, little (or nothing) of global relevance takes place. Examples include Nouakchott, Bangor, Utica, Yuhzno-Sakhalinsk, Port Moresby. (Note that some urban hinterlands are actually within type-1 cities: e.g, Canarsie, Brooklyn is within NYC, but is marginal enough to be mostly forgotten and unseen).

6. “Type-1 Nowherevilles” — these are areas just outside of #1-type cities; close enough for regular commutes into the centers of power, but lacking any but the faintest cultural identity with said center of power. Sprawly transition zones, suburbs, strip-mall / subdivision areas, bedroom communities, and places where the central economic interest involves a large proportion of the population commuting to a bastion of real cultural, political, and economic relevance. Examples include Rutherford NJ, Blue Island IL, Koshigaya (near Tokyo), Noisy-le-Grand (near Paris), Ontario CA.

7. “Type-2 Nowherevilles” — same as above, however, the “center” to which residents commute consists not of a #1-type city but of a #5-type “urban hinterland” (or, in some cases, the “center” is actually a Type-1 Nowhereville). This is an especially “American” genre of place. The examples illustrate the genre: Ankeny, IA (outside Des Moines), Overland Park KS (outside KCMO), Santa Teresa (outside El Paso), Johnson City (outside Binghamton) or Rosedale (outside Bakersfield).

This list is, of course, by no means exhaustive. It does not account for regions in transition, truly unique exceptions, nor extreme edge cases. Nevertheless, it provides a useful framework for discerning the relative “value” of places in fairly objective terms. For though I generally write about the sentimental, romantical reasons for why one might love their place — and I absolutely do not think these dimensions should be omitted from discussions on the subject — the fact remains that at the global scale, objective geographical value propositions drive the tone and tenor of how various cities and regions develop. I would argue furthermore that far more of this process now operates in a basically deterministic manner than not — and that that process is only very rarely significantly shaped by ‘softer’ concerns such as love of place, cultural allegiances, and so on.

The first thing you may notice in applying the above list to your own knowledge of geography may be this: most Americans live in the “Nowherevilles” of either type. Probably more live in “Type-1 Nowherevilles” than “Type-2,” to be sure — but if I had to estimate, 50-60% of Americans presently live in places characterized by automotive commutes to economic centers, strip malls, “stroads,” and subdivisions. Most of these have a fairly vague (or entirely absent) sense of local identity; life there is basically a matter of economic convenience. Many of them were built from scratch in the last sixty years. Nevertheless, I highlight this likelihood because whenever the urban-rural divide is discussed, we are not really talking about the lives and places of median Americans. We are instead discussing the fringe ends of a spectrum in which most people live solidly in the middle.

Yet nonetheless, I find that so far as the task at hand is to describe the basic preconditions required for la dolce vita, or “the good life,” only categories #1, #2, and possibly #3 seem capable of delivering — in objective terms. Categories four through seven simply require a subjective adjustment so far as their inhabitants wish to attain some version of “the good life,” and even at that, it will be a self-defined version of a good life far more than it will be the classic and timeless “dolce vita” that has proven so desirable since the dawn of human civilization.

By this I mean, unless you are living in a global center of power or in one of the globally rare climatic zones where things like olives, oranges, and grapes grow with ease — the onus is on you to find a way to engage with a self-created version of “a good life.” Not the good life — a good life. Note, for example, that the inhabitants of the South of France do not tend to have little signs hanging on their walls that say “Bloom Where You’re Planted” — they need no such reminders, for they live in a region in which human flourishing is so obviously natural and native. The only one who needs such a reminder is one who lives in a very ‘hard’ place.

Contrariwise, the Nebraskan housewife must have a reason to deal with the ceaseless cold winds; her environment is frankly unnatural and unpleasant whether she would describe it as such or not. She must be content with what family she has around, for the possibilities of expanding her social network are no doubt very limited. If she has a niche intellectual interest — all the worse; she will find herself in isolation. Then again, if she has one or two great friends, a lovely church, a loving husband, and a natural proclivity towards reading all winter and gardening all summer, why, she may very genuinely love her life in rural Nebraska. Such people tend to be, rather than interchangeable pleasure-seeking cosmopolitans — people of a very special character akin to the cottonwoods in the creeks and the wheat sheaves leaning in the fields.

This is what the “Coastal Elites” often miss. Because the isolation, unfavorable climatic realities, and apparently stultifying social, intellectual, and cultural realities of so-called “flyover country” seem to be such a grueling prospect when examined from a distance — they simply come to conclude that the inhabitants of such places must be stupid, dreary, and stark-raving mad for living there. They cannot empathize; they fail to imagine themselves taking the slow, quiet path one must take if they are to fall in love with rural Nebraska — they are haunted just at the very idea.

This is, frankly, a completely understandable response, even if their subsequent hurling of pointless invectives in the general direction of hinterland residents is boorish, stupid, and totally unbecoming. It actually makes total sense that they don’t get it. Most people actually really would loathe living in Nebraska, or Upstate New York, or rural South Texas — and that’s just fine.

Quite often, the metropolitan types who heap scorn upon the heartland are themselves totally deracinated. That is, they are without roots, they have been severed (or have severed themselves) from their home-place, or they may descend from a long line of geographically unstable people who have chased opportunity around the country or even around the globe. Such people very often cannot even imagine the idea of a large extended family at all, much less a large extended family that all lives in the same small town and has been there since God-knows-when. Such people often do not have families themselves, and may (voluntarily) never have children. They often enough have no religious faith, either, and few quiet hobbies of a type well-suited to long winters. They are not merely living in a different plane on a cultural level — on a psychological level, they are living in a different reality than their ruralite countrymen.

Without even the whisper of any roots (or after a rejection of them), without family (extended or immediate), and without religious faith, they are a people who finds it extraordinarily difficult to imagine living in a “boring and irrelevant” place for very good reason. In lieu of retaining any of the basic tools one must use to make life beautiful in a real hinterland — when rural people say “family is everything,” they often seem to mean it literally — they seek out ‘easier’ places; places that do them a few favors, places that make the days go by a little more nicely. They begin to focus most on enjoying life, and the schema they use to understand that is written in basically objective and universal human terms.

This is where the real conversation about ‘la dolce vita’ begins. When I use this phrase, I hope you know exactly what I mean: sun-drenched terraces by the sea, grapevines swirling around the bases of marble statues — rich wines and cold oysters, cigars and fresh grapefruit juice, long sumptuous days of reading in the leafy courtyard as the fresh air fills the lungs and the skin is burnished golden-brown. A man feels leisure living like this; he is not anxious about what is to come nor is he murmuring about cutting his cordwood nor stocking up his root vegetables for winter. His mind is sprightly, his body is lithe — he is living in a real scene, a cinematic analogue to paradise, basking in the low-level euphoria that only California and Park Avenue and Cape Town can inculcate; the blissful optimism the French Riviera blesses one with — the heavy, smirking fado of the Portuguese Algarve.

He is not fighting back tears as he hangs a “Bloom Where You’re Planted” sign in his drafty, vinyl-sided raised ranch home. The very idea of doing anything of the sort is foreign to him; he is about as far from Kansas as one could spiritually and metaphorically be.

Yet, by my eye, such a life can really only become attractive if one has lost any hope of finding a comfortable nest within the culture of parochial backwaters and Nowherevilles. To say that life in the hinterlands “sucks” is really only to make an admission that you yourself are in rough shape — that your family has cut their roots off, that you may be without faith, that you are in so low a state that you need the land and culture around you to do favors for you, to give you little pick-me-ups, to make life easy and pretty and sunny for you, even if it is mind-numbingly expensive to get there.

One finds people of this disposition constantly in California (or I did anyway); there are those who drifted “west of the West” out of a vague, almost amoeba-like urge toward the sunshine, as if by instinct and for lack of any other tie that binds. Where they are from does not matter; what they do does not really matter. They are simply there, in California, basking in a warm world, removed from the ‘casserole days’ of wherever they might’ve grown up, far from the snowbanks and the corn rows, wandering the palm-lined streets in a deeply American — and incredibly sun-soaked — reverie. No one can blame them; they have drifted westward toward the most incredible place in the world, and what light that place has covered them in does, often enough, lift them up on high, to let them really live — at least in fits and spurts, anyway, and in spite of the egregious rents.

Nevertheless, there is a real connection between ‘la dolce vita’ and the intractable problem of restlessness in one’s soul; there is a real call toward the wine and the sunny beaches and the dry warm winds that leaps out of the heart only when one can stand the casseroles of home no longer — or when they stop being served entirely. When the estate man mops up the last of mom’s belongings, or when the courier brings the divorce papers, or when one’s childhood home is torn down to make way for new condos (or has been totally abandoned) — a very natural yearning begins, and it eventually points toward easier climes, languorous living, and the rich royal beauties of a truly civilized life.

Perhaps this is because civilization produces such yearnful rootlessness as a matter of course. Everywhere, since the dawn of agriculture and cities and armies and written language — upheaval, displacement, and the flood of ennui that courses through the émigré’s wine glass as he wonders at where he’ll belong or how he is to find anything resembling rest. I don’t sneer at those who’ve lived this at all; I understand them in large part because I am them. I feel this way constantly; I feel the magnetic draw of the sun and the marble-columned courtyards, the slumped-over Cathedrals, the paella, the port. What else is there? What else is there but the remains of some timeless, flowering, crumbling framework of a universal home for all civilized men? And where is it but in those lush, sun-soaked places, where the cassocked Priests speed by on their mopeds, and the Mexican boys sell minneolas from their trucks by the palm-lined roadside?

Those who do not feel the urge or who find it foreign are, so far as I can tell, blessed greatly with a world that works. They have their family, most likely; they have a place that is for them. They are blooming where they’re planted — because anything else seems strange, foreign, unnerving. Such people are blessed indeed, for they are removed from the weird and destabilizing ennui that real deracination breeds. They are content to live in our “interior swamps” and “sweaty dust bowls” without complaint, without yearning for some vestigial ruin of bygone luxury and sun-drenched decrepitude — they are strong people who need no great favors from the realms of power, climate, culture, or good wine. And indeed, the hinterlands are theirs, and their resilience is their immense and wonderful power.

Does one need the other? Does the coastal bon vivant need the simple, warm provincial from the seldom-seen interior? Does the faith-and-family country man have any great need for a jet-setter who flits from wine tasting to wine tasting? Do the inhabitants of our sprawly “Nowherevilles” need any of them — and are they needed in turn?

The answer is an emphatic yes.

To embrace only one portion of the full spectrum of the human condition is really to die in exact proportion with the part of the human condition you’ve excised; to deny the humanity of those ‘on the other side’ from you is to tell on yourself as one who has some great gash in his soul or broils with jealous bigotry at what one’s brother has. What works here is not ping-ponging partisan quips across the digital public square, nor lobbing elitist screeds at so-called ‘flyover country’, nor raging against the ‘cosmopolitan elites’ as if they were an alien race of wine-soaked perverts and grifters. What works here is to examine the full spectrum of what mankind lives through, where the human race has been — to look straight at the brilliantly storied geographies and the psychological gardens (and junkyards) they’ve produced in the unending tapestry of human life — and to smile; to say “good God this all is just so much bigger and more beautiful than I ever could know.”

On that score, the so-called “coastal elites” miss the mark just as often as the hinterlanders do. The upright and decent fellow from the Upper West Side is wise to appreciate the earthy beauties of life on the prairie, or in the Louisiana swamps, or in the roughneck quadrants of the Dakotas — for they tell something of his own story, though perhaps removed by a generation or three. And the Budweiser-swilling Wisconsin welder is in kind wise to know that what those ‘nutcases’ in California have found is actually something quite beautiful, something he himself would enjoy — something so lovely his own sons and daughters might one day find themselves chasing it. It won’t be the end of the world if they do; they’d merely be transitioning to a different part of America, and exploring a part of the American story that is at once very ancient and by the same breath, very new.

Perhaps all of this is why, though Mr. Cioran’s comment was of a decidedly political nature — I haven’t gone there yet, even in 4,700+ words of typing. I’m not sure that I need to. For once one examines the geography of rootedness and loss, or the psychologies of deracination and home, it begins to seem as though all of the “political” baggage accompanying the urban-rural divide is, in actuality, not very political. It is instead a kind of vapor rising from two genres of souls that diverge tremendously; it is totally second-order to the realities of geography and the magnetism that different environs have for human souls in their various states and communities in their various stages of flourishing or decay.

For, even if Texas adopted California-esque laws, the soul of Texas would not be “Californiafied,” I think; some portion (probably a large portion) of what Texas is has already been hard-coded by the land itself. Even if enclaves of heterodox cultures establish themselves in Texas, I’m not sure they’d ever really be capable of “taking over” the whole of the land (even if they do take over the state government). Quite the same in reverse. The flim-flamming of the political arena is more or less a disposable thing that will shift and change; it was not so long ago that New York State was conservative and there were startlingly substantial numbers of actual Communists in unexpected states like Alabama and Nebraska.

These things change, they come and go. They are always marketed as dire things on which the fate of the world hinges. Yet there are no bills on the Senate floor, now or ever, that will alter the basic realities of the American psyche’s fascinating taxonomy of expressions; there are no Executive Orders that can radically change the shape of the Oklahoma thunderheads nor the zephyrs rolling into the hills around Sonoma County California. Things of such timeless gravity have already been sorted, really — and the movement of the political world is only a fly on the massive back of a great and powerful animal.

Nevertheless, each ‘genre’ of place seems to be prone to its own eccentricities and even pathologies. The “Nowhereville” type places seem to feed into paranoia and a ghastly obsession with the ugliest notion of “commerce” — the paradisical “goldilocks zone” locales seem to churn out bizarre and experimental luxury ideologies as a matter of course. And (go figure) those hinterlands where, for most residents, “family is everything” seem to occasionally fall prey to a vicious tribalism of sorts; an urge that obviously stems directly from a tenacious obsession with family ties, like-minded kin, and one’s local roots. Viewed in this manner, again, what we lately call “politics” seems to pretty strictly come across as a ‘psycho-geographical phenomenon’ far more than a coherent and well-reasoned series of ideological positions. In actual fact, most “political people” aren’t generally in the habit of deep study of their positions, and mostly cling to them for psycho-social reasons more than durable convictions.

And from there, it appears very easy to accidentally put the horse before the cart and to believe that the politics preceded the rest. In actual fact, I’ve come to believe that it’s the other way around.

All in all, the fact remains that by all objective measures, there are some places that really are better to live in, and most of these are well-known to the self-assured ‘coastal elites’. As for the rest? The extent to which they are nice to live in is subjective — and so frankly, that just makes them that much more fragile. The social ecosystem that valorizes rural or small-town life is wholly dependent not on good weather or beautiful vistas but on the social ties that bind and the collective psychological preconditions that breed optimism and resilience. When changes take place — economic changes, technological changes, religious changes, and so on — that wear that social fabric thin, hinterland-type places suffer and even die rapidly. Though they are durable in practically every other way, this one core weakness is a thing that only those living in the most objectively desirable geographies seem capable of avoiding.

And yet, I repeat, those living the cosmopolitan, footloose luxury lifestyles of the rich and powerful are very often estranged from the same kind of rootedness that gives the hinterlander his power. What they lack in the socio-familial durability so familiar to the ruralite is (at least partially) made up for by their truly excellent way of life. The core threat to them, then, is themselves: when they spur on the political arm of state power towards being not an inert, slow, vaporous thing but a swiftly-moving machine for actually reducing their quality of life — by tolerating crime, increasing taxes to punishing levels, or engaging in perverse open-air social experiments — they find themselves ruining their paradise out of sheer boredom, I suppose. Once this has happened, it seems many of these denizens of places like California finding themselves drifting back towards the vast unfeatured interior, to seek out the earthy rootedness their ancestors once knew. Every time they vote to make life worse in California, then, another crop of “two-year-wonders” comes to places like Vermont and Michigan.

Of course, many will return back home in short order soon after.

If we want the whole country to thrive, it is of the utmost importance that these various wings of the broader culture seek to understand one another, to tolerate one another, and to now and again borrow a few notes from their neighbor. I’m sure that Malibu, Manhattan, and Cambridge could use a few more barn dances and a few more babies — and I’m quite sure that Sioux City and Bangor would do well to trade the Mike’s Hard Lemonade for a nice California Pinot now and again. The guy from Fargo should try out Manhattan, and enjoy it — after all, it’s not gonna hurt anything but his wallet. And no doubt, the high-end crowd in Santa Fe and San Francisco might find Kansas markedly more charming than they’d ever expect.

After all, it’s all America, isn’t it? We are in no kind of race to figure out which place is objectively the best and to then lord it over all the other, totally inferior places on the map; it truly takes all types, and though the Coastal Elites may indeed be right about the coast of California and places like it — let us thank God that there are rugged family-men who much prefer the cattle ranches of Southwestern Nebraska or Central Missouri. If they all took off to Brooklyn or Santa Cruz, we’d have no beef, their story would end, and America would be far worse off for it than many might think.

And so in closing, I raise my glass to the ones who’ve found it within themselves to “bloom where they’re planted.” Though I suspect my own garden might really be a little too far gone for my efforts at that, I commend those who find a way to stick to it. For the rest of us, la dolce vita beckons — whether we’ll ever be able to afford it or not.

I have long sneered at these people. I’ve long made fun of them. The “snowbirds,” the Florida-obsessed middle-agers who fret over timeshares in Tampa and condos in Cocoa Beach; the “beach people” who seem to hate their own snowy homeland so thoroughly that they literally spend decades plotting their grand escape — I have laughed at them, scorned them, chided them for their unmitigated worship of the sun. Theirs are lives lived in service of languorous laziness and oceanside idleness and nothing more; they seem not to prize the bracing penance of winter — they seem to sneer at the chilly, sunless conditions that ever dyed their own ancestors’ skin white in the first place.

Yet lately, I have begun to ease up on these people. I have begun to see why “the Florida Impulse” might’ve ever come about in the first place. For, true as it may be that the idea of dodging winter on a white-sand beach might’ve been genuinely alien to our early Yankee forebears — in those days, people got together, and they got together even in the dead of winter. Communities here were not dysfunctional and hollowed out husks of their former glory, but genuine organisms of a most comforting variety that stretched into practically every domain of human life. Yule Log ceremonies and sledding days; ice-fishing derbies and Sunday dinners, friends dropping by for breakfast or for a cup of tea by the hearthside — all of these little comforts were once woven into the weft and warp of northern communities, and for them, winter was not only bearable but a real joy.

Of course, here I call them “little comforts,” but in actual fact, I believe I’ve now come to see that these small tokens of fraternal warmth and friendship are necessities in the extreme. In fact, the harsher the winter, the more absolutely necessary they are. To get through the roughest storms and the unmitigated subzero chill of the northern climate — a human being simply must have ample opportunities to ‘nest’ alongside friends, compatriots, acquaintances, and all manner of other human beings from outside the household as often as possible. From pub nights to sap boils, trapline rendezvouses and all-hands barn-shovelings, play-dates for the babies and range-side chatter for the housewives — the fewer of these sorts of occasions one has during winter’s roughest days, the more trying the season will be.

Much could be said regarding the cause of whatever has made these old staples of the northern world corrode, fail, and in many cases, all but cease. Rising median ages have ushered the most seasoned practicioners of them toward the grave with startling quickness, for one; for two, the youth have for some reason failed to pick up the torch. One could blame “smart” telephones, video games, televisions, and the internet for some of this — and they would be right to do so, I’d say. But even without these, or in quarters where these newfangled technologies have failed to penetrate very deeply, we still find the Old Ways of Wintertime to be faltering anyway. It may have something to do with increased political polarization — which is a blight on the American countryside now in so many cases — or with the ways in which our modernized drywall-and-HVAC households have divorced us from the land.

Whatever the cause — it does not matter much now. It seems to be gone.

The old and wonderful ways of the winter season are now atrophying here, and for it, winter’s coziness has waned, and the season’s six months now feel something akin to a prison sentence for many.

From here, it is not unreasonable for a fellow to say: If I’ve got to be alone anyhow, I might as well get some sunshine. After all, as a lifelong loner who has generally found good company wanting everywhere I’ve been, I can absolutely verify that it is far easier to be lonesome where the sunshine kisses the skin and the waves lap at one’s feet.

As a young buck I skied more than a hundred days a year. Occasionally, when I share this fact of my early days with some folks, they make a comment suggesting that I might’ve grown up in a wealthy family. I did not. Instead, my boyhood took place squarely in one of the last gasps of working-class ski culture in this country — and Upstate New York felt to be one of its epicenters. Our local ski hill had two lifts and a T-Bar, and at a microscopic 600’ of vertical drop (Aspen has, for the record, a 4,406’ vertical), it was a down-home, low-key little place — where the August price of an all-access season’s pass was as low as $253 dollars (Aspen’s one-day ticket price is now $279).

Being that I only lived a mile or two from this ski hill for my entire childhood, the logistics of a ski day were always extremely straightforward and simple. That they offered night skiing until 9PM made it even easier — even on a school night, I was up there getting my turns in, dropping cliffs in the woods, hucking off huge jumps, and slashing across all of the fourteen trails the little ski hill had back then. Moreover, I was never alone: dozens of my classmates and the other village children enjoyed the same ritual — at first chair on a Saturday, we’d converge like clockwork every week to ski the imfamous “9 to 9” shift, stretching a full twelve hours from the morningtime to day’s end. Many of us were ski instructors (an excellent first job I look back on fondly) and others had ambitions of “going pro” at freestyle skiing and snowboarding. Some took videos of daring acrobatics at the ski park — others cut way off-piste to go smoke weed and cigarettes in the woods.

It was a hoot of a scene every day, regardless of the weather. On many days, the piste was a mercilessly icy sheet of death; on others, the runs were patchy with grassy spots, or slicked up by dousing rains. We always skied anyway. But, being in Lake Effect snow country has its perks, too — and many, many, many times, we awoke to two or three feet of fresh powder snow, and would sprint out to the big cliff hucks on the north face of the glades, doing death-defying jumps into a marshmallow-esque world of pure powder. And of course, by season’s end, the warm days would come — days when one’s face would get sunburned by the gently warming rays of April’s first weeks; when we’d ski in shorts or wear wacky outfits, and end the day with a “pond skim” as we sped down from the top of the hill onto the big pools of meltwater.

These were my glory days as a boy; they were my everything, my Alpha and Omega — I worshiped the wintertime. So serious was my case that once the spring pollen came, and my nose cemented shut from allergies, and the summer’s heat began to paralyze me in rivers of sweat and discomfort — I would often become depressed, and count down the days until November, when we would finally see the first snow.

Back then, my love affair with winter seemed to be a given; I could never imagine anything else. Whenever I found myself listening to someone griping and complaining about winter, I felt acute revulsion and disgust — it was akin to blasphemy. Of course, many adults saw the winter as a season of difficulty, and they saw it that way for reasons I only faintly understood then. To them, winter meant rising at dark, snowblowing for an hour, de-icing the car, commuting a long ways on sloppy, dangerous roads (and possibly having to get towed out of the ditch) — only to then lay off work after the sun had set, driving back home in the dark, on long, dreadfully icy roads.

Their manner of work was something very new: prior to the inventions of the alarm clock, the automobile, and the 9-to-5 job (all in the last century or so), no one living in a wintry climate did any of this. An Upstate New Yorker in 1840 simply took the winter fairly easy; stuck close to home — the idea of commuting on dark, slick icy roads to a job you can’t be even five minutes late for had not been invented. Once it was, winter did become a whole lot more miserable indeed.

After some thought, I came to assume I’d avoid this flavor of misery by becoming a ski bum. I’d simply live in a van in the parking lots of ski resorts; then I’d never be stuck doing all that.

Though I’ve been a bum in many ways, my own “ski bum” chapter never did take place. I started traveling instead, and I never looked back. Within a few years, my skis would be collecting dust in the barn — and a season’s pass at even the most rinky-dink ski resorts would climb up around the thousand-dollar mark. Our local hill would change ownership, the lodge would be remodeled, and the entire culture of the hill I grew up skiing would be altered forever. I’m not sure if many of the kids I grew up skiing with still ski. If I had to guess, I’d assume that basically none of them do anymore.

More than this — I wound up hurting my shoulder later on in life. What began as a single dislocation became a chronic dislocation; not merely a little flash of pain, nor a minor dislocation — but a full-blown, complete dislocation so serious my arm can only be put back in place manually and through intense pain. When it comes out, it hurts so much I feel nauseous; there have been times when the pain has been so incredible I have nearly passed out. By now, I have dislocated that shoulder at least 40 times — and a military doctor told me “do not ever do anything where you could dislocate it and then fall on it, or you’re going to lose your arm forever.” If I am to take that doctor’s advice — I really ought to never ski again, or at least, I’m now limited to only mild Cross Country skiing and nothing more.

I did not realize it as it happened, but the slow death not only of the low-brow ski culture I knew as a boy but of my own prospects as a skier hammered in one of the first nails in my wintertime coffin. Without skiing, winter feels just a little more somber and lonesome. When you add the realities of what some have lately called “the loneliness epidemic” to that void — winter has quickly become far more like prison than ever before. Where once I was a wildman, running out in the bush at maximum speed in the waist-deep powder — now, I find myself limited to taking brief, bone-chilling walks on the slushy streets (for the sidewalks are being shoveled less and less lately). I find myself weakened to the cold, for I have fewer and fewer reasons to be out in it. And above all — I find that the old, cozy, friendly culture of wintertime I knew as a kid has all but died here; winter is now a season of pure isolation of a most trying variety.

Chalk it up to youthful hubris, I suppose, that this ill fate could’ve come for me though I swore it never would; blame it on the internet, the rising costs of lift tickets, the fragility of the human body — the aging out of the few classically warm-hearted northerners we had left. Now the dreams of Florida aren’t strictly for the elderly anymore; the youth want Florida, too. The beaches, the Carolinian condos, those low, low Alabama tax bills — the grilled oysters of Biloxi and the duck boats of Cocodrie, they all call. None seem to have the kind of gumption for winter anymore; none feel drawn to rekindling the old ties that sustained and nurtured the frozen fingers and weary hearts of the northland’s older types. Now there is only a cold resentment against the injustice of winter, and a habitual tendency to scroll through reels of men fishing down south, or of ladies on the beach, or to search Zillow for beachfront homes… all as the snow flies and the mercury drops on our dark, frozen nights.

I don’t know that I have a solution here. I don’t know that anyone does. As some say, “the past is a foreign country,” and we can’t go back there. Re-vamping the old ways is never as straightforward as our romantics might like to imagine; for there usually is an inconvienient reason or two for why those old ways ever died out. These days, we’re now content with weaker surrogates for our wintertime comfort — the internet seems to offer that in spades; we Netflix and TikTok and slump off in a haze, waiting for springtime. Gone are the old pancake breakfasts and get-togethers; and dropping by a friend’s house on a January night? Why, you’d better text first, and if you text, well, there’s a busy schedule and… well, why don’t we just get together come spring? No kidding — it’s often this way now. Something fundamental has changed. It does not feel dramatic to say that the culture feels less and less human, more and more neurotic — it’s as if we’re paralyzed by the very idea of sociality, and prefer the low-effort surrogates we find on the internet.

For this reason, the odds of fomenting some kind of a revival of the old ways of winter seems far-fetched — like a distant, doubtful notion. And indeed, the far-fetched-ness of this idea often makes the psychological burdens of the winter all the heavier.

If this keeps on, why, the rural North is just gonna die off and depopulate. Nobody can live like this; it’s just not sustainable unless you’re one of very few natural-born hermits. While there are, blessedly, a fair few northerners who have been blessed to have retained their old ways, their families, their long-time friends — such people are lucky; they’re the exception to the rule. What they have in their possession is a fragile thing. If it breaks, they’ll be closer to going down south to sunshine than they ever would’ve thought, too — because the long rough winters are only possible if you’ve got the warmth of community and friends coursing through your daily life. Though it’s sad to say it, the frank reality is that most people now have less and less of this. Many have none.

Without that, you really might as well just head south, I guess. What’s the point of freezing if you’re just gonna be alone? Freezing’s only fun when you’re doing it with your buddies — when there’s fireplaces and pancakes and liquor and bonfires. As we see all that go by the wayside, piece by piece, the North is just gonna get emptier and emptier.

After all, you can’t do winter alone.

Consider it this way: imagine that you must pass two nights in two different cabins for some reason or other. In one cabin, you are to bunk with your own grandfather, and he’s brought with him some whiskey, a pistol, and a game of Scrabble. In the second cabin, you are bunking with a notorious criminal psychopath known for dismembering his victims, and he brings with him the same kit: whiskey, pistol, and a Scrabble game.

In which does the “could” loom large as an unnerving threat? And in which does the “could” look markedly more pleasant or even jolly?

It would not be fair to say that one’s nerves surrounding the night spent sleeping alongside an armed, possibly drunk, and totally sick and notorious killer would be unjustified. To be nervous about that night there would not be wrong, nor would it be neurotic, deluded, or unreasonable. Even if the man was good company overall; even if the two of you elected to play a rousing game of Scrabble, and even if in so doing he was completely genteel or even funny — your fear would not be about what will happen, but what could happen.

Because of the “could,” it is doubtful you would get a wink of sleep. Nobody in their right mind would; any thinking person would be rather afraid to let their guard down around one who is known for dismembering his victims — particularly when you are locked in close quarters with him when he is armed. To let your guard down around this person would be dangerous, and not because of anything approaching a certainty — but only because of the risk.

Conversely, the night passed with grandpa would be completely different. Depending on what sort of a fellow your grandfather is, the night could range from awkward at the worst to, at the very best, a memorable evening spent bonding with beloved old grandpa. The whiskey is no threat here; the two of you could drink it or, if teetotaling, it could simply be there — inert, harmless, a presence one barely considers.

Quite the same with the gun. It is entirely likely that for the vast majority of those who’ll read this essay, their grandfathers are either responsible and trustworthy men of a sort one would always trust with a firearm — or they are skeptics of firearm culture who would not touch the gun anyhow. In either case, it is not a dangerous presence; one is not tortured by fears of some ill fate coming to pass, nor of any unforeseen shots in the dark. Consequently, it would not be so hard to sleep there — you’d get a far smoother night’s rest with grandpa than with a psychopathic killer.

Of course this all must seem completely obvious, and indeed, it is. But I highlight this difference only to make a broader remark upon the psychology of place. It is a kind of metaphor for the fifty US States and their respective counties, or, I suspect it could be applied well enough internationally, too. For example, a vacation in Pyongyang is markedly different from a vacation in Paris — again, not because of any great guarantee of what would occur in either city (it is not impossible to imagine having a wonderful time in Pyongyang and getting mugged in Paris) but because of the “could.” And reason would have it that the risk of vacationing in Pyongyang is, overall, wildly unfavorable as compared with that of taking a trip to Paris.

On the question of which US States we Americans choose to reside in, the calculus is not hardly different, albeit it is of a ‘softer’ variety. For example, for the one who has somehow come to conclude that the ability to legally smoke marijuana and to get an abortion are sacrosanct rights without which one is oppressed or ensnared in a theocratic hellscape — a life in Texas or Kentucky would appear to be a dreadful and unnerving prospect. And no doubt, a quick perusal of Reddit shows that a startlingly large proportion of far-left-leaning Millennials and Zoomers from those states are making great efforts at leaving them, often at great personal cost.

Contrariwise, there are many others who are from states like Illinois, New Jersey, and New York who find themselves fed up with what may really be some of the highest property tax rates in the modern world. They make note of Byzantine procedures surrounding firearm ownership, or building codes, or zoning laws — that do altogether make what they consider to be an essentially American life nigh impossible. After one notes they pay the full value of their home back to the state every 10 or 15 years, applies for a pistol permit doled out by Soviet-esque officials who demand things like “character witnesses” and “just cause” for the exercise of one’s second amendment rights, or after finding that basic freedoms like homeschooling or building a house are niggled down to nothing by arcane and obscure laws that even the enforcers themselves can’t seem to understand — they become unnerved, just as if they were trapped in a cabin with an armed psychopath, and may decide to leave.

Such people appear to be moving across state lines at numbers that may exceed those of their liberal counterparts. Judging by the “empty” or “deadened” character of so much of rural Upstate New York, or downstate Illinois — it seems rather apparent that leaving is the most popular pastime in so many of those states’ counties.

Whether one leaves a state over their alleged “right” to an abortion or over things like taxes and gun rights — we see people so deeply disturbed by the fearsome “could” that they’re even willing to pull up the stakes and uproot themselves from family and familiarity both. They observe the legal climate, hold up what they see of it against their own convictions, and find that the risk of finding themselves mired in a worsening situation is so serious that they must take direct action swiftly, even at great personal cost.

Is such behavior ever well-reasoned and just? Does it chiefly stem from partisan neuroticism — or is it that, at times and in the course of American life, one must really “vote with their feet?”

As a matter of principle it seems to go without saying that there are times when this kind of arithmetic and its subsequent results are completely justified. Was the dissident in Soviet Russia wrong to risk life and limb to escape the brutal regime that had taken root in his country? I doubt any thinking person could ever say so. Or is the migrant refugee wrong to flee whatever grim scenario is taking place in his home? In similar fashion, many would not say that it is. Therefore, this particular genre of mobility is baked into our conception of place at at least some level.

Yet, right alongside this basic understanding, we are just the same taken with repeating proverbs about how “the grass is always greener on the other side” or “wherever you go, there you are.” These are, to be sure, quite fair pearls of wisdom to circulate — it is true that moving house will not bring about a utopia, nor will it solve addictions, personality disorders, health problems, financial woes, or the fall of mankind in the garden. And so insofar as one’s grievances with a place stem wholly from the domain of the personal, and the desire for a change of place appears to be imbued with a salvific quality — the ‘leaver’ may, in these cases, set himself up for disappointment or new failures.

Juggling between these two heuristics regarding leaving is not as straightforward as it would seem. I think, for example, of some old classmates of mine from college. As a seventeen-year-old, I enrolled in the State University of New York at Plattsburgh in the “EOP” program. EOP stood for “Educational Opportunity Program” — a kind of acronymic euphemism for “the really poor kids with substantial scholarships.” All of us were from high-poverty areas, all of us were the first in our families to attend college, and almost all of us arrived at the pre-collegiate summer program with at least a few serious academic deficiencies, bad habits, and wrongheaded notions about the purpose of college.

The summer program sought to correct these, and was a measure taken to increase the odds that we’d graduate. Moreover, it created a sort of “pipeline” for kids from poor areas of NYS to come to a more prosperous, thriving little city far from each of our old problems — and indeed, 98% of my EOP classmates were from blighted urban areas. They grew up in Yonkers, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Washington Heights, Newburgh, and so on — and in fact, I was the only white person in the program. It was my first exposure to black people, Latinos, or any of the other types of people that as a kid, I really only ever saw on television — and all of them were from the worst ‘ghettos’ in New York State.

The only thing we had in common was that we each hearkened from zip codes with above-average household poverty rates — and had parents or guardians who were, at best, ‘working class’. Otherwise, their experience of ‘poverty’ was radically different from my own: they told ghastly stories of murdered cousins, hiding in metal bathtubs when gangs started shooting up their streets, mothers who prostituted themselves, and fathers in prison. Several had been to juvenile hall for various offenses — and one kid who had a stub of a forefinger claimed he “lost it in a brawl with a cop.” I never knew if it was true, but it struck me as a believable claim.

I learned very quickly what the value of getting out of the ghetto really was to those who called some of this state’s worst ‘hoods’ home. For many, it was life or death. The magnetism of the drugs was too intense; the “family business” paid too well for them to turn away from. Prison was discussed not as an accident or as an avoidable thing but as a given — an inevitability. The conditions of long-time family apartments were described as being appalling. Health problems were rampant, police beat-downs constant and brutal, and multi-generational cycles of welfare reliance (or fraud and abuse) were common to hear of.

At that time, I began to roll my eyes at the idea that “the grass [isn’t] greener on the other side.” For many of these kids — it was, beyond any reasonable doubt.

Yet “wherever you go, there you are” was nevertheless operational on all of us. Several of the students more or less immediately botched their opportunity by various drug arrests, assault charges, seasons of debauched partying, or flunking out from an abject lack of effort. Others did make it through — for one of my friends in the program, it took him ten years to complete his bachelor’s degree — only to feel trapped in Plattsburgh, or to struggle with rent back in NYC, or to idle at sub-par jobs for years on end. Though such people were no longer ducking shots on their home streets — some other, more ineffable thing held them back from contentment like a forcefield; a decidedly common fate for those who’ve grown up in dysfunctional or Dickensian conditions.

The most interesting element of these cases and their incumbent struggles was that they were more or less entirely non-ideological. The kids in EOP wouldn’t become inured to the mind-numbing ‘soma’ of political partisanship until later; none of them arrived with anything resembling a political consciousness of any kind. They may have carried a latent notion that Obama was “good,” but few of them could offer a defense of him other than the fact that “he’s black, like me.” Though this is understandable to a degree, and not entirely worthless — these ‘ghetto kids’ never seemed to conceive of their desire to “get out of the ghetto” in ideological terms. It was simply viewed as an absolute necessity, quite akin to breathing clean air.

When the “leaving” question begins to be tinged with ideological or political concerns, it is complexified substantially. For where the EOP kids — or for that matter, refugees, prisoners, or citizens of brutal and repressive regimes of any kind — sought escape from negative material conditions, the footloose ideologist often aims to leave in order to avoid anticipated negative material conditions. His decision to depart from a place with policies he believes could negatively impact him eventually is proactive; he is avoiding the risk of misfortunes that he has reason to believe “could” happen given the climate of how his state is being run. His calculations on this score may be rational and valid — or they may really stem from what Slavoj Zizek would call “pure ideology.” Parsing these is never straightforward.

Perhaps Proverbs 22:3 says it most clearly:

The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and pay the penalty.

Even some nine centuries before the time of our Lord Jesus Christ, we see that the natural human tendency to assess danger and “take refuge” somewhere safer was well understood — even to the point of directly stating that those who fail to do this are “simple” and will “pay the penalty.”

Lately I am thinking of this verse — as this year, my property tax assessment doubled out of nowhere. A house I paid $33,000 for last year is now assessed at $72,000, and at a rate exceeding 3% of assessed value. This means I will pay the full market value of my house back to the county roughly every thirteen years. If I live to be 85, I will actually pay the county the full value of my home at least four times before I die. And that’s if the assessment does not rise again — which if everything I’ve observed about NYS property taxes is any guide, it certainly will.

