In early 2020, just as the first stories about COVID-19 were hitting the national news, I took a trip to Panama. I rented a little car and drove nearly every paved road in the country, and a few unpaved ones, some of it with a friend from college, but mostly solo.

Yesterday I found my daily journal from the trip. It was mainly field notes and observations that only I would find interesting, but I have selected a few excerpts to share. Just in case it’s not apparent from these selections, I had a great time.

From Day 6:

I had good orange juice and a so-so burger at the hotel restaurant. The other guests were all garbage.

On Day 7, I checked out Boquete:

Boquete is a nice town, but it’s full of backpackers, retirees, and other white people.

So I didn’t stick around. Instead I drove over the Continental Divide, left my car in Almirante, and took a water taxi to Bocas Del Toro, where I only stayed overnight. I had this to say on Day 8:

On the water taxi ride I saw some brown boobies, which are birds.

Also …

I don’t like the kind of tourists that go to Bocas Town. There isn’t only one type — I just don’t like any of them. The old people are probably the worst, though. When we got off the boat in Almirante, one old man decided he needed to tell one of the kids working on the dock how to do his job, that he needed to help the passengers off the boat before he started unloading luggage. What pisses me off the most is that he thought he was doing a good thing. Seriously, fuck that guy. I hope he dies soon.

Then I ended up back in Boquete.

I was planning to go to David or thereabouts, but I took a wrong turn and didn’t realize it until I was already much closer to Boquete, and since I hadn’t eaten anything all day and I was tired and sore from sitting in the car and from hitting a few too many massive potholes that the car only came out the other side of because it bounced so goddamn hard when it hit the bottom … Boquete it was.

On Day 9, I discussed the luxury of a hot bath.

… I’ve been roughing it for years and I don’t have indoor plumbing. I shower at the gym or take an ice bath outside. Yeah, I’m super hardcore, and also some high school kids saw my wiener.

Sometimes that school bus pulls up at the exact wrong moment.

Later, I recounted a conversation I had that morning with the owner of the hotel.

David, Panama is growing quickly. I can see how that sentence could be confusing; he didn’t call me David, and I’m not calling you David, even if your name happens to be David. David, which is the name of a large city in Panama, is growing.

I’m not sure who “you” was, but I guess I always write as if someone else will read it, even if it’s my private journal. Day 9 was the best day of the trip; it will find its way into at least one of my longer pieces, so I won’t say more about it here.

On Day 10 I got to do some real driving.

The road up the hill was pretty steep and winding, and it just kept going up, higher and higher, and all along the way there were Ngäbe people, and kids especially — hundreds of them. I went to Hato Chamí and kept going. I went to Cerro Flores, then back down and off another side road to Peña Blanca and Llano Tugrí.

After awhile I was on a new road that isn’t even on the map yet, and I just kept driving up these impossibly steep hills and around these ridiculously tight, blind corners, dodging kids and cows and whatever else turned up.

After awhile I was pretty sure I was headed back down again; first I started seeing more vegetation, then dump trucks and taxis, and finally I arrived back at the Panamericana in Tole.

Later that day, I became a bit frustrated with the local commuters.

The road was very bad, and people were driving like absolute imbeciles trying to avoid the potholes. Most of them were in trucks, driving them like they were in cars, and I was in a little car, driving it like a truck. I must have passed at least forty of them over a fifty kilometer stretch, and some of them didn’t like it one bit, but they could only chase after me for about thirty or forty meters before they had to start swerving around the potholes again, as I just skipped across the tops of them. I don’t like to call a giant group of people stupid, but … they were acting like their axles were held on with rubber bands. You hit a bump once in awhile. Calm down.

Then I had a hard time finding my hotel.

Eventually I came to the right driveway and got off the bumpy road, onto a worse one. This was a very poorly maintained dirt road that I really shouldn’t have the rental car on. In fact if I damage it here, my credit card’s insurance won’t cover it. I’ll have to stage an accident somewhere else.

Thankfully, that wasn’t necessary.

The only other people here have a two year old, and she chose 9-10 pm to run around screaming, while her parents, who had been giving me suspicious looks ever since I arrived, did next to nothing to stop her. I was tired from driving all day and needed the sleep, and was also annoyed that this guy thought I was into his weird-looking wife or something.

At dinner the kid wanted to come over to my table and they wouldn’t let her within twenty feet of me, like I was some kind of monster. I don’t give a shit about socializing with their child — ok by me either way, but give me a fucking break.

It’s possible they just knew more about the pandemic than I did, but it’s more likely they were freaks.

The place had some privacy issues, which I discussed on Day 11:

I don’t want to hear my neighbors talking ten feet away while I’m sitting on the toilet, and I’d rather they not hear me pooping. When I was coming back up to my room last night I noticed that the curtain on my bathroom window was transparent when the light was on.

So I either shower in the daytime or with the lights off, I guess, or measure my waist height compared with the windowsill, and calculate the angle of the tallest female guest’s eye line to the windowsill from the nearest point in the hallway.

Or they could just get a better curtain and thicker doors and I wouldn’t have to think about any of it.

I got out of there and back on the road.

I left the hotel, and that road … I had forgotten in the short time I was there just how bad the road was, and how long … I went south to the end of the highway first, then doubled back, and when I passed the driveway for the hotel again, I thought to myself, if I had forgotten something in the room, would I go back and get it? Fuck no. The road is that bad.

There was much less traffic on the way back than there had been coming down, and that made a big difference, even though it was still a real piece of shit drive.

Finally, I got onto a better road, only to get stuck behind a parade.

… I don’t know what they were celebrating but it appeared to have something to do with Jesus and/or balloons.

At least I found someplace to stop for lunch, at one of Panama’s ubiquitous chicken shacks, where …

… I had chicken, French fries, and sadness. But it was under $5 so it’s fine.

Later that night, in Chitré, I went to a restaurant and encountered someone who rubbed me the wrong way. I’d forgotten about him until today.

My food wasn’t great, but the patacones were good. The Canadian guy giving his adult son relationship advice — not good.

It made me think of how they call Panama the Great American Interchange, where you have species from North and South America expanding their ranges, moving past each other through this narrow corridor; this guy was stuffing food into his mouth at about the same speed the bullshit was coming out of it.

I always like getting a read on dirtbags like him, and it’s so easy. Listen to them talk for thirty seconds and you know all there is to know about them, more than they even know about themselves.

He’s in his 60s but wants people to think 50s, so he dyes his hair, but to wear that Cuban shirt you have to be over sixty or under thirty, or just Latino, and you, sir, are very Canadian. The shirt also isn’t vintage, it’s retro, and those are two very different things.

He likes to pretend to be rich, but he makes about $60-70k a year and vacations in places like Panama because it’s cheap and he gets to feel like a big man here. Still, he doesn’t have the balls to go someplace even cheaper.

He works in sales and considers himself to be slick and persuasive, but in reality a website can sell his product better than he can; he knows he’s becoming irrelevant and has no idea what to do about it.

He’s single; he’s been married before, but he’s so insecure he can’t just have a relationship, he has to dominate, or cheat, or both. He needs the fuel for his ego.

He was never much of a father to his son, and that’s part of the reason his son has bleached, spiked hair as an adult. He’s trying to make up for that now, because his son is probably the last chance he has at someone looking up to him or thinking anything of him at all.

He tries to be authoritative, but he doesn’t know anything, especially about relationships, so he just talks and talks and never really says anything.

At the same time, he wants to be his son’s buddy, because he has no friends and he longs to be liked, so he keeps calling him “dude,” and saying gross shit that no son should ever hear from his father, about “smelling like pussy” and “fucking the shit out of” some poor, poor woman.

The truth is he’s never fucked the shit out of anyone in his life. When he does get the chance to have sex, it’s all about him, and it’s over very quickly.

He likes to talk about his son’s sex life because he gets a vicarious ego boost out of the deal. He also likes [sex workers], but he doesn’t want anyone to know, because it makes him look like he can’t get laid without paying for it.

A young woman recently told him he had old man smell. She didn’t mean it as an insult, but it’s been bothering him ever since.

They take a selfie and he flips off the camera, trying to look spontaneous. It doesn’t come out well so they take another one, and he spontaneously flips off the camera again, but this time he’s less confident and the middle finger is less pronounced, more timid, and sad.

He keeps looking over at me. He wants to be sure I can hear him. I’ve spoken only Spanish since I came in, so he doesn’t know if I can understand him or not.

I look straight through him. He doesn’t like it. In the time it takes him to get out his wallet and figure out what to tip, I get my bill, leave my money, and bounce.

On Day 15, it was time to go back home, and on the second leg of my flight, the reality of 2020 set in, aggressively, when a man …

… coughed directly onto the back of my head while there’s a goddamn pandemic brewing, so I’m probably going to die.

I got COVID pretty quickly after that, but I’m alive.

Happy travels.

