Today, I am writing from the edge of Denali National Park, at the raft guide camp I’ve been at for a few days. This is coming up on a week after my arrival in Alaska, the completion of a “50 state project” that I began accidentally in childhood. It was a big deal for me to visit all fifty states, but in the greater context of my life, there was a lot more to this trip than just completing that checklist. This trip, this particular trip at this moment, was very much a midlife crisis. It was a classic road trip novel, a quest to answer questions I had not been able to clearly articulate. And I got the answers I was seeking.

There’s a funny thing sometimes about enlightenment. Usually, when you discover a deep truth, you can dig back through memories to find a time that someone had told you that truth and you just weren’t ready to hear it. And I realized in the past few days that some of the lessons of this trip are things that my father had understood in childhood, but never knew how to explain to me. I feel that it’s not just my journey but also his; that I have completed something that he started, and uncovered a hidden aspect of his legacy.

Anyway, I arrived in Alaska and shortly began to feel a sense of arrival at home. Not right away. My first few days in this land were actually not that great. I was deeply frustrated, in fact. But, it did click further as I got deeper into the state, and by the time I was driving the actual park road in Denali National Park, it hit me hard. That this place is special not just on its own merits but to me. This place contains the answers to my deepest, oldest questions. This place is kind of what I’ve been looking for all along. And yet… so is West Virginia. This is even more, but the basics are there too.

This is a place where there are fewer people and more mountains and trees. And it turns out that such an environment enables people to be better to each other.

Ultimately, it didn’t take me long at all to feel that this is home. And that I must stay. So, I did kind of announce that in a few places.

Now, though, it’s time to be careful and considered, and methodical. I got really excited at the prospects before me – of it all seeming to come together to an even greater degree than WV. I started to see WV as the compromise because at that moment I was on a leash to New York that kept Alaska out of reach, and now that leash is broken. I do need to build my future here. Yet, I still don’t see myself as a man of one place. I will be back and forth. I will be both an Alaskan and a West Virginian, though an immigrant to both.

So here’s what’s next. I will be moving to Alaska, and it will become my primary home base. I will be buying a lot of land and building a compound based around the premise of intentional community. There will be room for others, maybe just my family but maybe, hopefully, more. It is the exact same vision as Jackson Acres in Bruceton Mills, but bigger, more ambitious, and in my mind actually more realistic for reasons I don’t really expect most people to understand.

Simultaneously, there are other life changes. I need to let go of social media altogether and that is really hard for me. It is like quitting smoking or leaving a toxic relationship. It’s not something that I can expect to just accomplish instantly. It’s going to take me time and work and there is a kind of transition to something else. But it does have to happen.

At this point, though, I need to slow down and not be reckless. I do need to be financially wise and the harsh reality is that I can’t really afford to do the whole thing the way I want to at this precise moment. I want a large piece of land. I don’t have the cash for it, and I’m not situated to get a loan. So it has to wait. There are a few pathways to get there. There are also alternative approaches, like just getting a minimalist rental to get through the winter. But, that means neglecting obligations back east, and spending more money than I have.

Essentially, I have two main options right now. I can try to stay right away, and put myself in a situation where money will be pretty tight. Or, I can return to my retreat in Bruceton Mills, and use the winter to plan and regroup. I can work on my house there so that it’s ready for my prolonged absence and not something worrisome. I can also refinance it so that it is less of a financial burden. But really, I will be able to accomplish more and be set up for success here more effectively if I take the time to go back to West Virginia, and New York as well, and do what needs to be done, to prepare correctly, to build up resources, to search for the right opportunity, and to come back here on the best possible terms.

Jackson Acres North is absolutely the plan. It’s gonna be epic too. But, it’s not gonna happen right away. The next stage of this journey is to plan, to conserve, and to do it the smart way.

I’m going to stay in Alaska through the end of next week as originally planned, maybe a little longer, and then head back to the lower 48 for the winter. I may even do a European tour next year as there are reasons for that to happen then and not be put off further. But eventually, maybe next summer or maybe even next winter, I will be returning to Alaska to establish roots and to build my future forever home. For now, there’s work to be done back east, and I will do it.