For the dubious privilege of paying such a scandalous amount, what do I receive? A dilapidated town nestled in a vast, dying region, with a median age nearing sixty. Cracked-pavement roads, rainbow flags flying over the schools, invasive homeschooling requirements, Draconian gun laws, arcane building codes that nearly double the cost of building as compared with no-code jurisdictions elsewhere. Legions of cops (some of the most per-capita in the US) setting speed traps to generate still-more revenue — legalized euthanasia, protected abortion, solar farms forced onto productive cropland by plutocrats from Albany, whole milk banned in the schools.

Even now, the NYS Department of Community and Family Services is actually deliberating as to whether denying “gender-affirming care” is a form of medical neglect — and whether they can take a parent’s children and put them in foster care if this “treatment” is denied. All of this is only a cursory view of the situation here; if I listed the number of grievances I have against the State of New York I would run out of room quickly.

Moreover, the sum total of these pointless indignities and obscenities seems to have demoralized the population here. Young people leave at high rates; any sense of community that does not hinge entirely upon those who will be dead on the other side of the decade is nearly impossible to find. The great majority of those who stay are deeply aggrieved by living in a place where, as some have said it, “everything I want to do is illegal.” Even the enforcers of the bizarre laws passed at the state capital are cynical; enforcement is often lopsided or targeted — or even driven purely by personal vendettas or abject mismanagement of office.

As one survivor of the Yugoslav Wars told me at a grocery store in Utica some years ago — “I had thought the nightmare was over in 1991, and I was wrong then. Then I came to Utica and I thought the nightmare was definitely over. But I see I was wrong there, too.”

What we find is a kind of “hostage situation” for so many Upstate New Yorkers; whereby three major factors entrap them here in spite of their profound and often crippling disgruntlement with living without political representation in a state that is run by NYC and its cronies:

1. Family ties. For many, ‘family is everything’ and their family is here. These are the types of people who, had they grown up in Russia, might’ve tried to dissuade their children from fleeing the country in 1917.

2. Financial realities. With resale values as low as they are in this state’s rural regions — the idea of selling and having enough to move elsewhere is basically unthinkable, particularly if your wages are already low.

3. Inertia. What “home” is is akin to a large diesel engine that, once running, is not easy to shut down. Many Upstaters never travel, or are not aware of quite how depressing our state often is. Like fish to water, it simply may not occur to them that life is easier or that people really are happier elsewhere.

For a very small minority, there is a fourth factor — and this one has been, in particular, my own Achilles’ heel:

4. Deep love of place combined with a “never retreat” mentality. The one who adores the land here (and it is truly magnificent) may choose to ignore the politics, and may make his peace with both the odious taxes and the crumbling social reality here; he may moreover argue that only a coward leaves his homeland, that he should “stay and fight” — but whatever “fighting” looks like, he usually does not know.

Each of these seems to negate the “could” somehow; each seems to lead the one who “sees danger” to blithely ignore it, and to resolutely hang on. I find that as time goes on, for many this process of hanging on only gets more difficult as time goes on. Just as the weight towed by a tractor in a tractor pull gets heavier and heavier as it is pulled — so too with the Upstate New Yorker’s own burden. For as family ties weaken (and they seem to weaken as a matter of course here), one knot loosens. Should monetary realities turn in favor of fortune, another tie unravels. Eventually, the only things keeping a man here may be of an essentially intellectual nature — for he knows that by force of will inertia can be overcome; and he goes back and forth on the efficacy of “staying and fighting.”

And here, the “could” impacts him in another way. Rather than the negative coulds — that if he should need to, God forbid, discharge a firearm to protect his family, that a liberal D.A. could jail him, or that his tax assessment could double again — the positive coulds start wandering through his mind. His family, for example, could abandon the turmoil, choose to behave as a family might again; it could be that the state turns things around, that better policies come around, that the taxes actually go lower rather than higher…

Each of these seems like a dubious pipe-dream, and yet the fantasies sustain something in him. The ‘staying-urge’ consumes them; these dreams are the only nourishment that that urge receives. The climate, the state, the tax-man, the culture, sometimes the family — none of it appears to feed that urge, none of it ever seems to straighten up and offer anything like an optimistic view of the future here. And so, like the one who limps through his dead-end life by so many television shows and lottery tickets — all of which are fake and he knows it — the ‘stayer’ here in Upstate NY feeds himself with little fantasies every bit as phony as those offered by the TV and the casino.

Those who are from elsewhere may find all of this sort of thing to be decidedly cynical — those who are from here and places like it will usually understand. Though we do have a minority of residents here who take a far more positive view of this place, such people tend to either be wealthy, retired, or are state workers. And of those with a positive view of this place who are not any of these — they appear to be a minority of scattered enthusiasts operating mostly in isolation, or else have grown up in the lucky few towns that have not completely died back into a husk of what they once were.

Perhaps because my own hometown has died in exactly that fashion — and is now unrecognizable to me — I am particularly prone to being unmoored from this place. It would be fair to say this, and I recognize my own bias on that score. Nevertheless, I do not think I am wrong to speak on this matter as I have here; practically everywhere I go in NYS, I see an almost endless stream of disgruntlement — and where I have generally made it my industry to blithely insist that things are not so bad as the naysayers claim, I must admit that this is a deeply trying and difficult place to live.

Then again, America was built by those who deliberately sought out to live in “trying and difficult” places, no? Those words would indeed describe the life of the frontier quite aptly. Why, then, could Upstate NY not simply be another “new frontier?” This has been my line of reasoning for some years now, and I do not think the idea came about vainly or without reason. Extremely cheap housing, poorly-enforced laws, rich land, and relative proximity to places of substantial cultural import (such as New York City and Montreal) seemed to make it the perfect proving ground for a new American vision.

My precise ambition here was to provoke a kind of Renaissance for the rural hinterlands; an answer for those fed up with sky-high housing costs elsewhere — a Haven for lovers of frugality and collectivity and nature and faith; a place for time-rich oddballs to congregate. Perhaps it could still be that — perhaps I have not yet gone far enough.

But one key respect in which this place is not frontier-esque in the slightest is in the law and in the tax codes. No westward-bound sodbuster paid the full value of his home back to the state every thirteen years. No fur trapper in Oregon Territory pulled a permit for his camp cabin — nor was a farmer of the old times ever cited for an illicit outhouse.

Part of what made America great was that formerly, one really owned their property; the notion that a free-born citizen would have to ask permission to use his own property how he wished was foreign to this country for generations. Those were the generations during which the greatest ‘bones’ of this country were ever built. The men of such times would find it hard to believe that all along, they were only working for a future where people would be literally taxed out of their own homes — with nary an ounce of recourse or representation. One wonders if they wouldn’t have built any of this country to begin with if they could’ve seen the future.

These days, though New York has an uncanny amount in common with frontiers — namely, the cheap, fertile land — it seems that each of those commonalities is directly countered by some respect in which New York is now the ultimate anti-frontier. Living here, one feels a strange admixture of feelings: at once, you are as lonesome as if you were on a frontier — yet with Albany looming over you, and the tax bills piling up in the mailbox, you get that eerie feeling you might feel if sleeping beside a drunken, armed psychopath. He is a dangerous man; he seems to hate you. It seems to be only a matter of time before he destroys you. After all, he could — and it is that exact kind of possibility that ever drove men to the real frontier in the first place.

And so I am led to wonder if I have made an error with regards to my home state. After all, there is still land as cheap as that of Upstate New York’s elsewhere in the country — and in states where the tax bill on a house like mine might be about $100/yr. States where I can, like an American, buy a pistol and keep it in my coat to protect my family — and where, like an American, I can buy land and do with it what I please, without asking father for permission. Such places still do exist, and I cannot tell you what it would do for a man’s nerves to live in such a place.

Perhaps it is all an illusion or a sham; perhaps I am only riding the high clouds of “pure ideology” and a neurotic pining for a kind of freedom that was slaughtered nationwide long ago. But I have seen enough of the Louisiana swamps and the Chihuahuan Desert and the Appalachian Range to know that there are places far freer than here, so far as I could ever tell; one wonders if any of them will last into my old age, or if what is happening now in New York State is only a portrait of our nationwide future.

To this, some will say that one must “bloom where they’re planted,” and I do suppose there is some wisdom there. Yet can one bloom if the tax-man comes to cut the blooms away once a year? What if he comes also to cut away the leaves, or to take away the soil and the sunlight? Can one bloom if blooming is itself made illicit — a citable offense? Or — what of the one who blooms alone, unseen, without friends?

It is all too much for me to answer today. I cannot say whether I will really leave New York State, or whether ‘thinking about leaving New York’ is merely an essential part of living here. It isn’t as if I haven’t already left, either — I’ve spent the better part of my adult life away from here. None would be shocked if I departed for good, though some would be saddened. Then again, if our daughter would be better off for it, this increase in her circumstances might outweigh whatever grief is generated by our departure — the father in me says it would. But for now, there is no answer; only an open inquiry.

All I will say is that from the view from here, the grass certainly does look greener — and seeing as I have traveled enough to have actually seen and felt that grass, I do know that it is greener. It will only do to stay here if indeed I am a true masochist — one who thrives on paying triple the price for inferior grass. Perhaps there is something edifying there; perhaps it is laudable to force oneself to somehow bloom in an absolute wasteland, where few others manage to do anything but “bloom” in a manner hardly different from how plastic flowers bloom. Perhaps it is a kind of madman’s bargain — a feverish deal with the darkness, a wager so absurd that the only one who’d win it is the one who has emptied himself out completely first.

There is no way for me to know, and so for now, I will only sit with it like an old friend. Doubtless, that old friend is not merely in my house lately, but in the houses of countless others who, through gritted teeth, call this place “home,” too. For all of us, Alaska is a fantasy — West Virginia, Arizona, Texas: they are like cartoon characters in a show so magical it lifts us out of our darkness until the rust and taxes re-appear in our veins again. Whether they are real or not is not in question — it’s whether we are better there or not that is. May God help me.

Standing silent on the balcony, the clean, crystalline lines of the oceanic horizon soothe me. Today I have no viral Tweets. I am not reading any ‘hot takes.’ There are no death threats in my inbox. And I have not a single obligation looming over me for at least four months.

This is the moment I have been waiting for for a long time, though I have waited without understanding just what it was I was waiting for. Standing wordlessly in this undisclosed location, deep in a neat, orderly, mostly-geriatric kind of terra incognita by the sea, I am reminded of what life was like for me before I got on the internet. A distant, fugueish memory of the time before I had any kind of a public profile sweeps over me — a memory of a time when I was always anonymous, unseen, obscure, and therefore free to do and say as I liked without so much as a word of running commentary on how I think and live. It was a wholesome and freewheeling time.

Now, those days feel far behind me. About 65,000 people watch everything I do. They expect me to be present online daily; continuously publishing my opinions, snippets from my life, theses on important issues, ‘influencing’ the ‘discourse’ with my ‘content’. And where once, 65,000 sets of eyes might’ve turned toward a single man once in a great while at most — even if he were a King or a truly famous musician, speaker, writer, etc — these days, the “watching” is not concentrated into a single discrete event. Instead, it is daily, continuous, 24/7 — and deeply granular. Moreover, it is available to anyone who posts online, at any time; one may go ‘viral’ very easily and without intending to do so. And all it takes is a half-dozen viral posts to make a normal person into a niche internet celebrity.

The constant, ultra-fine, deeply granular kind of “watching” that the small-time internet celeb experiences appears to be a thing with no real anthropological precedent. And though my own audience is an incredibly tiny fraction of the audiences of far larger “content creators,” I have found that the experience of being watched online is a distinctly terrifying, exhausting, even nauseating experience. The “parasocial” relationships people have with whatever version of you they have concocted in their minds is often genuinely disturbing.

Yet it pays — so what can one do but continue it? Even on the days that I do not feel like posting anything, I post. For the checks continue to come in, paltry as they often are — and it pays to wring out the mind and spirit like a sponge for any sort of “content” that might sell.

I put that word in quotes because it is a word that I naturally despise; to call the product of one’s mind and heart mere “content” is to bypass the creative process entirely. It is to sell a kind of formless, bituminous grey matter well before it is ever formed into anything resembling ‘art’. For in the digital landscape, there is no time for art — one must keep posting, one must constantly dredge up something else to post. Like dragging bile out of an unsettled and hungry stomach, you saddle up before the keyboard and begin to type. There are no quiet moments here; one cannot take a walk along the mountain trail with one’s beloved without carrying the camera “so that you can take some pictures to post.”

This has all been documented by others with large online followings before; perhaps it is now a standard life arc — a kind of ‘hero’s journey’ amongst those who rise to any kind of notoriety online. And again, I say all of this as one with a very small audience, all things considered — and one who is ultimately grateful for the audience I have. But it is not as if I have millions of followers, and frankly, I thank God that I do not have millions of followers.

I am not joking when I say that I actually pray that I never find myself being watched by millions of human beings.

It’s heartening to know that just as I find myself running this gamut of misgivings about being an “online writer,” I see that I am not alone. Two days ago, — who is both a serious influence on me and a personal friend as well — posted an article entitled Going Under, Coming Up, wherein he describes both his recent physical illness and what he termed “a season of deep fatigue and burnout” in his writing career. He says:

I could say a lot about what has happened [since being baptized] - I have said a lot on this Substack - but I could also say nothing and it would perhaps mean as much. Words have their uses and their limits.

Lately, I have felt much of the same. As many of you may have noticed, I have not posted since late November. Several times since posting my last article, I have consciously thought to myself: “If only I could publish an entirely wordless article, for it might say what I wish to say far better than words would.” Having already had these thoughts lodged in my mind and heart, it feels as if reading Paul’s essay on the matter gave me permission to accept this urge towards wordlessness rather than to view is as a failure or a liability.

For though the means by which we interface here is machinic in nature, and is indeed a piece of ‘information systems technology’ characterized largely by routine and robotic repetition — the author is not a robot. A man’s soul and spirit cannot spit out tasty little treats on command at all times. Moreover, it feels pointless to call our periods of creative austerity “writer’s block” or anything like it. The daily Tweets, the weekly essays, the monthly columns — these routinized forms of writing do not have seasons; they do not have a wintertime or a hibernation. They come not as fruits of a harvest with its natural time and place — but as a mechanical milking-machine comes for the cow.

But what is the cow but a witless dullard? Her purpose is to be milked for pablum for babies and cheese fanciers and pizza-stands — she offers us only the subtlest glint of anything derived from the intellect. And even there, what we can gain from observing the cow is largely projection anyway; the cow herself is only a kind of fleshy machine for turning grass and hay into milk. Quite the same with the true “content creator,” who finds creative ways to repeat himself over and over again in saccharine tones and glossy technicolor; what with scheduled posts and a surgically-curated repertoire of images and ‘hot takes’. His agenda is to meet the machine where it’s at; who he actually is often remains obscured behind the apparatus with which he is engaged.

There are more than a few things I’d reckon Mr. Kingsnorth and I have in common, and one of them is that neither of us has much of a desire to be “content creators” who churn out recapitulations of the same old thing in an effort to increase page-views. Neither of us wishes to hide behind a tired old schtick — we share an earnest desire to bare our hearts, not as speakers in a one-way oration but as compatriots alongside our respective readerships; fumbling about in our own way, sharing our work on the hope that those who read it might find something of beauty there.

And it is simply not always possible to reduce this process into the ‘weekly edition’ model. It is a thing that by nature defies consistency at one point or another; yet this defiance is at odds with the basic structure of the internet. The monthly invoices roll in — an expectation to produce regularly is attached to the offering of regular compensation for the “product.” The tides of digital opinion ebb and flow — each day, there is some news or some happening that commands our attention and must be addressed. Solicitations for advice now and again overwhelm my inbox, and each merits an answer, though the question of when I ought to produce that answer sails off onto the deep and undending horizon of time. Meanwhile, there are bills to pay, funerals to attend, errands to be run, and a cooing baby who demands the great bulk of my attention whenever she is around (which is to say always).

From this point of view, I would quite rather do “all my future writing in hand-printed chapbooks” so as to “give them out on street corners,” as Paul said in his essay. Perhaps I could really pull such a thing off — perhaps I would not be so crazy to try it out.

In reading all this, one might wonder why I ever involved myself in any of this online writing stuff to begin with. The answer is simple: If you wish to be a ‘writer’ at all, you must be online. You must have a social media presence. Perhaps a year-and-a-half ago, a senior acquisitions editor at a “Big Five” publishing house called me on the telephone — and his first question to me was “how many followers do you have on social media?”

I was stunned that this was his first inquiry. The quality of my work seemed to be a secondary concern at best, if that. His number one interest was in ensuring to the best of his ability that I could market my own book myself. And, owing to how he yawned at my modest social media numbers at the time, I realized that I had only one real option — I had to amass a larger social media following or I’d never get a serious book deal.

Some eighteen months later, I’d find myself with over 50,000 followers on “X” and over 15,000 followers on Substack. After achieving these landmarks, I had a conversation with the man who’d become my book agent. The discussion was all normal business, and he seemed very much interested in working with me — but after we’d covered all of the major questions about my upcoming book, I asked him an off-topic question. Our dear friend — author of the bestselling book Better Off, which is about the year he spent with the Amish — had no social media until very recently. He’s in his sixties, and in spite of having authored a best-selling book, he told us a couple years ago that he couldn’t get a book deal.

Why? Because he had no social media.

So I asked my agent: “Would you be interested in my friend’s work?” The answer was, not shockingly, an immediate no. The agent threw his hands up and said that while he understands Eric’s conundrum, and is certainly sympathetic to his plight — you’ve just got to have a serious social media presence to get published these days. That’s just how the industry works now.

It made me wonder just how many brilliant authors there are out there with excellent manuscripts collecting dust — solely because they have not elected to stand up to be continually watched by tens of thousands of people online. Moreover, it made me understand that though posting on X feels like the most profound waste of time imaginable most of the time — the following I’d acquired there would be my sole lifeline if I was to have even the slightest chance of writing for a living ten years from now.

Owing to this, the writer is now — whether he likes it or not — a prisoner of the social internet; he must expose himself there like a lizard in a terrarium, posing for the cameras, always ready to be ogled at no matter how he feels about it. Gone are the days of mailing off one’s typewritten manuscript from their beach-hut in Baja for a chance in the limelight. Now, we must submit ourselves to the all-seeing eye first and foremost or else accept utter destitution and obscurity.

As time goes on — that ‘destitution and obscurity’ doesn’t really seem so bad.

Mulling these matters over by the Atlantic as I am, I’m reminded of a 2009 documentary film by Ondi Timoner entitled We Live in Public. Though this film seems to be fairly obscure or at least seldom mentioned these days, it had a profound impact on me in college — for it was ultimately a prophetic (and avowedly dystopian) vision of “the social internet.”

The documentary explores an especially bizarre project headed up by Dot-Com millionaire and founder of ‘pseudo.com’ Josh Harris called “Quiet: We Live in Public.” The project consisted of placing one-hundred people into a large New York City warehouse space that was outfitted with webcams in practically every corner — even to include the toilets, the bedrooms, and every living area.

There was nowhere in the entire facility that wasn’t being livestreamed; and all participants agreed that they would remain in the building for 100 days. Participation was free, and in fact, those who had entered the building could get whatever they requested — be it food, booze, or even drugs.

In the beginning of the experiment, the atmosphere was charged with the raucous spirit of the Dot Com era. The year was 1999. Party people and exhibitionists packed into the underground apartments as the cameras were wired up for full-time 24/7 streaming. Thousands of people worldwide logged in to watch an apocalyptic orgy of live sex, drinking, partying, and mayhem of a flavor that could only have been produced in the year 1999.

But within a couple of weeks of insanity — even the most enthusiastic participants began to come apart at the seams. With nerves frayed, no sunlight, and not so much as a single moment of privacy during day-to-day life, a kind of madness swept over the underground bunker. People began to fight; some slunk into a dark depression — others had panic attacks live in front of the cameras. Finally, NYPD forced the doors open, and dozens of harried participants poured out onto the street, rubbed raw by the constant watching of the cameras.

There, in 1999 — five years before Facebook, seven years before Twitter, eleven years before Instagram, and seventeen years before Tiktok — a live preview of the social media era had already been shown to the world. Instead of taking the experiment as a prophetic warning, Timoner’s documentary won a few awards at Sundance and MOMA — and following this, Harris’ experiment mostly faded from memory entirely by the time the social internet’s delirium entered full-swing. Yet there was an obvious warning inscribed into the film; a warning that we all would’ve been wise to heed.

Instead — the money in watching has simply been too good for The Powers That Be to pass up on.

But much like the Colosseum claimed the lives of many of its performers, the new digital Colosseum we’ve constructed seems to generate burnout, mental illness, and “crashouts” amongst our “content creators” as a matter of course. Worse than this is that at this stage of the history of information — mystery is no longer an element at play. For the model of “Living in Public” demands that those who place themselves on display for the masses do so in an unbroken fashion — the collective attention span is simply too short for the wider culture to tolerate those who abscond intermittently for long and indefinite periods of time.

Yet absconding is often what one needs most to produce good and edifying art. One often may need to empty the calendar, take off, leave the telephone unanswered and the emails unchecked — but this is getting increasingly difficult to ever do. By all I can tell, this is largely because the internet cannot tolerate any regime of ‘content creation’ that is both slow and intermittent. Instead, routinized posting is rewarded; 24/7 cycles of outrage are milked for millions of views — users are algorithmically encouraged to bare more and more of the fine-grain details of their minds, bodies, and lifestyles, and to do so as often as possible.

Perhaps this has something to do with hosting fees. After all, as a website becomes more popular — that site or app will require more and more physical infrastructure. Servers will be needed, and they run on electricity; fees increase with every new score of users who log into the site. Therefore, as a site becomes more popular, it must generate more and more money if it is to make a profit. In time, every single website seems to go down the same path: toward faster, more quick-cut, outraging, granular type posts. The profitable site has its users logging in constantly, lingering long over all the posts they see, interacting at high rates — yielding metrics that are favorable to investors and advertisers alike. And to obtain those metrics, websites use many of the same psychological techniques as marketers and casino operators.

If a website or app were to adopt a slower, more intermittent model, it could not last if that site became popular — as it would struggle to finance the physical infrastructure the site would require. Substack is a prime example of this. Grateful as I am for Substack’s slower model, we see that as the site has become more popular — the owners push more and more more attention-grabbing features like reels and livestreams.

In short — for a website to stay competitive, it must hack the brain-stem. It must find a way to short-circuit the dopamine receptors in the brain. And there is no “slow and intermittent” way to do this. So we find that the natural, organic creative process in human beings is now at odds with the financial and physical infrastructure of the technological medium through which most created visual and written content is now circulated. This is a serious boondoggle for artists and writers around the world — and its default maximum state (or logical conclusion) appears to be akin to the experiment shown in the film We Live in Public.

There must, of course, be another way. Substack cannot be the final answer — for it will inevitably succumb to the same internal contradictions that turned Facebook into a ghastly AI-slop machine. Hosting costs will not go down; they will if anything increase, and sites like Substack will have to cover them by whatever means they can. The architecture of the site will, over time, be altered to become increasingly addictive — and consequently, the creative processes that are rewarded by the site will trend downward toward the ‘lower forms’ of ‘content creation.’ Already we see that shorter articles go viral more often — the attention span required to read a 5,000+ word essay is just too much to ask. Eventually, sites on this path either veer downward towards AI slop, porn, or a model that predominantly favors quick-cut “reel” style videos — or they go out of business.

Where, then, can thinking people find a durable haven? The answer is offline. That can be the only answer. Though the internet can and must play a role in facilitating offline events, advertising offline gathering spaces, or assembling snail-mail newsletter lits — for we’re all here right now, not IRL — we’d be wise to orient our activities toward the Real World. And yes, when I say “Real World,” I mean the world offline — I reject the idea that the online and offline worlds are equally real.

This is, in large part, why I am in Delaware. I needed to go somewhere that hadn’t been ‘hyped’ by the internet. I needed the least-Instagrammable place; a place that has gone largely overlooked by the all-seeing eye of the filtered selfie photograph and the TikTok reel. Here, there are septuagenarians with walkers on the beachhead. There are well-to-do DC housewives ordering the buttered scallops at the family-run seafood store. Something about the world here does not feel to be steeped in the blue light of the “smart” telephone — one gets the sense around here that nobody’s filming, that there aren’t any viral posts waiting for ‘content creators’ around every corner. It’s normal people, living with scenery that is “just OK.” And somehow, I find this very nourishing — it is the perfect place to think about what’s next.

I remain committed to opening a physical, offline, IRL social club this year. Though I’ve had to do a little soul searching after the death of my mother and the birth of our baby, I’m honing in on a vision for it. I’m seriously thinking about moving this newsletter into physical space, too — by turning it into a snail-mail affair for paying subscribers. The finer details of both the club and the snail-mail newsletter are still to be determined, but I write to tell you that I am now framing those visions up out here in Delaware.

Though I’d had a mind to go further south, and to take some kind of a wild trip across the country — we’ll see. Perhaps I won’t need to do all that. Perhaps I’ve got a vision that may offer a much-needed counterpoint to the We Live in Public model; and if I do, I will make haste to bring it into fruition come spring.

Until then, I’ll still be posting as we wander. But every post will be written less out of a desire to get you to click, interact, and subscribe — and more out of a desire to someday soon meet you in real life, offline.

Merry Christmas to you all, and Happy New Year,

A.M. Hickman

From a Quiet Beach in Delaware

And this time, such chuckling came with a bold, hoarse-voiced declaration from a leather-cheeked fellow who bellowed madly in the silence of the early morning gas station:

“I’m so late to work I forgot to get a job to begin with!”

The cashiers laughed out loud as his chuckling began. At first, it was just a couple chuckles, like hiccups — but soon, he was off to the races in proper style, like a diesel engine firing up, until he was red-faced and laughing at full speed and deafening volume and throwing his filthy hair back as if in the throes of passion. The cashiers couldn’t stop laughing either, and a couple old ladies who’d dropped by the station for milk and gas stood on stiffly — seeming stunned, horrified, or even offended by the display instead.

One wondered if the chuckling itself was a kind of mating call, for just as it ended and the man began to catch his breath, he raised his eyebrows and proceeded to make an ad-hoc marriage proposal to the sixty-eight-year-old cashier behind the counter — who, though greatly flattered, had to decline for what was probably the hundredth time. The man paid for his beer — at the early-morning hour of 8AM — and left in a hurry, telling everyone he was “late to work” and that “the boss was gonna kill him!” but of course, the man had nowhere to go but his ramshackle cabin — for the man was his own “boss,” and indeed, his industry was strictly that of a proper bum.

And though he himself might take at least some mild umbrage at being classified as a “bum,” he might rightly refer to himself as a ‘woodchuck’ or as a ‘rennaisance man’. But with his wild mane of curls and the furry mask of beard-hair hanging off his face, he looked more like a muskrat. By all I could tell, he seemed to be living like one, too — waddling back and forth between the town pump and his little burrow out in the woods.

I know where he lives — I’ve seen his yard. The land out in front of his house looks like it forgot to shave; his long-fallow fields are all drunk on floodwater and winterkill. There’s rusty old rakes and harrows lounging around his place like urchins of steel, immovable in their motionless indolence — perhaps a source of inspiration for their owner; who, in pantomiming their inactivity, then in turn ensures these once-useful tools shall remain free of any use or toil. His habits as a layabout are baked into the landscape there; they’re even visible in his home — where tattered sheets of tarpaper and Tyvek flap in the wind like the national flag of the lazy man of the backwoods.

Sans welfare, without internet, living only by what he can pull from the swamps, or the river, or the trash, or (perish the thought) by a little irregular employment; he’s a survivor, and the sole ambition inscribed within his continued survival effort is the hope that he might drink, lounge, and be merry at his lonesome little shack.

But this erstwhile fellow seemed to be a type of bum that’s becoming rarer and rarer these days. For while now we’ve got the “smart” telephones and the welfare cards and certain drugs that seem to have a zombifying effect on the indefinitely unemployed — he’s not into any of that, and in fact, he rebukes all of that sort of thing harshly by the mere fact of his own continued existence. The man was and remains a kind of living human antique — a throwback from a bygone era in the long and lazy history of bumhood.

Seeing the man, I thought to myself: where have the wino, the ‘pintman’, the tinkerer, the jolly town drunk all gone off to? The hooch-swilling hobo — the scrap-metal wisecrackers, the rag-and-bone men, the rambling rovers? All of these long-gone romantical categories of bums, vagrants, tipplers, mumblers, and so on — they all seem to have mostly gone extinct, and their extinction has come on with stealthy suddenness. Just as our towns get gentrified, our country homogenized, and our culture turned into one gigantic blaring, blinking, flashing, globalized techno-culture — we find that even our bums have gotten gentrified, standardized, and busted down into bureaucratized form. Or, where they cannot be induced to play by the myriad rules of the welfare office, we find they lately drift to the extremest margins of psychosis, addiction, and madness of the worst variety.

Many of this latter type are now dying like animals. What AIDS was to the gay community in the 1980’s — it seems that opioids have done something similar to the American “bum community.” Where once the local color sat on the same old bench, or slouched under the same old tree — like Dolphus Raymond in To Kill a Mockingbird — now that color is gone in so many tragic cases. What replaces our jolly old layabouts is rows of crouching creatures slumped over on the street, intermittently shooting up and scrolling on their little glass rectangles. Eventually, a ghastly proportion of these will be dead from overdose — but their miserable fate will not come until they’ve sufficiently raised the local property crime rates by a substantial factor.

So it is that so many of our misfits, dropouts, and vagrants have transformed from the old archetype of the basically harmless (and even vaguely quaint) old fools loitering in our town squares — to walking, slouching, trackmark-ridden human tragedies who elicit only a strange mix of scorn, pity, condescension, hatred, and a near-constant stream of both EMS personnel (who revive them) and beat cops (who chase them off or arrest them).

Or — there is another type, far less often seen in public; often unidentifiable even in public for the fact that they’ve blended in completely. These ‘bums’ dress like normal working people and behave like them too; except where working people work, these others seem to subsist on various social welfare programs as a matter of profession. They are tragic in another kind of way as compared to their strung-out cousins in the wide world of bum-hood — for most often, these layabouts vegetate in their public housing apartments, endlessly scrolling through social media or playing on their Xboxes and iPhones. No longer tinkerers and mumblers; far from the old wisecrackers and town tipplers — they die not the bodily death of overdose but the psychic death imparted on them by a suite of pacifying government programs and digital technologies.

These two burgeoning archetypes of people who evade all manner of participation in the wide world of work now compose the supermajority of America’s ‘bums’. They are either mired in the lifestyle of the dope-fiend and the psychotic — or they are withdrawn into a digitized, bureauractized world of professional poverty. Gone are the genteel old characters; they’ve fled from our towns like the hermit thrush. They’ve disappeared from the country just the minute that the country seems to have lost not only its characters but its character, too. And I rather wonder if we’re in the grim situation we’re in these days in part because they’re gone — for those old drunks and fools and bums occupied a niche in the collective soul that we didn’t know we needed filled.

For what is this country without characters? How dismal is it that our “local color” is now long-dead on fentanyl, or zonked out on pills? How somber to imagine Rip Van Winkle — that useless old bastard — glumly scrolling Instagram in the Department of Social Services waiting-room instead of loafing around smoking his clay pipe in front of Nicholas Vedder’s venerable old inn?

In an era when “nobody wants to work” has become a kind of boomer-coded truism — and it is not without at least some truth! — it seems profoundly strange that the fine old artistry of early American bum-hood would be all but abandoned. In fact, the death of that mode — the mode of our local gas-station cackler — seems to have silently inculcated a kind of identity crisis amongst American derelicts. Where once a fellow who didn’t want to work naturally gravitated toward the practices of both survival and its incumbent activities, and towards character, or some sort of social role as a kind of public jester, clown, prophet, or good-time fella — now, our ‘men of lumpen leisure’ seem to be sorted either into addiction and mental illness, or into welfare bureaucracy. There is no longer much of any in-between.

This is especially strange for, in our time, the ‘pickins’ for old-school bums are supremely good — particularly in Upstate New York. If you want to fart around in the woods, tinkering, mumbling to yourself, wiping your rear with newspaper, tippling a little Genny Lite on the ATV that barely runs, this is heaven. You can come up here and eat the beaver and the carp, buy the half-caved-in old shack, rough it in the old style. Live on saltines, sardines, and liquor. Putz around all afternoon talking to yourself in your crusty bibs and cracked-up shit-kicker boots. It’s possible there may be nowhere better for this kind of living anywhere else in the country.

Yet the few who are still living in this manner are now old. They appear not to have passed the mantle on to subsequent generations of layabouts and terminally unemployed gentlemen. Or — the young fellas just never picked up the mantle to begin with. Perhaps a life of Vicodin, ‘ObamaPhones’, and EBT cards was even easier than the life of a respectable bum. The unholy trinity of the smartphone’s brightly-lit infinite scroll, the soma-like buzz of opioid pills or fentanyl, and the caloric sufficiency of welfare hit all the notes with mechanical precision that cannot be rivaled by the self-starting ne’er-do-well. No amount of regular, natural, organic human effort can produce what they together offer — for while bums of former eras indeed escaped work, they were nevertheless unable to escape reality.

For many have rightly said that the man who won’t work usually winds up “working more at not working” that a man who accepts regular employment labors. This has always been true — until now. Now, the New World Order has come for this country’s bums; they no longer work at not working — they have escaped every measure of effort, and therefore are not edified by the labors of men who have ever toiled toward the avoidance of labor.

In their supreme idleness (which is really an unprecedented idleness the likes of which men through all of history until now have never known), the glimmering smartphone or video game console captures their gaze; and experiments with “better living through chemistry” seem to divert them further, until years pass during which our society’s bums have not interfaced with anything like reality at all. In the phantasmic void our techno-bureaucratic systems have created for them — there’s no more “local color” anymore.

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It is this void that seems to have driven the “traditional bum” to near-extinction. Yet where, as with other traditional ways of life that are under threat of disappearing, where certain conscientious souls work to revive them (as with homesteading, etc) — I’m afraid few if any will work to keep the old and frankly literary art of traditional bumhood alive. The incredible void into which the ardently unemployed now slip into by default may eclipse these ways of life forever, and men like our local ‘woodchuck cackler’ may be the last of a dying breed — for they were never innoculated with the dispirited hunger that sends souls hurtling downward into the chasm of digital mental vacancy, nor into the endless mental morass created by potent synthetic drugs.

Those who’ve been paying attention, of course, might’ve seen all of this coming. I think of Yuval Noah Harari who, in 2017, wrote a haunting essay entitled The Rise of the Useless Class for the TED Talk online news outlet. In the piece, he said this:

“The coming technological bonanza will probably make it feasible to feed and support people even without any effort from their side. But what will keep them occupied and content? One answer might be drugs and computer games. Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D virtual-reality worlds that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside. Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What’s so sacred about useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences?” (emphasis mine)

Harari’s harrowing postulations here get to the heart of a very serious matter that may become more and more important to consider as AI-driven changes in the technosphere make human effort (and even human beings) increasingly redundant: “What’s so sacred about useless bums who pass their days devouring artificial experiences?”

The answer is — nothing. Yet while this answer might seem upsetting within the moral schemas of both Christian and Humanist thinkers, who both share an avowed belief in the value of human life, the operative phrase in Harari’s question here is “devouring artificial experiences.” Indeed — the one who “devours” and does not produce something meaningful really is worthless in at least some dimension; and his worthlessness is not only external in nature, but personal to his own sense of self-worth. To be a ‘devourer’ alone is to arc toward nihilism and ultimately — towards death.

From this point of view, it should not be a great wonder that our “useless humans” now face higher and higher rates of “deaths of despair,” not only from drugs but from suicide, alcoholism, self-destructive behavior, or the slow death of crippling mental illness.

Yet amongst those who, like Harari, make it their ambition to morally tinker with the value of human life after AI — virtually none of them have any personal experience with extreme idleness, chronic indefinite unemployment, homelessness, or addiction. They have not surveyed the landscape of the “useless bum” in any but the most cursory and removed sort of way — and indeed, what one finds from afar is mostly bleak and dispiriting. One can therefore forgive their deriving a few extremely bleak conclusions regarding the value of human life in a potentially “work-free” human future.

This is where, bizarrely, my own expertise as a lifelong vagrant, bum, vagabond, and idler shines. Because I do not write about these topics for lack of extensive knowledge on them — and I do not write of them without ample personal experience. I myself have spent inordinate amounts of time with the homeless, not as a removed observer but as a fellow peer. What the social do-gooders, anthropology students, and missionaries see of the homeless, unemployed, addicted, and self-marginalizing dropouts is often markedly different from what is really true of them — and the reality is, the only ones who seem to have a reasonable expectation of a normal life expectancy are those who have a great and inimitable sense of style as goes their bum-hood.

For style is not an inert and impotent thing; it is a productive thing — a feature of one’s life and personality that exudes something basically literary. The highest tier of American bums all have it in common: they seem to use their own life as a kind of ‘canvas’ for a largely illegible artistry — and in the moments when their ‘art’ can be translated and made legible to the common man, they quickly find that they occupy a very real and genuinely fulfilling social purpose.

Immediately, when striking upon this purpose — however ill-defined or vague or even unconscious — they are no longer mere ‘devourers,’ not at all. They become living paragons of their own highly eccentric literary vision, and if they are able to thread the needle between mere abnegation of the duties of workingmen and the ultimate self-destruction of the addict — they may even become beloved members of a community for many, many years.

That is to say — they become characters. This term is almost an honorific when applied to any vagrant, dropout, or bum; it is an aspirational title, and it is because the role of the “character” is genuinely literary. I say this without a hint of irony, I am completely serious: the more “useless” one is in terms of real physical labor or productive capacity, the more crucial it becomes that a fellow figures out how to alchemize his uselessness into something of durable literary value.

For, in the starkest and most dismal economic terms, literature is actually a useless thing. There is no great need for it to exist, at least insofar as caloric needs, GDP, and human reproduction are concerned. Mythopoeic aura, great tales and stories, and the thoughtful (and delightful) refraction of human experience through the lens of a unique perspective are literally worthless things in purely theoretical material and economic terms — and yet they are indeed the thing that is, to the thinking man, of the very greatest value of them all. A proper reader, an art appreciator, one who feels and dreams and could rightfully be considered to be a complete human being knows for a fact that there are circumstances in which the value of a good story exceeds the value of the material trappings of life.