It was a win for all parties involved, as the restaurant could feed me for very little money compared with what it would cost to hire contractors, and the amount of work I actually had to do was negligible in light of what it would have cost to pay for my meals.

Most days I let the chef decide what I ate, and I was never disappointed.

One afternoon an older man and his wife walked in and took a seat at a table near the salsa bar. When the server came to take their order, the man asked her, “Do you know what a Taco Supreme is?”

It occurred to me that knowing what a Taco Supreme is and being able to make one in your restaurant are not the same thing.

This was an authentic taqueria. The owner had a second location in Mexico City. Her corn tortillas were handmade. Her ground beef, for those few who ever ordered it, had actual beef in it.

And here was a man, in an authentic Mexican restaurant, asking an authentic Mexican waitress for a trademarked fast food taco. And when she hesitated, because she had a basic understanding of reality, he began to describe it to her, and suggested she take notes.

It turns out that it’s not that easy to make a cheap, shitty taco with quality ingredients, but at least they had the requisite sour cream to make that taco “Supreme^TM.”

The customer wasn’t thrilled with what he received, but in the end his wife told him to shut up and leave the poor girl alone. Or not. I don’t remember, but I like that ending.

I’d have sent him packing, but that’s why I was snaking drains for free tacos and not running a restaurant.

On another occasion a young man and his girlfriend visited the taqueria and he ordered four beef tacos. What he received were four, fresh, handmade corn tortillas, piled high with carne asada, which he was free to top as he saw fit with various salsas, diced or grilled onions, cilantro, and lime juice.

“These aren’t fuckin’ tacos!” he growled, violently shoving the plate away from him.

The owner had made them herself, and was fairly certain she knew what tacos were, as the proprietor of taco shops in two different countries.

“These aren’t fuckin’ tacos!” he repeated, to the stunned taco professional.

His girlfriend was on the phone when his outburst occurred, and stepped outside so her belligerent boyfriend would not be heard by the other party. When her call concluded, she did not come back inside immediately, instead sending a text to her companion to join her out front.

Through the closed door, she could be heard shouting, “WHAT THE FUCK!”

It was more of a statement than a question.

He stormed off and she came back inside and apologized for his behavior. It seemed that the only tacos the young man had ever seen were from Taco Bell, so authentic Mexico City-style fare was unrecognizable to him. I could almost feel sorry for him, if he wasn’t such a bitch.

Thankfully, minutes later, he was hit by a logging truck and killed, and we all finished our meals before going outside to point and laugh at how silly his guts looked all over the street, and then I made out with his girlfriend with tongues and everything.

That’s how I choose to remember it.

I have spent nearly all my life eating Mexican food, and for many of my years, I thought I had a solid grasp of what it was.

I did not.

There was a time when I’d have told you that Taco Bell, with its weird, crispy corn tortillas and mealy ground “beef” was merely the white man’s crude attempt at Mexican food.

I’d have confidently asserted that only the whites ask for flour tortillas with their carne asada. I’d have insisted that ground beef was for hamburgers, not tacos.

Then I learned that entire regions of Mexico prefer tortillas de harina over tortillas de maíz. And I learned the history of Taco Bell.

San Bernardino, California has as much a right to call itself the birthplace of modern fast food as any. The first McDonald’s developed its assembly line approach to cooking there, and it’s where Glen Bell was introduced to Mexican food.

After seeing lines around the block at Mitla Cafe, he began eating there daily, befriended the owners, and eventually learned their recipes, which he adapted to the assembly line system used by every fast food restaurant today. Since then, his restaurant chain, Taco Bell, has done pretty well.

The story of Mitla is a bit more interesting. Founders Lucia and Salvador Rodriguez were unable to find many of the ingredients they had cooked with in Mexico, so they improvised with what was locally available, and their own unique style of Mexican food was born, though one could argue quite convincingly that the food is nothing if not American.

You can still eat at Mitla Cafe today and judge for yourself.

When it comes to Mexican fast food, I’m more of a Del Taco fan, but I no longer write off Glen Bell’s creation as the white man’s taco, though it literally is.

Neither do I pretend to know what Mexican food tastes like, even after living and traveling extensively in Mexico.

Most of the food in Mexican restaurants in the US consists of a handful of the same ingredients and the choice of which delivery mechanism to receive them with. A taco, a torta, a sope, a tostada. Same stuff, different vessels.

But try cochinita pibil or chiles en nogada and you’ll have your perception of Mexican flavors turned on its head. As a lover of more familiar Mexican dishes, you might not even like them.

Or you might find them to be supreme.

More importantly, you will be reminded that a nation of over 130 million is not a monolith, and it can no more be constrained by our narrow perceptions than its people can be held behind a crudely built wall.

You might be inspired to travel, and learn, and eat. To get to know your neighbor.

You might even decide that cultural authenticity is a false ideal, because a culture is just a bunch of people finding meaning where they can, in schools and churches and artisan workshops; kitchens, the backs of trucks, and drive-through windows.

And that’s pretty fuckin’ great.

On the other side of the hollow door was the busy back room of South Orange County’s most popular pet store, a cramped corridor where staff clocked in and out, and where all manner of live food for tropical fish and reptiles was kept. My coworkers passed through the area continuously; I had to stay quiet.

What had started as a slightly sick feeling in my lower abdomen had quickly become something much more pressing. I rarely used the employee restroom, but on this occasion I had no choice.

The first wave, a fetid eruption — one of many to come. “Horrible horrible horrible.” Layers of my insides were stripped away by every caustic blast, each successive evacuation an evolution in violence and agony.

The laws of matter began to break down as I passed barbed wire in liquid form.

Soon it was no longer a bowel movement — it was an exorcism. My colon was attempting to invert itself, to rid my body of every remnant of the pure evil I had invited inside of me.

The duration felt interminable, the quantity impossible. More was coming out than I could possibly have put in, somehow simultaneously surging while taking its sweet time.

When the contractions finally slowed, feeling a mix of relief and anticlimax, I lingered, to make certain the ordeal had indeed ended, that no stragglers would follow.

Two flushes and a ceiling vent fan had little effect on the heat and the heaviness of the air around me. And there was that smell. This wasn’t something that would dissipate on its own.

It was on me.

People would notice it. They’d think I didn’t know how to wipe myself properly. They wouldn’t understand that this was no ordinary odor — that it couldn’t merely be wiped away.

This would have social repercussions. It might even affect my employment. And I could think of nothing that would save me. Even soap and water seemed too conventional a solution for a stink so … supernatural.

As I scanned the tiny, dirty restroom, my eyes fell upon a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and my subsequent deduction was as follows:

Foul odor is caused by bacteria. Alcohol kills bacteria. Therefore, alcohol will eliminate this odor.

And so I took the bottle from the shelf, removed the cap, and poured as much rubbing alcohol into my cupped hand as I could hold, then splashed the liquid up onto the smoldering crater that was heretofore my anus.

Whatever pain I had felt while shitting became a faint memory in light of this new sensation, a burning so intense I had to stifle a shriek.

I leapt to my feet. Pants around my ankles, I shuffled quickly to the sink, awkwardly trying to position my ass over the rim of the basin, so I could splash my screaming hole with cool, running water.

The anguish did not subside. I applied a generous helping of liquid hand soap to the area, to no noticeable effect. Defeated, I rinsed away the suds and blotted the region dry with a paper towel, as the pain persisted.

There was no remedy. I would have to ride the burn.

Purified by chemical fire, I pulled up my pants, gathering myself. I wiped out the sink basin, then washed my hands and face. I coated the toilet seat with Lysol before spraying the rest of the can into the air and exiting the room.

I returned to the floor, still somewhat in shock, the fire in the back of my pants overshadowed only slightly by the confidence that comes from knowing you have the single cleanest and most odor-free asshole on Planet Earth.

It was a good half-hour before I was pain-free. The experience was unpleasant, but the alcohol had done its job, leaving me free to reflect on the decision that had led me there; it took place the night before, a few hundred yards away, in a restaurant called P&J’s Casa Fiesta.

Casa Fiesta no longer exists, nor does the pet store where I worked, or El Toro, California, where they were both located, but for a time in the early-to-mid-nineties, I ate there with friends two or three times a week. Justin and I always ordered the Big Red Burrito.

The Big Red had a perfect balance of intense heat and flavor — a massive flour tortilla enwrapping more than a pound of spicy pork. It was a wet burrito, smothered in a hot, red sauce, to be eaten with a knife and fork. The meat was tender, cut into large chunks akin to carnitas, many of them too big to be taken in a single bite.

We’d gorge, wiping the sweat from our foreheads and taking short breaks to cool our mouths, until we reached those final few, soggy bites, and scraped the last of the red sauce from our plates.

The rubbing alcohol incident could not put an end to my love of the Big Red. A day or two later, I was back at Casa Fiesta, eating yet another one, and the morning after that, I was suffering again in the employee restroom.