Photos cannot do this place justice and not just because I’m an inadequate photographer or for the limits of technology. It is the whole thing, the smell, the cold air, the other tourists hanging out their cars with camera… and words echoing John Muir in my head. We are in the midst of gods. We are in the true heart of the earth, the place where clean air is made. This is my home, our home, our true home.

This is my environment. I am a part of this. These trees, these far away creatures and fantasms of another world, they are of my world, they are the hidden heart and blood of the planet I inhabit. They are the hidden truth of the country I love, the ancestry of the ground beneath all of our feet. This is America, this is Earth.

This is home.

I’m going to stay. Not maybe, not thinking about it. This is home now.

So that kind of gives me a couple more answers about where I belong. There’s really no point in continuing to try to shoehorn myself into the main portion of society where I will never really be understood her embraced. And unfortunately, that also means that it’s time to let go of the idea of electoral politics. Two reasons. First, this thing; Voters cannot be reached if it takes five minutes for them to see me as something other than weird, because voters won’t give you five minutes, they give you five seconds. And I will never become a person who is appealing to the average person within five seconds. I will never be able to say the glibly satisfying things that make a person appreciate a soundbite slogan. The other reason is what I learned about social capacity and finite energy and balance on this trip. I just don’t think that I would physically survive the campaign trail, and as such, I don’t think I should do it. I think a lot of people have said over the years that the people who were truly the best qualified to lead would never seek the job, and I guess that’s my situation. I bring the depth of understanding to everything I do that would make for a good policy maker, but we do not elect politicians based on depth of understanding, reelection based on charisma in soundbites of 10 seconds or less. And that’s just not my thing, and it never will be. I would really like to live in a world where we elected leaders based on the depth of their understanding, and in that world I would be a leader, but I just don’t see a pathway to that world as long as democracy is the fundamental concept, and I am not ready to abandon the concept of democracy since I can’t imagine a pathway from democracy to an enlightened form of leadership. So, no elected offices for me. Maybe advisory roles, maybe I find a way to sneak in to a leadership position without a campaign like Hamilton did, but I think it is time to go undeclared, and instead to declare that I will not be running for Congress ever, versus the prior position of doing it later.

The main purpose of this trip has been to figure out what is next for me. The next purpose was to figure out in greater depth the answers to some of my social dilemmas and particularly to understand the barriers keeping me from intimacy and vulnerability. I have gotten pretty good answers to all of those questions so far. Not complete solutions, but understanding that helps me choose a path forward. The details are still unclear, but this trip has been profoundly valuable in what I have learned. I have still not made my final destination of Alaska, but really, that doesn’t matter; the novel has reached the climax of this plot plot, and from here we are merely working toward the resolution of the story. we continue to the end of the journey quite likely without much further drama, and then from there we begin the revisiting portion, tying up loose ends, closing out the plot lines that have not been resolved yet. I have to go back to northern space Pizza and Donair to finish my conversation with that family of immigrants and learn about their successes and challenges, I have to go back to Sasquatch and finish our conversation and give him the answers I couldn’t give him last week, and I have to go back to Lake Stevens Washington and see what else might happen there. That is likely going to be mostly the end of this journey, where the epilogue is written, and then from there, perhaps back to West Virginia, perhaps I establish a new homebase in the west, but it is true but I am never going back to exactly the life that I had before, although one could argue that there was never any coherent pattern for me to go back to Hill. What has bound me to the northeast binds me no longer. I am the most free that I have ever been assistant I have ever been to truly knowing myself.

Today? The Klondike Highway, to the top of the world highway. Tomorrow back to the United States, then Denali and the river.

Anyway it’s too much, it’s too big an editing task.  Imagine if I tried to actually write something about each state!  If I did, I could make it a book itself.  That’s really not a bad idea.  I could even make it a page, a section of this web site, and not just one blog post.  An entry for each of fifty states – the story.