And so — perplexingly, perhaps — we have struck upon a thing of ultimate value that naturally resides in the ‘least-valuable’ margins of society. Indeed, society’s least-valuable denizens are not only able to access it to begin with — which is a thing of great hope as it is — they naturally possess it in amplitude so long as they are not dispirited and incarcerated in a void of “artifical experiences.” From this perspective, the answer to “human uselessness” is not and cannot be a regimen of “drugs and video games,” as we are now trying out on our society’s least-productive members — to the contrary, the answer is to induce those at the margins to embrace a fundamentally literary disposition about themselves and the value of their own lives.

The natural starting-point for this, then, is not in the currently-downwardly-mobile remnants of the old middle class — they are too harrowed from the steepness of their descent. Indeed, insofar as we have an interest in addressing the problem of “human uselessness” as a feature of a possible dystopian techno-future, we are wisest to begin with those who are already at the bottom. This is because for today’s permanent welfare classes, bums, addicts, and homeless people — the “technologically-induced redundancy of human life” is already current. Were it not for high-tech agricultural machinery and production methods that have granted humanity caloric post-scarcity, these people would have no choice but to engage in useful human labor, likely as farmworkers! But because of the Green Revolution, John Deere, and the US Department of Agriculture’s (frequently bizarre and distressing) advances — they are now redundant in the supply chain, and are consequently on the cutting edge of “human uselessness.”

Yet we find they are mired in an economic, digital, and pharmacological environment that seems to make them almost immune to anything resembling a literary impulse! This may be one of the great — and well-hidden — problems of our time. The present manner in which we think of human uselessness is in terms of dysfunction (a hangover, perhaps, of the increasingly irrelevant Protestant work ethic). As a corollary to this, we also tend to feel an abject and immediate deflation of our self-worth the very moment we feel we have become redundant in the technological process. The moment we descend to the point of economic uselessness, we believe ourselves to be worthless, we become dispirited, and we sink into the chasm of digital technologies, drugs, video games, and whatever barebones caloric sufficiency is granted to us by the government.

This is very likely the worst thing we could establish as a default — for once one enters “the void” that now exists on society’s furthest margins, they nearly become steeled against anything that could increase their morale or situate their own life in a mythologically generative context.

Insofar as AI might well mean the emergence of a larger-and-larger class of so-called “useless humans” — and I must concede that this future does seem readily plausible — the architecture of human uselessness must be altered dramatically from what it is today. Style must come back to the fore; we must draw on the notes of history’s great ‘characters’, bums, dropouts, and rag-and-bone men. We must rise to the task of defending the ineffable and basically literary qualities that make us human; for the default mode by which human life is now viewed and considered by the Powers That Be is basically stripped-down, economized, reductionist — man is viewed first as a “consumer” and second as a stockpile of “human resources” that may become increasingly unnecessary. Insofar as we retain these dark assumptions about the purpose of human life and effort in our era, we seal our fate as a species who will sink into nihilism and spiritual abjection.

I do not think it is hyperbolic to say that such ideas contain the seeds of our own voluntary extinction — and that those who fail to reject them will be the great losers of the next several centuries’ worth of human history.

There is a wider critique here, of course — a defense of “useless man” is only one corollary to a larger struggle between the mechanical and the ensouled. As AI-generated “writing” and “art” proliferate, and the value of human agency in any artistic process continues to be denigrated, minimized, replaced, and excised entirely, we find our last bastion of human purpose now under siege. Indeed, we find that the very question of the existence of the human soul is now being debated and discussed in a hundred-thousand oblique and indirect ways.

Unless I am gravely mistaken about the nature of these technologies, I have to point out that if one makes a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox, ad infinitum — which is, to my mind, essentially what LLM’s do — something will be lost if the fire that formed the first copy goes out. That fire is the human race — the collective and individual souls of the human species; real (though intangible) things at the center of all human action and artistic impulse. It is a thing that is the source of all that AI “creates.” And oddly enough, in what may be the strangest instance of “horseshoe theory” in the history of our species; the essence of man’s artistic impulse seems to thrive most in his periods of “uselessness” — periods that will, if today’s technological commentators are not blowing smoke, become increasingly common to all mankind.

Therefore, we have a fantastic opportunity, and something of that opportunity has already been written and read, albeit indirectly. It is etched on the faces of men like our local ‘gas station cackler’ — or of our Rip Van Winkles, Dolphus Raymonds, Ignatius Reillys, Jeff Lebowskis, and Diogenes of Sinopes. Bums with style; the types who eat baked beans from the can, who crack jokes in front of the gas station, the types who — though they may occasionally stink a little — seem to be living way deep in a story all their own.

Miss this, and our allegedly inevitable descent into life as “useless humans” might be a good bit rougher and emptier that it’d be otherwise. Our bums, vagrants, and layabouts have already trod the path of infinite idleness quite well. There are lessons in their world that, strangely enough, may soon become relevant to the general populous.

But perhaps we’ve already seen this coming. God Almighty Himself said that the “last shall be made first and the first shall be made last.” He told us that the poor are “blessed in spirit.” So far as I can tell, much of that “spirit” is found in the fundamentally Divine realities of life, mythos, literature, and above all — of being a character. For is one’s “character” not synonymous with one’s soul, at least on some level? At the very bottom, and where men are their most “useless,” literature is not a thing that is read so much as it is a thing that is lived; one’s infinity of idleness exposes something of the soul’s true shape, if the idle one allows it. Fail to live it, and descend into darkness — but embrace it, and it is your strength.

So it is that I speak not in judgement nor in scorn for the bum, but I listen to him. Insofar as I’ve walked the path of one who has been variously “useless,” poor, and utterly, indefinitely idle — I’ve found that style matters most. Cackling matters most. If you’re going to be “useless,” you had better be a character — there’s no question about it, and frankly, it’s a matter of life and death.

Though it may be a strange insight, so far as I can tell, it’s a lesson that we’re all going to have to learn, sooner or later. The high-tech dystopia we’re hurtling towards simply demands it. So long as there might be some truth to all of this, to my mind — there’s still a great deal of hope.

The warm lights of the storefront bless the wet, dirty sidewalk outside as the rain pelts the windows; we step into the threshold of the Cafe Florentine, the great gem of Bleecker Street in Utica New York. For lovers of Italian pastries, the Florentine is a place of pilgrimage — a kind of sugary Shangri-La known far beyond the city limits of Utica. It looks to be the sweeter cousin of Satriale’s Meat Market in The Sopranos — the sort of place where one might half-expect to see mobsters meeting their bookies for an espresso and a cannoli. Instead, there are a half-dozen elderly Italian grandmothers (or perhaps great-grandmothers) lingering in the doorway, all in a frenzied state over the torcetti and bombolone and pasticciotti, filling great big white boxes with them all.

Just as I shake the rain off my coat, I smell the glorious mix of the fall rains and the fragrant scent of the cannoli — and the energetic posse of elderly Italian women turns toward the baby, whom they receive as the sweetest treat of all. The cheek-pinching begins; the blessings and benedictions are given, and every kind of imaginable praise is heaped onto our beautiful baby all at once. One woman was so floored by the precious face of our dear baby that she dropped her cane, which I immediately retrieved. And as I reached down for the cane, glancing at the floor, hearing the cooing of the grandmothers, smelling the sweet smells of Italian sugar — I thought to myself that this was not the first time such a scene must’ve occurred in the Cafe Florentine. In fact, for a blissful moment — it felt as if it was not the year 2025 here at all, but that we’d slipped back in time to some former era of American history.

After all, this place has been around since 1928. That’s a full ninety-seven years of pumping out the pastries that are ubiquitous at every holiday and every social event one could find themselves at in the greater Utica area. These are not any kind of bush-league pastries, either, for in the business of baked sweets, you don’t get to hang around for ninety-seven years by putting anything but the best out for sale. To the contrary, I’ve never had a better sweet in my life than the pasticciotti sold at Florentine, and that is exactly why I have been coming back again and again for years.

These little pastries — which locals call “pusties,” often to the shock or even disgust of anyone unfamiliar with the term, owing to the term’s orthographical similarity to the word “pustule” — are custard-filled pastries baked in a fluted tin. Their edges brown up a little in the oven, making a sort of ‘skin’ of crusted sugar that encapsulates the soft dough and custard. The flaky crust and the custard mix in the mouth perfectly, and the experience makes for one of the best (if not the best) pastries I’ve ever had. Truly, there may not a better baked good for sale anywhere in America.

Sitting down on the little cafe chairs below the map of Italy that hangs on the wall, we watch the rain pummel the street outside. The old, creamy off-white horsehair plaster ceiling is set aglow by the ancient yellow incandescent lightbulbs; the brakelights of the cars outside set the shiny wet pavement aflame in hues of high neon. We are in the city — and we are not here strictly for the pusties and cannolis.

The grainy, sugary cream-cheese filling of the cannoli explodes as I bite; the hard shell of the cannoli cracks perfectly into crumbly bits — I think of my mother. “You really aren’t very self aware sometimes,” she told me once on the telephone. “You’d like Brooklyn a lot more than you think — you’re not actually the ‘country boy’ you think you are.”

I think of her because the scene outside on the street is decidedly Brooklyn-esque; I am sitting in an inner-city cafe in an ethnic ghetto in my fine wool pants and Mexican leather boots — here, enjoying the ‘finer things of life’ that one simply cannot get out in my beloved “hinterlands.” The noise does not bother me, the smells, the chaos, the potholes; it’s all part of it, and frankly, I enjoy it all rather unequivocally and without reservation in spite of my ruralite reputation.

But unlike Brooklyn, here in Utica I am in another kind of hinterland. This ain’t the metropole — it isn’t the center of the world. There’s not even the slightest hint of the kind of arrogant self-importance of the megacity that shares a name with our state. It’s Utica — the butt of a joke, a worn-out, tired old town of sprawling, empty, crumbling-brick warehouses and pothole-filled streets. The way the alcoholic Sicilian glowers out the restaurant window as he forks his linguine; the amaretto spritzers and tattered red velvet curtains hanging over the dirty windows — the way the lanky Thai kid weaves the wheels of his moped around the gargantuan, rubble-filled potholes on the icy street… it is all a vestigial remnant of a former era.

There are men here who have not updated their hairstyle nor their glasses since the 1970’s — there are corrupt officials pulling stunts that, elsewhere, seem more like something out of a history book or a movie than something you’d read in the Current Events section. Utica is a city of haywire hijinks and nutty old codgers; corny jokes and bad heroin, a town for sad clowns, ex-felons, Burmese refugees, and tired old Polish plumbers who cackle on their slumped-over brick stoops.

More than this — vast sections of the city lay in weird ruins. The Mohawk Flats sprawl in rusty humidity and grattifoed abandonment over the crumbling, shut-down Barnes Avenue Bridge. Needles are buried in the toxic soil below the dead, skeletal stalks of ragweed; little old hovels built in the canal era — still lived in by living human antiques — slouch toward the railroad tracks within spitting distance. There’s a kind of comfortable feeling that all of this inculcates in anyone who finds the horrors of the present era to be all-too-heavy to handle — the ruination here is a kind of bulwark against the incursion of the 21st-century: a century that so many parts of this old city ardently refuse to enter.

Yet the life bustles through the streets of the city anyway, and does so in an old-fashioned sort of way — and the ancient asphalt of this place wears that kind of activity well. I think of what my dear friend Eric Brende once said about his beloved Saint Louis: “It’s like a well-worn shoe… maybe it’s cracked-up and old, but it fits you just right.” Utica is just the same; it’s got just enough life coursing through it that it’s not dead — but the rutted, overgrown concrete trails through which that life passes sure do look rough, sad and derelict from the outside looking in.

The immigrants don’t seem to mind: the Bosnians, the Karen Thai, the Nepalese, Indians, Salvadorans, Burmese, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Somalis, and others — for them, Utica was and remains a haven of great fortune or heavy fate. There was no way for them to avoid it; in many cases, they came on planes, only vaguely aware of where they were going — startled to find the whiteout snows boiling inland from off Lake Ontario as they deplaned. For many, their arrival here was the first time they felt freezing temperatures — but their gratitude at making it to the Land of the Free was so great they found themselves adjusting, and promptly began to breathe life back into the snow-covered ghettos of this tired old rust belt town.

Now, the rain’s picked up to a downpour, the baby is sleeping, the old ladies are packing up and the cafe is getting ready to close. And so I snap out of my reverie and realize that time is of the essence — now I must get onto the “pusties.” The flaky dough is dotted with razor-thin, slate-like chunks of baked sugar. The flour almost seems pasta-like — is this durum semolina? It would’ve paired well with an espresso but the energy of the city has me too keyed up for caffeine. Then: vanilla custard overfloweth with every bite, cold inside, and my wife and I are smiling in pre-diabetic reverie. This is Utica, baby. This is it.

I say: “This is the greatest city in the world” — a phrase I always say aloud whenever I exit the Amtrak train at the grandiose marble-columned Utica Union Station. My fellow Utica-bound passengers always chuckle when they hear it, shaking their heads at such an outlandish statement. Of course, I am not really joking when I say it — I’ve got a love affair with this city, a real one; no matter what I do, I can’t shake it.

And sometimes I even mumble the words that altogether constitute a heresy for the likes of the country folk: “Maybe I’d like to move down to Utica.”

To this, my ruralite compatriots only stare in blank horror. “Why the hell would anyone want to live in a shithole like Utica?”

The sky hangs down low like a scalloped gray cradle of gloom as we leave the cafe, and I pick the cannoli crumbs out of my beard on the haggard street in the foggy rain. I hear my mother’s voice again: “You’re not actually the ‘country boy’ you think you are, Andy.”

She always seemed to take a kind of smug pride in reminding me of this; for the futility of opposing her on this point was obvious to me even in eras where I would not admit it vocally. Try as I may to LARP as a latter-day version of William Jennings Bryan, or to work myself up into a polemical frenzy about the “moral corruption of the coastal elites” — I cannot squarely claim to be a “country boy,” even if indeed I am a ruralite by extraction and at that, a ruralite whose last name is literally “Hick-man.”

The variations of this particular rejoinder of hers were many, and took different forms depending upon the context — but the message was always the same. It was not that she reminded me of my status as a “non-country-boy” in a way that would denigrate those who were, nor that she was altogether raising up the urbanite into a place of cultural and intellectual supremacy (though there were times where she certainly did do something like this).

No, more to the point, she was essentially always reminding me that I am above all an eccentric — and that the mantle of the eccentric is heavy enough that he cannot afford to wed himself to any particular environment. Hermeticism is only a hazard to him; the nature of the discourse at the local American Legion’s bar can only take him so far. He must go where he can survive — he must move and shift with the winds, always taking care to situate himself wherever he is the least likely to go completely stark raving mad. The eccentric needs the company of kindred spirits, or, failing this, he needs a place that is nearly as weird as he is — a formulation that always brings Utica to mind.

“You’re always telling me how lonely you are,” she said once on the telephone, “so why are you so obsessed with the loneliest parts of this country? You’d think someone who complains about being isolated wouldn’t always be hanging around in isolated places…”

Her point seared me too much for me to ever touch it straight-on. I was lonely, and I’m still usually lonely — but New York City? This always struck me as the loneliest place. Tens of thousands of indifferent human beings in a wandering, faceless horde — usurious rents, screeching-mad streets, whooping sirens, delirious madness of the worst variety imaginable. My time in Brooklyn made me physically ill. It was more than I could handle, a shock to the system: I yearned for a cornfield, yearned to mumble to myself alone on the front porch of a rusting, dilapidated doublewide in a fallow field, perhaps in Fulton County somewhere, or in a wretched shack on a barren stretch of the Saint Lawrence River plain.

Or is any of this actually true? Have all of these affectations been a kind of ‘hayseed fabrication’ or theatrical exercise — a part I played for other reasons? What I remember is consciously thinking to myself: “I can’t let myself like New York City. I can’t do it, because I’ll never be able to afford it.”

Indeed, I have always tempered my emotional disposition and attachments with the basic and unshakable understanding that I would be poor forever. Being ill-disposed to working a 9-to-5, it has only seemed right to me that I could assume I’d forever languish in a state of toothless destitution and poverty. In fact, the Franciscan in me has always quietly hoped for such a thing. And New York City has no room for the Flaneur these days, is is not for the idle ramblers or starving poets anymore.

These days, it’s a city where you work or die. Anyone who can’t run with the wolves in the high-dollar lifestyle gets chewed up, gnawed down, and thrown into the stew — or, if they’re lucky, they might escape to Bayonne, or Philly, or Albany before The City eats them up entirely. That’s New York City — that’s a town that ain’t for anyone but the hustlers and big-time money-makers (and the children of such people), and so it sure as hell ain’t for me.

So I put it out of my mind, I steeled myself against the cogently incisive arguments of my mother. Now she’s gone; I nearly wondered if her ghost was with me as I rolled down Genessee Street, still meditating upon the sumptuous cannoli — a sweet treat that was among her favorites. I wished she could’ve been there with us, for even she — ever the Brooklyn-supremacist since moving down there a decade ago — would admit that the cannolis at Cafe Florentine were on par with the cannolis of Brooklyn. Sometimes, in an extremely rare flourish of flattery and praise for anything that could ever have come from parochial Upstate, she’d even admit that they were better.

We took a smooth curve on the road to Whitesboro, whizzing by the abandoned bridge on Barnes Avenue — where the gauzy gray skies bore down on the thicketed carpets of windblown reeds and snarling sumacs. The radio murmurred, the windshield wipers slapped, and Mom spoke again:

“You’re always doing this ‘black and white’ thing, you realize that? With you it’s always ‘all or nothing’ one way or the other. Not everything is like that, you know.”

There’s a point I wish I could’ve granted to her; but while she was alive I couldn’t concede it. No, I assured her — my assessments were simply rational. Inspect a given idea, extrapolate that idea’s logical conclusion, and treat the idea itself as if it were its own logical conclusion. If that conclusion is negative (it’s either positive or negative, OK?) then discard the idea — and be sure to do whatever its most extreme antipode is. Endeavor to run to the other side of the world from that horrible idea: do so speedily, with confidence bordering on bravado and with extreme prejudice.

And so in making my assessment of a city like New York City — I quickly found myself standing in the desolation of the Northernmost Point of the State of New York, on a silence-soaked beachhead on the Saint Lawrence River some four miles north-northeast of Massena. It was the very opposite of an idea whose logical end was one of high rents, the bleak, stomach-clenching feeling of loneliness in the neverending crowd — Massena. Even the name still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Land of $40,000 houses and eternal overcast, world of silent synchrony between snowfall and sleet and somber solitude. If New York City is a bad idea — then surely, Massena is the best idea.

Ah, but is it so? I couldn’t say. My eyes turn to the grey skies over Utica, the city that sits squarely between Brooklyn and Massena. I see the grey warehouse on Oriskany Avenue, the wolfish, grey-eyed Bosnian at the counter of the corner-store where I buy myself a six-pack of Utica Club. Utica is the “grey city” — the city where “black and white” dichotomies don’t make any sense. Binary thinking can’t survive a place like this, for both extremes are in the blender here — Utica itself is the eternally broiling cauldron of gilded age opulence, post-industrial ruination, silken ascots on the turkeylike necks of corrupt councilmen, road-salt-bleached lotto tickets in the dirty snowbank lit red by the neon lights of Delmonico’s steakhouse. It’s the place where a fat lawyer might pass off an extra eclair to the junkie out in front of the ritzy Fort Schuyler Club — it’s where Billy Fucillo tells us it’s all “HUUUGE” and we believe it as our waistlines expand owing to one-too-many slices of “upside-down pizza” at O’Scugnizzo’s on Bleecker.

To be in Utica is always to be of two minds; from Utica you can go East or West, North or South — and times in Utica are always either on the cusp of being disastrous or, on the other end: up-and-coming. The Utican himself oscillates between the moral desolation or mental vacancy that so naturally crops up in the denizens of washed-up old towns — and, on the flip-side, the feeling that he’s the guy, that he’s gonna make it, that his time to shine is here and boy why don’t he just do a few handshakes, pull the other guys up, and make it great. And that’s it, isn’t it? — it’s Utica who’s the real underdog, the horse only a drunk old fool would ever bet on, and you know what? He’s bettin’ on him big-time and he’s gonna win. That’s how the energy is in a town like Utica — there’s nothing about it that lends itself to the extremism of the rationalist. The far-flung desolation of Massena? There’s some of that here. But the bright lights and big dreams of the Big Apple? They’ve got a little of that, too.

And so it is that tired old Utica feels, at times, a little more ‘Brooklyn’ than Brooklyn feels these days. It’s still the underdog, like Brooklyn used to be, it’s still where “only the strong survive.” It’s got the old buttressed brick and the high-domed Churches; it’s got the water-towers and rooftops and neon of the old days. You know — the stuff that down in Brooklyn they already tore down, the stuff they paved over with yet another Walgreens and another condo building. Utica hasn’t done that yet — thank God — and for it, it still stands as a kind of living, breathing tonic to the kind of restlessness of the soul that so often afflicts those who find it hard to stomach the twenty-first century and all of its delirious, digitized machinations. That, my friends — that’s like therapy for those of us who’ve ever had the bad habit of engaging with “black and white thinking.”

Thinking this, I drive by Holland Farms — where the black-and-white, chocolate-and-vanilla “halfmoon” cookies are sold. I mean there it is right there, it’s all right on the packaging; they just go and spell it out for me right there. “Black and white thinking,” ha — if I hadn’t just had a cannoli I’d be of a mind to buy one of those halfmoon cookies right now. Mom sure loved those.

Next time…

As I keep going along the street, the vision comes: Red velvet curtains hanging down over the stonework by my 19th-century Italianesque windows. A leather-top desk by the clanking radiator, houseplants, a leather sofa, the maple parquet flooring with the gaudy rawhide rug.

And me, in my Polish leather loafers with the tassel, and the long black peacoat, hair slicked back, dark-eyed, somewhere between a caballero and a mafioso, cigarillo clenched in my yellowed teeth. I’m doing deals, I’m writing whatever it is I write, the maple leaves are curling down the curbs, we’ve got the chicken riggies in the foil pan — everything is ready. I can’t remember why I’m here; UPD said there was a nutcase up at Val Bialas, by the Eagle statue — said he was pissin’ himself drunk. The old Priest smirks, gives me the “hearty hand clasp” after the benediction, and as I step outside, that Reggaton shit is on the radio again — I think I kinda like it. Then on to the pub: someone get me another pint of Utica Club; this city is on the up-and-up again, baby, that’s for sure. We’re gonna see our names etched into the marble, gents, we’re gonna get our Keys to the City — if the city doesn’t go bankrupt next week, that is. Sardonic chuckle — another swig, long silence.

Ah, I could see it now — a life, a good life, a Utican life. It’s the best of Brooklyn without all the noise, it’s urban and provinical all at once. No black-and-white thinking here: just good pizza, cannolis by the box, Masses at Old Saint John’s, sharp suits, long dreary winters, Vietnamese noodles at Lucky Mey’s. We’d fit right in; we’d be naturals at the Utican lifestyle. I’d be a natural at slinking back at the edge of the plushy leather-top bar with greased-back hair, slack-jawed in an ill-fitting trenchcoat, beer foam on my moustachioed grin as the snowfall pummels the cracked-pavement streets.

It’s a city where a man can abscond — where he can attain the kind of peace that comes from being shrouded in obscurity and illegibility. A rusted-out, overlooked, unknown outpost for exiles, Rust Belt desperadoes, and refugees of all stripes. And unlike the mountain hermitage, the exile’s got company here in Utica — strange company. He doesn't need to be alone. He’s got the sleepy old cop at the train station who dozes by the marble pillars; the junkie who prowls along by the Bodegas on Whitesboro Street — the sullen-eyed whore who ambles uneasily through Oneida Square. For the real exile, the yearner, the freak — Utica is his own private, crumbling, American analogue to Naples; filthy, crumbling, boozy, dripping with old-world Catholic romance and petty crime — where a man can eat well and linger long in the private, sleepy drama of his ancient, has-been backwater and live life as one endless exercise in soporific, sauce-soaked stupor.

If all that sounds like something of an acquired taste, well, it is — but like many strange and bitter delights of an exotic and tough-to-swallow nature, there’s always a little sugar to help it go down. That’s where the cannolis come in. And the cheese and the pasta and the pilsener all help, too; the comforting glow of the neon admixing with the soft velveteen fabric on the restaurant walls tells you it’s alright to relax here — it’s alright to fall in love with this big, salty, smiling corpse of a city.

If you ain’t got anywhere else to go; if your mind’s wracked with the harsh sorrows of the world, if you’ve roamed the country over and found it all rather unfortunate and dreary — this old solid husk of a city that stands like a deathly sentry over the soggy swamplands of the Utica Marsh is for you.

God knows it’s for me. I’ll always wash up in Utica again and again and find my way, just like the refugees. I’ll luxuriate in my exile in Utica whenever afforded the chance to do so; I’ll take a suite at the Utica Hotel at the monthly rate, high up on the 9th floor, gazing out at the commanding views of the brightly-lit mini metropolis below me, taking my pink gin and eating cold pizza from Pizza Classic, sure in my footing, cleansed by the sheer beauty of it all, removed from the garrish banality and moral desolation of more ‘relevant’ quarters.

And in the overcast above, I’ll see the face of my dear mother. I’ll see the far-off lights of Brooklyn, the distant shores of the Saint Lawrence River at Massena; my whole life will swirl before me as the clattering jalopies buzz by on the red-eyed streets. I will be healed, and Utica will be my sanctuary, and I will forever be indebted to this gorgeous old shell of a city again and again.

Each time I take a bite of a cannoli from Cafe Florentine — it begins again. By the time I’m finished with each of my Utican reveries, I know I’ll be back again. It’s one of the last places in America that still makes sense, and for that, my love affair with Utica will never end.

I feel my face drooping down like a dog’s as I dream; I feel ancient and old, I am mentally there, I never left that place — the guitars continue to strum over the crackling restaurant speakers, the accordions wheedle their tired, circular tune in one long, dark, smiling corrido that I have somehow been living in since the beginning of time. I place my elbow on the sticky table-top as the sun filters through the dusty shades, head in hand — mind as empty as the open desert.

But I am not in Mexico, nor am I in Texas or California or anywhere near the border. I am in Rome, New York. The waiter is a somber-eyed man from Puebla. He looks lost; he has long, drooping lines on his face like those of a Bassett Hound. And the plump-cheeked bartender stares out the window; she is bored. The chimichangas come on a steaming plate, we pray a Hail Mary and begin eating.

“What were you thinking about?” my wife asks. She knew the answer. She knew it was the desert. But she asked anyway, perhaps so as to remind me that we were eating in Real Life and not in some sad, old Mexican-esque hallucination.

That I am a depressive is not a secret. I write and speak rather openly about it. Too openly, perhaps. Since the earliest days of my life I have felt the immense weight of a kind of romantic longing for some unobtainable, hidden thing — and the gravity of this weird burden has nearly killed me many times. The temptation to take my own life has been a constant presence through all but my most recent years. The apparently unending urge to leave and to go has been, if I am honest, a kind of corollary to this: a hackneyed attempt at finding any kind of a haven on earth where this grave burden is not merely known by the land and people around me, but understood by them. In finding even the vaguest twinge of this understanding, I am refreshed; something in me is sated, and I feel human again.

But moments of respite like this are not so easy to find. In fact, as the twin evils of societal decay and the ultra-homogenized “progress” of the free market both march on — each apparently aiming to out-conquer the territory of the other, ad infinitum — I find such respites only to be ephemeral, shrinking, fugitive things. Indeed, at the same old cantinas where I drunkenly stared out the windows in Yuma or in Mexicali, pleasantly hidden in grottoes of adobe, teenagers now sit scrolling TikTok; “Bad Bunny” replaces the Norteño greats of cumbia — the tiny old casitas of the campesinos have probably been steamrolled to make way for lane-widening projects on the I-10. Indeed, even Slab City — that lawless, heavenly respite of all respites for misfits of all varieties, where I used to live — has been marred by the all-seeing camera lenses of the “Influencers,” and the threat of gentrification looms.

Homeward, here in Rome or up north at my Adirondack Estate, this respite is under siege, too — but for another reason. I have written before about the stratospherically-high median ages, the apparently endless hemmhoraging of our young people, and about the general decay of rural America and especially Upstate New York; for me it is not merely an intellectual exercise observed at some distance, as it occasionally is for some metropole-based commentators who may come here to visit.

Life here is a front-row, daily seat to the Saddest Show of All: the slow, torturous death of my homeland — the barbarous, sleepy-eyed demoralization of a people who once raised wheat sheaves up from the tangled thickets and erected brick monuments to comfort and beauty and optimism; all of them now mired in the static of so many televisions and telephones, or of lotto tickets and heroin, or of apathy so paralyzing that many of us now seem only to be waiting to die.

There is no great turnaround here; there is no valorous march of the masterful men ever hurtling toward their tapestry of electrifying glories. If such a thing exists here, it exists only as a figment that serves to torment me; and when I have had enough of all the gut-wrenching darkness it shovels onto me — I retreat mentally to la frontera again in a manner hardly different from how the stray cat ducks into an alley to hide from a snarling dog. A retreat perhaps, but a necessary retreat lest the claws should come to grab me.

Mulling these kinds of things over, I look again at my baby, who is burping her little blessing over the plate where the sauce-drenched chimichangas were carved up and consumed without a word. Now, of course, I smile. She is the bald-headed portrait of innocent perfection; she is only just now bumbling through the first days of a journey that I have been on for over thirty years. And in looking at her, I take an inventory of all of the forces that have conspired to immiserate me and now arm myself against them as my most fearsome and true enemies. I will fight and scratch and claw against these shadowy spirits — that they may never savage her as they have savaged me.

Divorces and depopulation; fatherlessness and anomie — the high-gravity pessimism that arises in the minds of those who live in and observe the seismic contraction of American civilization (or its reconfiguration into One Giant Strip Mall). I weigh these forces frantically; lately, I am mentally consumed with mounting my best defense of our daughter against their clutches. It paralyzes me — every avenue toward raising an opposition to these forces feels doomed, distant, exceedingly unlikely. I watch as the Church crumbles beneath the hands of her stewards of decline; I watch as the towns demolish their old glories and landmarks with maniacal abandon. I watch as the stream of U-Hauls passes through the disheveled gas stations and cracked-pavement highways. The pill bottles in the roadside sand; the peeling paint — the cousins who don’t get together for barbeques anymore.

One can only smirk at decay of this caliber for so long until it enters them and crawls onto their back as a kind of limitlessly heavy leaden weight.

The ghost of my mother can give me nothing in this fight; my impoverished, gout-stricken, ex-carnie father only howls into the wind on the telephone with me, drunk. My wife eyes me with the wary look of the refugee, as if she knows already that the day will come when we will swim the Rio Grande under a desert moon — or perch atop a rotting husk of a Utica downtown apartment complex as if it were the Alamo, or sail a boat down the roiling foggy Hudson that we have named “The S.S. Exile.” As she looks long at me, my mind spins, desperate for something resembling a solid path forward for our little family; madly searching for something I can bequeath to my daughter that will not rust and crumble away in her tiny hands.

In such a state, I can only vegetate mournfully as the old corridos play on my radio. One thinks of the retired Mafioso at his hideaway; he sits on his porch in his bathrobe, reading the paper — until the inevitable SUV’s with the blacked-out windows pull into the driveway. Then, he knows — his shoulder is being ‘tapped’ again; he is pulled back into The Game. He has no choice; blood debts being what they are, there is a target on his back forever, his obligations are ineluctable and eternal. If la familia calls, he must answer.

The desert is like this; those who have ever been the inmate of any desert are forever trapped in a kind of double life no matter how long they’ve gone away. The desert rat knows he could, at any time, slip into a fugue state for a while only to awake by the gauzy desert dawnlight again. If such a thing should come to pass, he would not be surprised, nor would anyone who knows him. His family could only murmur a phrase well-known to the mothers and wives of Mafia-men and desert rats alike: “¡Qué vergüenza!” — or, “What a shame!”

And yet, on the flip-side, does the slow death of my own soggy, dark, rusting homeland not call the same phrase to mind? To stay home is its own kind of shame, too; to linger over the insuperable problems that have caused the death of one’s home is often just as painful as leaving it ever could be — in many regards, it is worse. In this way, the children of dying hinterlands and backwaters are forever caught in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation that knows no analogue on America’s “Main Street.”

Countrywide, from trailer parks to ghettoes to faded old hamlets like mine — the same drama plays out in one way or another, and to be rather frank, it is a story that is often just too sad to ever tell. For those who live it, it is a burden that feels too shameful to bring into the light. It is a subject we would rather not examine, for it is a grotesque and burdensome thing to behold whether one is living it or whether they are merely bearing witness to it from afar.

Perhaps the desert comes to mind as often as it does because it is the antithesis of Upstate New York. Where Upstate is old, la frontera is young; where our streets are lifeless and cold — theirs are hot and teeming with human drama. Both can be, in their own rights, depressive places in which the yearnful romantic finds portions of his fleeting peace; but where Upstate offers only the peace of frigid emptiness and silence — the desert delivers the peace of the sun, a florid domain hidden in Devonian desolation, all painted with a peeling patina of ancient Spain. Both are places of exile, but where Northern New York is really a place for hermits with a heavyweight tolerance for the macabre — the other bustles incongruously with sunlit faces and the eternal blush of spice and cacti and Catholic melodrama. It is not hard to see how the likes of Edward Abbey, Cormac McCarthy, and other ‘exiles’ of their type were pulled there; and as I close my eyes at the Mexican restaurant in Rome, I retreat to a private fantasy at the far antipode of my native home.

It is probably true that there is not really a place for me on this earth.

When I am in the northern wilds, what with whipping wind and whiteouts out the window as I vacantly stare into the stove’s fire — I am not there. I am not by the flame nor hearing the screech of the gusts as they lash at the eaves of my roof. I am in the desert; I am at the shantytown by the Salton Sea, where as one drives they drive by the shimmering fronds of the medjool date plantations. Carnicerias and Modelos, hippies at the hot springs, cumbias rebajadas blaring from low-rider ‘trocas’ — that is where I am as I watch the snows fly.

But just the same when I am in the desert, I am then thinking of the maritime shores of Maine — of the pine boughs lapping at the whitewater and of buttered scallops by the boat-docks; the slanted, pasty jowls of stern old newspaper-reading men who drawl and scowl and stare at the sluggish arrival of the tides. The tired, chipped white wooden corbels of libraries slouching by the rocky coast — the fog admixing with the steam from a cup of black coffee, so very, very far from the saguaros and the desert heat.

So I go there, and by the time I am there I am already somewhere else. Again and again, on and on, the heart and the body are dislocated, divorced, unable to ever operate in tandem or synchrony of any kind.

Above all, whenever it feels as if I have “arrived” — those rare moments where I taste a breath of contentment with where I’ve landed on the map — another thing happens. The victory’s vapors cover me, and I am quite satisfied with what I have done; that is the first part, and it is the most delightful feeling I have known in my life. Then, of course, the weeks pass.. the hours of the days begin to bare down on me, and I realize that I am lonesome. I realize that I have loved so many places — too many — and cannot ever possess them all at once, and yet anyway, I love them all dearly and try in vain to gather them up in my arms in a single motion. I fail every time. The lights of cities lure me; parties and events beckon to me, I wish to take trains, meet people, wander further than I have before, but so often these adventures leave me distressed and disillusioned. Just the same, I cannot stop making these attempts. I cannot stop trying.

It could rightly be called “samsara,” yes, but it is based in something observable. Because I have “arrived” before — because I have found myself in the company of kindred spirits before, and have just the same “arrived” in a handful of places at particular times, feeling a sense of home there... I know that it can be done. Therefore I cannot bring myself to ever really desist in my search to “arrive” again — those who say I should chop wood and carry water, or that I should content myself with a single place, sloughing through the incessant urge to go again, what are they telling me but to live my life as if it were a sort of prison sentence? Like “doing my time,” they seem to wish I would make scratches on the walls each day to mark my vague and empty time; one after another, gathering up the days like artifacts of a long and pointless exile… an exile that is in many respects far more burdensome than that of the vagabond, the desert rat, the wanderer.

My volition in all of this is totally absent. Like the torn and ravaged ligament of a chronically-dislocating joint on the body (such as that of my own shoulder) the remnants of my volition flap and squirm and ache; their futility is now their only function, and none of it can be healed. It is my grim and paralyzing prize — the wages of a vagabondish life and all of the urges in the heart that ever preceded it. This is worse than lust, it is worse than grief, worse than being jilted or hurt — it is a kind of ‘self-destruct sequence’ encoded in the depths of my everything, and it cannot be undone or mitigated. It flogs me across the map; it sends my mind sputtering into a shaking, howling, snarling fever — it is my owner, my master, my controller.

To disobey it is not only unnatural, it is stupid. Because in so many cases I know that its direction is correct; I understand that all it sends me out to chase is real and conquerable — that I can taste of its prizes and, if I am wise, hang onto them to be nourished and kept to grow. It always and forever seems so readily plausible that if only I could find myself in the kind of company I would wish to keep, I will arrive home... and if I should see to it that the next time I find myself in such a moment, I move carefully, hold fast, make note of my breath and my words and what work I might contribute — I could keep it again, this time forever, and live within the kind of community that I have so incessantly and so torturously dreamed to keep. More than this — that I might finally, after years of fighting for it, find myself in possession of a real prize worthy of giving to our daughter when she is ready.

Yet as the years and the miles have worn down my bones and contorted the skin of my heart into ever more unorthodox shapes, I have become an unrecognizable creature: a pariah — a doomed animal. My every breath is illegible; my aims are obscure.

Is there not honor, by contrast, in toiling in one’s quietude, or in plunging into the courageous martyrdom of resignation? Those who are not wracked with these burdens are exactly that — they are resigned — and truly, I say that without one trace of a sneer or a breath of contempt. To my eye, their life is made better by their tolerance for the glum, lonely days and by their sterling legibility; they are edified by their years of solitary toil and isolation and normalcy — they wear it as their armor and drink from it as their manna, and for it, they flourish in their sober silence.

Just as the monk and the nun are living vocations that are morally higher than those of us married laymen (those of us who were, at the end of it, too weak for celibacy) I might submit that the “resigned ones” stand on a real and definite moral pinnacle, high above us “ramblers” for whom all the good things of this world are never enough. While they offer up their lonely drudgery as a sacrifice to God almighty — we, the drifters and ramblers are busy seeking heaven all over every mile of the map, walking the earth forever as aimless ghosts, too weak to ever stay put or to content ourselves with the meagre meals produced by the fallen, routinized, empty world.