I’m only a little ashamed to say that I used the alcohol a second time.

I soon learned that the key to surviving a spicy meal and its unpleasant aftermath is to eat pungent food as often as possible. The solution to the problem of the post-burrito hot shits was not moderation, it was to eat more Big Red Burritos. The body adjusts.

It has been around thirty years since the Big Red ceased to exist, but my mouth still waters and my asshole still puckers a little when I remember it.

Justin and Eric used to ride their bikes to my work. Justin had glued two cow horns to his pink-striped bike helmet. Eric insisted on wearing spandex shorts when he rode, and he always had a rotten case of swamp ass when they arrived; thankfully he never ordered a Big Red, which would only have worsened his condition.

My managers rarely minded when I took an extra half-hour for lunch; I often stayed late to make up for it. It was my first job — the one I’d wanted since I became interested in tropical fish as a little kid. I started at $4.25 an hour and had worked my way up to around six bucks by the time I made my final exit, but the real payoff was the fifty percent employee discount.

I can best describe the work environment as a version of Caddyshack. Problematic by today’s standards, it was sex and drug-crazed chaos under the auspices of a respectable local business. Lines weren’t so much crossed as they were non-existent. It seemed the only thing that could get a person fired was to steal from the store, and that happened with surprising regularity.

It was also a place to learn. I received my first snake bite there; I did my first, rudimentary behavioral work with a biting dog. I learned about environmental enrichment, though I had no idea what it was at the time. I got an insider’s perspective on an industry that I eventually came to repudiate.

I also learned about people. I had my favorite regulars, but I particularly enjoyed the difficult customers, the narcissists, the ones who were unaccustomed to being told no. A few of my managers sent them to me instead of dealing with them themselves; they liked how I handled them — calmly, respectfully, but in a way that tended to enrage them and ensured they never returned.

I quit the job a few times to explore other opportunities, but when things didn’t work out they always took me back.

By the time I left for good, Casa Fiesta was out of business. The Big Red Burrito was gone, along with the newness of my first job, and my enthusiasm for it. I might have been welcomed back, but there was increasingly little to return to.

Sometimes a burrito isn’t just a burrito.

____

In September of 2014, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight published an article titled America’s Best Burrito. I was filled with rage, and twelve years later, I’m still mad as hell.

It was the culmination of a months-long project that spanned the nation, starting with nearly 70,000 restaurants, and narrowing the field to just 64 burritos, which then went head-to-head in a bracketed contest to determine a single winner.

The methodology was equal parts baffling and appalling. The country was divided into four regions: Northeast, South, West, and California. Besides the weirdness of the geography, the divisions ignored entirely that the modern burrito is a true ecotone cuisine, inextricable from the borderlands of the US and Mexico that shaped it.

The Northeast and the South are not burrito regions. They do not have their own takes on the burrito, unless you count ‘shitty’ as a valid cultural variant. Likewise, most of the West is not Burrito Country; there is no burrito tradition in Idaho or Kansas or North Dakota. Instead, there are multiple, distinct traditions along the southern edge of the West, each deserving of its own regional status.

And then there’s California. FiveThirtyEight was on the right track when they separated it from the rest of the pack, but lumping Southern California in with Northern California is burrito blasphemy.

I’m not saying that there can’t be a truly great burrito in Minnesota or Kentucky. I’m saying the tradition that birthed it, and probably the hands that made it, came from somewhere else.

For comparison, take another regional food that Americans love: pizza. We all know that pizza originated in Italy, where it already had different regional variations before it took on new characteristics in the United States.

A debate rages between aficionados of New York and Chicago-style pizzas over which is superior; meanwhile, many believe the world’s best pizza is found at Pizzeria Bianco in, of all places, Phoenix, Arizona.

New York and Chicago are our major pizza regions (some would say Connecticut deserves its own place in the conversation), but each is producing something very different from the other. It is truly an apples to oranges comparison, or Big Apples to Big Shoulders.

Neither is representative of pizza as a whole. Neither is more valid than the other.

Meanwhile, Chris Bianco is making incredible pizza in Arizona, for some the best there is, but that doesn’t make Arizona a native pizza region. It also doesn’t invalidate the differences in people’s preferences, or divorce the pizza from its cultural heritage and the personal histories of the people making and eating it.

The best pizza I’ve ever had was made by a Mormon in Washington State, who had worked at both Giordano’s and Gino’s East, stole all their recipes, and combined and tweaked them into something truly unforgettable. While it was my favorite pizza to eat, it certainly wasn’t the only way to make pizza, nor does Washington have its own pizza tradition. If you’d like to try it for yourself, I’m sorry to say he went out of business years ago.

As it is with pizza, it is much the same with burritos, if not more so. There are regional variations within Mexico, and in the US there are distinct styles in Southern California, the Bay Area, Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas.

For those who would extol the burrito traditions of Denver or Oregon, I need to clarify something. Fuck you.

The creator of FiveThirtyEight’s Burrito Bracket was Anna Maria Barry-Jester, a talented journalist who writes mainly in the field of public health. She holds a degree in Latin American studies and is fluent in Spanish, but it’s also important to note that she is from fucking Michigan.

With the country divided into ill-conceived regions, FiveThirtyEight analyzed Yelp reviews to choose the top burritos in the nation. The results were immediately skewed. In regions with no burrito traditions of their own, and fewer burritos to choose from, mediocre contenders rose to the top. Simultaneously, the analysis favored places like San Francisco and Los Angeles, due to their higher population densities, tourism, and tech cultures that more heavily utilized sites like Yelp.

Moreover, relying on Yelp to narrow the field has an even more glaring flaw, in that it assumes that the average asshole Yelp reviewer knows fuck all about a burrito, not to mention how many reviewers didn’t even order burritos, or awarded stars based on things like service, cleanliness, or what might have crawled up their asses and died earlier that day.

Next, a group of food experts weighed in, including chef David Chang, and food historian and notable Canadian, Jeffrey Pilcher. I encourage you to search for Pilcher’s photo online and then try to imagine asking him where to get a good burrito. Here are a few questions you are probably more likely to ask him:

Where can I buy sunscreen in bulk?

Will you teach me to tie a bow tie?

Does getting your ass kicked every day of your childhood build character?

The expert panel helped pare the Yelp results down to the top sixteen burritos in each region. The data team then organized them into seeds, and the model broke down almost immediately, forcing some Southern California burritos to be moved into the West region.

From there, things went from misguided to truly deranged. The winners in each bracket were picked by Barry-Jester, who traveled the country and sampled each burrito, giving it a numeric score from one to 100. It sounds reasonable so far, but she didn’t just eat them, she also dissected them.

This person took a scalpel and sliced each burrito from ass to forehead in a barbaric procedure she called a “burritopsy.” By diddling the guts of the burritos, she hoped to gain a deeper understanding of them, much like da Vinci with his stolen corpses or RFK Jr. and his road-kill collection.

And then, after mutilating them, she ate them. I had assumed that she ordered two burritos — one to eat and one to dissect, but I am assured that I was incorrect, that after transforming each burrito from a pressurized cylinder into an open-faced meat canoe, she ate it, using a modified fork with a fucking GoPro mounted on it.

I need a minute.

Barry-Jester chose her final four, representing San Francisco, Los Angeles, El Paso, and the Bronx. She declared the final winner to be the Carnitas Super Burrito, ordered Dorado-Style, from La Taqueria in San Francisco’s Mission District. Her boss, Nate Silver, joined her for a taste test, and claimed he “achieved nirvana” upon his first bite, thereby proving that he, like Barry-Jester, didn’t know a goddamned thing about burritos.

Any connoisseur knows that the first bite of a burrito is largely irrelevant — it is the last bite that matters. A well-conceived burrito is a feat of engineering as much as a culinary achievement, and eating one is a cooperative exercise. It takes the combined skills of the builder and the eater for the center to hold.

As one consumes the burrito, its contents must be kept in place by a mere tortilla, while juices and flavors become more concentrated in the ass end of the vessel with each successive bite, warping and softening, threatening to rupture the envelope, until finally, at the point of complete structural failure, the diner is left with the most intense and transcendent mouthful of the entire meal.

Correctly eating a burrito is a skill gained from years of experience, with training beginning in early childhood. It is not simply folding the pizza slice in half or tilting one’s head before biting into a taco. It is a mastery achieved across decades of stained shirts and deceptive droplets on the crotches of pants, of golden rivulets running from the webs of fingers down to the elbows.

For an authentic experience, you must eat a burrito in its entirety, beginning at one end and making your way to the other. This is true of smothered burritos as well, in a process that requires the conservation and continuous monitoring and redistribution of sauce.

You do not cut a burrito in half unless it is served to you that way. You do not eat it from the middle, Justin Bieber-style. (I know he didn’t really do that.) And you sure as fucking fuck do not slice it fucking lengthwise and eat out its insides.