Yes, I think I should do that.

of course that doesn’t actually make any literal sense in context, it’s just background music . But you know, I am finally on the road. I haven’t quite gotten very far just yet, as I write this, or dictate it anyway, I am leaving Richmond where, once again, someone I connected with for supplies along the way had questions about my story. This is a conundrum that I posted about on Facebook the other day: I am trying to learn to listen and seek the stories of others, yet, what actually happens is that people ask me question after question and I don’t get to stop talking. Of course there’s a skill deficit to that as well, and I am trying to learn how to stop talking and listen, how to stop telling my story and instead invite someone else’s story. Sometimes it’s hard to ask for the story, when it may not be a comfortable story. I find sometimes that I am scared to ask for someone’s story because I don’t want to hear the tragedy, I don’t want to feel inclined to try to solve their problems, or I just don’t want to feel bad for how much kinder life has been to me than to them. That is why I am on this particular journey, particularly to cope with the idea that I cannot fix the world, I cannot make life fair for the countless people to whom life is not fair in worse ways than how it is not fair to me.

Richmond is not really on the way, but this is not a trip about the most direct route in the first place. I’m trying to figure out my best way to camp and travel as things change, as my body is a little bit worse than it was on the last cross country trip two years ago , and I was pretty miserable that time as well. We don’t really talk much about being miserable while traveling, and that time I was directly punished for it; the woman I was visiting was very upset that I said negative things about the trip, as though The travel being unpleasant was somehow a judgment on her. But the simple fact was, I just wasn’t comfortable. And I’m not now.

So, I’ve been working on upgrading my bougie SUV camping routine, and I am very much on the fence about quite possibly upgrading to an all out camper once again. I invested in a custom mattress of the largest size that I can fit in the Volvo while still having any space at all for gear, and while I have gotten out of the habit of traveling with a cooler at all, this lime situation has me needing to keep medication cold, and so I went looking on Facebook for a good quality car fridge, which led me to Richmond. Of course, by the time I got to Richmond, the guy with the fridge for sale had stopped responding, so I went back on marketplace and found one in Asheville that is actually an even better deal, and while I was in Richmond I found somebody selling some AirTags that I need for the security of all of this gear. And then I met that person, a couple actually, and they asked questions about my story, and I guess I just kind of started talking, and then I walked away, and then they walked back up to me and we started talking again, and I guess I told them bits of my story and answered their questions for around half an hour, and I still kind of regret that I didn’t ask more questions about them and their story. I think right now I’m broken on empathy, I’m just not succeeding at properly caring more about others than myself, and I think that is really why I need this particular trip.

I’m thinking about books, and themes from different stories I have read over the years. The one I want to read again right now, but it’s not on Audible, it’s Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I feel like that really is the trip that I am on right now, chasing Phaedrus. I also feel a little bit like Thoreau in the version he tells of his Walden pond experience, although I don’t believe him and never did. Thoreau wanted to tell a story about self-reliance, and failed at it; in fact, I think he was the first archetype of the clueless self-help writer. Here’s the story of Thoreau: Henry was a privileged young man who was bored in life, and I think that he felt for some reason but he just couldn’t cut it in competitive society, and so he decided to go and run away and do things on his own. And so he tells the story about how he went into the woods and basically built this whole little country estate for himself using only the labor of his hands and blah blah blah. The truth is, he went camping on his family’s property. He was not poor, he was not starting with nothing, he pretended to start with nothing by imagining the things that he already had to be free and available to everyone, which frankly is exactly the mistake that every self-help writer makes. it is the fundamental problem of privilege.

I think that this entry has to be kind of a table of contents, and I think that I need to spell out what it is that I am learning about and thinking about and writing about. Make no mistake, this trip is a midlife crisis. It really is a crisis. I should know by now who I am and what I’m doing and why, but I just feel like it’s not working. I’ve done all of the things that you’re supposed to do, but not really, not at all. I haven’t compromised, I haven’t settled down, I truly have not learned to love and I absolutely have not learned anywhere close to how to receive love. If I am honest with myself in a way that I seldom openly am, the truth of the matter is that my life has been governed by something resembling a hero complex, what the young people are now calling “protagonist syndrome”. Now, I think their criticism goes over the top. True, it is kind of all about me, but it’s still about what I can do for others. It’s about trying to solve all of the problems of the world, and settling for spending my entire life solving problems of individuals, problems that are depressing as hell because my solution is not a complete solution. What I do is I help people who are broke because they are broken, and because I cannot help them not be broken I try to help them be a little bit less broke. And it’s not working. I tell myself the starfish story and how it’s important to make a difference in each individual life that I can regardless of how many other people are still suffering, but it doesn’t work. My dominant emotion tends to become that of Schindler at the end of Schindler‘s List, lamenting that he couldn’t do more. By the way, it’s not like I’m great; I’m lazy as hell, I barely work any hours, I rely on other people to get everything done for me basically. But you know, I make the hard decisions, I give the advice, I know what to do. But I am burnt out.