So, perhaps it is fine to admit it — I am weak. I am the lesser creature; the one who wears the blood of the gypsy and heaves out his illegible cry into the voids. My skin is soaked in moonlight and dust; rebirth and death are struck on my inaudible instrument like a chord, and the breathless silent choirs of derangement and homelessness hurl their cantos into my desert, forever. There is no end to it all but death; there is no hope in it but in Christ Jesus. I go as a pilgrim, seeking to shed my bruises, and to shed them again, until I am winnowed down to an impoverished, smiling spectre — one who haunts the quadrangles and parks and public squares, baring his rotten teeth as he prays, if only to remind passers-by that our great God put us up to forming heaven on earth — and good God, how we have failed!

I have loved and loved and loved and loved — and lost twice over for every time my foolish heart leapt outward toward my fleeting, vaporous, rosy-cheeked glories. If the words that I am now writing seem overwrought, it is quite because I myself am totally, hopelessly overwrought; the layers have folded over and baked and folded over and baked and broiled and burned and churned in every flood upon my surface until all that is left is a macabre surrogate for a human face. What’s funnier now is that I have still got my balls — my huevos! I have conceived with my wife; we have danced and nursed one anothers’ lips in the old and ancient dance, speeding down the roads upon the buses and over the iron rails in the train-cars — moving in great reams of heat and through sheets of rain, until the breath of God Himself smiled and rose into the womb, so as to say “it cannot be over, and the trail you have trudged is indeed a thing I can use.”

What will become of the child? What sights will her bewildered eyes catch sight of? Will the same curse that has ever followed me follow her? Perhaps I should die to the maps of the world; unlearning the shape of this country and all it contains — perhaps I should crucify what desire I have had to find any kind of friends, or a community, living face-to-face in fraternity in a world of sublimity and beauty. If I could inculcate in myself a sense of resignation to my status as a lonely outsider, if I could lease the remaining years of my life to the dying place from whence I came — could I break the curse, and liberate our offspring from partaking in it?

Of what use would that be? One wonders if, in even formulating these thoughts, the Lord is laughing at them — for whose purview is the alteration of my bloodline (which is quite literally a Gypsy bloodline) but His and His alone? How futile to attempt the change myself — how inconceivable is it that my purpose on this earth would be to rear a child who bears none of what I have ever beared? Far better, it could be, to keep my chin up and to learn to bear it with dignified grace — and to cultivate it, that it could bear fruit. If I could keep the million miles of the earth rolling feverishly beneath me, and if I could make each one of them into a heavenly string of galaxies in a great and endless tapestry for our baby — why would I do anything else?

Meanwhile, as I think on this weighty matter, I read the headlines written by the anthropologists: “Nomad Populations Worldwide are Declining,” or “Extinction of the Steppeland Tribes Now Feared,” or “Obituary for the Last King of the Scottish Gypsies.”

It seems absurd that there would be such an end proclaimed when there are so many nomadic souls still stirring in the American deserts (and I do use the term “nomadic soul” not without some hesitation, for it is lately an abused turn of phrase...)! Indeed, those who might take it as an obvious fact of life that nomadism as an element of the human condition has now passed beyond the grave, and can be described as a ‘former’ practice of ‘more primitive strains’ of the human species — they themselves may make such proclamations just the same week they pack their U-Haul trucks for Tampa or Tucscon or Texas! And all the while, they may tell their friends and children and compatriots of every variety of how it is “patently infeasible” for a man and wife to have a family without “staying put” and “putting down roots,” just as they go and so gladly sever their own.

Rootless creatures — many yell so loudly about “roots” only because they seem to lack them. But let my reflections on this matter be read not as a criticism (for how can I criticize those who are not born of the same tribe as I am?) but as simple, plain observations, bereft of any moral gravity of any form or type. I only make the observation to state clearly that by all I can tell, whatever “advice” I have received on the matter of my vagabond status has been incongruous and vague, polluted by a series of murky psychological phenomena that take root in sedentary peoples, and ultimately, this kind of “advice” has never been of any utility to me whatsoever.

There is a more fundamental difference between us; a chasm wide enough that our respective flavors of “wisdom” are more or less mutually unintelligible. In the ancient, many-many-thousands-year-old history of nomadic peoples (who were the majority of all human beings), I find myself on one side of the chasm, and they are all firmly on the other. Cain’s lack of repentance has purchased for him one thing; the ghost of Abel has purchased for me and mine something else entirely.

To write this way publicly is a little disgusting; it is to be a leper who does not cower in his cave, as perhaps he should — it is to air one’s wretched boils out in the sunlight of the public square. And yet it should be shown and documented, for these are the wages of the many-faced hyrdra that has diminished and humiliated the hinterlands of the world.

It is not a ghastly mask that I wear alone — hinterlanders the world over have been faced with every variation of these trevails, from the Mexican campesino who was made landless by NAFTA’s amendments to the eljido common-land system among the Mexican peasantry to the Fulani who finds his herd stolen, his camel shot, and his own son boarding a plane to New York City. The Iowa boy who ambles to Oakland to heap scorn upon his patrimony — the Newfoundlander who suffered bitterly owing to the cod collapse, only to be forced to relocate to Alberta to work in the filthy tar sands. To find oneself in a new place, clutching the old memories of home and gazing upon them with dark eyes; or to find oneself standing by the ruins (or the newly sprawling subdivisions), grieving in suspended motion — these are the wages of urbanization, mechanization, even civilization, and they are ancient.

Stability is a far-off vagary from here. We are, as Evola put it — “nomads of the asphalt” now; a sense of all-pervading homelessness and dislocation has now entered the bloodstreams of countless peoples and tribes. But where, in Biblical times, the dispersed tribes at least remained tribal, now, our dislocated souls find themselves not merely ‘dispersed’ but also without a people. For, miserable as it may have been to scatter across the earth in tents and on camels, phrases like “we are Tuareg” and “we are Qashqai” and “we are of Judea” have gone a long way.

Today’s scattered ‘nomads’ now have no such luxury. There are no tribes, no peoples, no sense of belonging to hold fast to in the boiling chaos we have unleashed with such eye-watering speed. And as hinterlands around the world empty out, they send apparently endless streams of ‘lost ones’ out and away from home — forever homeless, forever dislocated. One wonders if there will be a moment at which we can all catch our breath, find one another in the midst of the madness; one wonders if we aren’t living in the end of days. And I wonder whether the last of the nomads and vagabonds aren’t — in spite of all the scorn heaped upon them by the descendants of Cain — contending with all of this in a decidedly honest manner after all.

I drain my Margarita and tip the waiter as the brooding melodies of an old Mexican piano ballad mumble through the speakers. The bar-tender is now so thoroughly bored her head is lowered, facing the window — it is as if she is in a posture of eternal prayer. The window faces southwest, towards Mexico; and our sleeping baby slouches over her mother’s chest in the silky baby wrap as we schlep toward the door. Outside, the light is blinding — the air is cold. Crumpled maple leaves fly along the curbs of the deserted street.

Stepping along the sidewalk, my feet move to the rhythm of some eternal cumbia; my head is nodding as I go, I am moving to music that exists only in my mind. A lonely car swerves by us; the traffic light changes absent-mindedly, for no one. And though it is forty degrees, my skin feels decidedly warm. My wife wears the Mona Lisa smile, lightly stepping along the leaf-strewn pavement — we are going now to see my grieving grandmother. A knowing look passes between us; she knows what I know and I know what she knows, but neither of us could write it down or say it aloud or even assign words to this knowledge. The whole scene is only one tableau in an ancient history; it is only one flash so brief and incomplete it is, by itself, a kind of surrealist fiction.

There is no resolution at the end of this; there is no conclusion to this essay, for the topic I have written about here remains unresolved — and will remain so. Civilization’s garrish and madly-spinning carousel will continue to uproot people worldwide; plummeting birthrates will suck the blood even further out of once-thriving villages everywhere. There is no “one weird trick” to pull here; there is no calvary to call on. Where it will leave us in the end is not knowable, and this being what it is, perhaps the key is to move lightly — to forego biting our nails quite so much, even to banish thought. Whether we are in the desert or not — perhaps we must live in the kind of sun-soaked languor that the desert so famously inculcates upon a troubled mind. This will be the substance of our exile, I think, whether it is lived here or elsewhere; we must find peace in peacelessness — and find home in homelessness.

The music will go on; our tiny baby even knows this. When she wakes, she wants to dance with me — and if I stop the dancing, she fusses and babbles and shakes her arms and legs, as if to tell me that the dance is never over. And on these days where it sometimes feels as if there is no future for this beautiful little girl — it is this insistence upon keeping the dance going that tells me that she is going to be quite alright.

By the rich man’s country home (which sits on a whooping 28,000 acres) the little pile of rotting cigarette butts sits in the silence of the wilderness — it’s all piled up right there because this particular spot is “one cigarette away” from the gas station up the road. Indeed, dozens of smokers buy their pack each morning, light a smoke, drive south on the road, and by the time they’ve puffed that whole cigarette down to the butt and cracked their window to toss it out — they’re driving right by this same spot at sixty-five miles per hour. It takes them all just about the same amount of time to smoke and dispose of a cigarette. And there it lands, blazing butt after blazing butt, piling up there for months at a time.

Walking along this stretch, the observant fellow on his morning constitutional may even note a few granular details that no other man would see. For example, there isn’t just one pile — there are two. The first one is a little closer to town; all of the butts are Marlboros. And so it would seem that there’s at least one Marlboro smoker who sucks his smokes down extra fast. Further along, there’s another pile: all Camels and Pall Malls, with a few Signals mixed in — cigarettes from the Indian Reservation. Those who puff on these smokes are, I presume, a bit more languid in their morning smoke; perhaps still in the hazy state of having just woken up, or gabbing on the telephone. They do not draw the smoke into their lungs with quite the level of desperation and frenzy as our local ‘Marlboro man’ must.

Though I am not the sort to go and seek justice for the crime of littering at this pristine spot of wilderness just off the edge of the billionaire’s estate, I find myself picking up the butts and doing a bit of investigative work just for the hell of it. I heartily doubt that the billionaire himself is a smoker, or if he is, I doubt a single one of these butts is ever his — his Rolls or his Maserati just may have an ashtray in it that he makes good use of. Or perhaps not — I have no idea how Chinese billionaires live or have ever lived. No one I know has ever even seen the man; for all I know, his 28,000 acres are only some kind of tax shelter, or a place where he “parks his money” and pays a staff of upkeepers to live as his personal hermits. Mulling over the ins and outs of the billionaire’s life, I walk up to the gas station, where the ladies behind the counter sell the cigarette butts that wind up in the swamp.

“Hi there, honey!” the lady says as I come inside, shaking the rain off my jacket. I smile, glad to be standing in the gas station below the stuffed deer heads that are mounted over the meat freezers and beer coolers. She’s all dolled up today — she’s got the thick dark rouge painted on her, or whatever kind of makeup it is; her lip quivers as she sneaks a hit off her “vape” pen. Her lower lip has got a piercing in it, or maybe two or three tiny ones; I can’t tell if her “vape” contains marijuana oil or only nicotine. She’s got a lacy gothic-looking thing on under her shirt on that looks uncomfortable and strange.

I seat myself with a cup of coffee, staring out at the drizzle under the neon “OPEN” sign, which is hung next to another flickering sign saying “IT’S MILLER TIME.” There’s several sheaves’ worth of paper fliers hung on the bulletin board: “We Buy Houses! ANY Condition! Call Today!” hangs limp on the board, faded from repeatedly being wetted by the humid blasts of wet, rainy air from the opening and closing door. “Garage Sale: Bowhunting Gear, Polaris UTV Best Offer NO TRADES” hangs at an oblique angle, right next to the papers advertising the Methodist Friday pork dinner (“do they serve meat on Fridays just to keep the Catholics away?” I wonder) and the bereavement group (“can I come if I wish to grieve the death of the state?”).

Soon I hear a croupy cough and watch an elderly woman shamble in. “Jimmy got real, real fucked up over at the valley the other day,” she announces before doing anything else. No one replies to this crass non sequitur. The lip-pierced, Gothic-looking cashier adjusts her bustier and cracks her knuckles, appearing to get ready to deal with one of her more burdensome daily customers.

The woman hacks and coughs, leans on her walker — her hair is soaked from the rain; she shakes it delicately, like a ragged poodle fresh in from the storm. “Lucky 13 and Cash-Word Doublers, for starters,” she says. But just like a window-shopping woman tallying up her orders at a big-city department store, the litany of scratch-off lottery ticket names continues. She goes on so long that a large line forms behind her: A man in dirty sweatpants holds a six-pack of high-ABV Molson Ice beer (though it’s eight in the morning), a painter eyes the breakfast sandwiches spinning on the heat plate; a gaggle of school-aged kids in sagging pants are all reaching for the Cow Tales and Snickers Bars and Bug Juice.

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Outside, a UTV rolls up to the gas pumps — it’s got a 48” lift kit, and the speakers are blaring some kind of country rap. I can hear the lyrics clearly from inside through the rainy windows:

Hot damn, another shot up in the air again
I′ll probably never care again about anything, I’m arrogant
Ooh, I′m messed up, head spinnin’ like a hurricane (like a hurricane)
I′m messed up off that alcohol and Mary Jane (and Mary Jane)
White boy, b-brown, b-brown boots
Piece of piece of white trash, piece of piece of white trash

The big fella comes in from the UTV; he’s got bright-white teeth and high, tight jeans over big filthy boots. He seems a little too “energized” for eight in the morning; one wonders if he’s high or whether he’s just had a few too many cans of “Bucked Up” brand energy drinks. The woman at the counter is still rattling off her litany of lotteries; the folks in the line are starting to get visibly pissed off, and the cashier keeps saying, “OK, OK, that’s great, OK” in between making eyes at the painter waiting for his breakfast. The school-aged “wigger” boys ( wait, can I use that term? I forget) are now scrolling TikTok on their telephones — aren’t they supposed to be in school right now? Or are they just boyish-looking men, old enough to have graduated already?

Finally, the line clears, the lottery woman shambles back out to her car to see if she’ll win big (she’ll be back inside after she scratches them all off, to play again), and the cashier with the heavy eye makeup makes quick work of all the customers to follow. One of the men — a recently-divorced-looking fellow with yellow, jaundiced eyes — buys two packs of Marlboro Reds, and I wonder if I have my “early cigarette butt pile” culprit. He seems harried, nervous, like he hasn’t slept but ain’t really tired either — and sure as shit, he jumps into his truck and lights up immediately, tearing out of the parking lot toward NY-30 south, towards the billionaire’s estate. That’s him — it’s gotta be.

And now, seeing him go, it’s all coming together. The lotto tickets and cigarettes, the bizarro combinations of inner-city black hip-hop culture and the “country” identity — the big UTV’s (all of them $45,000 or more and bought on credit), the six-packs, the TikTok, the lip piercings, the vape pens, the Goths and the Juggaloes and even the Kentucky-Fried-Transgenderism of the cashiers at the Dollar General; it’s all swirling together for me now, right here in the middle of the wilderness. I see it unfold together in a village that, to the outsider visiting on an Adirondack idyll, might seem to be like one old burning ember of Opie & Andy’s America. But there’s no one whistling Andy Griffith around here, mostly — no one’s doing any whistling at all save for me and a bunch of old men, many of whom will openly tell you they’re now thinking in terms of months and not years.

This ain’t your grandpa’s rural America anymore — that’s for sure.

Yet while I could present tableaus such as these alongside some kind of a lamentation about cultural decline and decay, or as artifacts of the degeneration of rural Upstate New York, that’d only be part of the picture. I believe there is more to the story. I have a theory that, rough and tumble and haggard as many of our people up here are — they can be credited with actually saving this place in many, many ways. Their gaudy blow-up Halloween decorations in their yards, their rusted-out trucks rotting out in the woods, their haunted-looking peeling-paint homes and trailers, their gigantic “MAGA” and “LET’S GO BRANDON” murals painted on the broadside of their barns and lip-rings and vape pens — these people are, unwittingly perhaps, some of this state’s greatest bulwarks against what could only be called “rural gentrification.”

For virtually every element of their lives, homes, speech, aesthetics, politics, and activities reads as a total affront to the contingent of urban “yuppies” who might aim to “Vermontify” Northern New York. Here, we are far from the Yankee-Candle-tier quaintness of the Green Mountain State; Bilbo Baggins would find no shire here — Martha Stewart would shudder at how we live in this place and do a heel-turn, headed straight back to the neat-and-tidy domains of New England. There are no yoga studios in this town, nor cupcake shops; there are no “In This House, We Believe…” signs, nor is the homosexual battle flag waving in all its rainbow splendor over the sidewalks and storefronts, at least not here.

Though I am far from straightforwardly condemning such people — I’ll admit, for example, that I don’t mind a nice cupcake from a cupcake shop, and am known to light a Yankee Candle or two now and then — I can only comment on them more as an economico-cultural phenomenon than as individual people. For in all my travels, I have seen the same old, sad, sorry story unfold time and again: A nice-looking town with some decent hiking around, or perhaps a ski resort or two, lays sleepily in wait, what with cheap old houses, tired old storefronts, and a few still-solid shreds of the old rural ideal. It sits there as a lonesome damsel, unprotected, ready to be spruced up with so much of the lipstick and mascara of “economic development” — and next thing you know, men in suits are knocking on doors, offering people fat wads of cash to clear out, that they might build condos and co-working spaces, and pack the town with hordes of newcomers who know nothing about “the way things are” in their brand-new town.

I say this kind of thing not with anything like bitterness — for who can blame the inmates of our cities for pining for a little fresh air? Covid brought them in scores to places like rural Vermont, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Maine, and New Hampshire. They were fleeing the lockdowns and the crime and the riots; the rising rents and the stifling air of the emptied-out cities — they were seeing “cottagecore” posts on the internet and hoping to step out into the countryside to find a purer, cleaner, fresher style of living. I can’t blame such people for their decisions, even if I may not share their politics nor their affinity for expensive cups of coffee and spendy Reiki sessions. I know that such people are people too — and at that, Americans, freely moving about the country as is their natural right.

However, my wife is from near one of their target towns — Bozeman, Montana. Anyone familiar with “Boze-Angeles,” as it is now cheekily called by so many Montanans, will tell you that out-of-towners have flooded into their little city in such numbers that the housing market is now a nightmare. In inflation-adjusted terms, the cost of a house in Bozeman has tripled in the last twenty-five years; young working-class kids who grew up there can no longer afford to buy a house in the town they grew up in. They either wait to inherit property, pay outrageous rents, live in a camper — or leave. This has had the effect of ‘cutting off’ the continuity of the culture there; the Bozeman “old-guard” now finds itself diminished, steadily replaced by the new generation of largely ex-urban newcomers who have effectively ‘colonized’ the town.

Moreover, even if a young Bozemanian (Bozemanite?) can situate himself in a decent housing scenario — his town is now a sprawling, traffic-choked version of what it was when he was a kid. The construction is endless; there are hundreds, if not thousands of people now living on the streets there in RV’s, vans, and campers. What once was a quaint, fairly conservative little town in the Gallatin Valley is now another thing entirely — and though the city still bears the same name as that old quaint town, it may as well be another place entirely; lost to “progress,” fashion, an exodus from California, and unchecked domestic migration.

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Bozeman’s story is only one of many. Time and again, once a place gets “discovered” — that place will experience not only a flood of commerce and money, but ultimately, it will face its own extinction as a cultural organism. Places that get “discovered” by the big-money urban set will handle the sharply double-edged sword of relevance, development, and progress — and in a very short time, the children of that place will find themselves priced out of their own hometowns. I’ve seen it in Vermont as much as in Montana; I’ve seen it in Colorado and Texas — I’ve even seen it elsewhere in New York State, but I thank God that at least for now, 95% of Northern New York’s land area has managed to evade this distressing fate.

As I weigh these happenings and concerns, I’m forced to ask — if there was a way to “skip” this era’s idea of development, commerce, and gentrification, what would it be? How could we get there? If we could, wouldn’t we just want to sit this round of economic history out — that some old burning ember of former days might be kept alive, however bedraggled?

On that score, Upstate New York is the shining star. Obstinately outside the eyes of the wider world, our state’s rural hinterlands seem to have by and large been skipped over and frozen in time — in some parts, this “freeze” on any entrance into the present era seems to have, for the most part, dated as far back as the early days of the industrial revolution. Though the old culture of former days hangs on barely by a thread, and has been winnowed down to a degenerated, decrepit version of what it once was — it has not necessarily been “replaced” by any sweeping program of “revitalization” either.

Instead, the wider culture has percolated slowly into this place rather than sweeping over us like a tsunami; slowly, the cell towers were erected (in some places there still aren’t any). Slowly, the “smart” telephones and fiber came. The country-rap combos and pricey UTV’s; the vapes and punk culture and TikTok transgenderism — it all came bit by bit, faster than usual, but not so fast that we’ve lost our rudder completely. Indeed, many of the same young fellows around here who might sag their pants and “hit the vape pen” are known to go ice-fishing on occasion, or to still show up for the sap boil during sugaring season. They might maintain a facade as gothic Juggaloes or as quasi-ghetto types — but they still know all the words to old Hank and drink Old Milwuakee and Wild Turkey with grandad at the Legion now and again. Though changes have come, there’s still a “center” here — a rudder, a vein connecting the present to the past that does not seem to have been severed, snapped, or subsumed entirely by fast-tempo changes.

I can’t help but wonder if our “trashy” side helped us on that score. Had we been the kind of place where the fence gets a regular coat of paint, and the bushes are trimmed — what with old Victorian B&B’s and cobblestone gardens and strapping young lads in slacks and corduroy — would we have been overtaken by now? I reckon so. Had an Interstate been built a little closer, or had it been that our weather might’ve been a few shades less funereal than it generally is — perhaps the armies of yuppies, developers, and Covid refugees might’ve come.

Instead, they didn’t come. Instead, I live in a place where I bought my house for $33,000 cash, move-in ready. We’re living a good life here, almost solely because we haven’t really been “discovered”. And in fact, I believe that the “trashier-looking” a place was during the real estate tulip mania of the Covid era — the lower the median home price remained, and the easier of a time the young folks have had at buying homes and starting families. All it took was a few rusty trucks, thousands of gigantic “MAGA” flags, and some cashiers at our gas stations with altogether too-much makeup on.

In a sense, then, have we not been saved by the “people of Wal-Mart?” For all the scorn anyone heaps upon those sorts of people, and in spite of whatever their daily struggles may be — it is not untrue that they have a way of spooking off the well-to-do?

So perhaps America would do well to stay a little on the trashy side. Maybe “trashy” shouldn’t even be considered an insult but ought to be a term worn as a badge of honor. Because our rusty ruffians and wild boys and scratch-off-ticket-scratching old ladies are our vanguard against the beast of gentrification — without them, things might’ve been so pricey here we’d have had to go farther afield to find our home-place. Without them, that thin, sturdy old thread that connects the past to the future might’ve been snapped up, broken, paved over, and buried under the foundations of so many new condos and cupcake shops.

I don’t really know, but it sure seems that way to me. Meditating upon these matters, I watch the ATV’s peel out of the gas station, with cigarettes lit in the unshaven lips of their drivers. I wander the roads and see the little piles of butts, picking them up as I go. The stinky little sandwich-baggie of butts sits in my coat as a reminder of where we really are; that secluded billionaire’s estate looms off in the woods, out of sight as the cars swerve by. The moose’s hoof-prints fill with rainwater at the edge of the bog; things are still sane here, normal, original. Huckleberry Finn might recognize all this, strange as it may now appear on its surface. I’m not so sure he’d recognize Bozeman, or Burlington, or Boulder.

And though it ain’t our grandad’s idea of rural America as it once was — there’s enough of a seed here that we might be able to grow it back. I feel it’s my charge to make sure they never pave that little old seed over; that whoever may come here will never forget that it’s here — even if it pays richly to forget it. To that end, I know I’m not working entirely alone; I’ve got the Gothic Juggaloes working with me, the trash in the yards, the lip-pierced waitresses and the redneck boys on their UTV’s (more than a few of which I’m related to). Whether they know it or not, I think they’re working on the same thing I am, and if I’ve got to pick up their cigarette butts now and again, I’m just alright with that.

Together, the five properties would total 11,742 square feet, and would together incur their owner an eye-popping $11,104 in annual tax liability. And their owner would be constantly busy with remodeling jobs from hell. Pointing up the structurally unsound, crumbling brick, removing giant flocks of pigeons from rotting soffit boards, mudding square miles of replacement drywall, replacing mouse-chewed insulation soaked rotten by roof leaks. It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy and spruce up these buildings, and as one worked tirelessly to remodel them, the clock would be ticking — as their owner would have to come up with $925/mo in property taxes for the duration of all the work.

At the end of it all, that adventurous investor would have won for himself a rather dubious prize — he would own most of the ‘downtown core’ of a 300-person village in a federally-designated “high poverty area” that sees no real tourism, has no industry of any kind, and whose median age has just lately crept over 60. The scenery in the area is nice, but sub-par as compared with the High Peaks region just a 45-minute drive away; the logging industry has wound down to a trickle, and large machinery has cut down on the need for workers in that enterprise besides.

Welcome to Obituaryland.

There is, in effect, no real reason to be here, nor to invest here; and so in all likelihood, in spite of this superlatively cheap series of investments that some bold fellow could make — the properties will sit on the market for years, empty, rotting further. Out-of-state owners might (foolishly) park their money there until they realize what an unwise investment they’ve made, and then they’ll dump them for even cheaper prices. Eventually, local officials will probably condemn the properties, some of which will be bulldozed for the fact that they will pose an “Immediate Danger to Life and Health,” and all that will remain will be overgrown vacant lots. Like the “war years” in the Bronx or Detroit, deep rural Upstate New York is faced with a cataclysmic level of ruin that, from where we sit today, does not seem remotely likely to be reversed.

I meditate on these matters as I watch my wife grip our bathroom’s doorknobs, squatting down and groaning. “I can’t do it,” she’d said to me at least a dozen times by then. I breathed deep and smiled, putting my forehead to hers: “Of course you can do it.” The midwife grinned, quietly saying — “When they start to say that, that means they’re going to give birth very soon!”

Now — another push. The midwife placed my hand down low, where I felt the wrinkled skin of the baby’s skull poking out into the world. “You feel that?” she asked. “It’s strange to say, but it should feel a little like ground beef.” It felt like ground beef indeed, but I could not think about the sensation long before the next push came. My wife grunted, eyes locked straight ahead, squeezing the doorknob so hard her fingers went white.

“There it is!” the midwife shouted, “ONE MORE PUSH!!”

And all at once, in a flourish of mad, wild, chaos, a little squirming purple bag of flesh wriggled out — muscular somehow, writhing out with a bizarre kind of force that I hadn’t anticipated. Frightening amounts of blood — “All very normal,” said the midwife — poured onto the absorbent pads placed along the bathroom floor. My hands were there; I caught the baby, whose little tiny mouth began to quiver with fear. My lip was quivering too; I began to cry. I cried for the sheer, intense, mind-shattering beauty of it all; I cried for the Herculean effort my wife had made to push through to this moment. I had never felt closer to another human being in my life than I felt to my wife just then; I watched her smile the most perfect smile and take a deep, nourishing breath as we placed the baby on her chest — and the midwife smiled wide and proclaimed: “IT’S A GIRL!!”

All of this took place not three-hundred feet from the dilapidated downtown buildings of our village. Out there — decay, death, the end: another day where the weeds continued their march over the long-fallowed lawns of old, long-shuttered village institutions. Another day for the pigeons to coo and lay eggs in the rafters of the storefronts. A long, somber meditation on the death of place, happening live outside our door — door within which new life had been introduced to the village; a baby born in a village where, quite likely, no other baby has been born in decades.

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How much more charged a moment could one ever bargain for? Birth by itself is a miracle among all miracles; it is a wild, delirious rush through the canon of human emotions and physiological processes. It is, if I may say it, a kind of proof that we humans have been hand-crafted in the image of an artisan of a God — the birth of a human is a delicate, fragile display that knows no analogue in the animal kingdom. As if this was not altogether enough, the birth of our particular baby took place mere steps from a site of collapse. On that day, we took the beginning and the end together in a single gulp, heads spinning with the gravity of the contrast, wondering, above all, about the future of our baby in a place like this.

Days later, after catching up on sleep, giving the baby a thousand kisses, learning how to console her when she cried, and helping my wife convalesce — I found myself walking through the village, where another dimension to this whole display popped into view. Sitting down alone on the picnic table by the gas station to lunch on a slice of pizza, the crickets hummed what may be the final stanzas of their summerlong ballad. Geese hurtled through the opaline skies, high over the gently curling, reddening leaves of the maples. The waterfall quietly shushed in the distance — and a man in an old square-body Ford F-150 was playing the radio at the gas pumps. The milky, smoke-soaked riffs of Led Zeppelin played:

All last night, sat on the levee and moaned
Thinking about my baby and my happy home, oh-oh

And the guitar wound up for an intricate, Louisiana-bayou-deep-fried melody of the most intoxicating, ‘Old-American’ variety one could dream of. It was here that I paused to reflect on the one shining, shimmering, beautiful benefit of collapse and ruin and irrelevance — some ember of ‘old America’ goes unmolested here. It remains pristine, defiant against ‘the times we’re living in’, somehow virginal in spite of the passage of the years, and it remains so precisely because this place is irrelevant, dying, forgotten. The murderous ‘invisible hand’ of the market has not seen it fit to come here to engage in any kind of a recalibration, reimagining, or overhauling of any kind — not here. Our seclusion and poverty has kept the homogenizing hands of prosperity at bay, and so the truck, the gas station, the greasy pizza, the Indian Summer sun, the Led Zeppelin riffs — all of them ‘landed’ in my heart in a way that reminded me of my childhood, and so it was that I was sent into a reverie over our baby’s future.

I thought of vinyl lawnchairs on the lush old lawns of my youth, rusty Oldsmobiles swinging wide over country road curves, lemon freeze-pops, rough-handed cigar-smoking daddies haggling over antique farm tools in the old barns of my boyhood, hosewater-soaked toddlers on the slip-and-slide in high July… I realized then that I’ve just communed at the same cup as those old daddies of that bygone era did all those decades ago; and for all that seems to change these days, I began to feel a great contentment in entering the fraternal order of the old American fathers. There in the sunshine, I laughed alone, contented to the very gills of my beat-up old heart — reminiscing on a future that may really look more like the past than anything else. This, I thought, this is a rich inheritance to offer our baby, and I could only offer it to her in a place like this.

A week on, the baby has already begun to change. Her grip upon my finger has gotten a little tighter; her neck muscles bulge as she vainly attempts to raise her head, getting closer and closer to success with each try. And where in the first day or two, nursing was an alien artform that seemed distant to her — now, she’s taken to the teat like a champion, consuming great quantities of milk as if she was born to do it, because indeed, she was.

As she changes and grows and learns, even at this early hour, a haunting notion sweeps over me. It’s a revelation of a type that, intellectually, I might’ve said I already know, or even categorized as something “obvious” — but there is knowing and then there is ‘knowing’. And now I know as deeply as a man can know it that this little stripling babe will not stop growing. At no point will her development be halted, arrested, or stopped. Raising her head unsupported will lead to rolling over, and rolling over will lead to crawling and later, walking and running. She’ll begin to form words. She’ll begin to see everything my wife and I say and do. She’ll develop tastes and preferences — she’ll even dream and eventually do. Hell, the day will even come when she flies the coop completely: off to the altar, whether it be with her new husband or whether she takes up the habit at a convent. Either way, it’ll be splendid; the final send-off into a world we’ve not yet seen, because it will be the world of the future. And we already hope we she thrives in it, though it’s a long way off.

If it all sounds painfully ordinary and even trite, perhaps it is, from the outside looking in at least — but when you’re holding a tiny seedling of a human being and realizing you’ll be on standby for all of her changes for the next twenty years, there really is no feeling like it. It’s like holding everything, everywhere, all at once — in the form of a tiny, breathing ball of flesh.

Singing to her, I change the words of old country songs to be about her. I bump her up and down in my arms, kiss her neck, watch her eyes staring up at the stars on an evening chilly enough to make her snuggle deeper into her blanket. I see her eyes — they almost seem to interrogate me a little, without so much as a word nor a thought on her part. Though I may only be imagining things, she seems to be asking me:

What kind of life am I going to live, daddy?

To answer that question, I have to turn my focus toward Hickman’s Hinterlands. For there is no question — our daughter will be a hinterlander just the same as we are. She’ll know this weird, crumbling world I’ve known and loved. She’ll see it crumble even further. And the tone and tenor of the whole display will move to the metronome set by her father’s work here at this publication; for in all truth, Hinterlands is quite liable to become my life’s work. Now, then, I must ask: What is the future of Hickman’s Hinterlands? What ought I be plotting out on the trail ahead?

For the first, I’ll say that I never meant to use this publication as a personal blog. But this summer has thrown my wife and I so many curveballs that it’s made our heads spin and stay spinning — from the slow, anguished death of my mother at the age of fifty-one, to the agonizing wait for our very-overdue baby, to all my nerves about making a living for the baby, adjusting to life in a new village, planning for the uncertain future, a slurry of distressing current events, turmoil with family and friends, and finally, somehow managing to write enough to make subscription to this publication worth your while. There have been several instances this summer where it was all I could do to simply report on the happenings of my life, though I wished to instead be traveling and writing more focused pieces on the actual hinterlands themselves.

This turn of events wasn’t for everybody. My publication’s rate of growth slowed down. I’ve lost dozens and dozens of paid subscribers, and my income has dropped off a cliff — which is a truly nerve-wracking prospect on the eve of becoming a father. I can’t blame those who unsubscribed; I haven’t been doing my best work, after all. But here, I want to offer my most profound gratitude to those of you who’ve kept the faith, stayed on, and continued to support this publication. Your trust in the future work I’ll be doing here means the world to me — and the dollars you send my way has kept and will keep our baby clothed, fed, and warm for the forseeable future, thank God.

What I want to tell you now is that the wait is over. The future of Hickman’s Hinterlands is now here. A return to the regular programming is now nigh. Of course, there’s a twist — our family is in a period of serious transition now, owing to the arrival of our baby. The way we live, work, and travel is about to change. Gone are the days of raising our thumbs to hitchhike to some isolated outpost with few services or amenities, at least for now. Long-distance trips by automobile, overnight train, cargo ship, bicycle, or on foot are temporarily off the menu. Yet where one series of possibilities is blocked and put on a hiatus — another series of possibilities opens up, and that’s what I want to talk about here.

My life has been characterized by two things, which are really a corollary to a third: I’ve been a traveler for my entire adult life, and for almost all of my adult life, I’ve been on the ‘social internet’ in some form or fashion. Both of these I’ve done in the service of one key ambition — having great conversations. No kidding, whenever I’ve gone and hitchhiked to some far-flung place, I’ve done it in the hopes of getting to know the people there. I’ve lived almost solely for the rare all-night conversation of a high and illustrious caliber; and when I could not obtain it offline I took to the internet to seek out its digital analogue. Truly, there’s nothing I love more in life than connecting with kindred souls and discoursing about ideas on a high-flying kind of level. And while, up to now, travel and the internet have sufficed well enough for the purpose — I have another idea.

After all, the traveler who wanders in search of a good bout of discussion must have a destination in mind. He’s got to have a hunch about this place or that, and he’s got to travel on that hunch and see if the place he’s got in mind might really be a trove of bright minds, eloquent speakers, and long nights (or even weeks) of erudite and enlightening discussion among one-of-a-kind spirits. Having moved between many dozens of such places, and having involved myself in all manner of social groups both online and off, I now realize that I might be well-disposed to founding one such node on the map — that I might do very well to create a kind of ‘destination’ for thinking people, right here in Northern New York.

And now, with a long chasm of time before me, a sweet little baby and a happy wife, a small but sturdy purse of resources, and a newfound feeling of geographical stability here in my hinterland home — it is my intention to start a kind of ‘club’ for readers of Hickman’s Hinterlands. A gathering-place, a kind of hostel-bar, the sort of place with a crock pot for chili, a fridge for beer, and a few dozen canvas cots on which our friends can rest. Perhaps a couple cabins for long-term writers’ residencies; maybe even a small armada of canoes on which to explore the local rivers.

I want to do this not only for selfish reasons — I have a strong feeling that visiting readers of Hinterlands would bring some fantastic conversation to our backwoods home — but for more macro-scale reasons, too. For though I’ve found some interesting and often nourishing iterations of something like “community” on the internet, bringing that stuff into the “IRL” world is the next step. After so many years online, I’ve found there’s nothing like friendship to be found on here — only the barest murmuring of a thing that could only become friendship offline.

More than this, people are lately starving for focused, convivial, fraternal, face-to-face connection, and I believe I can give it to them here. Loneliness is the plague of our era; it’s lately harder than ever for like-minded souls to encounter one another, especially regularly or for any length of time. But up here, real estate is cheap, and we’re situated in a region that is a day’s drive from 67,000,000 people. We’re close to several Canadian cities, as well as several crossing points on the International Border. We’re down the road from the most-often-visited portions of the Adirondack Park, and not far from Burlington, Vermont. Truly, I don’t think it’d be especially hard to get folks to turn up here regularly.

But prudence would have it that I ought to be quite specific in how I frame this effort out. For, tempting as it is to go into what’s called “the hospitality industry,” I don’t aim to do that. My ambition is to run a one-man show; no debt, no employees, super-low overhead costs, and to run it as a kind of daily operation (with periodic shut-downs for the sake of travel, here and there). This being what it is, I have not the time or the resources to devote to running a high-end, luxury kind of affair, and I want to say that from the start.

Instead, I want to advertise a fairly Spartan bill of goods from the beginning: Heavy soup in a bowl. A canvas cot with a military surplus sleeping bag. A can of cheap beer. When the fire goes out for the night it's cold unless you wake up and add a log. Traipses through unremarkable, thicketed woods; paddles on dreary swamps. Trough urinals, couches and chairs from the thrift store. A rusty old Quonset hut in an isolated wasteland on a barren northern plain. A radio and a deck of cards. All of it clean and just absolutely DIRT CHEAP.