As for Nate Silver’s experience, the premature ejaculation of achieving nirvana on the first bite is better kept to oneself.

Moreover, the entire exercise of ranking, scoring, and dissecting burritos reduces the culmination of centuries of cultural heritage and personal experience to a grotesque pornography. Barry-Jester wasn’t just cutting up food, she was gaping my life.

She gaped us by the millions.

In an interview about the project, Silver called it a mix of seriousness and whimsy, stating, “We also know that burritos are not a matter of great national importance.” Barry-Jester later echoed the sentiment.

Appealing to the tech-bro luxury of “whimsy” to justify the algorithmic trampling of someone else’s heritage feels too Midwest Nice for my borderland sensibilities.

Along the southern border, the burrito developed in immigrant communities as a food of the laboring class — compact, portable, nutritionally dense. Each iteration addressed a different local reality, but what they all share is their connection to the common people, be they farm workers in southern Arizona, builders in El Paso, or even surfers and skaters on the coast.

The hands that expertly cradle a burrito, in its perfect tension, are the same hands that adeptly cut and stack lettuce into wooden crates, that smooth the concrete beneath our feet, that ache and bleed to preserve our way of life.

The food that gives power to those hands is not mere fuel. It is love. It is strife. It is living history.

It is more than the sum of its parts.

That a Mission-style burrito won the contest is less of an outrage than the contest itself, but it does further betray the naïveté of the people at FiveThirtyEight, to think that they could conduct a valid competition without sparking a national uproar. They prioritized a cold matrix over warm memory, and people were pissed.

I can set aside the presumptuousness of naming a restaurant La Taqueria, when it was predated by thousands of other taquerias named for their owners, saints, and geographic or cultural landmarks. What I can’t excuse is the notion that a Dorado-style Mission burrito was treated like something representative of American burrito culture instead of the outlier it clearly is.

That it became the template for fast casual chains like Chipotle should do little to secure its status as the archetype, just as the success of Taco Bell should not be sufficient to convince you that it is the genuine article, or that the thousands of taquerias along the southern border are the knock-offs.

The Mission-style burrito is a relative newcomer to the scene, having originated in the early 1960s. It features a large tortilla stuffed with an array of fresh ingredients and wrapped in foil to seal in its steam and help with adhesion. The Dorado-style version is seared on all sides on a heavily greased plancha.

Mission-style is the Chicago deep dish of burritos, which is not to say it can’t be an excellent meal, but that it bears only a minimal resemblance to its borderland cousins. It is a city burrito. A tourist attraction.

In El Paso, burritos are smaller, with fewer ingredients. Typical fillings are guisados — stewed meats like chile verde or chile colorado. They are highly portable, and leave little room for error.

Heading west, New Mexico’s burritos reflect its Native American heritage, and serve primarily as delivery vehicles for the state’s famous Hatch chiles. While handheld options are available, a breakfast burrito smothered in red or green chile sauce and melted cheese is New Mexico’s quintessential burrito experience. For the undecided, a ‘Christmas’ burrito is split in the middle between red and green.

Arizona’s burritos bear a heavy Sonora influence. Frequently called burros, they feature a paper-thin, slightly translucent tortilla stuffed with carne asada or machaca. The chimichanga, invented in Tucson, is the deep-fried version, and the Percherón, named for the French draft horse, is an oversized variant filled with carne asada, melted cheese, and avocado.

In Southern California, the San Diego-style relies mainly on carne asada for its protein. A standard carne asada burrito comes with a scoop of guacamole and some pico de gallo, and nothing else, while a California burrito contains carne asada, French fries, and cheddar cheese; some versions also have guacamole and sour cream.

Being on the coast, San Diego burritos may also feature shrimp or fish, likewise common in the beach cities south of the border. San Diego burritos are wrapped in butcher paper, never foil, so that moisture can escape and their Sonoran tortillas won’t become soggy.

Los Angeles is famously a taco town, so its burritos are indicative of that heritage. Most are smaller, and feature guisados and refried beans cooked in lard. They do not contain guacamole. LA is also known for the other end of the spectrum, with its gigantic, smothered party burritos, meant to be shared, and eaten with utensils.

And sitting between LA and San Diego is Orange County — the melting pot.

____

When Arturo Galindo and his wife Maria arrived in El Toro, they were surprised at the lack of the fresh, stone-ground corn products they were accustomed to in their native San Antonio. After Art’s discharge from the Marine Corps in the early 1960s, the couple moved briefly to Santa Ana before he took a job as a restaurant manager at the Colony Kitchen in San Juan Capistrano.

In 1984, after amassing years of restaurant experience, Art and Maria created Las Golondrinas, in English, ‘The Swallows,’ a nod to the local folklore surrounding the annual return of the migratory birds to the town’s historic mission, and perhaps a bit of a pun.

The little tortilleria focused on selling fresh ground corn products and simple fillings to go. There was no seating for diners, so that nearly the entirety of the restaurant’s space could be used for food production.

The shopping center where Las Golondrinas began was next to a small private school where my mother was a teacher, and I was a third grade student. After school, while my mom graded papers and did other work in her classroom, she would hand me a check with the amount left blank, and send me to Las Golondrinas to buy tacos.

The shop was a runaway success, opening a second location in Capistrano Beach in 1988. Others followed. With increased business, they expanded their menu. And as I also grew, I began to order burritos instead of tacos.

In 1992, the Big Dave was introduced as an extra-large version of any other burrito on the menu, but soon it became its own menu item. I always ordered a Big Dave de asada, later upgrading it with extra salsa.

I loved watching the kitchen staff at work. A woman with a hair net would pull two, enormous flour tortillas from the stack, which she’d throw in a press to soften them up. A single tortilla would not be sufficient for what was coming.

While that was happening, she would chop the carne asada, loudly, with a cleaver. Then she’d take the tortillas from the warmer and lay them, overlapping one another, over two sheets of butcher paper and one sheet of foil. A smear of refried beans would be applied.

Next came the carne asada, and a heap of rice; then a giant handful of thick-grated cheese, some cilantro, and two ladlefuls of salsa.

What followed was the miracle. In quick succession, the ends were folded in and the fillings drawn into a tight mound before the entire mass was rolled into a tidy parcel. Somehow a pound and a half of fillings were compressed into a perfect bundle.

Over decades, I have periodically tried in vain to recreate this process at home, with disastrous results.

To eat a Big Dave correctly, you must first open the foil and butcher paper wrappers carefully, remove the burrito, and inspect it to decide from which end you will eat it. This is an important decision, and once made, there is no going back. I try to identify the less stable end as my starting point, which designates the opposite end as the burrito’s delicious ass.

The ass is then planted firmly in the center of the wrapper, flattening it enough that the burrito can now be set down on a table without falling over. The wrapper is folded up around the burrito, leaving approximately one third of it exposed. The paper and foil will be rolled down as you make your way through the meal.

The first bite will be mostly tortilla, with a little bit of meat juice and salsa. This is as it should be; the purpose of the first bite is to awaken the senses, and to release some of the pressure inside the package.

With each ensuing bite, the flavor and moisture increase, and the ingredients are encountered in different proportions from one mouthful to the next. In one, only meat and tortilla; in another, meat and a large helping of cilantro. In one bite, the cheese has melted; in a later one it has been kept cold by the salsa, providing a delightful contrast in temperature, texture, and taste.

Much has been said about the inclusion of rice in burritos, with its detractors suggesting that it adds unwelcome blandness to the flavor landscape, but this is only true if the rice is not itself flavorful. In the case of the Big Dave, the rice is necessary to absorb the liquid from the extra salsa.

As you make your way through, you must be mindful of the structural integrity of the vessel, rotating it regularly to address moisture damage and weight distribution issues as they arise. In the rare event of a breach in the vessel wall, you must apply steady pressure with the wrapper, and consume the material above it as evenly as possible as you make your way to the affected area. Go straight to the rupture and you risk Biebering the burrito, only worsening the situation.

As you move into the home stretch, you might be tempted to take a break, but you must resist that urge. You are in a race against the laws of thermodynamics; slow down now and the ass end of the burrito will become too cold to sustain your eating pleasure. Lukewarm is acceptable, even inevitable, but cold is intolerable.

“Why not just save it and reheat it later?” You shut the fuck up. You shut the fuck up and you eat.

Next stop, Ass City.

Buttburgh.

Kiesterville.

Rumpopolis.

The closer you get, the more the structure of the burrito will deteriorate, and juices will begin to pool. You must use the wrapper and the remaining tortilla to form a cup to contain them. Slurp them up if you have to, but do not let them spill from the wrapper, lest you look like a novice and a slob.

As you approach your final few bites, you must ration them in such a way that the last one is the largest — not so large that it causes discomfort, but enough that it is bigger and better than the ones that preceded it. This could mean taking a few small bites until what remains is the appropriate size.

And now, you have arrived. Put it in your mouth and savor it, but do not allow any residual fluids to spill from the wrapper, as these will be a refreshing sip to top off your meal.