My father always told me that he didn’t know anything about practicing law or running a business or any of the weird things that I do, but what he did know was that what I was doing was not working, not in the way that I needed it to, and he said that the smart money move was for me to find something else to do, and he was right. So you know, that, but it’s not so easy to just quit so along the way I might as well start by simply taking a little break, clear my head a little bit, get back into a literary mindset.

I tried to take a day off, but it didn’t work. I hired a replacement and told my staff that I was on leave, I told the government I was on leave, and it was not enough. Ultimately, it has been a process over time to gradually pull back, as I delegate more, and I finally got the government to honor a short moratorium on my hearings altogether. For six weeks, which should be enough for me to have one proper day in the eye of the storm – three weeks after the last hearing to stop worrying about it, and then a few hours before I start worrying about the next one three weeks later. I have at least three weeks of driving before I get to the Arctic, about as much on the way home, and kind of an open ended question in the middle. It might honestly depend on when I run out of money. After that, I come back to life, I recommit, I find the next mission and I truly enter middle age.

I typically like to drive no more then 400 miles or six hours a day, if avoidable, so that basically sets me up for more than 30 driving days, really at least forty.

There are places within Canada where premium gas is presently close to $8 per gallon, though I guess not quite with the conversion rate. Still, I’m not expecting much more than 15mpg for most of the way.  So realistically this is 1000 gallons of gas, and looking at GasBuddy, I can expect to pay close to $6 a gallon or more for parts of it.  That makes the gas alone on this trip potentially upwards of $6000.  Hopefully less, but that plus food, tolls, and the occasional lodging.  This is pretty darn likely to end up being a ten thousand dollar trip before it’s all over.  I don’t doubt that it will be worth it, though.  

Even with all that figured out, I am still seriously considering adding a camper trailer to make the extended time off grid a little more comfy.

I started traveling essentially as soon as I had control over it.  In childhood, my parents tended to center travel around a fixed location, a weekend house they built on the opposite side of the city in the Pocono Mountains.  But once I graduated high school, travel became a bit of an unconscious habit.  I don’t really remember the exact progression of my road trips, but I started practicing with the eight-hour drive from Long Island to Houghton during my first bit of college.  After my sophomore year in the chaos my life entailed at that time, I ended up starting to take the occasional impulsive overnight trip, starting with a music festival in Illinois.  Then I joined the Navy and flew back and forth when I wasn’t driving, and eventually took my first real cross-country trip as a move in 2005, and then back again less than a year later.  Really, I look at it as one continuous voyage because I didn’t come back or fly at all along the way.  I left New York for California in late fall 2005, and then from there took a six-month deployment across the equator and international date line, to Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Dubais, and then myriad figure eights off the coast of Iran for a while, then back to California via Hong Kong and Pearl Harbor, and then back across the country.  By that point in my life I had been to around half of US states (I had a little laminated map) and a total of eight countries, on only three continents.  Over the next almost two decades, I continued to travel habitually between work and my hobbies, not to mention the occasional idle meander.  I started to track states where I had visited, states where I had worked, and after a business trip to Montana in January 2020, I realized I was within striking distance of all fifty states.  With the lockdown in progress, I saw little reason not to just go and explore the backwoods of those seven remaining states.  Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Alaska.  Along the way I would also revisit the PNW with my car and my own boating gear.  But the trip essentially ended at Bellingham, as the border was closed.  

I did some more road tripping the next year, when a Grand Canyon paddle trip became available, and then I ended up briefly dating someone in Arizona.  Jackson and I and the Volvo checked off a few more states that way. 