It might feel something like a "man camp" or a "bunkhouse" for eccentric intellectuals. A rogue military officers' mess shed on the northern frontier. Not a luxury, halfway-luxury, or even quarter-way luxury type "resort" (save for a couple of cabins reserved for residencies and elderly visitors). The vibe for those who come here will be: "this is so outlandish — and so ridiculously cheap — that I don’t mind ‘roughing it’ a little!" And the company, conversations, and unique setting will be altogether so good it'll make it all very unique, and very worthwhile for those who decide to visit.

Those who can’t or won't rough it will be encouraged stay in a motel. I'd gladly point them to a nice one nearby. This is because I'd like to go pretty strictly into the "good conversation business," not the hotel business. If I earn less because of it, I don't mind. After much deliberation and plenty of input from prospective visitors — I have faith that this model, though unorthodox, should suffice in producing the results I aim to achieve.

Membership will be simple: It’ll involve “dues” of $20 per month. If that manifests as a “Founding Member” subscription to Hickman’s Hinterlands, that works! If it comes as a USPS money order, or cash paid right at the door, that works, too. But as of today, all readers of this publication who have already opted (or who will opt) to become Founding Members at $240 per year will be automatically granted club privileges every year they pay. This money will go toward keeping the lights on, the taxes paid, and chili in the crockpot.

As of now, I’m at the earliest stage of development — with a fairly firm idea of how I’d like the end result to look and feel. The interest is there: several hundred followers and readers have, in the last six months or so, personally commented or reached out to me expressing a high level of interest in being a part of something like this. The next step is for me to purchase a property, build out or renovate a structure for the purpose of acting as a social hall and bunkhouse, and to form a legal private club entity. Once these elements of the project are unrolled and firmed up, we’ll schedule a “grand opening” hootenanny, to which all Founding Members will be invited. Following this, I’ll aim to host regular events featuring speakers from around the country — which could be as various as authors writing about rural concerns, local Mennonites and Priests, accomplished travelers, or open-mic type events where lovers of the Hinterlands of all stripes will be invited to speak, sing, read, or share a piece of their minds on any subject of their choosing.

Down the road, we may run canoe trips, walks, hiking trips, writers’ symposia, and my wife may run a sort of school of the feminine arts, as she has done before. I may aim to do religious retreats for Catholics, with the help of Priests and Monks from the region, and if there are any young men looking to get a good start at life in rural America, I may welcome them here for various clinics, work parties, and courses that could be of aid to them.

The net result of all this could work to precipitate a revival of this region, or perhaps, if I may be bold — a revival of America’s hinterlands in general. It may attract new settlers to this area who appreciate the liminality and obscurity of Northern New York, and serve as a ‘launchpad’ for social groups around the country with a strong regionalist flavor. But above all, it might result in a wonderful environment in which our daughter can grow up — what with fascinating, lovely people from all corners of the country and even the world coming around for our get-togethers and events, teaching, sharing, learning, befriending, and adventuring out here in the boondocks.

My whole "thesis" for starting a social club of this sort is something like this:

What would happen if you built a club in a desolate, isolated, dilapidated, bitterly-cold backwater? Who would come during the bleakest, dreariest months especially? No tourists, no sun-soaked beaches, none of the usual "draws" for vacationers. Hard to reach, rustic, primitive, austere quarters. Extremely limited, simple, cheap menus. Cans only — no taps. Frigid, rusty, haggard, weird. Next-to-no 'nearby attractions' — but damn good company, big bonfires, cold Canadian Pilsner, and Quebecois country music, all for dirt-cheap prices.

Who are the kinds of people who make any kind of effort to have this sort of experience?

My kind of people, I'm sure.

The kinds of people who may have the keys to rural America’s future in their hands. And just the kinds of people I’d like my daughter to meet, spend time with, and learn from. By springtime of 2026, I believe I can get the doors of the club open, and I believe then that we’re going to start to meet some of these fine people.

So, with that, I invite you to consider becoming a Founding Member today if you wish to be a part of what we’re starting here — and I assure you that from today on, I’m going to work hard to return to the regular programming here at Hickman’s Hinterlands. Every ten days, it’s my aim to bring you the finest essays about America’s rural regions, about the ‘Old America’ way of thinking and life, and on all the various things one gets to mulling over on their back porch in the backwoods. A massive thank-you to those who’ve stayed with me through this wild summer — I can assure you, you’ve not waited in vain. There’s a lot of great things coming down the path for all of you who subscribe.

Thanks again, and God bless you all.

And it is here that I am caught empty-minded in the churn of life’s swirling current the very week that the summertime makes her final flourishes before the fall. I walk, stumbling and sweating along the old country road like some kind of wandering Cossack, hopelessly lost in the short summer of an unknown northern province.

Here, the tar in the cracks of the road melts and lolls along the stones like icing on a crumble-cake of baked asphalt. The road sign stands proudly aright by the thickets of sumac and stripling maple:

“CREAM OF THE VALLEY ROAD.”

Cream, yes… Cream and milk, milk and honey, whisky on the mountain ridge, pickled eggs served to pickled drunks at a tavern on Cucumber Street by the fields of curcubits and cackling crows… now the accordions are blaring in my mind’s ear, the maple drizzles over the ham, the smiling fields of sunflowers are welcoming me home as anyone would welcome a heroic, galumphing fool here in this sweltering prairie. But I am dreaming again…

High in the vapors of the late summer season, I find myself here along this milk-drenched country byway, drugged by the burning daylight, roused by a feverishly nostalgic, hallucinatory landscape whose sentimentality is startlingly infinite. The late summer romance of the North Country is so overwhelming it seems to knock you over the head and make you drunk, and one cannot resist its spellbinding, intoxicating romance.

And the sunbeams slow down time; thermals and vapors rise over technicolor ragweed and briar. Here, the whole landscape seems like a postcard from the 1970's, 1870's, and 1770's all at once. One walks straight into the postcard’s image as they wander the woods, finding its backdrop of veiny roots, primeval whirlpools, chittering chipmunks, wavering maple canopies, and soup-warm creekwater over cold Devonian slate.

There is one word on my mind, and only one. It is the word overdue — a term that has been applied to my fair (and very pregnant) wife not once but twice in the last five weeks. It is also a term that could be quite fairly applied to my work here at the Hinterlands — for I’ve just simply failed to publish anything for several weeks, and for this I must apologize to you all. But the simple fact is that the ‘writing man’ is not a machine; there are times when the texture of time is too rough and unnavigable to allow for anything resembling ‘thought’ (much less writing). Since I last wrote to you, life has brought me not only the lingering grief after the death of my mother — but a pregnancy so overdue that the due date had to be recalculated and pushed to a new due date, for which my wife is now once again overdue.

Just as the autumn seems uninterested in arriving in the North Country as yet, so too with our baby. This is forgivable — understandable, even. For if the child is anything like its father, it may detest the summer and its mirage-like tricks and sweat-soaked wiles. The child may earnestly wish to be an “autumn baby,” and if so — I approve.

Whatever the case, my wife and I are now firmly ensnared in a stage of pregnancy that could only be called “purgatorial.” The very idea of a “due date” now seems to us to be a thing of grave (if unintentional) cruelty; and we are at the stage where, with a flourish of radical, anti-civilizational primitivism, we’ve been compelled to reject “time” entirely. There are now no days or nights or hours; all of our calendars have been burned. When we are pressed again and again by the villagers, or by family members on the telephone, or by online fans via email, about “whether our baby has arrived yet,” we simply don’t understand what they are talking about. To acknowledge the clock and the calendar is a sin in our cosmology now; we cannot cede any ground whatsoever to the world of the “day-numberers” and their machinations, especially when they are so often using that harrowing word “yet.” Yet? No, my dearies — upon God’s calendar and watchclock, there is no “yet!”

On this score, the late summer, what with its giant clouds, days of languid and lizardlike heat, chittering insects, and so forth — seems to back us up. There is no “time” during this season, no days of the week; nothing numbered at all. There is only now, heavenly and vaporous, a heavy, smiling, aestival bird who wallows in the muddy flows of an unspoken and imprecise analogue of “time.” The baby wallows, too — upside down, in a sack of darkness and hot fluid, bobbling down the asphalt with us on a steamy morning on “CREAM OF THE VALLEY ROAD.” Sleeping there, it is dreaming of hot heavenly milk and of someday wearing the mortal world as a crown on that fine day when he or she should seek to expose his or her head to us. Then, the air will be cold, the leaves will be curling, the whole earth will seem to have sobered up.

Until then, what can we do? Lounge upon the porch, avoiding thought, avoiding time, taking good care not to venture out into the village when the others are out (for if we see them, they might use that awful “yet” word once again). I ride my ATV out into the bush to stare at the river without a word; we cross the county to look at some land to buy — we dream of the CREAM OF THE VALLEY from high above in our highland hamlet, thinking of all the cream we will ever feed to the baby when he or she decides to join us for a taste of it. It will be soon; it will be a wondrous release from the unbridled tensions of one long, heavy, purgatorial summer.

Even with the such thunderous, heavy languidity thrust upon me by the season, however, I cannot avoid thought entirely. Periodically, in between cloud-gazing and procuring snacks for my pregnant wife, thought jabs its finger into the ribs of my mind, and it dawns on me that indeed, I am about to become a father. This is a topic that I have already thought through ad nauseam — I had unconsciously timed my ruminations on this matter to come to a neat-and-tidy close exactly on my wife’s due date. Now that she is twice-overdue, I find that my expectant paternal mind is indeed overclocked. With every passing day, another exercise in attempting to divine a matrix of paternal unknowables commences, and I am left scrambling up a dry, rocky chasm of fears and worries of every kind.

The one that looms largest over me is what I could call The Upstate Question. For, just as this land is “of two minds” as it oscillates between summer and winter yearly, or daily, runs back and forth between the dreary and the sublime — inmates and natives of this odd provincial backwater are also liable to be of two minds about their home state. For on the one hand, we are, as I have written about before, an overtaxed, under-represented, largely forgotten (or scorned) region — one managed by Albany’s bureaucrats like a distant, bitterly-hated colony that, in their minds, deserves nothing but ruin.

And ruin it has gotten in spades. Upstate’s ‘deep rural’ realms are voids of depopulation on a scale that is literally comparable to the Black Plague in Europe. No kidding: where certain countries in that period lost 30% of their population or more to the plague on net, many townships in the Empire State have lost comparable percentages of their own population — in as little as 25 years. As our provincial economies were decimated by technological changes, comedically bad governance, obscene rates of taxation, and mismanagement of every flavor imaginable, the countryside withered. Urbanization, too, seemed to have a way of sucking out all of our youth; after childhoods full of Reality TV shows glorifying the urban lifestyle, or being encouraged to literally “go far” in life, away they went. Those who have stayed have been saddled with tax burdens formerly paid by two or three residents. In many towns, boarded-up windows, abandoned houses, and bustling nursing homes seem to be all there is left.

How, then, could I bring a baby into such a place as this? One side of my mind says — “run, and run far, and run for the baby’s sake, like everyone else!” while the other is slower to make such a judgement, wondering if traveling the opposite way of the herd may or may not pay dividends on the long arc of time. After all, depopulation means cheap real estate, and young men who stick around could plausibly amass vast tracts of fine acreage of a type that was formerly reserved for the baronial classes.

And just as I begin to endeavor to dream my baronial dreams, I stroll into town to the Stewart’s gas station, baron-like in my posture… But as I order my double-thick Stewart's milkshake from the toothless gothic Juggalo cashier with a lip piercing and a Vicodin habit, I shudder — is this who our baby will grow up with? Will the child’s fate here be to rattle around in rusted-out cars, lip pierced, taking a “toke” off the “Philly?” God forbid it; yet if we are to aim toward forbidding such a fate, who then will our baby grow up with? “Nobody” is not an answer, is it?

Or: are things not so bad, then, anyway? The cashier is a nice girl, albeit dressed in a somewhat disconcerting fashion. I was, of course, a “punk” myself at one point, too, and I do like to believe I turned out alright (?) — perhaps I am really overreacting at this pleasant interaction with this smiling young lip-pierced lady; and perhaps indeed, Upstate New York can amply serve to give a stripling young baby a solid and venerable kind of raise…

These are questions that are, from where I now sit, completely unanswerable; yet when the bony finger of thought enters my skull lately, I play ping-pong with such questions endlessly, as one of the chief forms of torture in our season of ‘purgatorial pregnancy.’ And thankfully, after these sessions are complete, and my double-thick milkshake has reached its concluding slurp — the golden late-summer sun takes over and once again reduces my brain to a giddy, empty blob, and my wife and I hold hands without so much as a word, reveling in the nut-brown shade of the hickories. Hours later, of course, it returns — The Upstate Question — and I find that I am back to where I started off; weighing and balancing the first real paternal decision of my fatherhood… As Shakespeare (kind of) put it: “to leave… or not to leave — that is the question!”

G.K. Chesterton said: “Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.” And indeed, in taking a walk through Rome, New York — it is abundantly evident that men have ceased to love Rome, though indeed, she was once great.

Of course, Chesterton wasn't talking about Rome, New York — he was talking about Rome, Italy. A city of heraldic spires and archways and brick corridors; the seat of the Church that brought the Gospel to the billions — the center of global power that Jesus Christ Himself sent the Apostle Peter to nearly two thousand years ago. And indeed, Chesterton’s simple assessment of what made and may still make that city “great” strikes me as being basically true. Rome was not built on magical soil; and even if indeed, Christ willed that global Christendom would find its center there, it was nevertheless a land and a city that bears no special germ of indifferent greatness that would stand alone without the hands and hearts of human men.

The implication etched into this axiom about greatness of place applies far beyond the boundaries of Italy’s timelessly wonderful capital — it is the idea that the question of whether a place thrives and ascends to a position of beauty and greatness is only answered by those who inhabit that place, and that it is not answered merely by words, nor even strictly by action — but through love.

But note this: the quote uses the plural form here; it says “men” rather than “man,” and “they” rather than “he.” There is a very good reason for this. A solitary man cannot singlehandedly make a place great. Even a band of ardent lovers of a place cannot (if they comprise only a tiny fraction of a city, town, or country’s population) cause that place to rise to greatness. No, to the contrary, there is a collective element inscribed into the formulation, and indeed, it is a thing of the hoi polloi more than anything else. For when whole generations of men aim all of their vigor and heart toward the same blessed target on the land, carving their initials into the foundations and buttresses and trumpeting the vibrant and stirring song of their place, only then will their collective creative energy bouy a city high upon the cresting waves of history and economy. That is when a place might find itself proudly wearing the honorific title of “great.”

This being what it is, we must ask several questions: What of the native sons of ‘dying’ places? What of the few obscure, strange, far-flung fellows who adore their homelands of rusted decrepitude and empire lost? Under what circumstances can their adoration of their blighted homelands actuate and sustain the “greatness” that Chesterton describes in the ascent of Rome?

I ask these questions because I have meditated upon this idea of Chesterton’s for a very long time. There have been periods of time during which I have been utterly, passionately, almost obsessively convinced that I alone could bring his formula to fruition here in my own homeland of Upstate New York. And there have been periods of disillusionment during which I have publicly grieved my Upstate home, writing yearnful, dark soliloquys of exile and relinquishment and even departure — only to see Chesteron’s quote lobbed at me like a stone, as if to tell me I am a coward for even vaguely intoning that I might “give up” on my native state.

This is a strange subject to contemplate in a country dotted with thousands of “ghost towns.” It is all the stranger to reflect on matters like these in a state with one of the highest out-migration rates in the USA for decades. Here in what I’ve come to call Obituaryland, the funeral home’s lights never seem to go off — and dilapidated houses all stand on, long-abandoned, sleepily watching as the young people fill up their U-Hauls with dreams of Floridian beaches (and Floridian tax bills) in their eyes.

Are these young domestic migrants “giving up” on the Empire State? Were the final residents of America’s many ghost towns cowards? Is there some sort of high-flying moral imperative to stay, even when the staying ain’t so great — or is even abjectly grim? While we ponder over these matters, the peeled-paint slabs of pine on the old farmhouses fall down onto the overgrown, long-fallow soil — ruins of some former era when scores of men came to build and do and cultivate, and above all, to love these places.

The pigeons ogle from the telephone wires by the old, crumbling, empty feed store, staring on in silence, as if to wordlessly ask:

“Will you leave, too?”

Meditating upon the soul-bruising theme of leaving, standing here beneath the inquisitive cocked heads of the pigeons, I form only one thought:

When a place dies, the corpse is never buried.

When you return to a place after its death, you stare right into the eyes of the corpse; remembering when it was alive while looking at the now-rotting remnants — the eyelids are still open.

And around the body, the land is heavenly. It is the same old land you remember, but the human element is now covered with a pallor. Wretchedness sprawls below the boughs of old oaks you knew in your boyhood; cataracts of icy wind come tumbling through windows that have not seen the warmth of woodstoves nor the laughter of children in many years — even lifetimes.

If there could be a future for you in such a place, it could only be found amidst those old trees, in cold solitude, doing all you can to avoid making eye contact with the eyes of the corpse. But you cannot avoid it. It will suck you in. The memory of its life will fester in you, and even men with the strongest stomachs and the most steadfast hearts will be forced to go away from it or go mad.

You cannot bring it back to life. Maybe you try to make the most of it; maybe you try to celebrate decline in a macabre way, but after so long, this sickens you. Your heart oscillates between imagining maybe you could revive it or conceding that you could not, but after so much back-and-forth, the reality that you cannot tackles you; you ruminate darkly upon it until you finally admit that this death is final.

After this, there is only the map, yet there is no reason to go elsewhere. But you cannot stay in your homeland, either. You cannot pass your cursedness onto your children; you cannot let them play in the cold dead fingers that held you when you were a baby.

This is what being from rural Upstate New York is like. There are not many who understand it; from the outside it looks like melodrama — only to those who have toured the ruination that covers the land here may it make any sense.

Now, with the baby coming so soon, my wife and I are at the edge of a thrilling precipice of a completely singular type; the sort of ledge one only ever jumps off of once, on the day when their first-ever baby is born. She is about to bring new life into this village of ours.

Yet I cannot describe how bizarre this “life” business feels to contemplate given the place we live and the history of how I have conceived of my work, travels, and ambitions as a lover of dying places. For, “energy” and “eagerness” and “the future” are all vague mockeries in a place such as ours — my speciality is in decay and somber finality and in bearing witness to ‘the end’. How can a man square an outlook such as this with the rollicking, rhythmic ‘thumps’ of an unborn baby upon the womb’s surface? How can one look at a baby — who is really a beginning! — and kiss it just before returning to one’s work as a geographical mortician and eulogist?

How can I imagine the future? I reflect on the moment when maybe, as our child increases in age and lucidity, they might someday ask me what I’ll leave to them. I may only be able to say: “A front-row seat to a grisly and heart-wrenching death of our homeland,” or, “an absurdly unlikely chance at witnessing a renewal that has no real reason to ever occur.”

What sort of an inheritance is this? Indeed, it is the very inheritance that I ever received as a native son of Upstate New York. The heinous mismanagement, failed attempts at governance, and depression-inducing degrees of profligacy and waste that wrought my homeland’s decline and death have ‘marked’ me — they have trapped me in the rearguard position, as an impotent nostalgist, a morbid onlooker, a wheedling romantic who pines for a resurrection that shall never take place.

I am not alone in this; think of others who hail from Upstate. Find me in the company of James Howard Kunstler (“doomer” extraordinaire), Bill Kauffman (the stolid old reactionary of Batavia), Richard Russo (author of the downright-cheery novel ‘Empire Falls’), and Fred Exley (Watertown’s top vodka consumer and resident schizoid genius). None of these men are exactly paragons of optimism nor purveyors of gladness. If they are jolly — here’s looking at you, Bill Kauffman — their jolliness is hard-boiled and hard won; fruits forced from years of staring directly into the abyss of one’s own heavenly, terminally-ill, grubby, failing, once-great homeland, with no security whatsoever of it’s revival or improvement of any kind.

AND YET — there is always the CREAM OF THE VALLEY. I stare upward at the road sign in wonderment at the sort of man who might’ve given that particular road its blessed name. It reads like a benediction; a timeless, ultimate, soaring proclamation of universal agrarian optimism. Yes, the milk price is low, yes, the hay-fields are fallowing or now thicketed with snarling brush. The bridge above the stolid old river has rusted completely through; the old stone farmhouse has been made into a mason’s yardsale of disheveled stone by the freezes and the thaws. One piddling U-Haul truck flies across the emptied prairie; one old codger sips his coffee high upon the rocky mount, as if unaware of all that has changed. And in his coffee, there it is — the CREAM, cream of the valley, of his valley, and the mere fact of its existence, smooth and cold and fresh, coating the tongue of a man who has laughed and cackled and rolled across his fields as a master farmer; what can this be seen as but one grand overture wrought by heaven’s hands, one furious symphony of wholesome hope?

Alone, it is true — perhaps there is no “greatness.” But perhaps, “if you build it, they will come.” A gamble among all gambles — the wager to embarrass all wagers! For, what is a father if all he has amounted to is a sort of actuary, calculating risk, averting every disaster, until every square inch of his life is air-tight? No; the true protector protects his party even as they voyage to odd corners of the map on a dubious tip of fortune — the father’s aim must be to shoot for the moon and to actually hit it, such that his babies stand in awe with mouths agape. Panning for gold and raising timbers, seeding down the worthless muck on which no crops could possibly grow (“yet they will!”), pointing up the bricks on an “unsaveable” building. A “mad lad,” a nutcase, a fruitcake, an absolute wild man — perhaps the fathers of the cream-flooded valleys are all a little bit foolish; and are saved only by their shrewdness to save themselves and their loved ones from the disasters their own puppy-like dreaming have wrought.

Now, of course, I am all worked up. Now, I am emailing the realtor again in search of my “hundred-acre wood.” Tomorrow, I will be a Gypsy again, packing up the caravans, proclaiming apocalypse, raising my fist against the pointless ravagement of my homeland and salting the earth as I make my way West. And the next day, I will not even make it to Pennsylvania before I turn around again, the doggedness beaming in my eyes, certain that against all odds, my homeland is not lost.

Truly, a ravaged homeland cannot yield peace of mind in its native souls. Now, such dramas are part-and-parcel; they are a feature of the landscape as truly as the granite shoulders and slated canyons of the rambling tributaries are and were. How could I ever get so worked up over this damned place if indeed, my love for it was not of the truest kind there is? How could I — one who could probably live anywhere else on earth if I really ardently wished to do so — keep coming back to this place so many others have fled from, again and again?

As I weigh this, my eyes turn toward the world map… I think of so many Iraqis and Somalis and Syrians, Native Americans and Appalachians, Roma, Yanomami, Circassians — people for whom “decline” and “decay” and “collapse” (and worse) have all been going concerns at one point or other. What of those who stayed? Were they not mired in a “two-mindedness” akin to my own? And what of their victories? What of their future?

I can only end on a note that may seem boring to some. In the midst of all my questions along these lines, I decided, on a whim, to purchase a New York State flag. After buying it, I forgot I had even ordered it until it came. And when it did, I rolled my eyes at myself a little — what a strange thing to buy, anyway! Though in other states, like Texas and California and Tennessee, one sees the state flags flying on peoples’ homes fairly often — such a sight is never seen in New York. In unfolding the flag, I wondered what my neighbors could possibly think of it… some sort of weird doubt gripped me, and I hung the flag on the clothesline for a day or so to in order to mull it over.

Later that night, I took a long, hard look at it, and somewhat embarassingly, I felt something. A sentiment flooded into me; a kind of innocent love came over me. I said aloud: “Why, I’m glad I bought this…” The motto — Excelsior — stood proudly on the State Seal; symbol of New York City and of Albany’s graft and incompetence, symbol of a land foreign to my own, and yet emblematic of it all the same. Affixing it to a fresh-cut maple sapling, I hung it on my porch, and I was proud.

Maybe there is a future here for this baby. I don’t know how; I don’t know what it will look like. But I am willing to buy the land, to see it through. Even if we may travel for many seasons on end, even if we may move throughout the state as vagabonds — I believe I really may have to make my peace with the fact that this is home, however degraded and dilapidated it may be. It may take some effort to get myself to remember this when my annual tax bill comes in the mail… but remember it I will.

I reach the bottom of my Stewart’s double-thick milkshake again, and the mountain-sized puffball clouds sail overhead. The sun beats down on my wife’s sleeping face — and I see a tiny foot kicking along her stomach from within. All in good time, I suppose; perhaps one only needs to take their coffee with CREAM, and to take a good long look at the opaline skies hanging happy over the tough maple forests and brooks to remember that time does pass. Autumn will come, the baby will come, and what has died here in Upstate New York may live again. There may be no greater joy to be found for me than in watching such things take place — on God’s time, not my own.

That a downpour has now visited the tin roof of my back porch comes as no small thing. For lately, it has been dry here in the Adirondacks — suspiciously dry. Though to the outsider’s eye, this strange, largely desolate region might seem to reach the height of gloom in deep winter or in the endless misting rains of autumn, I find this place to be far gloomier in the weird, blazing humid heat of a summer drought.

For, in snow and in rain, the somber character of our forests feels natural; in those seasons, the weather meets the landscape at a natural juncture, where everything rhymes and “fits.” But in the height of a rainless-yet-incongruously-humid summer — the woods feel like one eerie, silent, cornfield-esque mass of tired trees; the foliage covers the dusty backroads in one long, dreary green tunnel, and so far as rainfall is concerned, one gets the acute sense that something’s got to give. The heat simply must ‘break’ into splendid, comfortable, chilly nights and mild days; the rain simply must start falling at some point, and until then, it feels as if all of life itself has been “paused” in one sweltering, breathless, dusty, mind-numbing void in time.

Whenever I have found myself passing through summer seasons like this one in Upstate New York, life has, by and large, continued as normal — albeit the daily trappings of life have been hotter, muggier, and more exhausting than in any other season. But this year, I’ve found myself passing through the rainless humid days faced with a series of life events that all seem to be on the extreme end of the human spectrum. They have also come at me with extreme speed. It is only as the rain comes now, having turned my porch’s tin roof into a deafening drum under the inch-an-hour downpour, that I am able to even begin to reflect on things properly. Even so, I believe it will be a long time before I can completely make sense of all that has happened and is now taking place.

For the first, and easily the gravest — my mother has passed away, God rest her soul. She passed eleven days ago at the age of fifty-one after a horrific battle with colon cancer. The day came some three-and-a-half years after her initial diagnosis; in that time, she managed to continue her work as a schoolteacher for the bulk of those years, and as she was teaching her classes, the cancer metastasized into her lungs, stomach, and — we think — the bone marrow of her femur. The beginning of the end for her came at Easter of this year, when a series of heinous pains in the back and chest sent her to the hospital in a fugue, and since that date, our family has been under a delirious level of stress. Our family stayed by her side in the hospital, and then in home Hospice in Brooklyn, and then in home Hospice in Rome, NY, and then finally, after a particularly harrowing episode, in an in-patient end-of-life-care facility near Utica, where she passed away.

Her final days were exceedingly grim. Suffering from a combination of disease progression, a possible bout of UTI psychosis, and a startling level of progressively-increasing aggression and delirium, daily care for her demanded a heroic effort which was spearheaded almost entirely by my grandmother. Now, my grandmother is exhausted, tired, brokenhearted — and with my mom’s death being so recent, she is faced with a great many of the soul-achingly tough bureaucratic tasks that come with any death. I wish to console her, but often, I feel I don’t know how.

In those weeks, watching mom suffer was almost unbearable for all of us. Like the rainless days of summer, we all shared in a kind of wordless wonderment, thinking — something’s got to give. Mom’s suffering must end; we begged God for mercy, which was granted not on mom’s scale of time, nor on ours either, but solely on His. She passed away right in front of my two teenage brothers, expiring as they stood by her, watching in heartbroken disbelief. I could not be there; my wife’s due date was only two days before — we agreed that we should be at home, resting, making ready for the birth. I must accept that I could not be there for my family on that dark day.

Now, those boys must face life not only without their mother, but without their absent father, too, who is a heroin addict. The darkness those boys now face is nothing short of unimaginable, and as of today, their future seems to hang heavily in the balance, and the risk of familial turmoil over that future remains high. Once again, something’s got to give, and we know not when it will come, nor what it will look like. We can only cling to vague hopes; watching in wonderment at the motions of the Hand of God, which sometimes seem to move so agonizingly slow — and other times, too quickly for the eye to keep track of.

As if this situation weren’t enough for a soul to bear, it has all taken place in the final trimester of my wife’s pregnancy. Our baby rocked and kicked and nudged in the womb as my mother was hospitalized; it (we know not whether the baby is a boy or a girl) swam and napped and fidgeted through every stage of its grandmother’s death, from the somber days of sitting in hospital rooms to the ghastly family blow-ups to the incoherent mumbling of my dying mother and the tears of its grieving great-grandmother — the baby was there, yet to be born. Mom held out with all her strength for the possibility that she might hold her first grandchild before the end, and she tried and tried with every ounce of her will to live for that moment. Instead — she could not make it; she could not be there in spite of this heroic effort.

In witnessing my mother’s suffering and slow, anguished demise, I constantly thought to myself that something’s got to give. Yet I had not anticipated that the ‘something’ would ‘give’ mere weeks before I might’ve hoped it to. I take comfort only in knowing that in the infinite benevolence of the Lord Almighty, He has made some purpose for this severance between the generations that as of today, I may be too feeble of heart to understand. Whatever its fruits, they are nothing I have ever dreamed of, and I will know not what to do with them on the day they arrive. Only God might show me what hidden blessings He has hidden in this strange and alien garden of grief; and even against all of my instincts to rage against this turn of events — I trust in Him, for He is good. And, in what seemed to me like a minor miracle, my mother was able to receive Last Rites from a Catholic Priest in her final hours. For this, and for all she gave me, too — I am eternally grateful.

In the weeks leading up to my mother’s death, there were afternoons and nights when I found myself literally bridging the circle of life singlehandedly. To my left, my wife slept the sleep of life, the nourishing, maternal rest a woman must sleep for the sake of her unborn child. And to my right, my mother, sleeping the sleep of death, occasionally startling herself awake, disoriented, clinging to wakefulness as her final morsel of conscious life. With only the three of us in the room — I and the two most important women in my life — I could only stare forward in a kind of cosmic awe; I could not think, or read, or write. I could only hold on, caught in the weird ‘waiting room’ between life and death, wondering whether my mother would die first or whether our baby would be born first.

My answer came. Now, on Friday my mother’s funeral will take place. Will my wife be in labor then? Will the baby come today, or tomorrow, that we might brighten that tragic day by bringing along our newborn — that the funeral guests might behold the full circle of life, right before their eyes, in one great and improbable flourish of tragedy and joy?

Or — perhaps more likely, the realities of birth will keep us from making the funeral at all. I may really miss my own mother’s funeral in order to assist in the safe delivery of her first grandchild.

Only God knows.

Only God knows when the rain will fall, or when a dying woman will pass from this life, or when a baby will finally be born. The foreign clockwork of heavenly time spins madly, deep within the center of my head and behind my heavy eyes; I lately feel as if I must live as a kind of renunciant, that I must disabuse myself of any idea that I could ever be in control of such grave occurrences. While, in the wider world, doctors schedule C-Sections and “assisted death” appointments, that they might pencil them neatly into their schedules, making ample room for after-work rounds of golf — in the land where God’s time still reigns triumphant and unmolested, a man’s will is only a piddling, breathless, nervous little thing. At times such as these, a wise man lets go; he concedes his control, his intellect, his insistences, he even places all of the hours of his days and the breaths within his lungs on the altar, remembering that they are only borrowed from Providence — and shall be returned when the Lord calls for them.

What shall follow this? When the rain has fallen, and the dust has settled, what then? I shall become a father the very summer my mother has died; and for wizened old family of the sort I might come to for advice — I will only have my grandmother and my estranged father (who was, admittedly, never any type of father).

A sort of “reset button” has been hit on the generations of this family, then — something new is afoot, and its growth rests squarely upon my own shoulders. The final Catholic in my lineage who has not lapsed, I carry the future of our stripling family straight to the altar, not only figuratively but literally — when we baptize our baby in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, placing our infant child into the hands of the Church Christ Himself established on the day He gave the keys to Peter and sent him to Rome. It is a new beginning of the most radical sort; the sort of beginning that, perhaps, demanded soil freshly ploughed by tragedy to take root. I have no answers there; I must simply plod straight forward into this new future of ours — a bastard-now-become-a-father, in the living memory of my mother, beside my grieving grandmother and brothers, cleaving tightly to my wife whatever may come.

I am harrowed by it all. I am exhausted. I am delirious. I am barely hanging on. My writing is bruised; my mind is unraveled. I am praying for rain.

Though I would prefer to be writing about the Hinterlands at the far edges of the map — I suppose now I am instead writing about the weird ‘hinterland’ that lay between life and death; the strange, ineffable ‘back-country’ that exists in the cracks between severed generations. Of any voyage to obscure places I have ever taken, this one has been the most trying of them all; and indeed, if I am to remain intact through the journey, it shall only be by the grace of God and at the side of my incredible wife.

Now — I must stop writing; I must go upstairs and check on my very-overdue pregnant wife, to see whether the contractions we have been praying for have finally, mercifully come. Like death, like the rain, we knoweth not the hour or the day. Please, in your charity, pray for us.

I thank each and every one of you for your patient, kind friendship and support; as always, you do have my sincerest word that one day soon, I will bring you my finest work, and those of you who continue on with me will be glad you did.

In Christ,

A.M. Hickman

I said sure, I didn’t doubt he’d live forever: why not? It seemed to me that his truck – a 50’s-era International pickup – might live forever, so why not him, too?

“I’ll tell you why I’m gonna live forever,” he whispered, putting his hand on my leg as he spoke. I didn’t know this man. The bony, rough hand on my leg was unnerving; he’d picked me up on the side of the road in Kalispell, Montana, where I’d been making my way southeast in a hurry to get to Bozeman after a scuffle in Northern Idaho. I didn’t care who he was, or what he was thinking – just so long as I made it closer to Bozeman, I was glad to ride with him. Until he put his hand on my leg and made me open up the glovebox.

“Open it,” he hissed, punching the dashboard as he barked the order. And I had no choice but to oblige him. Inside, there was a bit of tupperware which he told me to open. “It’s eggs,” I said, because all that was in the tupperware was just plain old eggs. He took one from me and cracked it on the steering wheel – but yolk didn’t drip out, nor did I see the whites of a boiled egg. Instead, blood dribbled out, and the tiny face of an unborn chick, which he popped into his mouth whole. Chomping down on the little bones, speeding down the highway, the pavement flying down through the floorless cab below my feet – he said “that’s why I’m gonna live forever, boy…” and seconds later, he fired up his meth-pipe and stomped on the accelerator like a madman.

Then a song by Faith Hill came on his radio and he turned the speakers all the way up until they crackled and blared in deafening, distorted tones. He began to cry and even whimper. “I’ll take you to my place,” he said, flashing a look at me with his wet, bloodshot eyes. “I’ll take you to the place where yer gonna see JESUS!” And I began to realize that I was in one hell of a situation — this fellow might really insist that I go to his place to smoke meth and to “see Jesus.”

The whole mess of it, it was all surreal. The auspices under which I’d left Idaho were weird as it was – I’d been kicked out of the trailer park my girlfriend had been living at. As the obese landlady informed me of my ejection from the park, she told me local residents were “afraid I’d burglarize their homes,” and that I was very obviously “the product of inter-generational poverty.” Her nephews — who looked at least as much to be the ‘product of inter-generational poverty’ as I did — were outside shooting their shotguns at melons, staring at me, smiling. I bid my girlfriend goodbye, sleeping under a bridge that night, and stormed off toward Montana in a huff the next morning.

A sad-looking single mother brought me as far as Kalispell, giving me a cheese sandwich and a Budweiser, though it was only 9AM. And at Kalispell, this meth-smoking, fertilized-chicken-egg eating wildman was my next ride. Now, watching him get high and bawl his eyes out over Faith Hill and chicken eggs and Jesus, I realized I had to get out of that truck.

To my great relief, he pulled over to take a leak in the bushes not a few minutes later, and I grabbed my pack to sprint down to the river, where a bunch of other cars were pulled over to fish. I could hear the fellow growling mad once he’d realized I’d left the truck. And at the river I asked the first man I saw – a sweater-vest-wearing professor-looking type of fellow on a flyfishing trip – if he might be willing to give me a ride, post-haste. I didn’t usually pull stunts like these, but in this case, I figured that other man might come after me, and said as much, and the professor-man realized the trouble I might’ve been in immediately. He obliged without complaint, firing up his Buick that minute to run me down to Polson.

“Thank you so much,” I told him, and as we sped past the raving lunatic who was now shirtless and smoking more meth in the back of his pickup truck, he told me it was the least he could do for me.

These are the kinds of vignettes I can tell all day long; the kinds of yarns that have colored my view of this country and have come to define the word America for me. In 100,000+ miles of hitchhiking around these United States, I have found that this nation is nothing if not profoundly, feverishly, unbelievably weird. From the hitchhiker’s point of view, randomness is the word; an endless menagerie of sharply contrasting scenes, one after another, mile after mile, all viewed beside the majestic backdrop of the American continent as she passes by beneath the high-speed rubber tires — that’s the hitchhiker’s sustenance.

The Mormons and the Mexicans; the glue-sniffers and the queers, Codeine cowboys and Colorado cougars – the bizzaro procession never ends. One ride after another, the hitchhiker gets a window into what’s really pumping through the veins of this country, and usually, his up-close-and-personal view of it is shocking to behold. For not only is he seeing it first-hand – he’s in it; he’s offered himself up to it whole, and where it will leave him in the end is unknown and unknowable. He passes his years inside of it, drinking and belching, sweating and cursing, cackling and sucking down gas station chili dogs and tax-free smokes from the Rez. It’s winking at him like a flirt, it’s socking him in the jaw; America rises like a ghost from ten-thousand exhaust pipes – a hallucination that flies by him, finally leaving him standing in the sand by the highway to scratch his head in awe and wonderment, day after day.

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For five years, I traveled this way, day in and day out. You might say I was addicted; it’s a ‘high’ that never gets old. Standing in the broiling daylight for hours and days, dodging the cops, loitering at the gas stations, begging God for mercy as the desert wind fills your every crack and crease with dust in a sandstorm; until finally the brake lights come on, and the window rolls down. What’s inside might be a drunkard with lizardlike skin, knee deep in fast food wrappers and empty cans – or it might be a golden-eyed hippie, or a perverted divorcee in a Prius, or an old veteran who leers and shows you his revolver and belches as you climb up into his truck. Whoever it is, and whatever they’re bringing with them, well, it doesn’t much matter – because you’re headed anywhere but here, and when the day is done and the miles have been traveled, you find you’ve gotten a mega-dose of adrenaline and weirdness, in equal parts.