If you are experienced, you will have saved the entirety of any drink you ordered to be consumed after the completion of the burrito. But if you are a master of your craft, you will have purchased a second drink.

I have never encountered another burrito like the Big Dave de asada, even here, in the Galindos’ former home state. But I will continue searching.

On my increasingly infrequent trips back to Orange County, I often stop at Las Golondrinas before visiting any family or friends, a practice not one of them has ever questioned.

____

I didn’t expect to be living in a Mexican car wash at age 38, hanging out with smugglers, money launderers, and a cartel enforcer.

That was not in the five year plan.

Sometimes you just need to get away. Sometimes you want to go where nobody knows your name. Sometimes that place is a defunct car wash in Ensenada.

There are stories I can never tell. Some simply don’t belong to me; some are too dangerous to write down. I can only share a few of the lessons I learned:

When you’re pulled over by the police, and you have certain people in your car, the officers will apologize for stopping you and quickly leave the scene.

When you cross the border with a convicted smuggler, you will remain a subject of particular interest to CBP for at least a few years.

If a guy used to be a mob lawyer, he’s probably still a mob lawyer, unless he was disbarred, in which case he’s a mob accountant.

Sometimes the quiet kid in the basketball jersey who hangs out in your friend’s office turns out to be the guy in all those stories you’ve heard.

Never say no to free tacos.

More than the lessons I learned, I was moved by the warmth and generosity of the people who taught them to me. It’s easy to think in terms of good and evil, right and wrong, until you have to live by your own definitions.

There is no black or white, or even gray.

Reality is in color.

I didn’t know when I arrived in Playas de Chapultepec that I’d stumbled into the culinary epicenter of South Ensenada. It felt like every meal was the best one of my life. I was broke, but I ate like a high-roller.

Some of the restaurants were brick and mortar shops, but many were little more than a vinyl canopy and a few burners. Some had specialties; others offered the standard menu of tacos, sopes, and the like.

I learned the differences between the taquerias as I sampled their offerings. This one has the best salsa. That one puts beans in the tacos. This guy buys his bread from the lady across the street.

To find the best restaurants, I didn’t use Yelp, I used my eyes and my feet. I walked around and paid attention to which places were crowded. An empty dining area on a Sunday morning probably meant you’d find a hair in your food.

But of all the meals I had in Ensenada, I had exactly one that was bad, and in most of the United States it would have still been the best Mexican food in town.

Everything was within easy walking distance. Tacos El Poblano was a solid choice for a standard, Baja-style taco, served with your choice of toppings, like salsas, cilantro, limes, and the region’s famous, impossibly pink pickled onions. I now make them at home.

Up by the main road there was a menudo joint with the best breakfast potatoes I’d ever had. Around the corner from El Poblano there was a tiny hotel that made huevos rancheros like you might find on the breakfast table at any house in the neighborhood.

For something more upscale, there was Estero Beach Resort, but I had no problem slumming it. Even the gas station tamales were good.

Down a dirt alley about a hundred feet from my driveway, an old man would roll out his birria cart a few days a week. I’d sit on a stool, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, as he handed me one taco at a time, until I’d eaten my fill. A squeeze of lime. A squirt from the salsa bottle. Perfection.

At the end of the street, in a makeshift shack, was Big Burro. The place was popular with the locals, but even more so with the Baja 500 and 1000 drivers and their crews, who enjoyed slapping their decals all over its walls.

A true family business, owners Juan Carlos and Irene were frequently joined in their tiny kitchen by their children and grandchildren. There was a warmth at their little lunch counter that meant more to me than the food they served.

When my mom and stepfather visited, they ordered shrimp tacos. I preferred the carne asada burro, which came sliced in half for easier consumption, but what I liked even more was the torta with carne asada or adobada.

No one would blame you for being jealous. I was immersed, not in good food, but in truly great food, made from fresh, local ingredients, and sold dirt cheap.

And about once a week, I’d drive or walk into town and get a Western Bacon Cheeseburger at Carl’s Jr. Don’t judge me. It’s been my favorite burger since they first started field testing it in 1982.

I settled into a rhythm, walking my dogs on the beach, sometimes ten miles a day, filling my pockets with shells and sand dollars along the way.

I stole cuttings from neighborhood cactuses and dug palm seedlings from sidewalk cracks and foundations.

I found a tiny, flea-infested puppy in the street, dehydrated and anemic. I took him to a local vet, nursed him back to health, and added him to the family.

My Spanish was slowly improving, as I began to build relationships with neighbors and local businesses.

I was piecing together a life, but the pieces that were still missing felt too cumbersome to drag into place.

I had no income. I’d been offered a job helping expats move their furniture and other belongings from the States, but I knew that wouldn’t be all I was moving. Some risks aren’t worth the reward, and some choices can’t be unmade.

I yearned to explore more of the area, but I couldn’t afford to drive very far; I felt trapped inside a walkable radius.

And I had unfinished business up north, loose ends that might have been better left untied, but nonetheless, those strings were pulling me back to the cold and damp.

I’d pieced together a life there, too, and I hadn’t finished living it yet.

For years after I left Ensenada, when I returned to visit, I’d stop at Big Burro, and Irene would ask about my mom. The intersection has been built up, and today the shop is across the street; it’s called Baja Burro now, but the food and the people have not changed.

The car wash is gone, and the neighborhood is a bit more crowded, but it’s mostly the same. I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t have stayed. My life would certainly look different. I might be some leather-skinned burnout in a little beach house, or running guns and cash for the cartel. I might be planting a vineyard in the hills, or tending my sheep in the desert down south.

I probably left too soon. I was pretty raw when I arrived in Mexico, and my wounds were still open when I went back to the Northwest.

Ensenada was a better place to heal.

A better place to think.

And a better place to eat.

____

I’ve been fortunate to dine at Michelin-starred restaurants. I’ve also cooked a turkey in a trash can full of burning scrap, and bought tamales off the back of a truck. I’ve eaten weeds from my yard, and things I could not identify in markets abroad.

And thousands of burritos.

I’ve learned that the best meal is the one that warms you up when you’re cold, wet, and exhausted.

No amount of sorting, scoring, or dissection can assign a value to that experience.

In 2014, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight tried to find America’s best burrito, and they failed. They failed because they never learned what a burrito was.

Long days after school.

A first job.

That drunken fight at La Posta.

A reward for fixing the leak in the employee restroom.

A piece of my childhood I found a thousand miles from home.

The time spent healing, if not quite enough.

What I fled.

What I ran to.

The stories I can never tell.

The places and the people we have lost.

In May of 2026, ABC deleted the entire FiveThirtyEight archive from its servers. In an instant, eighteen years of journalism and statistical analysis, the work of hundreds of contributors, disappeared.

It seemed unnecessarily cruel to erase a man’s legacy, but ABC clearly felt it was not a matter of great national importance.

There’s a little donut shop in Capo Beach where the day laborers gather in search of work. Southern California’s donuts are special, the legacy of Cambodian refugees — a history I took for granted until I walked into a Dunkin’ in New York City and learned just how bad a donut can be.

This particular California donut shop used to also sell breakfast burritos. It changed ownership sometime in the last several years, and I don’t know if the burritos survived the transition, but for a time, they fed countless workers on job sites all over South Orange County.

After a long night of driving, hunger had set in. I’d dropped my trailer up the hill, so I could maneuver my pickup carefully through the tiny parking lot. I tried to get into a spot quickly — the laborers were already circling. A pickup truck usually meant work, but I wasn’t hiring.

I slid out of the truck and plodded across the lot, tired, a little sore. Inside, I ordered a chocolate bar, a black coffee, and a chorizo, egg, and potato burrito. It was warm enough to sit outside, so I took a seat at the little table farthest from the door.

It had been years since my last Southern California donut. They were better than I remembered.

A green pickup pulled up along the curb, and the driver held up two fingers. The crowd of workers reacted, but only the two quickest made it into the back of the truck. They’d have money in their pockets tonight.

On the corner, a man stood lookout, ready to warn the others at the first sign of la migra.

I took my first bite of the burrito, exposing fluffy scrambled eggs and melted cheese. I squeezed it a little, to open a small fissure, and filled it with hot sauce. I added a little more sauce after every few bites.

By the time I reached the bottom, the potatoes were saturated with sauce and drippings from the chorizo, intermingled with tiny bits of egg and cheese. I savored the final bite, holding it in my mouth for as long as I could.

My heart was heavy, and my mind was weary, but in that moment, my spirit was calm.

Sometimes a burrito isn’t just a burrito.

Sometimes it’s the only thing that matters.

I had never heard my father pray before, but this was no prayer. He was talking to me. I was around nine years old.

“I’m not God.”

He pushed back a bit before dropping the matter, and we continued across the parking lot to his pickup. We had just attended a service of the Church of Religious Science in Huntington Beach, California. Reverend Peggy Bassett was the organization’s first female pastor, and became president of the worldwide church a few years later.