I have been wanting a “redemption run” to cross the border successfully and drive up to Alaska.  Then this year happened.  Man, I guess this year snuck up on me but it’s been a doozy.  My father had a stroke and died, and the event itself wasn’t as painful as I feared, but boy did it force me to think about the course of my life.  I realized that it is time to reboot and reorient, and that this up and through plan with the law practice just maybe isn’t the right answer after all. And I don’t know what is next, but I need a break.  I need time off the grid.  I need new settings and fresh air.  So, it’s time to go to Alaska.  

I arranged things with the government back in April to keep most of August and September clear from my hearing calendar, and then went a step further and hired someone to cover the bulk of my hearings for the foreseeable future.  Currently the plan is to go yet the final step and simply walk away from the whole practice, helping my employees get jobs elsewhere and referring my cases to a colleague.  That is all in motion, and it’s time to get moving.  Nothing is holding me back here.  Work is squared away; the little that I do need to do on the road I can easily handle remotely.  My finances are in adequate shape to coast for a while without worrying about income.  

So here I am, a little past due for departure, and I’m realizing that I still have some planning to do.  Not a ton, but some.  

I realized that if I was driving the Alcan Highway anyway, I’d be close enough to the actual arctic to go just that much further.  Canada has a road all the way to the Arctic Ocean, the Inuvik-Toktayuktuk highway.  From what I have gathered so far, it’s a challenging road as roads go, but still a road.  I can traverse it in my Volvo no problem, certainly with the small cargo trailer; possibly with a larger camper.  I’m still doing research.  

Back to the “what a year” factor, it was just a few days ago that I learned that I have Lyme disease.  So, no big deal, it’s just a bunch of pills for two months, the same two months I had this trip planned.  I have actually suspected the disease for a while, but now there is a little less doubt, and some hope for treatment.  But the fatigue and joint pain I have been increasingly feeling over the last year isn’t just in my head, it’s not just laziness, something is really wrong.  And that makes my kind of think it would be kind of okay to indulge in a slightly more comfortable travel setup.  More on that in another post, I guess.  As I type this, my Apple TV is showing me a lot of old travel photos just because that’s the screensaver.  I must go.  

The basic itinerary is pretty simple.  I’ve got a couple specific people to connect with, starting with two of my dad’s sisters, in Atlanta and Sacramento.  I’ve also got to pick up a boat I bought near Sacramento, and I may be doing some boat transport along the way.  I think me and Jackson and the Volvo may also just swing down to Florida for no good reason just so that THEY can get a little closer to my fifty state total.  After Sacramento, there are no deadlines or schedules, just north and whatever happens along the way.  I’ll decide along the way, I suppose, which is first between Denali and Tutoyaktuk.  I think that maybe Tuk first makes sense, but I figure I’ll figure out more detail along the way.  There’s a junction point where each is 500 miles in the opposite direction, so distance does not give me an order to visit them in; they are both forks off the same road.  And after I have visited both, then I guess I just come home.  Meander even.  

I am struggling to plot the route on apps, too, just because I can’t find one app that can handle the whole multi-stop route all at once.  But basically, out and back again in a circular pattern around the country will be at least 15,000 miles, with room for more.  It’ll be around a thousand gallons of gasoline too, almost anyway, and in some spots premium is up to $8 per gallon in deep Canadian backcountry.  

I actually opened this document window to just start updating the packing list.  I don’t want to just start loading, and I think I’m basically ready to pack and stop worrying about getting the house perfectly ready.  I may want to lock some stuff in the storage room, and clean the kitchen and some stuff, but I can still be on the road by the end of the week.  Boy that didn’t sound convincing at all. 

I feel kind of bad that I haven’t been blogging along the way on this trip. I’ve been updating Facebook and sometimes Twitter and Instagram, so see my personal social feeds for the blow-by-blow.

I’ve been on the road for a little over three weeks now, on a trip that will eventually encompass the whole month of August, nearly 10,000 miles, and I suppose around a dozen states – 13 so far, probably at least one or two more along the way. Jackson has swam in three Great Lakes and one ocean; he will hit the other ocean before the trip is over, and the other two Great Lakes when we get home if not before.