For from the hitchhiker’s point of view, our country’s highways aren’t just long white and yellow lines on the asphalt, nor are they simply an unending stream of truck stops, corn fields, desert mountains, and billboards that say “HELL IS REAL.” They’re a kind of living organism; a place of convergence for souls in motion, each hailing from strange and unknown lineages that pool together in metal contraptions flying eighty miles-per-hour down the shimmering pavement. Elders and whippersnappers, outlaws and straights, rednecks, vaqueros, fondlers, holy rollers, Mormon soccer moms with screaming babies – they’re all there, rolling along together cross-country in silent synchrony, forever. Far from the sentimentalist platitudes and the blithering jingoism that’s ever been pushed by politicos, partisans, schools, and the media – this is America, real and raw and unfiltered. The hitchhiker’s highway hides nothing; it’s the God’s-honest truth served piping hot at eighty miles-per-hour, and once you’ve sampled it, it never leaves you.

And so it brings me great sadness to write the words that I have, by now, been left with no choice but to write: Hitchhiking is dead.

What I write here today is its eulogy – and if I said I wasn’t mired in a deep, years-long eddy of grief over this loss of a former national pasttime, I’d be lying. Without the hitchhiker’s highway, I am a man without a country; no part of my understanding of my homeland or my life makes sense. Lord knows, our children won’t know one fraction of the road I knew. By then, they may not get to live even the slightest flicker of it for themselves — not by thumb, at least.

This is because a thing like hitchhiking hearkens from an era of civilizational youth and innocence — it is an artifact of a time when social trust was high. Well before the slashers and serial killers and nutjobs started running the roads, well before the crisis levels of homelessness and immigration and drugs; America was the kind of place where a freewheeling youngster might stick his thumb out just for the sheer joy of it. No more.

These days, to catch a ride practically anywhere one feels as if they’re getting away with something. Passing motorists dial the cops, who come around with flashing lights, conducting ID checks and bag searches, considering the activity “suspicious.” Streams of automobiles whizz by, usually each of them piloted by a lone driver with leery eyes – some of them will avert their eyes from you, as if they might catch whatever illness no doubt has you standing there in the rain by the side of the road. When you do finally arrive at your destination, store owners will see your backpack and think you to be a thief; simply walking down public roads may arouse suspicions – practically anywhere you go now, the American hitchhiker is treated as a deranged criminal, and after so many years of this kind of treatment, it is hard not to feel like you’re not one bad day from living in the plot of Rambo: First Blood.

By the end of it, you realize you have got to stop hitchhiking or you’ll go crazy.

I certainly did both. That the end was near was apparent to me throughout my days of thumbing it; as it was, I was already considered a nut for even trying. “You’re going to get murdered!” was a common response to my profession; claims about rape and assault and crime of all sorts seemed to have taken the popular imagination over on the subject of hitchhiking. Perhaps I was simply lucky, but in all my years of hitchhiking experience, I have not been murdered yet, nor was I ever raped, beaten, or kidknapped. Quite to the contrary, I found myself being initiated into a kind of mystical brotherhood of underworld wanderers – a guild of vagabonds and vagrants for whom the randomness of the long American road is a known friend and a wellspring of life and hope. Though I have done many things in my life, I am first and foremost a hitchhiker; and for all I have seen in my miles, I am a patriot too – albeit a patriot for a country that no longer appears to exist, save as a haunting and distant memory.

Years after my own hitchhiking heyday, I mused on these ideas aloud to my wife as we stood by the side of the road with our thumbs raised. Her stomach was bulging with a baby who will, God-willing, be born in the next few days. Being that I had a doctor’s appointment over in Vermont – and that the county bus just doesn’t go over there – we saw it fit to raise our thumbs along the road to Burlington, just for old times’ sake. As we stood, we realized we were violating a key rule to hitchhiking – never hitchhike in groups of more than two people. For though we only would be in need of two eastbound seats; we were indeed traveling with a third person, whose status as an unborn baby made for easy travel. Heaven knows, years from now, we’ll be able to tell the little fellow that he or she was a hitchhiker even in utero – a true protege of its mother and father.

But by the time our baby grows into adulthood, what will this country be looking like then? It’s distinctly possible — even likely — that there will be no more hitchhikers out on the highways; that the flickers of fraternal roadside warmth I knew as a young man will have been snuffed completely. It may really be that “The United States of America” will, by then, only be a kind of “economic development zone” in which citizenship doesn’t mean much more than the right to earn money and file taxes. The polarization of our people might reach a fever pitch that makes the divisions in this country today seem downright quaint; fences and cameras, tracking apps and biometric ID’s, robocops and drones and social credit scores – God only knows what kind of a country our baby will grow up to find. While we can hope that things turn around, if these last ten years are any indicator, we aren’t exactly optimistic.

Soon however, our discourse on the country’s future was interrupted, and a nice lady pulled over in an SUV. She was talking a mile a minute; telling us about the great community work she was able to do with her local Episcopalian Church, giving us the rundown of who-lives-where, how much snow they got this winter, what trees fell down and whose yards were flooded by the heavy rains. She said she’d never seen hitchhikers around there before – but was delighted to have the chance to pick us up. Meanwhile, our baby slept soundly, deep in the womb; and my wife and I were glad to be out of the hot sun. It was a full day’s travel to Burlington for us; riding the ferry, catching the city bus, staying overnight in town – all for a fifteen-minute appointment, during which I was informed that I should, by all rights, be wearing a hearing aid.

“Maybe I’m just getting old,” I said to my wife. Maybe it wasn’t the country that was going downhill – maybe it was just me. “You’re only 31, Andy,” my wife said, half-rolling her eyes at my display of faux-geriatric melodrama.

Then again, I argued – it ain’t the years, it’s the miles.

But as we raised our thumbs again to head southward, toward the other, smaller ferry in Charlotte, Vermont, the sun was glistening through the leaves of the trees. The birds were out in full force, flying in formations like a chirping little Air Force. A lovely old woman scooped us up, just as if it were the good old days of hitchhiking, and cracked jokes with us the whole way to the ferry. We stood there, waiting for that old, slow, rusty boat across Lake Champlain, staring out at the vapors curling over the mirror-flat water and the Adirondack Mountains and the little islands of emerald green shrubs and trees – maybe this country’s got miles yet to go. Maybe some kind of revival could happen here. It really could be that these days, this country’s just in a dark little chapter that has no need to continue nor to worsen; a time that comes not as a permanent reality but as a teacher of an all-important lesson about what a nation is and ought to be.

If we do stay here in America, well, we’ll need to keep that kind of optimism with us. We’ll need to give it to our baby.

And if we should find ourselves driving down the road in a car – we’ll just have to pick up every hitchhiker we see, however rare they become. It’s our hope we’ll see many more of them yet.

“No one can live this life and emerge unchanged. They will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad.”

Sir William Thesiger, Arabian Sands, 1959

“I WOULD like to live in a cabin in the woods,” the modern social media scroller thinks to himself; re-tweeting and re-stacking and commenting again and again, expressing the kinds of ideas that have, for millenia, driven men to rush out onto the fringes. Again and again we see these kinds of sentiments circulating about the digital atmosphere, and always, without fail, the algorithms seem to adore this kind of “content.” From “cottagecore” Pinterest boards to memetic lyrical odes to “Uncle Ted” and Alexander Supertramp and many viral posts about leaving “the 4HL” to “live on a farm,” romantic fantasies about “dropping out of society” are now a classical, timeless genre of online whimsy.

I call it “whimsy,” of course, because for all my life, I have approached this particular subject in a strictly practical kind of sense: and indeed, most of those espousing some sort of a desire to “drop out” will not be doing so anytime soon. In fact, quite a few of the same who would hit “like” on a post about absconding into the forests of Alaska or Arizona or Patagonia to get away from the harsh sorrows of society may, in actual fact, actively scorn those who really have dropped out of society.

There is a strong and delirious kind of irony to this — the one who dreams of exiting the cubicle in favor of a self-sufficient cabin homestead in the wilderness or a life of endless wandering is quite often the very same one who says “get a job!” to his hippy-dippy cousins and friends. Or, in assessing the lives of actual drop-outs, he may offer so many warnings and curses and doubts, and exhibit a strong leeriness about their aims and methods. Far better to stay on track, he reasons; to take the job, pay the bills, and, when the workday is over — to scroll through images of beautiful cabins and desert shanties or to read stories about society’s marginal refuseniks from the comfort of one’s air-conditioned home. The urge to drop out must be confined to the domain of whimsy, or of vicarious imagination, or even to parasocial relationships with the digital hoboes of Youtube or the resident burnouts of X; nothing more.

But what of those for whom these kinds of ideas are not mere whimsy? What of those whose yearning for some sort of “exit” from “normiedom” is earnest, serious — even dire?

Such people seem to have a way of reaching out to me with their queries, and for good reason. Online and off, I have accidentally become known as a kind of “dropout par excellence,” and this has not happened without good reason — I have exactly the résumé and the expertise for the job. If there is anything I can uncomplicatedly speak with authority on, it is this.

These would-be wanderers, idlers, bohemians and vagrants have sent me requests for information with such intense frequency that I realize it might be wise to compose a sort of “master guide” to the thing. Rather than repeating myself time and again in private messages and calls, why not open this information up to the public?

For most, reading an essay like this will only be a kind of interesting foray into a curious, alien, and often gritty world they do not live in. Or it will feed the forbidden fantasies of those who might admit they are poorly adjusted to “the 4HL,” tempting them to contemplate a life that they very well may never go out and live. For the rest, it is my hope that what I write here will serve them well in their inevitable march outward and away from the burdensome strictures of life as an upright worker-consumer-citizen. Whichever demographic you fit into, I hope above all that what I have written here will serve as a reminder to you that there are many, many ways to live, no matter who you are — and that if the grave pressures of one mode of living might really become too great a weight to carry, there are always other options.

Or — in the memetic parlance of today’s digital youth: “Never kill yourself.” For some of us, this dictum is so easy to honor and live by that we do not think about it at all. But in the world we now live in, there are others for whom avoiding suicide is a full-time job.

This article is first and foremost for them.

On many occasions, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting America’s most isolated southwestern deserts, where I’ve occasionally seen signs that say something like this: “WARNING: Proceed at your own risk. There are NO services in this area; rescue may be difficult.” To proceed anyway is to take your life into your own hands. During the times I’ve chosen to do so, life has felt a great deal more “real” in such desolate places, for the consequences of one’s actions there are not so insignificant as they are in more civilized quarters. The one who enters these deserts enters into a wild domain without backup, without safety nets, where a fellow’s survival and safe return are purely his own responsibility.

The one who has wrested himself from the norms, duties, and expectations of the society into which he was born finds himself in a similarly hazardous domain. Without credit or regular income, without ID, often enough without money or fixed address — living a life that certainly will render him totally illegible to his fellow countrymen: the regular suite of protections, securities, and luxuries that are afforded to those who hold up their end of “the social contract” may not be afforded to him. If they are, they may come only as the most skeletal iteration of them — he may be hustled out of emergency rooms in half-taped bandages, laughed out of banks, ignored by police (more often: chased by them), and his friends, family, and potential employers will regard his bizarre and outlandish trevails with profound skepticism. At times, his history of “dropping out” — however long ago it was — will be viewed as a crime requiring continual punishment, with ample “I-told-you-so’s” distributed at every chance, even from his closest associates.

Moreover, the longer an individual might choose to stray from the regular structure of an upstanding life — the longer it will haunt him in the future should he ever choose to reintegrate. Giant, gaping “résumé gaps” will have to be explained if he should seek to find normal employment; often he’ll be passed over even if the explanation is quite good. The absence of credit bars him from seeking a car loan or a mortgage until he has played the “credit game” for at least a year or probably more. Obtaining ID can be profoundly difficult for those without any — particularly in cases where vital documents like birth certificates and Social Security cards have been lost or, in the case of those with a flair for drama, deliberately destroyed. Without rental history, apartments are hard to come by, and the sorts of places one can rent without any history or references are often pricier, seedier, or both.

And the health and social consequences may also be serious. After so many years of sleeping on the hard ground, my back muscles and vertebrae show levels of distress generally seen in men twenty years older than I am. The overnight vigilance of such sleep can cause lifelong difficulties; one may find it hard to sleep indoors for a time, or may find it impossible to avoid sleeping with one eye open. Nutritional deficiencies, alcohol and drug use, violence, or exposure to harsh elements can cause further lifelong physical and psycholgical pain. Finally, in veering off the normal course of life in society for so many years — one’s friends and family may forever regard you with suspicion, or may consider you to be insane. Occasionally, they won’t be too far off the mark, for your habits may have unwittingly devolved into a primitive or even semi-criminal state; and in the event you’ve witnessed horrifying scenes on society’s darkest margins — your nerves may quite rightfully be a little jumpy for the rest of your life.

These are the warning signs the dropout faces before he has even taken the first step; they are not the kinds of things spoken of or celebrated by poets and romantics and the sorts of vagabonds and hippies with a penchant for “getting high on their own supply.” The depictions of life “outside society” they peddle are generally incomplete, and often exclude the hazards. While there is a great deal of romantical, high-flying poetry in the mountain man’s ascent to solitude, or in the hobo’s flight across the steel rails of America — it is not nearly as popular to describe how morbidly difficult it can be to re-enter polite society, nor of how these difficulties can “trap a man outside” forever. I say this as one who has failed to re-integrate completely or even substantially. Even the military could not succeed in doing that for me — I am simply too habituated to life on the edges of the wider world. Without clocks, with little money, hidden in obscure hinterlands, master of one’s own time: once you have tasted of this, it can be nigh impossible to turn away from it later.

Indeed, dropping out of society is a thing that comes in an unmarked tin, without a warning label or any disclosure of what it contains. Usually, those who endeavor to do it only faintly understand the risks, or know nothing of them whatsoever, but in our case here, I believe it is my duty to quite plainly state to the reader that all manner of difficulty can result from the decision to drop out. What I have listed so far is by no means an exhaustive account; it is only a brief run-down of some of the ways that this life will tattoo you, mark you forever, and leave you totally altered in the end.

But, if in approaching and weighing these likely outcomes and costs, one finds that their enthusiasm for departure from the life of a respectable citizen has not diminished or evaporated entirely, or even that their desire for an exit has increased because of it, then go and do not hesitate. You will step into another world, you will march into an alien land. You will be branded, marked, and you will either bear that mark as a curse — or you will sing its song confidently, forever. If you are to take this first step, understand that as you slough off the burdens of respectability and the reputable citizen’s duties, your new burden will be to wear that mark gracefully. If you cannot, it very well may destroy you in the end, with every measure of isolation imaginable.

So — proceed at your own risk.

After noting the warnings, one of the first and most crucial realizations one must face in making their exit is this: a human being has shockingly few needs. Any student of anthropology could affirm this axiom, at least in the abstract — for a brief glance at the primordial hunter-gatherer origins of mankind would tell the whole tale. A flint knife and a leather pouch; a shanty of thatched reeds and bent saplings — a spot of meat by the fire each day, and cool creekwater to drink from a leaky bladder of goatskin. To walk and to breathe; to pray and to convene with the others — to sit in the profoundest idleness high in the unconquerable and wild hinterlands… these are a man’s simplest needs, and their simplicity is physiologically universal to human beings everywhere. It is only in cases where the habits of any populous have led people to insist upon princely fineries that anyone is tempted to think differently; but the societal dropout cannot afford such luxury, and in fact, he lives to prove that the primitive simplicity of auld has never died entirely.

He should not want such luxuries even if they came to him for free. For luxury controls a man, and indeed, it controls a people. Of the one who punches his clock and dutifully pays his bills today, what can we say but this? He must earn because he must pay his bills; and he must earn richly, for his bills command a sizable monthly fortune. And to earn, he must work, selling not merely his time but his fealty for the sake of whatever money procures for him.

What does he do with his money? Only rarely does he employ it toward some kind of a sublime and high-minded end — only very occasionally is the working-man taken with purchasing fine ivories and soapstones to carve, or to taking Greenlandic sabbaticals, or to collecting rare Vedas or medieval tomes… to the contrary, his money is squandered on the various luxuries to which he is addicted, all of which are of startlingly recent marque and invention; he is a machine-man, surrounded by machines. Televisions and washing-machines, automobiles and tickets on flying jets; trips to the stadiums and to high-dollar bars and clubs — ATV’s, Disneyland vacations, cigarettes and candies, expensive hotel rooms with sprawling staffs who fluff his pillows before he has even arrived… it is for this feverishly novel manner of living that he labors, and it is this that drives his incredible fear of unemployment.

We, on the outside, must never judge him for what he does; not at all. This is crucial to remember. It is natural that, in the course of human life, some median would be constructed, providing a large degree of comfort to those who submit themselves to the greater good, or to productivity, or to the protective authority of the state. Quite frankly, it is an excellent bargain unless one is patently indisposed to the sort of activity it requires (as the dropout is, by nature, liable to be).

Therefore, it is important to remember that we, the dropouts, are the ones with the handicap — not the others. Tempting though it may be to indulge the idea that we are, for our intrepid ventures outside the august limits of the upright life, somehow superior to them, the opposite is true. Homage must be paid to the ones who dutifully work and live lives of great toil and comfort, for they build the world and grow the food that sustains our life. And in the end, our status as outsiders on the far bleeding edge of society is meaningless if we cannot occasionally return to the settled world to bring such people some kind of sublimity or inspiration; we must harvest the strange crops that can only be harvested in the desolate places, that we might bring something edifying and life-giving to the bricklayers and paper-pushers, who are often tottering on the edge and in great need of tasting something of all we have seen…

Of course I am now neck-deep in a digression. To get back to the point — to walk away from society is to voluntarily banish oneself from the comfortable life, and to take up the Spartan mantle. It is, at least by default and from the first of it, to choose to sleep in ditches rather than on feather beds; it is to drink water rather than expensive gin and porter. Food from the grocer’s dumpster — unelectrified cabins, bicycles instead of cars. It is to become a feverishly cheap sort of man; a master of “Woodchuck Economics.”

Only if a fellow can make certain that he is able to tolerate the sorts of “indignities” inherent to the frugal life (which are, for the record, already a thousand times more luxurious than all that our hunter-gatherer forebears subsisted upon) can he be sure-footed in his journey outside the pale of society at large. And so it is that before one endeavors to make their flight into their long self-exile at the margins — they must take care to slash away every conceivable monthly bill, even at the cost of comfort; to take great care to ensure that one can support themselves on sums of money so paltry they can be obtained practically anywhere and with famously minimal effort.

With this achieved, the prerequisites for one’s exit from “society” have been fulfilled — and the journey can begin in earnest. For what does one need now? Sixty-three cubic feet of space in which to pass each night of sleep; preferably non-freezing, secure, and free of any environmental hazards to health, for the first. Then, what else but a few measures of rice and beans, lentils and discount chicken, a bag of oranges now and again, clean water, perhaps a spot of tea and a plug of tobacco — a pair of shoes, a set of clothing, and some means of transportation.

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The very simplest and most minimal dollar figure such a life could cost would be as paltry as a few dollars each month — perhaps even less than $100, if indeed our dropout had a simple tarp, a pair of boots, a rucksack, and a willingness to harvest the great bulk of his calories from the grocery store dumpsters… Heaven knows that I have lived this exact kind of life before, walking and hitchhiking, stealthily sleeping wherever I was well enough out of sight, eating whatever I could find — and indeed, long, sprawling seasons have passed in my life during which I spent nothing, earned nothing, stole nothing, and received not a single handout. I was only a vagabond and a scavenger; harmless as they come, and though it may seem unlikely to imagine from ‘more comfortable’ vistas — I count such periods among the happiest days of my life, for I was purely my own man.

Ever since, I have considered this exact configuration to be a thing I call the default state of man. For though I descended to such a state purely by my own choice, my years of “slumming it” had a great deal in common with the lives of primordial hunter-gatherers, refugees of great disasters and wars, castaways and orphans, criminals on the lam and ruined men of every type and flavor… My manner of living then was indeed the “lowest” a fellow could go, but I nonetheless found myself smiling with contentment during those times, to my great amusement and gladness. With years like these under my belt, the question of “survival” ceased to trouble me; I lost my fear of “losing everything” and “starting from the bottom.” In fact, I nearly pined for it, and still do — because those living such a life have a near-constant stream of wonderful puzzles to solve each day, and what a thrill it can be to solve them.

In fact, one hitchhiking ride I received years ago in Nebraska offered me a humorous bit of wisdom about my condition. The man was a stock broker on Wall Street; he’d decided to take a long, solitary road trip after a nasty divorce. He said: “You’d make a great stock broker, you know that?” Naturally, astonished at his strange remark, I asked him why. The reply: “Because you’re living at the bottom already and you seem to enjoy it… On the trading floor, you’d have no fear of failure; you wouldn’t get shaky hands on big, risky trades. And for that, you’d outperform practically everyone — because they’ve got bills to pay! They are worried!”

I certainly couldn’t argue with that — for he was entirely correct. Traveling to the “very bottom” of things, and operating in conditions of such radical scarcity that one nearly forgets the comforts of warm beds and locked doors and hot breakfast buns and high-end cocktails — it is an education. Unwittingly, I achieved the highest ideal of what a “dropout” might set out to achieve; and in so doing, I constructed a wonderfully solid foundation on which to experiment, improve, and build all sorts of things. Even as I sit here typing this at my Adirondack estate, I remember it — and if the day would come where this place would burn down, or be repossessed, or whatever else; why, I would only smile, and revert to the life that I gave so much of my youth to, for however long it took.

Now of course, an ideal is only an ideal. Like surfing a great wave, or seating oneself perilously upon a stone in the center of a raging river — it is a wondrous thing to behold, but it cannot last. It is educational, and demonstrative of some enlightening principle or another — but you very likely cannot stay there forever unless you are some rare, heroic, mystic of a man. For while the fellow who lives in vagabondish abjection really has succeeded in exiting society almost entirely, his heart, his aching body, and the sands of time are likely to altogether conspire to drag him back to another reality entirely.

I say this because as I went, my body broke down slowly. A grave weight hung down on my heart after so long, too, and I took to tippling more than I should’ve. More than any of this — I was lonely, and quite wished to find myself not only in the company of a tribe of like-minded compatriots, but in the company of a woman. In short, it became clear that I — like the vast, vast majority of vagabonds who have ever walked the earth — could not continue with this kind of life, not without making some major adjustments. I would have to take what I’d learned up to then and build up on it for some higher purpose. Nevertheless, I was glad to have lived it, and though I dreaded living another way, and kicked and screamed the whole way to the next chapter — now, I stand in a position all the firmer for what I learned living that way.

And so I implore the would-be dropout to begin with a chapter wherein they experiment with the default state of man. Go and dive headlong to the bottom; see what is there — realize that if life’s stakes have ever seemed high, such heights have only been a kind of mental vertigo and little else; once you have ventured down to the “worst off you could possibly be” — if you go in with jolly spirits and a keenness for solving life’s little problems — you’ll see that it is not so bad, and will walk with a great sense of security forever after.

This is, to my mind, the greatest education one can receive; it brings a peace of mind that few living men now enjoy, and those in possession of it will flourish, even at the furthest extremities of mankind’s footprint upon the earth and in any crisis whatsoever. And let us remember that life “outside society” is ultimately a life of crisis — those who choose it will need to be armed with a profound and smiling comfort with the “bottom of the bottom” now and again.

Worthwhile as it may be to descend to this “default state of man,” there are a host of reasons why it cannot be a sustainable long-term way of life for the great majority of people. Instead, after so long of dwelling there, it becomes clear that a discerning fellow has a God-given ability and need to build and do and create that must be exercised… more than this, he is also built to love, and may pine for a family, or for a piece of soil to call his own, or for a mode of nomadic travel that is more sustainable long-term — and more readily able to sustain the needs of a family or tribe.

It is only now that one might arrive at their “cabin in the woods,” or to their sailboats, buses, vannagons, or bender tents. Herds of goats high in the public steppelands — riverboats on the Monongahela, isolated tracts of wilderness in places like Alaska or Nevada or Maine. To take a wife and head for the hills; to raise home-birthed, home-schooled, no-social-security-number babies out in the desert wastes — these notions might actually come to fruition here.

A single essay cannot address all of the possibilities; even a book-length work would struggle to do so. There are as many ways of living, frankly, as there are human souls on earth. Each one will have a different set of aims and ambitions — but it may be useful here to establish two sets of general principles that could aid in the decision-making process a given ‘dropout’ will employ.

For the first, one must know themselves rather well; they must take the time to study their own proclivities. Some will already know them quite well — others may need years of wandering to discern the general ‘shape’ of what their life ought to look like. Others will never find out but must try anyway.

For example: Are you a ‘naturally nomadic’ sort of person? Does restlessness come up and bite you when you remain stationary for months or years on end? If so — accept it, do not squirm beneath this basic reality, nor should you be tempted to imagine that such a nature comprises a flaw or a glitch in your own nature (lest you try and fail at settling, again and again, as many have done before). After all, human beings are a nomadic species, by the by, and though settled societies may’ve sought for millenia to eradicate, harrangue, hassle, and generally banish nomadic peoples to the furthest edges of the earth or even into extinction — such a life is still amply possible. So far as I know it, the modern vagabond’s nightly, whiplash-inducing randomness cannot be sustained with a family; but a modified, seasonal, rhythmic pattern of movement can. Study traditional nomadic peoples; learn what you can of their ways, and adopt their way of life as a workable ‘baseline.’

Or — if you are a sedentary sort, you must contend with the reality that settled people have a profoundly dangerous achilles’ heel. For the sedentary workaday types and their bureaucracies have shown a deep distaste for “alternative” kinds of people; they have been known to raise taxes, condemn buildings, and call Child Protective Services on ‘non-conforming’ families. Where nomadic types can simply remain light on their feet, traveling away from ‘hot’ locales as needed — the settled ones, by definition, cannot do this1. The question for “settling” type people then becomes one of finding where a family can settle without drawing the attention and the ire of any and all authorities who believe it is their duty to police citizens’ mode of life into conformity with the “normal” ones. Will it be, then, the Unorganized Borough of Alaska, where there are no building codes or property taxes? Will it be a life of obscure outlawry in the wilds of states like West Virginia and Missouri? Isolated regions of seldom-traveled deserts? Or will you have to pull up the stakes and leave the so-called “Land of the Free” for countries with a higher tolerance for ‘weirdness’?

As you may now be coming to realize — there is a great deal more to this sort of thing than the romantic idyll would suggest. The nitty-gritty considerations matter greatly; and the basic idea that mainstream society will hate and persecute you by whatever means they can should not be disregarded, laughed off, or ignored. By all that I have ever seen, this kind of persecution is not to be conceived of as a matter of “if” but as a matter of “when.” For nomads, it will be more frequently encountered but more easily sloughed off or evaded — for settled people, it will be rare, but potentially devastating when encountered. What we are all dealing with as dropouts is a situation that is as old as Cain murdering Abel, as serious as Western settlers massacring the beloved Buffalo of the Plains Indians, and as annoying as 60’s-era signs banning ‘hippies’ from restaurants and shops. Ruby Ridge, the M.O.V.E. Bombings, and the tensions surrounding Rainbow Gatherings in recent years are all testaments to the friction that “alternative” and “dropout” types will encounter — ranging from the annoying to the lethal, even in modern times.

Always, it is best to frame one’s activities in terms that are legible to the ‘respectable’ folks where possible. Nomadic families ought to seem like “homeschooler families on a camping trip” rather than full-time nomads; settled homesteader types with close ties to the Amish and a plain manner of dress often slip under the radar, being dismissed as “Amish-type” people, and therefore free to do “Amish-like” things. Certain business may be best to leave un-mentioned to outsiders. The wisest course is to always imagine the visual reality of one’s life from the perspective of the “squarest” types of people imaginable — and to see to it that nothing about how things look would raise any alarms in such people. And at the same time, avoiding real paranoia is also paramount.

If one adopts a cautious disposition insofar as public image is concerned, stays true to their own nature, and keeps costs devilishly low — long-term success at sustaining a ‘drop-out’ status is readily plausible, even in multi-generational terms.

Time loses its meaning rapidly in such a life — whether one lives as a solitary vagabond, a cabin hermit, a homesteading family, or as a family of bus-dwelling nomads. What some Mexicans call “the Mañana Mentality” seeps in in mere months; for when one’s needs are simple and their life is cheap, there is seldom a reason to hurry towards anything. When wage work is irregular or unstructured, the mind can wander and get sidetracked; a fellow can take a siesta. A healthful idleness enters into the routine; but if one is not careful, such idleness can spread across one’s daily hours so extensively that it comes as a dangerous and paralyzing blight, or even poses a risk to sanity! Learning to have unlimited free time is a real skill that many Americans have no native intuition to learn; they must study it, practice it, even (ironically) work at it a little.

But this is, like “the default state of man,” a hurdle one must pass over and through for themselves. At the beginning, it is best to lean into the apparent endlessness of time; to stare out into space (preferably somewhere beautiful) infinitely until finally, the synapses snap on, and ambition rises in the heart and the body unprovoked. Though it may seem that this will never happen — I assure you, it does, so long as you have not succumbed to mindless entertainment, strong drink in excess, or endless traveling. When it happens, it is often simple: in seeing a strange bird, for example, one is enthralled by it, and its flight disturbs the endless yawn in time through which one is living. Then, it’s off to the library to search for the creature’s taxonomy and origin; and days later, one is suddenly an amateur ornithologist. And from ornithology, an interest in the birds of Siam might arise, and then in Siam itself, and then in British foreign policy regarding Siam, until finally one finds themselves poring over obscure British cookbooks and simmering boiled breakfast beans over their camp stove…

Others will find this kind of ‘wandering mind syndrome’ to be strange, but so long as one does not rush through it, it will become a kind of compass that guides a fellow through the unendingly blank schedule of his life. Those who adopt this as their practice will be well-pleased in the result: a life of curiosity, study, building, voyages, and a marvelous well-roundedness of mind.

Time’s impact, of course, does not only work upon the mind. Indeed, great hurtling chasms of time — taken alongside the kind of scenery that dropout types so famously tend to situate themselves in — will also work profoundly upon the spirit; and it is there that one might be able to appraise something of their reason for even “dropping out” in the first place. By this I mean: relieved from the pressures of bills and pay-stubs, removed from the grind and hustle of the commute, the “keeping up with the Joneses,” and from the synthetic environments in which the hoi polloi tend to reside — man is prone to meditating upon the marvels and beauties of his life, and indeed, he may be taken with thinking about God.2

He will be bound, for example, to notice the peculiar abilities of mankind as compared with all of the other creatures he observes in the daily course of his life. And in reflecting on such an idea, he might come across some ancient Patristic text of the Christian faith, or even Scripture itself, claiming something to the effect of “man” being “made in the image of God.” Meanwhile, the fellow notices a peculiar connection between his relative poverty and his contentment; or he will see a man die somewhere along the road and feel something — or he will watch as the falcon snatches the trout with such elegance… and he will stare up in wonderment at the idea that this life of ours could possibly be only a random assemblage of particles and atoms in a Hobbseian race for evolutionary dominance and nothing more…

For while the urge towards nomadism has not died, nomadism largely has; while man’s heart may insist upon freedom, there are now laws and cameras and an intensive suite of intricate, machinelike duties and requirements for citizens of our air-conditioned nightmare. Wilderness may be inscribed upon the heart of a man, but men themselves have shunned the wilderness, hiding from it. They hide from God also — for God is, like the wildlands He made, a timeless, indefatigable, ultimate reality; He and all that He has revealed and taught may ultimately hold the blinking, shimmering, shining world that modern man has constructed in complete and absolute Divine contempt.

It is only when the idle soul who has “dropped out” finds himself with a Bible in His hands, or slips into a Cathedral in a fit of unexpected curiosity — that he realizes he only wished to “drop out” of the mortal world of men and their endless web of anxious, soul-blackening sin. In this way, we find that the soul of the “dropout” is that of a living human being who only pines especially intensely for heaven in the end.

And so, though we may in our travels find ourselves in the company of the junkies and the hippies, the punks and the drifters, the criminals and the migrants — the ultimate arc points toward, after it all, keeping the company of the Saints. Only when one sets out on this maximal, final, flourish of a journey do they appreciate and see that among the old junkies and hippies and bums are there so many souls yearning to be Saints — but trapped in the bodies of broken human beings, tortured by cycles of sin.

If, then, a man’s quest might finally lead him to being seated in thunderstruck awe before the altar, kneeling with mouth agape before the Flesh and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ; he has finally “broken through” to the heaven that he has ever sought. He stands before the mystical blueprint of heaven-on-earth; he is assured that he has not yearned for ever-greater freedom in vain. Far from juvenile witticisms about “the sheeple” who are “in the system” and so on and so forth; far from the vagabond’s blackout benders and nights in lockup — through all of that was one undying axiom that drove the fellow from the first first step he took: the idea that this world is damnable and sick. The dropout is, in his heart of hearts, only one tough, uncompromising, often solitary soul. He is hardened like a soldier, contemptuous like the punk, scrappy like the crackhead, built for survival, tortured by the hell of loneliness and grief; and he will follow his intuition and its inescapable judgement that there must be more in this life. There, he may well catch sight of Christ Jesus and be cleansed in an endless baptism of ultimate, final hope.

How, then, could the settled ones hold him in contempt? How could they chase him to the edges of the earth, to deprive him of everything, to wrest his children from his hands — even to murder him like Cain did Abel? For the erstwhile wanderer, the hippie, the baleful-eyed mountain man — are these not simply men whose soft, loving, desperate hearts have been covered in clouds of smoke or shields of armor, or hidden in the inaccessible deserts and jagged coastlines — covered by any defense mechanism they can conjure in order to slough off the constant painful reminders that the world is dead, fallen, wracked with darkness? Ugly as such people may seem now, we must remember that they may only be on one anguished step of a journey that will lead them straight to the hands of God Himself. And that, like monks without monasteries, they bear the weight of the world’s sins on their shoulders in their backpacks and rucksacks and far-flung mountain encampments…

So goes the cycle of life “outside;” so moves the heart of the peripatetics and nomads and frontier-seeking wildmen and their wild-eyed children. Theirs is a bloodline blessed by the Lord — whose Ever-Blessed Mother was in a state of flight on the night of His birth on earth; Lord who was born in a barn, whose people wandered the earth to proclaim His teachings. It is a race of human beings that shall go on forever; and if indeed, you are one of His — or are taken with the ways of His children; then go — do not hesitate.

What you will find will breathe life into you. The idle days, the desert sunrises, the incredible miracle of a plain bowl of rice — the smiles of your children as you fold the tents yet again to make for the winter encampment; the heavenly face of He who made all, leading you back to the very societies you “dropped out of” if only to share the peace you found “elsewhere” and by way of another kind of life.

If this is what is hidden behind every “like” on the social media posts about “living in a cabin in the woods,” why, I wouldn’t be shocked at all. For what heart has not hungered for heaven? What man or woman has not had a thought to take flight, to stray from the ragged flock, to make one’s life a living memorial to Old Ways that seemed all but extinct? Verily, many have had such a dream; and many will live it.3

For them — I’ll see you on the road. You are welcome at our camp anytime. Until then, go with God; stay light on your feet!

This kind of feedback, while extraordinarily generous, does not give me much of an opportunity to make a “business plan,” nor does it provide many insights into why anyone unsubscribes, or cancels a paid subscription.

Nonetheless, I cannot help but wonder what I am doing right and what I am doing wrong. I comb through the various metrics; I write up lengthy notes and assessments and strategies — I attempt to discern some kind of a pattern in what may or may not bring value to you, the reader. In all of my efforts in this direction, I have discerned exactly no patterns whatsoever. In truth, making a living on Substack appears to be a completely random thing — and when newer Substackers inquire as to how I ever managed to gain the sort of following I have on here, or how I’ve somehow managed to make a living doing this, I can give them no answers at all. This is because I myself do not understand the inner workings of this site, nor do I understand what has ever delighted readers so completely that they decide to become paid subscribers to this publication.

Nevertheless, everything I use, wear, or eat, and indeed the very house in which I reside — it is all paid for by a couple hundred generous souls who, in reading my written work, have decided that I ought to do nothing but write. I have honored their request with a certain degree of amazement — it is a profound privilege to get to do this for a living. In fact, as we await the birth of our firstborn child, our paid subscribers are quite literally feeding and clothing a baby — truly, God bless you; we love you all.

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But each of these wonderful patrons of mine has no doubt lent me an offering for a number of different reasons. Some simply like my style, or the ‘shape’ of my ideas; others enjoy travelogues, or long, anachronistic essays about Upstate New York, or Catholicism. Others were drawn to the Falling Back in Love With America project — or to my fondness for rural America, or my strident criticism of modernity and the grim ‘human monoculture’ it has spawned. I cannot keep track of the multiplicity of reasons that some of you may subscribe to this publication: I can only continue writing and hoping that you will be edified by what I do here. And I can only pray that as my wife and I welcome our child into the world, this strange living I’ve begun making here won’t just altogether dry up one day.

The fear that maybe it will indeed “dry up” is exactly what has ever had me curiously scrolling through articles about “How to Succeed on Substack.”

And of course, it has lately been the fashion here to write about how to become successful on Substack. Invariably, when I scroll through the Notes section of this website, I see several articles hawking “This One Weird Trick” for Substack success, and so on. Many employ what some have called “The Hook Method.” This is a strategy that many herald as being extraordinarily efficacious with regards to stimulating growth, and they urge me to try it. But I have my suspicions about it.

It works like this: If I were to write an article about some of my travels, I might like to title it something like “A Long Walk Across Delaware.” Such a title would serve just fine if, after long-distance walking across The First State, I wanted to share the experience here. But to practitioners of “The Hook Method,” this title would be completely insufficient. For, after all, the title is the first interaction with the reader — and the reader is a potential customer.

Instead, a proper hook would require that I take an inventory of what I learned on the trip, and to locate some strange and unexpected insight that would defy conventional ideas about traveling, or about Delaware, or some kind of a weird “gotchya” that I could work into the title. I might call the article “Delaware: It’s Not as Boring as You Think,” or “The Most Underrated State: Why You Need to Get to Delaware ASAP.”