Her sermon dealt primarily with the power of affirmation. “We are all God,” she explained, and therefore, we had the power to speak things into reality. The Universe would deliver whatever we desired, so long as we truly believed, were persistent, and were precise with our words.

She told the story of a woman who wanted a new Cadillac. Each day, she did her daily affirmations, repeating her mantra, “There is a brand new Cadillac in my garage. There is a brand new Cadillac in my garage.” Within weeks, The Universe complied; a drunk driver crashed a brand new Cadillac through her garage door.

It seems The Universe is kind of a dick.

In fairness, if I was a universe, that’s exactly the kind of universe I would be.

Reverend Bassett went on to explain that the woman had needed to be more specific. She should have instead said, “I own a brand new Cadillac,” or perhaps she should even have noted the year and model, the condition of the car, and that she owned it debt-free.

On any other Sunday I would have attended a Presbyterian church with my mother and grandparents; this talk of being God and manifesting material wealth gave me a sick feeling in my stomach. And there were the obvious limits of the practice, like what happened when two true believers wanted the same Cadillac.

Even so, one thing Reverend Bassett said resonated with me, as she urged her congregation to embark on their affirmation journeys without procrastination. “I’ve never known anyone who could ‘shoulda.’” The sentence hit me hard as a child; today it haunts me.

I shook hands with the Reverend after the service, and she said she hoped to see me again the next week. I was sure to tell her that I was a Presbyterian and would not be returning.

I’ve never had any difficulty telling people what I think. I had my first argument with an authority figure when I was four; my preschool teacher and I disagreed over whether or not alligators laid eggs. I insisted they did, but she would not concede, so the following day I brought photographic proof.

If my grandparents’ dinner table was a TV show, it was Crossfire, not the Cleavers. Critical thinking and effective communication were valued over compliance; I was well-behaved, but I was not a compliant child.

So in Sunday School that morning in Huntington Beach, I spent much of the time arguing theology with the teacher. I don’t recall the substance of the debate, only that all the kids were given star-shaped purple pencil toppers that smelled like burning tires.

In the adult service, I struggled more in my discomfort. In most ways this was no different from the church I attended every Sunday. There was no cross on the chancel wall, no mention of Jesus Christ, no Communion, but I was struck more by the similarities.

They sang songs and read scriptures. People were warm, and seemed genuine, just like the Presbyterians. They even greeted each other with the same, broad spectrum of awkward handshakes, ranging from the performative Bone Crusher to the mortifying Dead Fish.

What stood out more than any of the specific ritual differences was that these people seemed very happy. It’s not that people at the Presbyterian church were depressed, but these were perhaps the happiest people I’d ever seen, bordering on maniacal.

Their happiness also had an edge to it, a hint of mockery, almost like they were getting away with something. They seemed to be receiving all of the benefits of religion without any of the costs. They were there to worship themselves. They had no need of forgiveness. And they were all about to be very rich.

My father’s apartment was barely furnished. He still had the old waterbed my parents had slept on when they were married, but I used a mattress on the floor. We ate beef stroganoff or ‘beans and weenies,’ the only two things I’ve ever known him to cook.

He was not the archetypal ‘Disneyland Dad,’ only because Disneyland, just up the road, was out of his price range. Each time he picked me up, he’d ask me what I wanted to do, I’d say I didn’t know, and he’d complain that I was indecisive. We’d inevitably end up at the Westminster Mall, where I’d play with the puppies in the pet store, for free.

On birthdays and Christmases he’d give me the free gifts he received for attending time share seminars. I remember a portable black and white TV that never picked up any stations, a knockoff Casio SK-1 keyboard, and a boom box that survived into my high school years, until it met a swift end at the beach one afternoon, after daring to eat my Master of Puppets cassette.

The last time I was in his Huntington Beach apartment, my father had a vision board pinned to his bedroom wall. It was a sheet of white poster board with a photo of himself in the center, and all around it he had glued fans of undersized hundred dollar bills.

I wondered if he was being precise enough.

He later moved to an intentional community and clothing-optional hot springs resort in Central California, somewhere between Ronald Reagan’s Rancho Del Cielo and Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. I visited a few times in my early teens. I recall spending the night under the live oaks, the smell of sulfur in the spring-fed pools, the endless parade of saggy balls.

My older brother also lived at the resort, and he stayed long after my father had moved on. We talked about Guns N’ Roses on my last visit; he thought they were the last of the real rock ’n’ roll bands, that Appetite for Destruction was a perfect hard rock album. It was the last time I saw him before he died.

My father moved to another commune, where the only hard stipulation for residents was that they submit a weekly statement of personal belief. By then he had become more of a religious skeptic, and even that minimal requirement seemed to exasperate him.

I lost track of all his locations and movements and associations. He appeared on a daytime talk show to promote some form of polyamory. He was inducted into an unrecognized Native American tribe, and given the name ‘Singing Bear,’ because, as he later relayed to me, he was always singing. That was news to me.

By my college years he was living in Florida, running a scooter rental business with my uncle. I once heard them talking about keeping their cash receipts off the books to avoid paying taxes. I guess The Universe finally came through.

____

Three distinct explosions, first one, then two more in quick succession, a rhythm permanently lodged in my memory. They don’t sound like the bombs in the movies. There’s a short pop, and then the concussion wave hits.

We run, thousands of us, and then we slow, and turn back. Maybe we can help.

A blood-soaked woman screams as medics try to get her into an ambulance. A female soldier with long, black hair sobs and shakes as her friend tries to comfort her. On the sidewalk, a pigeon lies dead from a single, small wound, amid flyers claiming responsibility for the attack.

September 4, 1997, Ben Yehudah Street, Jerusalem.

It was my fourth day in Israel. Classes hadn’t started yet, and my roommate and I wanted to do some people-watching. Mikey was from Nashville, a Jew by Choice with Christian beliefs. He had a Star of David tattooed on his chest, and a minimalist crucifix ran the length of his back.

By chance, we were the only tattooed, ‘punk-adjacent’ students on our little campus, nestled on Mount Zion, between the Old City and the Hinnom Valley. Herod Agrippa’s two thousand-year-old city wall formed one side of the hallway between our dorm room and the toilets.

On Ben Yehudah Street, we argued about the best vantage point. I liked a shady spot against the wall of a little corner shop, but Mikey wanted to sit in Zion Square. I caved, and we made our way down the street. Minutes later, the corner shop was destroyed.

Three men, members of Hamas, had entered the store, reportedly disguised as women, and detonated explosive devices, killing themselves and five others, and injuring perhaps hundreds. Among the dead, three fourteen-year-old girls.

Friends who had been across town in the Palestinian Quarter when the bombs went off described shopkeepers sobbing as they rolled down and locked their overhead doors. When asked why they were crying, they said it was for the Israelis who had just died, the desperate men who had killed them, and the retribution they knew was coming.

Back on campus, we were told that God had saved us. He had a plan for us. I questioned why an all-powerful god would have allowed three teenage girls to die instead of me, why he wouldn’t have just disarmed the bombs instead, or better yet, brought peace to the region.

The closest thing to counseling I received was talking about the event with the other students who had witnessed it, around twenty of us in all. The faculty and staff had a more detached perspective. “That’s just the way it is here.” “It won’t be the last time.” “Life goes on.”

Indeed the very shop that was blown up on Ben Yehudah Street was repaired and reopened within about a week.

Most days, and nights, Mikey and I wandered, or I wandered alone, between the Old City and the New, down residential streets, past archaeological sites and along fabled pathways.

We walked one night through a newly bulldozed neighborhood, where a Palestinian family huddled in the rubble of their former home, cooking dinner on an open fire. We nodded in acknowledgement as we passed; there was nothing to be said.

Down the hillside, a tent city had formed, where displaced families awaited relief or relocation. It was still early September, but colder nights were coming.

I took a student job as a security guard. With my partner, Eric, I patrolled the campus boundaries, and at night we escorted female students to an auxiliary housing unit in West Jerusalem. Women were cautioned to never walk at night without a male escort.

Our job training consisted of some minimal instructions, and the addendum, “If you have to get physical with someone, use your best judgment. Just know that anything you do will be nothing compared to what the police will do.”

We only called them once, when a sex worker rolled out a blanket under a tree just outside the campus wall and refused to leave. Men had begun to gather, and a few of them were shooting heroin.

Eric and I decided that getting physical was in no one’s interest, especially if it exposed us to dirty needles, though we agonized over whether or not to involve the authorities. We’d heard stories of torture in police custody. Thankfully, when they arrived, they assisted us in merely walking the last stragglers out of the area, and no physical contact was made.

In the Christian Quarter of the Old City, the police would come to “collect taxes.” Mikey and I helped Palestinian shopkeepers lock up their stores before the cops could raid their cashboxes.