So why? I realize now I don’t need a reason. I don’t need to justify travel. My ultimate reasoning for this trip comes down to wanderlust. Many years ago I was inspired by the Johnny Cash song “I’ve Been Everywhere”, but I never really did anything about it. Honestly, I still haven’t – I haven’t been to most of the cities and small towns he names in that song – but at one point wide travel was a personal goal, one that just kind of fell by the wayside. When I first drove cross-country in 2005 and 2006, I had a laminated map that I drew on with a sharpie to illustrate the states I had been to, on that trip and in general, and if I hadn’t lost it in some move years ago I would’ve kept it going. I think I’d gotten to something like 22 states by the end of that trip, maybe more. By the beginning of this year, I’d been to 41; by the end of January, when business took me to the interior northwest for the first time, I’d gotten to 43. At that time I’d set a goal of hitting all 50 before turning 40, which would mean a trip to the remaining seven (including Alaska) this year. COVID-19 seemed to nix that plan… and then one day, controversially, I just decided to go anyway. While I care about the pandemic, I do not believe life should grind to a halt to wait it out.

This is not purely a mission to check off trivia facts about myself or numbers on a list. I don’t want to have visited all 50 states by age 40 just to say that I have. Honestly, it’s not that impressive – 40 years is a long time to wait for a trip that could be done in a year; a teenager could do it with their first beater car. No, it’s not an impressive achievement. It’s just a starting point. By visiting all 50 states, albeit many White briefly, I can get an idea of where I want to explore further. Now unfortunately in that sense the mission hasn’t been as productive as one might hope; I haven’t quite *ruled out* that many states. From this trip, frankly most of my stops have been worth further exploration down the line, but yes I think I can focus on fewer than half. Wyoming certainly merits more time exploring, and I think is my next mountain biking destination. Michigan is amazing for gravel biking, and I guess really just a general relaxing vacation. Washington and Idaho require more river exploration. The other states from this trip admittedly made less of a lasting impression, but nonetheless I will return at least briefly on future travels.

Another purpose of this trip was much less abstract: I was just going nuts staying in Buffalo, and I didn’t feel content to repeat my usual travels. Ohiopyle and surrounding areas have come to feel similarly stifling as Buffalo. North Carolina was similarly played out for me after spending most of last year in the area. The only option to satisfy my wanderlust was to go exploring.

Finally, this trip has been a voyage of self-discovery. Not in any profound way. I don’t think I’ve learned anything I didn’t already know; but I confirmed something I’d maybe forgotten, and verified something I’d come to doubt. I have learned that I am inherently a nomad. I am not, by my nature, meant to be in one place. None of the places I’ve been, as amazing as they have seemed to me, have rung out as a natural “home” in a particular sense. No place out here triggered in me a nesting impulse, a desire to stay put. To the contrary, the more I traveled, the more I wanted to travel; the more I found myself a visitor and a stranger, the more I realized that is all I’ve been anywhere, including Buffalo and even Long Island. I am, in a philosophical sense and obviously not to be confused with the sociological phenomenon, homeless. And that is fine. What I call home is merely an arbitrary choice and a practical arrangement, a place of convenience to leave behind the things I don’t need to travel with, a place to receive mail and pay taxes, and a place to cultivate an adequate sense of normalcy for the comfort of others. My home is not a true home in the emotional sense. I do not profoundly miss it. Yes, from time to time, I desire rest from the road, and the place is suitable for that; but only temporarily. I will not remain there indefinitely.

So there it is. Mission accomplished – I have learned more about who I am. I have not solved or settled anything, I remain unsettled and migratory, but I know that is my unavoidable nature. I will not fight it further. I will not try to civilize myself. I will not be domesticated. And I will live with the implications – the largest being that it will be even harder (though still not impossible) to find a suitable partner. Tinder it seems remains a joke – the last girl I talked to seemed promising, until she said, bitterly, “some of us have to work.” She didn’t care that I do – it’s not on her terms so it doesn’t count. She’s not for me, that’s fine. I’m open to suggestions if anyone knows a good dating platform for vagrants.