This is, in essence, what gaining attention online is all about: building an implicit syntactical schema, finely tailored to whatever may pass for conventional wisdom among conventional people — and implying that you are about to share information that will shatter that wisdom and cast it all in a new light. Many entertaining, interesting, fascinating things are built in essentially this fashion. Jokes, for example, most often involve exactly this sort of thing — and the punchline is funny precisely because it is unexpected, not only in its content, but in its very syntax.

“Why did the chicken cross the road?” is a question that, in the drab and un-funny world of conventional speech, might have a legitimate answer. “To get to the open bag of feed on the farmer’s porch” would be a reasonable answer that is, at least to chicken-keeping sorts of people, more mundane than it is humorous. The classical punchline answer: “To get to the other side!” is funny, or is at least funny in theory, because it has turned the syntax of the question on its head. The answerer has playfully and daftly assumed that the inquirer to whom he is replying might have been seriously asking whether a chicken crossing the road is indeed trying to get to the other side. Conventionally, an inquiry like this would be built around discerning the reason the chicken would do such a thing, and takes it as a foregone conclusion that anyone — chicken or not — crossing the road is obviously attempting to get to the other side.

And so the “to get to the other side” answer is a cheeky bit of humor, as it simultaneously makes you wonder about the answerer (“is he daft?”) and Judo-throws you into an aimless bit of reflection on the very purpose of language.

This somewhat elementary example works here only to describe how the “gotchya” drives human interest. It removes its listener from the mundane, with a little daftness and a jocular spirit. And in quite the same way, the “hook method” that many Substack growth gurus are selling is built in the same way. Or, as former Yankees outfielder Oscar Gamble once said: “They don’t think it be like this — but it do.”

And so it would be that if I had endeavored to walk across the State of Delaware in a single go, I might not want to use the title “A Long Walk Across Delaware” because it does not set the reader up for a “gotchya” moment. There is no surprise etched into a title like this; it is a title that plainly informs the reader, before he has even begun to read, that the essay is about a long walk across Delaware. Our Substack growth gurus look at this and say: “Boring!” and declare that a piece titled in this manner will not stimulate the growth we are all, no doubt, desperately seeking on Substack.

A growth-minded author, then, might title it differently. If, in walking across Delaware, I was shocked by how wonderful this seldom-written-about and seldom-visited state is, I might title it: “The State You Don’t Know Anything About,” or “Is Delaware Really Just Credit Card Companies and Joe Biden?”

Or, if the unexpected insights the trip gave me had more to do with walking, or with traveling itself, I might title the piece: “My Traveling Secret: The Unexpected Truth of Long-Distance Walking.”

Obviously, I am not very good at this. These titles are a little ridiculous, and in making the point about the “hook method,” they’re completely on-the-nose, and not the sorts of titles that I would ever use. But nevertheless, perhaps you see what I mean — these are attention-grabbing titles that have a subtext etched onto them rather plainly. That subtext basically boils down to: “You, the reader, aren’t as smart as you think — here’s the secret information you need to know, and only I have it.” And at the end of such an article, there are numerous admonishments to pay the author if you’d like to wade deeper into his private world of coveted knowledge. Sometimes, at this point, there is even a subtext implying that you’d be foolish not to part with some of your gold doubloons for the great privilege of gaining more of this hidden knowledge.

Without going off the reservation too far here, I am led to ask: Doesn’t this mode of communicating our ideas contain the seed of the Gnostic heresy? The author is positioned as one who is in possession of esoteric information; of information not known to the general public. He is the secret insider with The Truth — and in publishing it, he is inviting the reader into his secret circle of people who are ‘in the know.’ He is also now and again subtly denigrating (or “negging”) his reader — by implicitly suggesting that the reader needs a teacher, needs a source for some sort of truth that is beyond his grasp; truth that in the regular course of his life he would not be able to locate on his own. And so he requires a guru of some kind.

The initiation of this process, strangely enough, seems to contain the same rhetorical and syntactical structure as humor. Our “hook” titles are, in a sense, simply more advanced versions of “why did the chicken cross the road?” No one thinks the author will say “to get to the other side,” and if the reader is amazed by this delightfully esoteric and unexpected kind of information, why, he ought to remember to Like and Subscribe!

Americans in particular seem to be completely addicted to this kind of thing. Our nutrition experts are all warring chieftains of obscure, mystical, gnostic cults — to delve into health and wellness discourse online is to descend into a miniature version of the Reformation or the Second Great Awakening. Political commentators offer all sorts of paranoiac conspiracies, some demonstrably true and others laughably false — and in the arena in which they operate, there are many voices aiming to “wake up the Sheeple.” Financial planners of all stripes debate the merits of various investment strategies, and each lingers in the digital public square, with their collar up and their trenchcoat open, muttering, “hey kid… there’s this one weird trick to increasing your retirement portfolio’s gains… click here!”

What we have created, in essence, is a digital environment that is quite akin to the old medicine shows or chaotic markets bustling with snake oil salesmen. A veritable casino of secret information — virtually none of it verifiable, and much of it downright wrongheaded or even irresponsible to share. On the streets of this market, normal, well-adjusted, curious folk veer in to have a look, hoping to find something genuinely beautiful or rare — but eventually, one of the merchants hawking their chinsy wares manages to cast a spell on them, and then they’re “hooked.” What follows is a reading public who seems to have been cut adrift from the original, lofty, noble intentions a reader might initially have — plunged into a hypnotic world of secret information, insider clubs, premium subscriptions, nutritional master courses, and obscure religious, political, and cultural information that they hold onto as if it were coveted treasure.

This is, for the record, exactly the gamut of hazards that ever brought about the death of other social media platforms. Those of us old enough to remember the first generations of Facebook can compare those quaint old days to present-day Facebook — which is rife with “AI slop,” boomer memes, outrageous dramas, and pyramid schemes that make you wonder aloud at who would fall for such ridiculous dreck. Lately, the app formerly known as Twitter appears to have been making the same sort of descent. In the last few weeks, many users have been asking about algorithm reform — as the X timeline appears to be an endless, cacophonous bedlam of drama, political madness, aimless extremism, ghastly pornographic spectacles, and boorish commentary of the worst sort.

Of course, both Facebook and X did not shy away from the chaotic, snake-oil-salesman elements within their user base. To the contrary, they embraced them — and they embraced them in the name of good business. The Gnostic-esque, “gotchya,” esoteric model of communication and sales goes, after all, straight to the brain-stem. It triggers the same responses as sugar and sex and gambling — it is the fastest way to coax users into clicking, scrolling, and ultimately, buying. The brain-stem is the dynamo at the center of a new cultural and informational ecosystem — to deviate from the basic structure of its cravings and urges is to doom one’s enterprise; it is to secure a starkly uncompetitive position in the Brave New World of the creative economy.

In writing this, I think of the great country star Tracy Byrd, who sang the following lines in his hit song entitled Drinkin’ Bone:

The drinkin' bone's connected to the party bone
The party bone's connected to the staying out all night long
And she won't think it's funny and I'll wind up all alone
And the lonely bone's connected to the drinkin' bone

These lyrics come to mind simply because the literature bone ain’t connected to the brain-stem bone. The greatest, most edifying written works are not “hook-shaped.” They are not built like sticky honeypots to dupe apparently-pedestrian dim-wits into shelling out another few bucks — no truly great written work is designed to ensnare the reader with a neverending and Daedalian chain of “gotchyas.”

In fact, the only ‘bone’ that is connected to the ‘brain-stem bone’ is, at day’s end — the lonely bone. This is because the sort of written work produced by Edward-Bernays-tier marketing tactics will be intrinsically unable to fulfill the real, deep, radically human requirements of real literature. No neon lights ever led a soul to the heavenly face of God — no admonishments to “click here” ever lifted a human spirit out of the ravagements of his own darkness or bruised condition. There is no rest in such a world of snake oil and neon; there is only the whirling, feverish, devilish madness of more and more and more — and in the end, all that is produced by such written work is an unfillable “hole” or void; a chasm that gapes so large it looms like a glacial morass where no poetry of any kind can survive. It is here that the soul sinks; this is the phenomenon that puts the “doom” in “doom-scrolling.”

Perhaps in the end, real art worthy of the name cannot survive on the internet at all. Perhaps the digital environment ultimately stretches the creative work of men far too thin for it to ever weave its magic in the hearts of the seekers and the romantics; like some lunatic streets of Bangkok or Calcutta or New Orleans, here, the light is too bright for men to see — the sounds are too overwhelming for the delicate whispers of the angels and the muses and indeed, of God Himself to be tasted or heard. Instead — hooch and hollering, trance-like litanies of cults and derangements so large and so intense they crush human thought itself in the end. A world of mere matter to be packaged and sold — a portrait of life that consists only of dopamine and reels and lonely all-night orgies of blue-light scrolling and brief, two-dimensional moments that make users utter a flat “wow” and move on.

If indeed Substack is to maintain its present position in a lasting way — if indeed it is to be a kind of refuge for those who have ever sought to find real beauty on the internet; perhaps these reflections must be taken quite seriously or we shall all lose in the end. Yet as we see infinite scroll and reels and a seemingly limitless frontier of growth salesmen and gurus run rampant across this online haven of ours — one wonders if the rot has already taken root. One wonders if it is always inevitable; if indeed, the lovers of the “beautiful internet” will always be forced to wander from site to site and platform to platform. It really may be that every great era on every website is only an ephemeral thing — that there is something intrinsic or fundamental about the technological backbone of large websites that forces the hand of their owners and managers; a need for capital and funding and money that leaves them with no choice but to tickle the brain-stem forever, again and again and again until there is nothing left.

After all, heavy-duty webhosting ain’t cheap. The bills have got to get paid somehow, and as platforms grow in size, the costs increase, and the temptation to reach for the “hooks” in the brain-stem may become too intense to resist.

If this is the case — what keeps us from logging off forever? What keeps us from parlaying the great moments we have here, the successes, the communities, the sublime and heavenly art and friendships and enriching things we have ever found online — and taking them into the “IRL” world? What keeps us from taking all of this off the screen and out into the Hinterlands?

I suspect that our ceaseless quest for a website or platform that does not degenerate into a blinking-neon brain-stem tickling scheme is only a symptom of a wider problem. If our world offline weren’t one-tenth as bleak as it now is — would we even be trying to build something beautiful online at all? In truth, I believe we would not. I believe the internet would then only be a side-dish to a far richer main course. But these days, things have gotten bad enough that for many of us — though crucially, not all — there is nothing but the internet. Certainly, this is true in my case, and I know quite factually that it is the case for many, many more than just me. We use the internet as a surrogate for all that we have tried and failed to obtain offline — and it is a weak surrogate indeed; where it seems to sate our hunger for the good things of this life, it comes only as a brief ephemerality that will soon expire, nothing more.

In the end, there is no “one weird trick” to “save Substack.” I have no estoeric knowledge on this matter to teach or share or give. I have no “pitch” that would tell you to “like and subscribe,” and I take it as a foregone conclusion that you, dear reader, are a human being who is whole and living and real — containing depths that are, from where I now sit, unknowable to me. But I wish to know you more deeply; I wish to love you if I could — to love as the artist loves, or to know something of how God loves, or to share in the kind of affection and warmth that compatriots and community-members and friends know. If I cannot give you this here and now — I hope to at least give you some real encouragement along the way; to gesture toward some heavenly signpost to the good and the true and the beautiful. And if, at the end of it, you wish to press a penny into the hands of a digital wayfaring bard like myself, I give you not only my thanks but a seat at my table; be it here at my home or anywhere I might visit on earth.

Here, you pay not to be teased with “gotchyas” nor to scroll and scroll nor to receive secret information. You offer a gift to a friend; you pay to know that another soul sees some of what you see, and wishes to see still more and to share it with you as he is able. You pay so that my baby might eat while I pine for heaven publicly; seeking to bring the holy genius of great God almighty out into the sunlight for all to see and adore — that life might be more and more laden with good gifts and blessings and beauties, rendered worthwhile, raised to the status of the only gift that we will ever taste together.

On that score, please bear with me as I try. Our time may be short; but for that, we shall not go hungry if I have anything to say about it at all.

Let us pray that the good things we have come to know and enjoy on this website will not stop flourishing and proliferating for years to come. If they should, however, you must know that I will not be going away — we will find one another again, in cyberspace or on the living soil, and there, we will recognize one another as true friends.

Post-Script:

I wish to tell all of you who read Hickman’s Hinterlands that I am lately under a great deal of pressure. Between my mother’s slow death from cancer in Hospice, my wife’s pregnancy and imminent birth, and my own nerve-fraying worries about supporting a family as a writer, or about my and my wife’s apparent inability to stay put for any length of time — I am finding it quite difficult to write. Furthermore, we are lately limited in our ability to wander about the Hinterlands in search of worthwhile stories for this publication, and are trying to save up our money besides; and so please forgive me if I have not been posting as much, or if the quality of my work has faltered whatsoever.

Thankfully, we have just arrived back at our home in the Adirondacks, where my wife can be comfortable in the weeks leading up to her giving birth; and because of this, we are not with my mother right now, and I will have far, far more time to focus on writing for Hickman’s Hinterlands. And so in the weeks to come, we shall be returning to the regular programming here, and it is my aim to post a little more often than usual.

Truly, I cannot say it enough: Thank you to all the paying readers here, you do a great mercy not only to me personally, but to our family. This innovative and unexpected way of deriving an income on which to support a family is a Godsend to us; for as you know, we have never fit very squarely into the Way Things Are in the world today. You’ve very generously given us your patronage, and for it, we live a decent life. Let us hope that I am able to return your goodwill in tenfold, however I can.

Sincerely,

A.M. Hickman

It is a case of añoranza — a kind of deep, yearnful longing for some unknown or perhaps unknowable thing.

Perhaps it is only the case that I am the “final American.” Like Nietzsche’s “Last Man” I have been forced to face the end — to stare directly at the hemorrhaging of my world and the draining of all its poetry and vigor. Were it to be that I was a more dignified and stoical sort of fellow, why, this burden would only be a private one — but I am not; I am quite frankly taken with the hysterics and the melodrama and drum them up in big public displays. I weep for my country so much that the weeping ceases, and after so long, instead of producing a single tear, I stare forward in a kind of cynical wonderment, dazzled by the ugliness wrought upon the once-shining skin of my beloved patria.

Uncorking and sipping and idling as I am, I weigh the situation and examine its gravity with a sense of tragic detachment from all fate; I wear the heaviness of my miles and my years not as a prize but as a pointless punishment. Yes, I have seen the country. Yes, I know what I have seen. Yes, I have sworn an oath for this country — donning a uniform, saluting the Spangled Banner as I strutted across the brow of a tired old ship. My haircut was tight and my manner of speech was crisp then, but before, of course, I was a bearded sluggard, a vagrant, a malcontent. Like an American Siddartha, I traveled from low to high; once a respect-starved vagabond and, later, a military sailor who gorged on respect. I went from dumpster-diving my dinner to rolling up to restaurants in my BMW, from under overpasses to the high halls of Hilton hotels — I searched this country up and down and I know exactly what it was that I found.

It was nothing to celebrate, not really. This is harsh, this is a message that does not sell — nobody wants to hear it. But it was like this: Imagine meeting an esteemed family with an old and venerable name, but finding every one of their children to be wastrels and degenerates who spit in the face of their patriarchs and laugh. In your stay at the family estate, the only compelling personages were the geriatrics; the only riveting stories were those scraped up from the depths of the depths of ancient memory. The house is either stifling hot or it is fearsome with icy drafts — the food is ravaged by vermin and the children are illiterate. Yet everywhere, the family crest is displayed; the family name uttered with a sense of extreme reverence bordering on the comical and absurd, and it is comical because the state of the house is so abundantly deplorable.

Yes — if America were the estate of a single old family, perhaps it would be something like this. For of course, there are corners of it where its beauty is immutable and serious and of a timeless sort of character, like any truly great estate; there are a few old faces, too, who remember whatever it was that gave the family its regal name — but when leaving-time comes, you think to yourself “thank God” and make haste to depart.

Of course then an awful discovery is then made. You realize that you are a member of this family, and in fact, that you exemplify their traits so aptly they wish to make you into some sort of baron. They can offer you the marble-columned guesthouse as your stead, and rush to do so — but it is a stinking, crumbling place, without bedding or chairs or so much as a single alluring quality except the view out the window. Now you are its inmate; you find an old board of wood to sit on and station yourself by that window, and as you sit and gaze at the genuinely delightful view, you can only study the history of the estate and continue to repeat the family name as if it were your Alpha and Omega. But, each day, you must venture out into the rest of the squalid, distressed estate and it is there that you remember the carceral nature of your tenure there. It is there that the raw and unfiltered degeneration is so garishly on display, and all the ways in which you have been blessed admix with a bizarre and darkening sense of despair — for you are powerless to fix the endless problems of this dying family.

But enough with metaphors — I suspect you get the picture by now. I am, let it be said squarely and plainly right from the start, just the sort of man who might seriously have been born to ramble. A natural émigré; a soul not merely born into exile but conceived into it — all my life I have pined for the steamer ship and the trunk and the foreign port and the tersely-worded letter home. Perhaps this would have been true for me even if I had been born into the very highest spires of the historical American Empire; even if I were a high-born St Louisian presiding over the gilded buttresses of the World’s Fair I still would’ve ventured away, if only because it is in my nature to depart.

And so it is that I am ill-suited to going on long patriotic diatribes, except as a vague kind of exercise or as a way to put bread on the table. Just as Anais Nin and Henry Miller wrote erotica to support their actual novel-writing habits — perhaps I could make the same sort of career out of re-hashing nationalistic themes for the sake of getting the crowds fired up. Heaven knows I would be good at this, but just the same, it is a pursuit that is really every bit as low as erotica-writing ever was — perhaps it is even actually worse, because at least it can be presumed that the erotica-writer does occasionally enjoy having sex. As for me, I find the vast majority of this country’s shape in the present-day era to be flatly repulsive (I take no joy in admitting this) and at day’s end, I am always relieved to hear anyone speaking French along the northern border, or to hear the musical tones of español down by Mexico. When I hear these foreign melodies, I am reminded that the world is bigger than the country into which I was born, and in this I take heart immensely.

Now you know that I am being dramatic — because it is not really as simple as the above paragraph might lead you to imagine. To the contrary, I am actually of two minds about America, and those who have read my work for a long time can probably tell quite clearly that this is how I feel. Because in lieu of having a country that, for the first, even sees itself as a coherent “country” to begin with, and for the second, is a country that thrives with a citizenry who raises their heads with unequivocal dignity and great power — all I have been reduced to is the pursuit of searching for the few still-warm embers of what the country was or could have been and holding them in my hands. When I succeed in doing that, I always find myself giddy with delight. Because it is true: The United States of America was, and still very occasionally remains a completely stunning, magnificent kind of country — a place that sends my spirit soaring to the highest heights, and in a sense, it is my greatest lover.

Those heights, of course, are hazardous — like any high precipice or vista. One can fall down so easily, and without fail, every time that I rise to such heights, I am almost immediately after exposed to the banal ugliness of what we have done and I die again; my ‘American spirit’ is cajoled out of me as the traffic rages by and the endless concrete strip malls shimmer with lifeless and unpeopled heat. All I smell is the stupid Burger King — you know they pipe ‘burger smoke’ out of those places, as if they are always running some kind of sordid, meaty conclave in there — and the exhaust of the cars. I behold this all as the ultimate betrayal; I simmer and boil with black hatred for what has been done now in the name of convenience and a sham caricature of “freedom,” and as I stew and murmur and curse, my countrymen look as me as if I were a certifiable schizophrenic. They seem comprehend it at all; it is as if we are a different species, though we have the same passport.

And so it is that I have gone and seen as much of my country as I conceivably could — far more of it than the vast majority of my fellow citizens have ever seen or ever will see — only to be regarded with a kind of contempt by the patriots. Those who call me a ‘communist’ or a ‘faggot’ or tell me to ‘move to Europe’ do not seem to detect that I am on their side, and always was. Yet now I sip my wine and cut myself adrift, for I feel I can fight no more; some kind of fatal exhaustion has crept up into me, and a most unfortunate kind of disgust or cynicism has left me jaded. I stare at the map on the wall — Argentina, Bolivia, Azores, El Salvador, Oman, et cetera et cetera — and find a kind of comfort (maybe it is really a perverse comfort) in knowing that the world is so much larger than these United States.

In truth, these dark ruminations may now really be the wages of a truly idyllic childhood. For again, I know what it was that I saw in my youth — it was all distinctly real, and I can confirm it time and again when speaking to my elders, who lived it and watched it just the same as I did. It was a Norman Rockwell painting, or, really it was something even more exhilarating and primordial; it was a time where, yes, NAFTA and oil crises and wars and recessions and so on had taken their toll, in quite the same way as all the rest of the Rust Belt — but there was something else, something underneath the bruises left by the bad policies, depressed economics, and high rates of outmigration.

That living thing beneath the ruin and decay was an organism — our culture, our family, our life; it was not a machine, it was not yet ossified into a series of transactions or bureaucratic negotiations. We lived and we breathed as human beings then and there was no internet and no cellular service; the porches were occupied and the yard parties were constant. The humid heat shimmered high above the June-time leaves and flowers and gardens and neighbors greeted one another. Old-time friends and socials; dances, even, and meetings and barbeques. The automobiles were easy to fix, and cheap to boot — the radio played polka songs on Sundays and at Easter, Pączki came in white boxes to the kitchen tables. These are not the reflections of a nonagenarian, nor are they sham images generated by aimless and irresponsible romanticism — they are the historical and biographical facts of my own life, as told by me now, at the young age of thirty-one.

In just twenty years that ‘organism’ has died a wretched and torturous death. Ember after ember of those days has been extinguished by the forces of a barbarous “progress” — Obituaries have followed obituaries, and countless families have moved to Florida. No one remembers now, or if they do, they only finger through those memories in their minds as the televisions blare and the porch sits emptier than ever. I cannot afford to buy a home in my home town anymore, either; and if I could, I would be pissing up a long rope to ever hope to mend things or fix them. Like an exile from the squalid, rusted backwaters of some far-flung province of Moldova or Poland or Russia — this may seem to be a dramatic analogy but by all I know it is distressingly apt — I have held my beloved home in my hands and watched it disintegrate. Now, there is no dreaming left to do; there is nothing left to witness except the bloody coup de grâce.

It is either this — or there is departure. And the taste of departure floods me with wonderment; it comes as a sane and healthful tonic and yet, beneath these gladdening notes it smacks just the same of betrayal and rootlessness and retreat. Yet I drink of it nonetheless, and on that score, that is where the wine comes in: the ‘terroir’ is a kind of travel — to taste the fruits of the vine from all corners of the globe as I meditate on these grave matters is really to taste a little of a foreign land; a land where things might not be so frosted with despondency… lands where all the vigor and sunlight of my old, dead village might become knowable to me again.

Cab Franc from the Uco Valley of Mendoza tells me a story of Argentina and beckons me… “che, boludo, che!…” and then I am onto the Albariños of Spain, meditating upon those hot, arid uplands where the Oratorios cut skyward over the vineyards. Sicilian Lambrusco and Chilean Malbec; the Rhône and the Riebeek valleys — I am drinking the whole world from the porch of my crumbling homeland, and as I read every label, I really do dream of absconding, forever.

Whether I will is another question, of course. For in so many ways, the Land of the Free is quite like the “Hotel California” — one seems somehow to possess every freedom but the freedom to take leave of the country itself. A thing with momentum is not easily stopped; three decades in this place and I have scarcely left yet — and this is in spite of continuously traveling for over ten years. More than this, I am from the country that everyone on earth wishes to come to. I am from the great originator of the global project of cultural homogenization — the highest King of commercialism and automobiling; the land of the coveted Blue Jeans and Justin Bieber songs and Coca-Cola.

How could it be that as I stare at the doom that hangs over this place, there are now, as I write this, families clutching their belongings in heinous deserts at a hot sprint northward for a chance at this American Dream? Are they ignorant of the problems here? Or do they bring with them a similar ‘organism’ of family and faith and culture to that of my old village — ‘organism’ that it seems my country’s great “progress” actually murdered? It could be that these migrants will come, station themselves here to enjoy the great fruits of wealth, retaining their dances and songs and closeness and custom — only to realize, all too late, that “America” is now a kind of machine whose accidental purpose is to kill that culture. The “melting pot” is now, it seems, a furiously speeding centrifuge; the uneven and organic ‘chunks’ of old cultures are no longer visible or swimming in the soup — now the centrifuge melts all together on a molecular level, spitting out the ultimate global monoculture as it whirs and whizzes… and at the end of it, the migrant’s grandchildren are unrecognizable or even lost.

But what might be read as a warning to the poor immigrant is, to the rich Gringo — a kind of eulogy. Of course, it is an unreadable eulogy; a thing choked with such grief and madness that a patriot must avert their eyes or slink into an impossible abyss of doubts. Or, if they have the courage to look at it, what will they do? The idea of “fixing it” feels so long-gone to me now; perhaps it is not so far gone elsewhere as it is in my home town… these are unanswerable questions.

I ponder it all as I sip. Beside me, my wife sleeps with our baby growing and kicking and sleeping and readying himself (or herself) to emerge into the world. What kind of a world will we give this child? All I can give now is a front-row seat to the terminal decline; a slice of extreme liminality and isolation. I am not rich enough to live in the few vibrant places left in America — our Manhattans and Chicagos and Vermonts may as well be a foreign country to which I have not been invited and could never afford. This provincial life of ours comes just a generation or two too late — if the “Empire State” is an empire, it is doddering and wheezing; it is Spengler’s collapsing empire… a place in which a young person will find nothing.

It may be that if we raise our baby here, they will grow to emigrate anyway — and then, what will my loyalty to this place have been for?

There are no answers, not yet. There is only wine and the resplendent leaves of the beeches wavering through the thick and broiling air; there is a label saying “HECHO EN ARGENTINA” below a printed map of Mendoza. Visions of Coahuila and Sardinia; half-baked thoughts of sailboats or of becoming a microbusero on the carreterra austral. Dreams of Greenland and the Falklands, or of estancias and asadas in Jujuy… Azeri odysseys, the sharp springs of Siberian motel beds, dribbling palmwine drunkards lurching about on Micronesian islands…

Now, I plunge either into the depths of pure written fantasy at my lonesome estate — or I make ready for a voyage to end all voyages. It might really be a kind of desperate and pointless melodrama; I cannot say. Perhaps things are not as bad as I have seen after so many years along the American highway. Or perhaps, if they are bad, they are only bad for me. It could be that what the critics say is true — that I am the sort of man who only pines for heaven, and that indeed, I would be happy nowhere on earth. If that is the case, may Christ be with me; and may the journey lead me to Sainthood by any means that Providence should allow. Whether my exile be internal or a real, genuine kind of exile, let me find my homeland in Christ Jesus as I find Him in the Blessed Sacrament… and after Mass, let me sip upon my wine and stare once again at the map of the good earth.

I believe that it is, in the end, a thing the Brazilians call “saudade.” Wikipedia defines it this way:

…an emotional state of melancholic or profoundly nostalgic longing for a beloved yet absent someone or something. It derives from the Latin word for solitude. It is often associated with a repressed understanding that one might never encounter the object of longing ever again. It is a recollection of feelings, experiences, places, or events, often elusive, that cause a sense of separation from the exciting, pleasant, or joyous sensations they once caused.

The term is completely apt because it describes a kind of mixed feeling; a kind of lost joy that is remembered so fondly and mourned in the same breath. It is a kind of contradiction in which the soul lives and resides and breathes — and Brazil is, apparently, the kind of country where a human heart can park their saudade comfortably enough.

Is America such a country, too?

Staring out at the speeding cars on the boulevard, I find no answer.

There are times when ‘boring’ is quite good, of course. As ‘interesting’ as it could be to travel to the hospital by way of a donkey cart when one has broken a leg — most people would far prefer the sane, simple, clear comforts of an automobile or an ambulance in such a case. But outside of the most dire emergencies and the most mundane sorts of tasks, it is always my policy to choose the least convenient, most ridiculous, circuitous route to travel from point A to point B.

For this proclivity of mine, I am always amply rewarded. In fact, the more inconvenient, difficult, and strange my route — the better.

When my wife and I began our journey southward to grandmother’s house for Easter Sunday dinner, we sought to do a thing that I have never heard of anyone doing before — we aimed to cross the northern quadrant of New York State using only local rural county transit buses. No driving automobiles, no Amtrak or Greyhound, no coach bus or taxi if we can help it; not even any real walking, cycling or hitchhiking. I’d searched out and found schedules for about a half-dozen obscure and mostly unknown rural bus routes, and strung them together into a bizarre and dirt-cheap long-distance traveling route.

This is much easier said than done. Each county’s transportation department seems to operate independent of the counties adjacent to it, and none of the schedules have been designed with intra-county transfers or long-haul transportation in mind. Moreover, these routes are not generally on Google Maps — in many cases, if they can be Googled at all, whatever digital footprint these bus schedules have is obscure, difficult to find, and often outdated. To find them, you must occasionally leaf through old, grainy PDF files of scanned schedules — some of which are unreadable, corrupted, or ‘dead links’. Very often, you simply have to call the office and see whether a route is still in operation or not; it may take numerous attempts to get them to answer the phone. Once you’ve done this, you must arrive at a stop at a certain time and begin planning which bus is next. Sometimes, to get to the next bus, you must walk miles and miles — or even stay overnight — all to cover a distance that, in a regular automobile, might take just a short while to travel!

For obvious reasons, no one does this. In fact, that it could be remotely feasible is not an idea that seems to have ever crossed the minds of the men and women who drive these rural transportation buses. On the bus that took us from Watertown to Lowville, the driver openly marveled at what a strange and unorthodox idea it was for anyone to attempt what we were doing. Yet, by the same token, she seemed pleased at our ardent enthusiasm for rural public transportation — a genre of public works that generally seems to go unseen, unnoticed, and often seems to be chronically underfunded. This is now and then true even in regions where the demand for such services is surprisingly substantial.

When I said that I’d write about it afterward, she said “maybe your article will get people out there to realize just how important these services really are. We need all the good publicity we can get.”

In a sense, rural public transit feels not only like an essential service for hinterlanders around the country, but like some last gasp or ember of a former, more "third world" America. To board these buses is to enter a world full of characters, where the clock runs a little slow, days are sleepy and long, and the map is totally imprecise.

The bus stops are often just tiny little shanties in the middle of nowhere; sometimes, they are only a sign nailed to a telephone pole and nothing more. The actual routes are cockamamie and often improvised — and the exact bus fare is occasionally vague. One bus we regularly use has a rider who seems to pay in car wash tokens; the driver said "yeah, by next month, I should have enough to get the bus washed!"

Sometimes, the check engine lights on the buses are blinking as we rattle down the backroads, but it doesn't stop the drivers from gunning those old buses up the mountain roads. The riders themselves vary from ex-cons fresh out of prison to Amish families to DUI guys, junkies, elderly farmers, developmentally disabled folks, impoverished families, and oddball eccentrics. Sometimes they bring things like pies to sell in town, 4-stroke engines, or even crates of live chickens. (The chickens are tolerated, by the way, not as livestock but as “emotional support animals” under ADA law!) You truly never know what you're going to see, who you're going to meet — and you never know just when you'll arrive at your destination.

For the long-haul local bus traveler, this delightful imprecision can also pose a real risk: it means one can very easily find themselves stranded in the middle of nowhere. Many of the towns these buses pass through are bereft of alternative transport options, taxis, coach bus stations, Amtrak, food stores, or motels — meaning if you miss your connection, you’re either hitchhiking or you’ve got to find a place to “stealth camp” until the next bus, and you’d better hope you brought snacks. Some routes only serve a particular stop once a day — or in certain cases, just a few times a week. There are even a few bus routes I’ve see that operate as infrequently as once a month.

But all of this just means the stakes are higher — and a journey that would’ve been a simple, boring ride in a car, train, or coach bus has been converted into a thrillingly strange kind of adventure.

From the Deep Woods to the County Seat

Knowing all of this, we rose at the crack of dawn and shouldered our packs to embark on a little experiment. From our home in our little village in the wilderness, we walked down the road to meet the bus at the senior center. “Come inside,” the driver told us. “I’m not leaving for a while, but we’ve got coffee.”

To be young in a place like this is to be a kind of celebrity. Conversations stopped as we entered, and all eyes turned toward us, wordlessly saying: “Look — Young people!!” Old Vietnam veterans eyed us with a smile; ladies looked up from their crossword puzzles and excitedly asked when my wife — who was and remains very visibly pregnant — was due. Conservation flowed freely, ranging from discourses on whether the blackflies will be bad this year, to which drivers were substituting for Dave next week, to whether local officials would finally tear down the old decrepit buildings on Main Street. Though we’d come early so as to ensure we’d be on-time for the bus, time seemed to lose its relevance; and when the clock struck a seemingly random note, the driver rounded us up and welcomed us aboard his bus.

Our local route is not what they call a “fixed route” service — it is instead a “demand service” route, meaning it offers flexible door-to-door service in outlying regions of the county. Because of this, the bus could get us to the County Seat (population ~5,000) in as little as 30 minutes — or the trip could take an hour and a half or longer. As a result, passengers have no real way of knowing when they’ll arrive except in the vaguest sort of way. Daily bus users seem to have achieved a kind of indescribable “flow” with this chaotic process; to understand what the bus might do on a given day, one either needs to be wholly plugged into the wider organism of the route and its regularities, or they would need a sixth sense. In lieu of these, the only option is to sit down and resign oneself to not caring what time it is, where the bus goes, or when they’ll arrive.

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On this particular day, the bus served some of the most outlying areas of an already remote county composed largely of wilderness. The bus sped down dirt roads, some of which struck me as only barely passable by the large and ponderous bus-van. Eventually, we were so deep into a network of unmarked and unpeopled dirt trails I wondered if the driver was simply riding around out there for the hell of it — until we came to a dilapidated old trailer home where a 79-year-old man lived. He rose from the door of his home — which appeared to have no electricity of any kind, though the man was not Amish — with a spunky step and a giant, toothless grin. An old farmer who’d sold much of his land to build himself a kind of retirement fund, he was too old to drive, and probably too poor to afford a car anyway. But judging by his bright affect as he boarded the bus, he didn’t seem to mind it one bit.

The driver greeted him and spoke up: “Bill, have you got any land you’re selling? This fellow in the hat is looking to buy a woodlot and I’m betting you might have a few acres for him.”

Apparently our bus driver had heard that I was in the market for a few acres of land, and was already working to broker a deal. But, having sold all of his holdings save for the acre he lives on, Bill had nothing for me. No matter — the conversation shifted toward how dairy farming has changed for the worse, and then to the Vietnam War, in which our driver had served in the United States Marine Corps.

“Yeahp,” he said, “when I came home it was 1973, and they called me a baby-killer. That was the same year they legalized abortion, too. So I’ve always wondered who the real baby-killers were!”

As he spoke, we veered back onto the blacktop road, and woods gave way to fallowing farm fields, small dairies, and Amish homesteads. Passengers began to filter on, each being scooped up at odd intervals. At a desolate crossroads, a young man emerged from the bush, out of nowhere — he was on his way to work a shift at Burger King. From behind the ruins of a collapsed barn, a woman in cut-off “Lilo & Stitch” pajamas limped up to the bus, smoking a cigarette. Amish men waved their arms along the road, where the driver would pull over with a sudden, jarring stop to let them board.

In listening to the passengers tell the driver where they wanted to go, they seemed to be speaking in a kind of local pidgin — “Upta Patsy’s, yup,” or “The mart by the Crisis Center” or maybe just plain old “hilltop.” The driver knew all of these locations, many of which were quite strangely positioned along the way, resulting in a cockamamie route. Finally, however, we pulled up to the bus stop at the County Seat — a wooden shanty in a desolate parking lot, where freshly-released convicts from Upstate Correctional Facility were waiting in clean white T-Shirts, holding feed sacks containing their belongings. They were waiting for the 8-hour-long Coach Bus ride to New York City.

“No, boys,” the driver chuckled as the convicts sidled up to the opening door of his bus — “this ain’t the bus to New York City!” As the door opened, we got off. Checking the clock, we realized it had taken roughly 90 minutes to cover a distance that takes only 30 minutes by car. “Then again,” I reasoned aloud to my wife, “you don’t hear people driving cars talk about how much faster it’d be to take a helicopter!”

Now, we had roughly four hours to wait for our next bus — The North Country Express. This is a bus that I have written about before:

We lounged at a nearby gas station to wait, sipping tea and reading the local newspaper. There was something very “old world” about this — here we were, in the largest town in our county, dressed well, idling with a purpose. Leafing through that newspaper, dipping the teabag up and down in my hot paper cup, watching the traffic, nodding at passers-by; we were in town on official business, and yet we were doing exactly nothing. I realized as we sat that this way of doing things used to be a great deal more common — that train stations, courts, libraries, street benches, barber shops, and so on simply used to have a lot more people waiting publicly. In an era of drive-thrus, overnight Amazon delivery, and on-demand conveniences — our stint at the gas station cafe tables felt downright archaic in the best way imaginable.

Soon, the bus arrived, and we sped westward into torrents of violent rain. For most of the way, we were the only passengers on the bus. Our driver fell silent; the rain and wind whipped the bus all over the road, and though the awful driving conditions made me rather nervous, I felt myself slipping into a kind of “liminal state” one only ever finds on empty buses speeding through the pouring, blustering, flash-flooding depths of grey and aimless northern infinity.

The droning of the bus fans and the whine of the transmission — the rhythmic slapping of the windshield wipers. A black figure along the roadside, huddled over a woolen shawl with one solitary, wet arm raised against the ravaging storm — the way the sideways rain shot into the bus as the door opened and the Amish woman entered, alone. It is in moments like these when some internal choir of angels begins to harmonize in the far-flung depths of my mind, and all the grave burdens of worldly concern evaporate completely. These are moments of such profound “nowhere-ness” that the sheer weight of this heavenly nowhere nestles the body down like a comforter, and the eyes sleep without sleeping, staring their glazy, gauzy stare out the fogged up windows…

Then, the bus’s arrival in Potsdam shocked me awake — and we walked through the soaking, fog-wrapped streets of that sandstone city, shambling about with our raincoat hoods hanging like monastic garments, drifting toward the light of the Stewart’s gas station like lost moths pulled to neon by instinctual magnetism. A bottle of iced tea, a slippery hot dog, a long and wordless look at my wife as the rain calmed to sunshine and birdsong outside the windows — it was nearly sundown, and we proceeded to walk up a hillside to a boarding-house, where I’d rented us a cheap bed.