Sometimes we’d work in Carlos’s olive wood shop so he could have a break or run errands. Haggling was a favorite pastime, and we became ruthless; we always tried to fleece the tourists worse than any shop owner would have.

In school I studied Hebrew and archaeology, but I was unable to focus. I didn’t sleep well. A slamming door or a backfiring car would jolt me awake, and cause my heart to race. One night the mere clacking together of my own teeth awoke me into a panic.

At field sites, I chased lizards along the remnants of ancient stone walls, as my more conscientious classmates tried to conceal their amusement. I started most of our sessions at the back of the group, half-listening to the professor, half-scanning the terrain for agamas, before drifting away on my own.

In a moment of contrition I decided to make a stronger effort, and I moved to the front of the class, determined to give the professor my full attention. And then I saw it — the foamy saliva collecting in the corners of his mouth as he spoke. Why had no one mentioned this to me? I turned and ran toward the nearest sunbathing lizard.

I was not the only one who was distracted. When our field studies took us into caves, a few of us would split off from the group and look for alternative ways in and out. This invariably led to someone’s head or foot popping through an opening at an inopportune moment. Some of the passageways were barely large enough to squeeze through, but thanks to all of the walking and the school cafeteria’s low-protein diet, I had become quite slender.

I dropped my Egyptology class because I found the way the professor said “Mmmkay” to be emotionally distressing. But as I had already paid for the weeklong trip to Egypt, I got to join the class without having to study. I needed that break.

In temples and tombs, I played a cassette of the Indiana Jones soundtrack in my Walkman as I ran through corridors, hid behind columns, and leapt between massive stones. I didn’t have a bullwhip, but that was probably for the best.

When I sensed another student becoming overwhelmed by our relentless schedule, I’d hand over the Walkman. “Take some alone time. Put these headphones on, and when you’re ready, press play. Come back when you feel better.”

On a short trip to Jordan we visited Petra, an important site in its own right, but one meaningful to me because of its use in the final scenes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. In reality there is no temple hidden inside the iconic Treasury, and the site is crowded with tourists and vendors, but for a child of the eighties, it was a sacred place.

Near the Treasury, two Bedouin men with some horses offered rides to tourists for a few dinars. I invited a couple other students to join me for the lazy walk up the trail to the parking lot. I paid one of the men and I swung into the saddle; then as he turned away to help my friends onto their horses, I took the lead rope and bolted.

For less than a minute I was riding at a full gallop, winding through the Canyon of the Crescent Moon, leaving a cloud of dust behind me. I didn’t even need the soundtrack. The ride was over in seconds, but while it lasted it was the best I’d felt in months.

When I reached the top of the trail I dismounted and walked the horse to cool him down. Minutes later, an out-of-breath Bedouin emerged from the canyon, calling my name between gasps for air. “Steve … (gasp) Steve …” One of the girls must have told him my name after I took off. No one had known I could ride.

“Steve, you were supposed to let me walk you up the trail. Now my horse is too tired to work for the rest of the day.” I knew his horse was fine, but I emptied my pockets, happy to pay for that moment of freedom. We talked about horses for a few minutes until the girls arrived, led along by his partner.

That night in Amman, a tense cab ride put Mikey and me on edge. Our driver stopped to pick up a friend, who had a fresh bandage across his throat, before asking us, “You are American?” We told him we were. He then asked, “What do you think of the Jews?”

Mikey covered his Star of David with his shirt collar.

I answered, “As an American, I try to hate all people equally.”

That seemed to satisfy him, and he shared some of his experience as a refugee, his enmity toward the people who made him into one, and his distaste for Bill Clinton, all peppered with the kind of awkward profanity you might hear from a kid still learning to cuss properly. We were glad the ride was short.

On the bus back to the border the next morning, we passed women in black burqas as they walked along the dusty roadside, where vendors bartered beneath makeshift canopies, and young boys drove their heavy-laden donkeys and multicolored herds of scrawny camels.

I braced for the shift back, wishing I’d had a little more time.

The Hinnom Valley was once the site of child sacrifices to Moloch. In the first century it was used for the isolation and burial of lepers, and the same tombs had served as clandestine burial sites in more recent years. While exploring them, two of my classmates found the skeletal remains of several people.

Called Gehenna in the New Testament, the valley came to represent a place of eternal fire and final judgment, with some later traditions regarding it as Hell itself. For some, the characterization is only reinforced by its large numbers of Egyptian fruit bats.

Across the valley from campus, there was a tiny movie theater, and when I learned they were screening Delicatessen, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s post-apocalyptic masterpiece, I convinced about a dozen of my classmates to join me there.

After the film, as we walked back across the valley, we noticed several young men walking some distance behind us. We began to move faster, but the men matched our speed, and soon they were gaining ground. As the gap between our parties tightened, we saw rifles and a few Uzis.

We sped up again. And so did they.

Soon we were sprinting, the armed men keeping pace. I reached the campus gate first, and fumbled with my keys for a moment before finding the lock, then held the gate open as my friends ran inside and sheltered behind the stone garden wall.

I slipped through and slammed the locked gate behind me, but the moment I was inside, my fear turned to anger. I remember the looks of horror on the women’s faces when instead of taking cover, I turned and faced our pursuers.

When they reached the gate I shouted; my exact words escape me, but it was something akin to “What the fuck!”

They kept their guns lowered, and through heavy breaths, a man with an Uzi asked me, “How do you get to the Wailing Wall?”

“Are you fucking serious? You scared the shit out of us!”

He explained that they were IDF, visiting from Tel Aviv. Young IDF soldiers are married to their guns for the duration of their mandatory service, even when they’re on leave and wearing civilian clothes.

This makes for an interesting dating scene.

As the semester neared its end we took a final field trip to the north. We stayed at a kibbutz by the Sea of Galilee, where a nearby hot spring kept the water pleasantly warm. I floated on my back, alone, late into the night, as shooting stars streaked across the sky, and for the first time since I’d arrived in the Middle East, I felt peace.

The next morning I awoke refreshed. The campus manager had joined us on the trip. “How was your night?” he asked me. I told him about my peaceful swim, and the meteor shower.

“Those weren’t shooting stars,” he said. “Those were rockets from Lebanon, being fired at an Israeli military base.”

____

I walked into the student lounge on the little college campus in Lakewood, Colorado. There wasn’t much to the room, just a few couches and tables, and a small TV — a place for casual hangouts and study groups.

On this day, things were more tense. The TV was on and everyone was watching intently.

“What’s going on?”

“A bunch of kids got shot at a high school. They haven’t caught the shooter yet.”

I turned my attention to the screen as a call came into the news room. A boy had escaped the building, but his twin brother was still inside. He was frantic, trying anything he could think of to reach him. The emergency lines were jammed up by other students and their frantic parents, so he called the news.

I recognized his voice immediately. “That’s one of my youth group kids.”

We watched as the situation developed. Information trickled out at a painfully slow pace. We learned that two shooters were down; some time would pass before we’d be told how many they had killed.

April 20, 1999. Columbine High School.

Details emerged over the following weeks. Two social outcasts, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, had entered the school carrying firearms and murdered thirteen of their fellow students and one teacher before committing suicide. They had also planted homemade explosive devices around the campus in advance of the attack, but none of them had detonated.

The news media and a horrified public scrambled for an explanation, and theories abounded: Harris and Klebold were victims of bullying; they played too many video games; they took too many drugs; they listened to too much Marilyn Manson.

In certain religious circles, there was another theory of the case: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were possessed by demons and set on a mission to kill young Christians.

I attended an evangelical Christian school with a youth ministry department, so it was no surprise that many of my peers had connections to Columbine. Some were close to the victims and their families.

The youth center where I worked was not part of a traditional church; our events were attended by a few Columbine students, but a lot of our kids had dropped out of school. Some lived on the street or in squats; most were drug-abusers. And three days before the Columbine massacre, we held an event that was attended by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

The evening was a bit of a departure for us. We normally put on punk rock shows featuring local Christian bands and the occasional touring act; I’d been handling a lot of the booking for the last year and a half or so. But on occasion we would cater to the goth crowd, and that meant a performance by a Christian industrial goth band called Rackets & Drapes.

I didn’t go to the show that night, for reasons I don’t recall, apart from not being the one who organized it, and the fact that it wouldn’t be attended by the majority of our regulars. If I had been there, I might have seen Harris and Klebold’s car, loaded with improvised explosives, parked outside our little warehouse. It is believed that they planted the bombs around the school shortly after leaving our show.

Pastor Larry was a charismatic preacher, and you probably have to be if you want to get a roomful of punk kids to take a break from the music so you can tell them about Jesus. He didn’t speak at every event, but he reserved the right to take the stage when the Spirit moved him.

All he asked of our kids was that they not be violent, that they leave their drugs outside, and that when he decided to speak, they listen. The vast majority were happy to oblige.