Southward Miles — Energy Math

To walk more than one-hundred miles is no small task, and on this matter, I am well-qualified to speak. On several occasions I have walked distances in excess of this amount, if only to test myself, or to travel in the simplest, most natural manner available to me — to make my way upon my God-given feet. Each time I’ve endeavored to travel far distances by foot I’ve learned to marvel at the incredible speed with which most human beings now travel, whether by boat, automobile, bicycle, plane, or train.

A distance of just ten or fifteen miles might take a man the whole day to walk, depending on the conditions. For the motorist traveling in an automobile, of course, such a distance could be covered in less than fifteen minutes on the highway. Should the driver wish to spend his entire day piloting his car down the road, he could cover a distance of perhaps 1,000 miles — the walker could, at best, cover twenty.

Yet, being the consummate cheapskate, I have to wonder about all the wisdom of all this ‘motoring’ that Americans like to do — the Bureau of Transportation Statistics claims that the average motorist spends $0.81 per mile in total expenses for the privilege of such easy travel. This estimate figures not only the cost of gas, but the expense of insurance, maintenance, initial purchase, registration fees, and so on. Even if the BTS has gone far off the mark, or if an automobile owner is exceptionally frugal, driving must cost, at a minimum, $0.25/mi or more in all.

This figure is probably lower than what the long-distance walker pays to travel, once the extensive caloric needs of walking are taken into account. Three-thousand calories, heavy in fat and protein, carried, cooked, and consumed by the roadside — it is difficult to walk whole days for less than $20 per day unless one subsists on what they can pull from the dumpster. Cycling and canoeing involve the same problem, and so it is that the motorist can sit in his car, smiling at his relative good fortune and thrift.

Yet as he drives, a bus whizzes past him at a far cheaper price per passenger mile. To book a Greyhound bus ticket from New York City to San Francisco can still be done for a price below $250 per ticket — $232 is the lowest price I’ve lately seen. To make way across the 2,902 miles, from coast to coast, then, can be achieved at a cost of about $0.07/mile. And the Amtrak is not much more expensive; a $441 ticket results in a figure of $0.15/mi. It was this exact mathematical inspection of the various modes of transportation that ever led me to think more seriously about buses and trains to begin with.

These numbers can, amazingly, be improved beyond all belief, especially so far as regional transportation is concerned. For example, to travel from the US-Canada border at Akwesasne via Saint Lawrence County Public Transit, one can travel as far south as Gouverneur, some 70 miles away, for a single $2 bus fare (with free transfer included). This form of travel costs $0.02 per mile — a stunningly cheap figure, far cheaper than even a walking man could achieve under normal circumstances. If, then, a series of buses could be concocted from town to town across vast swathes of the countryside — bus to bus, stealthily camping overnight when needed, filling the ‘gaps’ either by walking or by the use of a folding bicycle, it could altogether result in the absolute cheapest mode of transportation imaginable in all of human history.

We marveled at these ideas as we boarded the bus at dawn. True — we were not operating under the most ideal circumstances just yet; what we were doing now was only a rough draft. We’d paid for a room the night before, which drove the cost up; we had not brought our folding bikes along, either. And worse, owing to a major lack of public transportation in Jefferson County, NY, a large “gap” in the transit systems exists. There is no obvious ‘bridge’ between the Saint Lawrence and Lewis County transit systems; and so we rose at dawn to ride a one-hour, $12 coach bus from Potsdam to Watertown. It rolled along the hoary steppes of the northlands in the darkness, stopping and stooping low by the steps of Clarkson University. The driver took our tickets and we embarked.

Next time, it will be different, I remembered. Rumor has it that the Saint Lawrence County system will soon be operating a $2 bus all the way to Watertown — where the Lewis County system takes over, offering service clear to Utica. At Utica, the private Birnie Bus system runs daily service to Syracuse, and from Syracuse, routes exist as far as Albany and Oswego. Going east, Birnie Bus runs to Little Falls, and another eleven miles of walking or cycling leads to Saint Johnsville, where a bus to Amsterdam runs daily, and from Amsterdam, the CDTA system totes passengers to Albany seven days a week. Next time, we could even make it as far as Ohio or Maine…

The possibilities are limitless, and they lilted upon the surface of our minds as we rolled southward in that giant bus, finally arriving at a Byrne Dairy gas station in sleepy-eyed Watertown, where the slatelike blue-grey dawn hung brightly in a moody display. We schlepped up a small hill to Jefferson County Community College, where Lewis County’s “JCC Connector” bus runs M-F service to Lowville for $4.

We were early; we ambled through the empty, silent corridors of the little college hall, sipping cups of tea, staring off into the distance. The bus wasn’t due until 9:30am — but I told my wife we might just as well wait outside sooner, and so we stepped out at about 8:50.

Thank heaven we did — the bus came thirty seconds later, and did not linger or tarry to its scheduled time of 9:30. We were shocked and grateful that we happened to flag the driver down at the right time; if we’d missed it we’d have been stranded in Watertown for another night. And, I realized — if we’d been here on a Friday and missed it, we’d have been trapped in Watertown until Monday! Lesson learned: always stand out at the bus stop as early as you can tolerate on strange adventures such as these, even if it is chilly, rainy, or dark.

The twenty-six mile route cost us $4 apiece, or, expressed per mile, it cost us $0.15 per person per mile — a figure that even a very cheap automobile could not boast. The Lewis County bus was larger than the others; a heavy, long, low kind of bus that swooned and careened smoothly over the long bluffs below the country asphalt. We sped by the frost-covered fields and farms, eyeing collapsed barn after collapsed barn — casualties of a rough and wild winter, where more than twenty-five feet of snow fell this year, decimating countless barns, structures, and homes.

There were no other passengers on the bus except one young man; a homeless fellow who was living at a motel in Evans Mills. The driver seemed to have a motherly attitude toward the fellow — asking him how he’s been doing in a particular tone that suggested she knew of some awful plight he’d only recently overcome or conquered. Perhaps drugs, perhaps abuse, perhaps abjection and poverty or all of the above — whatever his story, it seemed somber in its shape, and certainly, that little bus was his only mode of transportation and his motel room his only home.

“I applied for a job in Tennessee; maybe if I get it I don’t need to do no more of this winter shit again…” He slugged back from a one-liter bottle of Mountain Dew as he spoke, slinking down sleepily into the warmth of his hoodie, one hand resting on his belt buckle.

At Lowville, we disembarked and bid farewell to the driver. Now, we had many hours to kill — the bus to Boonville wouldn’t come to the Dollar General in town until 2:30. We wandered around in the misty village, swinging up to the Stewart’s gas station for a doughnut, having a sub sandwich at Jreck’s, and finally decamping at the village library for a spell to read and relax. Again, here we were — idling with a purpose, reading the newspapers, waiting for our stagecoach to take us southward for the holiday.

Where the morning had been only kind of chilly, and without wind, the afternoon brought wild, cold, harsh winds that kicked garbage across the streets of the town and sent the crows doing barrel rolls over the park. My wife donned a windbreaker, cinching the hood tightly around her face; we stared up at the second and third floors of the downtown buildings — all of them strangely abandoned and devoid of life. I couldn’t help but think of what lovely apartments they must’ve made for in former days; with great big windows overlooking this happy, bustling, cold little farm town. Some part of me has always adored Lowville as a kind of haven of sanity and peace — the final bastion of wholesomeness in the far-flung American steppelands; the kind of place with a good diner (Lloyd’s), a splendid stone Church (Saint Peter’s on Shady Ave), and even an annual Cream Cheese Festival. Yes, someday I could see us taking up residence in one of those apartments, throwing the windows open each morning to sing to the denizens of this last ember of a smiling, industrious little America…

The bus came on time — Route 631 to Boonville, our final bus in this strange journey. And it was the strangest bus we’d taken yet; for where usually, these buses are either packed with Amish folks, or are half-full with the sons of the “country poor,” or are now and again totally empty — our fellow passengers constituted, in this case, a totally new demographic of transit users. Every single passenger on the 631 bus was, excepting ourselves, a little… special. Developmentally disabled “individuals” (as the State system calls them now) filled practically every seat, and as we boarded, the driver, passengers, and the sort of ‘warden’ for the passengers all seemed at least a little leery of us. In Lewis County, it seemed, young, vigorous people all drive automobiles. The only people who are on the bus are either poor, old, or are… a little ‘special,’ and we did not appear to fit squarely into any one of these categories.

But the sensation of being strangers in a mostly unseen world of transportation was made all the stranger by the cockamamie route the bus traveled on. Like a scene from a harebrained sequel to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, our driver turned a drive that normally takes just thirty minutes into a high-flying, county-wide odyssey of unprecedented proportions; an hour-and-forty-five-minute fever dream involving practically every road, paved and unpaved, of southern Lewis County. Often, we drove in circles on weird roads I’d never seen before in my life — we backed into the driveways of old Victorian-era estates that had been converted into sanitariums for the intellectually disabled. The wheelchair ramp deployed out the back of the bus while our seatmates whined and groaned and stared and belched; the bus did another backcountry figure-eight as one fellow in Velcro shoes clutched his lunchbox, shooting a suspicious, paranoiac glance in my direction as though I had a thought to deprive him of it. Outside the windows, the misty rain blew in reams of 38-degree air in the sunless woods; until finally, after some part of our souls seemed to have evaporated into clouds above an unknown Valhalla — the bus dumped us off at the Tractor Supply in Boonville, where my grandmother was sitting, smiling.

We had done it — we had made it across the North Country for Easter. We’d proven that this odd, unlikely, dirt-cheap mode of travel is not only possible, but may be one of the most ravishingly beautiful, enjoyable, edifying forms of travel we have ever discovered.

My New Favorite Way to Travel

That this journey of ours was a kind of experiment or ‘pilot’ has already been mentioned; and as far as experiments go, we count this one as a raging success. With this journey under our belts, my wife and I agree that we have many more trips of this nature to take — our ambition is now to ride as many local bus systems as we can, on routes that extend as far as it is practically possible to travel, and for sums that seriously may constitute the very cheapest kind of travel that is possible in North America. For while the expenses associated with this particular trip were not as low as they could’ve been, I am now confident that they can be refined to the maximum — and that with a little know-how and planning, we can cover vast distances for practically no money, without the expense of owning an automobile, nor the precarity and danger of hitchhiking, nor the physical exertion of walking, cycling, and canoeing.

In all, this trip’s expenses were as follows:

1. Local bus to the County Seat: $3/pp

2. North Country Express to Potsdam: $2.50/pp

3. Room in Potsdam: $49

4. Trailways Coach from Potsdam to Watertown: $12.65/pp

5. JCC Connector Bus from Watertown to Lowville: $4/pp

6. Route 631 to Boonville: $4/pp

TOTAL: $101.30 for the two of us.

Possible reductions in cost:

1. Stealth camping instead of renting a room (-$49)

2. New Potsdam to Watertown Route, $2/pp (-$10.65 x 2 = -$21.30)

3. Use of folding bikes from home to North Country Express (ride 7mi on bikes to save $3/pp County Seat route, AND reduce North County Express fare to $1/pp instead of $2.50/pp = -$4.50 x 2 = -$9)

NEW TOTAL (pending new bus route to Watertown): $22 for both of us.

That the route is 146 miles in all, the cost per mile for both of us would then be $0.15/mile for the both of us, or ~$0.08/mi for a solo traveler. So far as I understand it, there is no other form of travel that can compete with these numbers — no automobile, bicycle, canoe, or walking route that I know of could result in a cheaper option.

But the cheapness is only a kind of ‘game’ I like to play — it is, to me, a satisfying puzzle to make such calculations as these. They would, of course, all be worth nothing if the experience itself was not so incredibly enriching. To fly low along the farm roads, staring vacantly at the overcast above, silently rattling down the highways by the cornfields and forests, ‘hidden’ in a realm of deep, calming obscurity — ‘gunkholing’ through the margins of the margins, rolling along with the car-less in an automotive world… it reminds me that the world is not quite so ‘flat’ as it may seem on it surface. There is not only one way to live; there are other worlds contained within ours that are seldom seen. Some are not even detectable except by great effort — yet once the traveler breaks into them, he is nourished, and the gravity of this country’s modern-era homogenization is lifted from him as the bus jostles down the rainy roads and drops him into tired old villages to wait for hours…

I am also a hitchhiker at heart; and so I relish the randomness of rural public transportation, for much like hitchhiking — one never knows with whom they will ride. It could be a quiet ride, or a wild one; it could be with twenty other chattering men or with no one but the silent driver. And, like hitchhiking, there is also an element of risk — one never knows if they will get stranded, forgotten, lost, or if the driver will fail to adhere to the route or pull over for a stranger when he hails the bus. In such far-flung places as these, where there may be no train or coach bus or taxi — the stakes feel just high enough to tickle the side of me that craves a touch of real risk in traveling. To take these buses, then, is truly to wander and to move with delightful degrees of imprecision. It is this very imprecision that has proven to me, again and again, that there is still a taste of romance on the long American road, so long as one is willing to embrace inefficiency, slowness, and vagary in large measure.

Until next time, my friends,

A.M.H

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Now, there might seem to be a certain cruelty in talking about housing. I say this because, by all I can tell online, it’s a sore subject among the younger crowd. A long and mostly endless stream of “blackpills” about the cost of housing can be readily found on any social media platform — and often enough, the “boomers” are the scapegoat; the ones who lived their American Dreams and, as the allegations go, pulled up the ladder behind them as they tasted their successes.

Then again, for the right young person — there are many opportunities to stop pointing the finger at the boomer and to become the boomer, if they so choose.

They’d merely need to content themselves with a manner of living that would be more in line with that of their own great-grandfathers than the life so often depicted on reality television, TikTok, Instagram, and whatever else. They’d need to disabuse themselves of the idea that they ought to abscond to some kind of a tropical Shangri-La; and moreover, they’d need to leave behind the idea that snow, overcast, wind, rain, and long winters are all that bad to contend with, because in all truth, they’re actually great. Yes, startling as it could be to many “Zoomers” and “Milennials,” it just so happens that if you really want to become a member of the landed gentry, it’s really not so far out of reach just the moment you decide that you like the snow, don’t need access to the hottest clubs and the biggest cities, and can be more than happy with getting cozy in a smaller house.

Moreover, the vision that I am going to postulate here would not even require very much in the way of work. I say this because by all I have seen, many young people today find the idea of indefinite wage labor to be a dismal one. They seem to prefer a “low-work lifestyle,” but very often, the manner of living that such a lifestyle would require is completely foreign to them. Because of this, right alongside the many social media posts on the topic of the awful expense of buying a home — there are just as many posts, it seems, complaining about “life in the 4HL,” or pining for remote work, or (rightfully) bemoaning the scam-infested, difficult-to-navigate, often cynical and fake job market that they’ve encountered.

Some go so far as to say that young Americans ought to move to foreign countries, where life is cheaper, the weather is “better,” and prospects all around seem more favorable. Yet I’m not so sure. It seems to me that there are a great many opportunities right here in our own country that would amply address the various grievances of so many of our nation’s young people. In fact, were it to be that any of those who seek a simpler, more straightforward, more affordable way of life matched themselves up with the various regions in which that kind of a life is on offer in spades — it just might make our country better. For, the places with inexpensive housing are often in great need of new blood; such places could often use the vigor, enthusiasm, and life that only young newcomers seem to bring.

To get there, we only need to take a little trip up north — to my neck of the woods.

Massena, New York is a place that I have written about before. In fact, it’s a place that I’ve been obsessed with since I was a little boy.

All one needs to do is to look at a map of the Empire State and find its northernmost point, and there it is: The Town of Massena, standing proud at the confluence of the Saint Lawrence, Grass, and Raquette Rivers. Anyone who stands along the mighty Saint Lawrence River there stands at the first stretch of American soil between open ocean and 20% of the earth’s fresh water — in the Great Lakes. More than this, the Seaway is there; a navigable channel that allows ships passage into this vast, incredible system of lakes. And alongside that first lock lies the Moses-Saunders International Power Dam — a giant dam straddling the international border with Canada that produces the cheapest municipal electricity in the United States.

This whole area is surprisingly flat; Massena’s south side is flanked with sprawling farm fields, rich wetlands, and a seemingly endless realm of high-quality timber. Water is plentiful here — with ample rainfall, substantial snowfall, and intricate networks of subsurface water, lakes, creeks, streams, and rivers, one need not worry about droughts and water rights. And the soil in the fields is some of the best in the American Northeast. Indeed, vast quantities of milk, grain, beef, apples, and other valuable foodstuffs is produced here, and the natural scenery, as well as the hunting, trapping, and fishing is all world-class.

And so if I should tell you that for the low, low price of just $29,000, you could find yourself enjoying the full gamut of Northern luxuries that is on display here, you’d think that people would be lining up for a chance at such good fortune.

Instead — no one is. For reasons I have been unable to discern, Massena is one of the poorest, least-desirable places not only in New York State, but in the United States at large. True enough; it’s very far to any large American city here — yet on the flip-side, it’s within very close distance of two major Canadian cities, and so you’d wonder if that’d make up for it. Apparently, it doesn’t. For though I personally find the area to be among my favorite in the United States, and in spite of having some of the lowest housing costs in America — the combination of distance from the rest of the US, a sub-optimal job market, a conservative culture (too conservative for the liberals), a liberal state government (too liberal for the conservatives), and perhaps above all, the endlessly “dreary” weather (which has far more upsides that it is presently popular to admit) has altogether conspired to make this place a totally forgotten hinterland.

Now, if people decided to come here and fix it up, do business, and make it “great again,” as certain politicians have ever said they’d do across this country at large — why, you’d have a generation of people coming in who’d be privileged with a very low buy-in in what is effectively a sleeping empire. No doubt, in raw geographical terms, and by any reasonable historical standard, this is a highly desirable place. It is only the whims and fashions of our very peculiar time that have temporarily arrested Massena’s inevitable emergence as a major regional power.

For those with a mind to see it, and a willingness to break rank with the pack — the opportunities to be a part of this ‘sleeping empire’ are now totally staggering. As an example, up on Route 37, which runs along the Saint Lawrence River, there’s a 600-square-foot house for sale for $29,000. It sits on a quarter-acre lot just a mile from a 3,000-acre nature preserve on the river, where bow-hunting is allowed and there are many dozens of excellent fishing holes. The house is also situated on a significant east-west route so far as public transit is concerned. And so, unlike so much of rural America — this is a place where one could conceivably live quite well without bearing the egregious expense of an automobile. Though I and my wife do not presently live in Massena, we live nearby, and we’re doing exactly this — we do not have an automobile, nor do we want one. We use the rural county transit bus, which we have found to be extremely cheap and quite reliable; and it has certainly saved us thousands and thousands of dollars by liberating us from the onerous expense of keeping a car.

The house is also situated within the Massena Electric district — meaning the resident would have access to the cheapest municipal electric in the United States, which presently sells for just $0.04/kwh. The taxes are reasonable as well, coming in at about $500 per year after the STAR rebate, or $41 per month. And, with such a strong Amish presence in the area, there are ways to purchase bulk food at cost through their channels that can lower one’s food bill to laughably low levels — my wife and I presently spend perhaps $300 per month on food for the two of us. Considering that the property has a well on-site, water is free, and as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little extra in electric for that — or they could have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply.

With a flip phone for communication — at $8/mo from US Mobile — and a willingness to entertain oneself by reading books from the library and fishing, one’s total monthly expenses could look something like this:

Taxes: $41 
Electric: ~$30 
Water: $0
Heat:
Transit: $53 for a 30-ride pass for each person living there, assuming you go to town 3x per week at $2/trip. Multiple options to take the bus to town each day from this location. 
Food: ~$300/mo. 
Telephone: $8/mo 
Entertainment: Fishing and library, free 
Internet: Use library

This altogether totals up to about $432/mo, or $5,184/yr for a single person. And for those who might be quick to point out that there could be a dearth of jobs there, note that when people say “there are no jobs” in a given area, they generally mean that there are no jobs that could produce a normal, upper-middle-class lifestyle there. Which, even in Massena and Ogdensburg isn’t entirely true. But even if it were, the Stewart’s gas stations in both towns are actively hiring part-time cashiers at $17/hr. These places will let you work just one day a week if you like, and seem to be pretty good about flexible hours. In this case, you could work just one ten-hour shift per week, and in so doing, earn more than 30% of what you need to live well at this particular house with just four days of work per month.

Working at Stewart’s is just one example, of course — there are plenty of ways to earn ~$5k-$6k per year in America, ranging from local wage work to traveling for seasonal work to running some kind of a mail order business from one’s home. I’ve known men who grow rare Chinese medicinal herbs in greenhouses on a tenth of an acre to sell via the mail; or my uncle, who takes lumber from old barns and crafts it into shelves to sell online. Others go out to North Dakota once a year to work the sugar beet harvest, head up to Alaska to work in the fisheries once a year, or work from the Department of Labor’s seasonal job list.

By the standards of our great-grandfathers — that is, with a little work here and there, a big garden, a fishing pole, and some venison in the freezer — there’s never been a better time to try to “make it” in America and live the older version of the American Dream. If we can’t see that now, it doesn’t necessarily mean that things have gotten bad — it might mean that our perception has become grossly skewed by an era of hyperabundance, marketing, reality TV, and social media comparison syndrome.

None of what I am writing is some kind of a thought experiment. My wife and I really live a life very similar to the one I’ve described here, and are living on practically nothing. And I’ve actually been inside of this house, because I nearly bought it myself back in 2021. It needs work, but not that much; you could realistically move right in. For the low, low price of $29,000 — or really, they’d probably take $20,000 — you, too could live this kind of a life. Heck, if you don’t have $20k, I know of a bank up here that would give you a mortgage on this place, with NO inspection or appraisal required, with 20% down. With a credit score over 700, and a couple thousand bucks, any American could live an earlier iteration of the American Dream — and could be living so cheaply, they’ve got their expatriate buddies down in Mexico beat.

This is only one example. I fully believe that there are ways to live a fairly normal life (by mid-20th century standards) in rural America for even less than $432/mo. There are ways to feed a family while working even less than forty hours per month — without welfare, or begging, or dishonesty. And as long as these possibilities exist, it seems to me that those who are anguished about horrible job and housing markets are functionally choosing to be anguished. After all, there’s nothing saying we can’t go and live like our great-grandfathers did. It’s all there for the taking; I see analagous homes for sale all over the country, whether it’s in PA, IL, ME, ND, IA, AL, MS, WV, or a handful of other states.

They are all simply waiting for young, enthusiastic Americans to come and say “yes” to these far-flung regions. Those who do will find not only that they have less debt, more free time for family, prayer, and creative pursuits — but that they’re actively making this country better. That they’re actively taking the great wealth of our history, land, and infrastructure and hanging onto it, preserving it, standing up for it — in a way that simply isn’t possible for those who choose to pack into top-10 cities with sky-high rents.

At the end of it, most people don’t want to live this way. That’s OK — I’m not here to judge them. But I am here to tell anyone who is fed up with the housing market, tired of living the “4HL,” and sick of seeing our country’s heartland regions continue to crumble that there are actionable solutions to their problems. They could do it today. They could make the change if they wished.

Heaven knows, if enough of them did, it could change American history for the better. And for a few of you — you just might wind up being our new neighbors!

As for the town itself, the word “future” is hardly mentioned — for how could it be? To see a human being under the age of 45 here is nearly as rare as catching sight of a moose or a marten or some other seldom-seen creature. And, like the moose and the marten, you know they’re probably not going to stick around for long, either. Usually, grim as it is to say it, they’re just one or two family funerals away from moving to Florida.

And the funeral home is busy — the lights are always on. In this village of less than 300 people, the fire department’s siren wails at least three times a week. Following each call, there is an accompanying Facebook post about what happened: most are posts about who broke a hip, who had a stroke, who’s going to Hospice. Quite often, the posts are obituaries. It is not a rarity to see the stretchers unloaded from the ambulance as one walks down the street here; and the church bells ring so regularly that when we first moved here, we wondered what kind of odd schedule that Church was running on. It turns out that they were almost all for funerals and wakes.

From afar, it could seem melodramatic to call this an ‘apocalypse’ — but that is exactly what this is. This is a place that is declining in suspended motion. Those here to see it can linger over every frame; brick by brick, the buildings falter and sink — face by face, headstone by headstone, the former paragons of this long-gone community find their eternal rewards, with no replacements to take over in their place.

As I write this, I gaze over at the old town school, which has a tree growing out of its chimney, and pigeons roosting in its classrooms. The lower floors are used by a wrinkled and wild-haired old fellow who stuffs the rooms with junk; he has stocked the old gymnasium with scrap metal, broken boats, firewood, and rusty vintage snowmobiles. Across the street, an abandoned stone storefront is crumbling onto the sidewalk, and in the eaves — more pigeons, cooing and nesting and defecating and squabbling. The telephone pole leans dangerously into the street; the wires sag into the boughs of giant, wind-gnarled spruce trees. The wind whips up the sand from the surface of the empty street, and the air tastes of the woodsmoke of residents’ stoves. Two bearded drunks zip around on their ATV’s, doing burnouts in the gas station parking lot and cackling as the yellow sodium street lamps kick on — they are only passing through.

Walking the back streets of the village, it is clear that this year’s recordbreaking winter has wreaked havoc on the structures in the town. While there are over five-hundred residential structures here, only half of them are occupied year-round. Many are camps, trailers, RV’s with protective pavilions built over their roofs, and rough old houses that have become cheap summer homes for an aging class of out-of-state residents. Peeling paint shanties, camps with sagging beams, and this year, trailers with collapsed roofs dot the wooded streets of the hamlet; many are ruined beyond any hope of being saved. Remnants of summertime parties from years’ past are strewn about the yards, too — beer bottles in the muck, tipped-over burn barrels, junk cars, boarded-up sheds full of bedding, fishing reels, inflatable swimming toys; all of them arrayed in a haunting still life of the abandoned summers of so many of yesteryear’s rusticators and roisterers.

Cruising the plat maps of the township, one finds a tremendous amount of real estate owned by the dead: roughly one-in-four properties have dead men listed as their owners. Google their names and find obituaries and unsettled estates galore. Many of the properties are likely unwanted by their inheritors, too; lists of those who survive the departed often include their current place of residence, and Florida, Carolina, Arizona, Texas, and other Sun Belt states predominate. Often, the taxes are unpaid, and the Town Board has been forced to raise the property tax cap. The Supervisor says a re-valuation of property is going to be necessary; meaning taxes will keep rising for the ones who stay here. One wonders if this trend could continue forever — if eventually, the hangers-on in a place like this will be forced to collectively finance a town budget formerly paid by more than twice the taxpaying residents.

More likely: Services will be cut. The town parks are already full of stone firepits that are doddering heaps of rock and crumbling mortar, all moss-covered and overgrown. Flood-damaged footbridges don’t get rebuilt. The little sewage system the town runs is in desperate need of updates; there has even been talk, here as with elsewhere in rural America’s crumbling hinterlands, of de-paving town-owned roads to save on highway department expenses.

Meanwhile, the process by which tax-delinquent real estate is ever sold off takes so long that, at the tax auctions, it seems one can only ever purchase half-rotted buildings. Had they been sold sooner, they might’ve been able to be saved; instead, they are usually purchased by faraway investors who only let them rot further. You see their names on the town’s tax rolls and instantly know the nature of their dealings — Bangladeshi immigrants with Queens addresses, firefighters from New Jersey, holding companies run by contractors from out-of-state. One wonders if, from afar, the properties appeared to be worthwhile investments owing to their startlingly low price. But, doubtless, should these new owners ever actually visit the properties, they will be in for a sobering moment.

I am not really complaining, not at all. Rural America’s levels of decay run on a spectrum, I think, and it only makes any sense to bemoan the decline during the first few levels. After these, a kind of ‘fulcrum point’ has been quietly attained — and a town or region has descended to such a radically feral state that decline is a foregone conclusion. Perhaps in this respect, a town is a lot like a hayfield — if it goes unmowed for a season, it can be mowed back to productivity. If it goes unmowed for a few seasons, it might be able to be, with considerable effort, ‘brush-hogged’ back into workable land. If it goes unmowed for decades, it is now a forest, and memories of arable land cease to be relevant. The occupants of such parcels tend to learn to use and enjoy the woods rather than pining for the long-gone days of lush pasture — sometimes, they may even come to prefer forests to hayfields.

And anyway, what we have here is, in historical terms, a “power vacuum.” The early days of logging and marginal farming in this region built a certain sort of town and raised a handful of families up into a position of strong influence. Early ‘fathers’ of the village set the tone and the tenor of the place; and its riches, meagre though they were even in the hamlet’s heyday, gave this town some kind of relevance to the wider world. Now, that has eroded entirely, and the unspoken question hanging over this place and others like it is — “what, if anything, will take root here now?” Without jobs, newcomers and immigrants won’t come. Without arable land or a suitable growing climate, the Amish and Mennonites won’t, either. The region’s young people are fleeing in droves, and their parents and grandparents are dying quickly. When they are gone, what will the future be?

Perhaps, after so many funerals and so many partings, there will be nothing. It is not hard to envision a future where the township is dissolved, the roads are de-paved, the town parks and buildings cave in, and the homes and storefronts are occupied only by rats, pigeons, and whatever ephemera those departing or dying have left behind. The Church (which is already merging with not one but three area Churches) will shut down; the bar will slide into bankruptcy and its owner will abscond to Florida. The store will close, and then, perhaps, it could be leased by a Punjabi family who thought “New York” meant New York City (a sadly common mistake among immigrants). They will realize they’re in over their heads, sink into insolvency, and then it will close again forever.

Of course, the moose will return, too — the otters will come further downriver; bobcats and fishers will hunt squirrels on the overgrown Village Green. The trees that would’ve been cut for firewood will grow into sprawling canopies and primordial behemoths. The few human beings who would remain in such a place would be, for lack of a better word, a little feral: the sorts of men who could not fit into the wide world of work and bills — the types who would rather subsist on beaver meat and blackberries than ever punch a clock. Such men are already here, to be sure, and it is doubtful that their ilk would ever leave. In all these respects, places like these will, as they decline, quite possibly preserve the greatest facets of both the Eastern Wilderness and of original, pre-modern American culture. Perhaps this is the default for such a place as this.

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After all, even the Indians didn’t live here. This is the Adirondacks — a name that is an Anglicization of the Haudenosaunee term, ha-de-ron-dah, meaning “eaters of bark.” Legend has it that this region is so termed because any Haudenosaunee or Algonquin foolish enough to attempt overwintering here soon faced starvation, and was forced to stuff his stomach full of the inner bark of pines and spruces to survive. Such people eventually made their way back to the Mohawk and Saint Lawrence Valleys, begging for food, and were laughed at and joked on as “bark eaters.”

Later, the whites who came here usually fared no better:

Such stories are common in the early histories of the Adirondacks. Years ago, I read an old, gigantic leatherbound history of the Adirondacks that had been published around 1915. It read like an especially long and twisted Cormac McCarthy novel. Suicides, drownings of starving relatives, land scams, murders, fires, ice storms, un-tillable land, low-quality ore, sickly ruminants, alcoholism, snows so deep that the pursuit of game was impossible. It should not be any great wonder that many of the earliest settlers of this wicked place usually left for the West, which, for all the trevails such places might’ve presented — offered a comparatively gentle series of prospects.

In the modern era, it seems, the only measure of subsistence that is possible here is found either in tourism or employment with the government — and in general, the latter is driven by the former. Tourism is simply the economic lifeblood of the Adirondacks; hotels, camps, resorts, taverns, little shopping districts, ski resorts — without these, large segments of the populous here would be forced either into an austere subsistence lifestyle or into moving elsewhere. And without them, government services would shrink and shrink until their eventual shuttering and death; state workers would move off, too. All that would be left would be ruins, memories, and a few tough old woodsmen with the skills and the grit necessary to eke a living out of this harsh, unyielding landscape.

Tourism is, of course, a weird bugaboo unto itself. Most visitors come from afar, and understandably aim to visit the greatest, most dramatic vistas the Adirondack Park has to offer. They want the sweeping, gorgeous, far-reaching views of the High Peaks region around Lake Placid, or the skiing experiences of Gore Mountain, or beach campgrounds on mountain lakes with a perfect horizon of jagged peaks; in places like these, they pack in to enjoy the scenery — and, unwittingly, to cause parking problems, erosion on trails, and gentrification.

They also tend to find the long drive up I-87 to be exhausting — and are not wont to drive an extra hour or two for less-dramatic, less-Instagrammable scenery, even if it is much less crowded. And so it is that the Park’s more obscure regions, like this village and its surroundings, are ignored. Vague, swampy highlands and low, unremarkable mountains — featureless chasms of unpeopled forests and blackfly-choked vlys: such areas as these do not attract tourists in any great number, and probably never will. They are firmly off the tourist circuit, and for it, they are often languishing in deep, generations-long economic decline.

Yet — strangely enough, these are also the areas where some extremely wealthy people have a penchant for purchasing sprawling, isolated estates. Certain billionaires who’ve enjoyed a spot on the list of the world’s hundred wealthiest people are known to abscond to this area occasionally, keeping small, hermetic, vaguely-medieval-style staffs of caretakers on lifelong retainer for their rare visits. The lot lines of such estates often border the property of some of New York’s most destitute citizens; the wealthy magnates themselves may never visit the nearby villages even once. One wonders if, in the event any of these wealthy landowners lose their fortunes, their estates might succumb to abandonment, too — to revert to wilderness again, as so many estates have ever done in this part of the country.

When villages like this one decline, there is often no one — no farmer or miner, no logger or bureaucrat, no working-class tourist, no ritzy ski bunnies or billionaires to stay on or intervene or care. The decay is almost wholly unnoticed and unseen — except by the elders. Once they, too, are gone, such places may only come to constitute a hidden world of un-chronicled dereliction and an exercise in a sweeping and wordless return to nature.

Then again — here I am, chronicling it. More than this, my wife and I have chosen to live here and intend to stay. In writing this, I think of an old legend about the mine down at Tahawus, which was shut down in 1989. It is said that when it closed, the State put one old fellow on payroll to live there, alone, for the purpose of “ensuring that the area decays properly.” I have no idea if this tale could actually be true, but perhaps this is to be my and my family’s lot here in this village. By all the signs I can see — it is very likely to be the default outcome of our life here, and if nothing else, it will be a fascinating thing to witness.

Surprises, of course, can come — especially to places where a ‘power vacuum’ has emerged. No doubt, there are resources here now; there is just enough vitality to altogether constitute an attractive prospect for those young families for whom the idea of a ‘soft exit’ from civilization is attractive. A bar and a Church, a store and a volunteer-run library and a county bus line — tens of thousands of acres of awe-inspiring primeval wilderness literally just outside one’s back door. As of today, there are four houses here now for sale for less than $50,000, and probably many more to follow; all walking-distance from the town’s major amenities. One could subsist here on a combination of exceedingly irregular informal labor, and hunting, fishing, gathering, gardening. One could plan to travel for seasonal work, or, if they are creatively-minded, they could try to use the internet to derive a small income by selling handmade items, mailed wild crafted herbs, or things like art, music, and writing. From where I sit, it seems as if it’d be a fine life!

Of course, I must say here that I am only living as I am now because of those of you who are paid subscribers to Hickman’s Hinterlands. I spend basically all of the money you pay me at the local businesses here, and so in that respect, your subscription monies are a direct contribution to this town’s continued existence. And what excess I can save will go toward buying an abandoned storefront here and using it as a brick-and-mortar clubhouse for paying Hinterlands readers. It is also my intention to turn my back barn into a hostel and a gathering-place — so that we can regularly host events here for all of you, and can take in travelers as they come.

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My gratitude for your patronage is, on these points, nothing short of immeasurable: not only am I writing for a living, but I am now poised to support our first child (who is due in July) here. And quite possibly, by way of your faith in me and your financial support for these ambitions, I could be able to spur some kind of a tiny Rennaisance for this town — a mild wisp of hope in the faintly beating heart of Obituaryland.

To close I’ll only remark on how completely strange it is that a place like this would die. We are in some of the most pristine wilderness on earth here, and there are times where, haggard though this hamlet may be, it contains all of the charms of a storybook village. True enough, there are no jobs here — but for how absurdly cheap the living is in this town, one only seems to need a quarter of one whole job to subsist. Verily, one could not build a house for what they are charging for them here… More than this, it is not as if commerce could not be conducted here. The internet is here; USPS is operable — and though we are far off the tourism circuit, and lacking in the kind of dramatic scenery that could ever draw that sort of interest, perhaps other possibilities for bringing in visitors could exist. Perhaps it could become a place to engage in a bit of ‘time travel,’ to sample the Empire State’s deepest hinterlands — a place for early retirement, for Catholic revivals, for cheap retreats for writers and thinkers and eccentrics of all stripes. And on these latter possibilities, if they could occur, they might take place right here on my porch — by the good graces of paid subscribers to Hickman’s Hinterlands.

Whether we are here to observe the decay, or whether we are here to breathe a little hope into this village, I do not know. We are new here, though I have been coming here for years; we know that matters like these are, at least in part, matters of Providence. Whatever the shape of our lives in this place may ultimately be — I am beyond grateful to be here, away from the monoculture, away from the cacophonies that are now blaring throughout America’s “Main Streets”. With a little gumption, it seems readily plausible that places like these may be the most apt locales in which to foment a revival of old-school Americanism; or to preserve the old ways of earlier times. To live among the principalities and powers that the wilderness breathes upon men and their efforts — to stand aright before holy God at the bleeding edge of the civilized world. I can think of nowhere better, dying though the place may be; perhaps we are buzzards and vultures — creatures taken with the sumptuous feasts of the carrion and corpses; scavengers who cling onto older bones and former times. If that is what we are, my friends, I say with a smile that indeed, we have found the right place.

NOTE:

While I cannot name which village this is (as I find it unwise to name it publicly online, for security reasons), I welcome paid subscribers to reach out if ever they are in the Northern Adirondacks — we would be thrilled to entertain you whenever you are in the area. Please stand by for updates about a potential paid-subscriber get-together here, too. While we’d planned to host this in June, because of my wife’s due date, we are now thinking about doing it in September. Those who come will, God-willing, be able to say hello to our baby — who, by all I know, is liable to be the first one born in this village in a very long time. Thank you, and God bless.