The night of the Rackets & Drapes show, there was little question that Larry would give a sermon. His message was always a variation on the same theme: you are lost, and hurting, but we love you, and God has a better future for you.

On this night, he added something new: “God is telling me that one of you is going to kill somebody.”

And then two of them did.

That thrust Larry and our little youth center into the spotlight. Larry believed that several of Harris and Klebold’s friends had been in on their plan, and that he had convinced them not to participate. He believed that if the Holy Spirit had not given him that message, even more people would have been killed at Columbine.

And so as a mass shooting became the singular focus of all Christian youth ministry in Colorado (I can’t speak to what happened elsewhere) Larry told his story of salvation to any who would listen, and thousands did.

He was not the only one with a story. One of the victims, seventeen-year-old Cassie Bernall, was reportedly asked by Harris if she believed in God. When she said yes, he shot and killed her. About four months after the attack, Plough Publishing released her mother’s bestselling book, She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall.

In the weeks and months after the story was reported, I met several people who confidently told me, “Cassie Bernall was my best friend.” Maybe she was.

In an environment where one’s connection to Columbine was rapidly translating into status, and where that status was becoming increasingly performative, I was careful to make my own distance from the events clear.

I never met Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold.

I don’t know anyone who died at Columbine.

I wasn’t there when Larry gave his sermon.

Numerous services and vigils were held for the fallen. I attended a conference in Colorado Springs with a friend, where I wondered if we’d be welcomed once people found out we worked with the ‘bad kids.’

They turned out to be very receptive to our point of view; above everything else, what people wanted most was for something like this to never happen again. And to that end, they prayed.

Larry was sometimes seen on a hill overlooking Columbine High School, arms outstretched in prayer.

Bumper stickers reading “We are all Columbine” appeared on cars all over Denver.

We weren’t.

A year after the massacre, things were very different at our youth center. Larry was still telling his story about preaching to Harris and Klebold, but fewer kids were showing up to hear it.

I finally told him, “If you don’t stop telling that story and come up with a new message, this place will shut down for good.” He agreed that it was time to move forward. He said he could not imagine doing his ministry without my help. He even called me a prophet.

A week later he spoke to the students at my college, and told the same story again. When I confronted him, he claimed that the Lord had told him to share it. For reasons that I suppose are His alone, God had left me out of the loop.

One of the things that drew me to Larry’s ministry was its simplicity. There were no complicated program schedules, singalongs, skits, or party games. We put on a free punk rock show every Tuesday night. We got to know local kids on their own terms. If they asked for help, we did our best to provide it.

Now Larry was preaching at every show. He formed a core leadership team that looked very different from the kids we worked with. We met for extensive prayer sessions, where people wept as they confessed their sins, while others spoke in tongues.

We were adrift. Our compass had broken, and we could not see the horizon.

For a time it seemed that we had found our way back, and would return to being a community youth center. Larry announced that we would expand. He hired three of us as assistant directors, with modest salaries. He created an internship program. I was about to graduate from college, and now I would move straight into a full-time job.

I’d had a rental house on two and a half acres in Aurora, but my landlord sold it to developers, and I was struggling to find a new place. I lived in my van while I finished my degree. The school administration was either unaware or didn’t mind that I was sleeping in the parking lot. If I didn’t show up for my eight AM class my professor would send another student out to knock on my window.

A steady paycheck right out of school was going to be very helpful to me. The ministry did not have the funds yet, but Larry had faith that if he took the first step and hired the assistant directors, the money would come.

He also had a new direction for the ministry itself. We were about to go to war.

Larry was always open about his pornography problem. It was part of his origin story: he’d been hooked on pornography, but God had saved him from his addiction. He spoke of it frequently, but lately, he’d given it a new spin.

He had discovered that the part of Denver where all the porno shops were had a long history with sexual deviance. There had been saloons and brothels there when Denver was still a mining town, and a succession of similar businesses over nearly 150 years.

For Larry, that could only mean one thing: demons.

He studied area maps and determined that running through the city of Denver were spiritual highways, which were traveled by demons, and along these highways, the sins of the flesh had long flourished.

We would go to these spiritual thoroughfares and fight the demons head-on. We would anoint the bars and porno shops with oil, and pray over them. By the power of Christ we would run them all out of business. We would expel the demons and break their stronghold.

I left the organization.

Larry said I had never been a good fit.

The ministry closed its doors a few months later.

Decades have passed since the Columbine mass shooting, and those searching for answers have still found little relief, but the video game industry and Marilyn Manson are probably in the clear.

We still don’t know why they did it, but the FBI’s conclusion is fairly banal — Eric Harris was a psychopath and Dylan Klebold was depressed. One wanted to kill; one wanted to die, and didn’t mind the killing.

Investigators do not think that Cassie Bernall was ever asked if she believed in God, though it seems clear that she did. Witnesses heard Klebold, not Harris, ask a different student that question, to which she said yes, and he spared her life.

There has never been any evidence that other students were involved in the planning of the attack. We’ll never know if anyone else was dissuaded from committing murder by Larry’s sermon, only that Harris and Klebold were not, and that our prayers didn’t stop it from happening again.

____

I drove up the dirt road, past the little house where the undercover ATF men had lived, and parked near the monument bearing the names of the dead. I took a moment to read them all, noting how many were children.

A small sign said the monument was paid for by an East Texas militia group, and requested a donation to help with its upkeep. I slipped a five dollar bill into the collection box and hoped it would only be spent on cleaning supplies.

This was the site of the New Mount Carmel Center, a church compound about twenty miles outside of Waco, where around thirty years earlier, an ATF raid led to a gunfight, a fifty-one-day siege, and a massive fire. Four agents and eighty-two church members died. Around two dozen of them were children.

America has many sites of great tragedy; when I visit them, I do so in quiet acknowledgment, to sit with the weight of what happened there, but I don’t know if that weight is attached to those places, or if I bring it with me.

I was a high school senior when the Waco Siege took place, making David Koresh and the Branch Davidians household names, and prompting a wide-ranging national debate about guns, religion, and the role of government.

The church had a history of legal battles, gunfights, and even grave-robbing that spanned decades, but when Koresh took power, he caught the federal government’s attention with accusations of polygamy, taking child brides, and stockpiling weapons.

A lengthy and somewhat clumsy surveillance operation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms led to a botched raid and a two-hour firefight that killed four agents and six church members.

Following a ceasefire, the FBI got involved, and the siege began. After nearly two months, agents initiated a tear gas attack in an attempt to force the Branch Davidians from their buildings.

The FBI insists that their gas canisters did not start the fires that destroyed the structures and killed all but nine of the people inside them. They point to evidence that the fires were deliberately set by church members. Others disagree, claiming they were started when the Bureau’s CS gas canisters were struck by gunfire.

The compound was razed a few weeks later, leaving only the concrete foundations of the buildings and the remains of an underground bunker where many of the bodies and weapons were later found.

For many years the property remained vacant, but a small chapel now stands on a portion of the old building site.

I walked the grounds and read the signs explaining what had taken place. A few other visitors milled about, and we had brief, quiet exchanges.

A man and his wife arrived with a group of little girls and a puppy, bringing a burst of life and sound to the otherwise somber scene. The girls ran, squealed, squabbled over who would hold the dog’s leash.

The man was the property’s caretaker, and he was eager to share what he knew with the visitors. He took up a position near the bunker, which had been filled with water and now held schools of goldfish and koi. Having loved koi ponds since I was a kid, I naturally gravitated to the water feature, and listened as the caretaker spoke.

Tossing a handful of fish food into the pool, he noted how the site of a great tragedy had been turned into a thing of beauty. He discussed the church’s new direction, away from the teachings of Koresh and the chaotic history that preceded him.

His wife, literally barefoot and pregnant, took a break from supervising the girls to offer an opinion — the world was sick and in need of healing, and mass media was to blame.

For the caretaker, the tragedy at Mount Carmel had its roots in the spiritual world. He explained that the siege had not been the first significant loss of life to occur there. He spoke of massacres of Native Americans in the 1830s, at the hands of armed troops backed by Charles Alderton, the inventor of Dr. Pepper.

My mind began to wander, and my body soon followed. Around that time the pastor’s wife arrived and asked me if I would like to see the inside of the chapel, and I happily accepted her invitation.

It was not like any church I had seen before. A massive Trump flag was displayed prominently in the front of the little sanctuary. Trump posters and campaign signs were scattered along the walls, amid framed anti-Clinton collages and various accounts of the siege.

“Alex Jones built this chapel. Are you familiar with him?”

I was.

I took my time, viewed every display, and thanked the pastor’s wife for allowing me inside, then made my way back to my car. I took another look around the grounds before settling into the seat.

In 1995, survivors of the siege planted 82 trees on the property, one to commemorate each of the church members who had died. There are now only 81. The current pastor cut down David Koresh’s tree about twenty years ago.

There was no Indian massacre at Mount Carmel in the 1830s, or in any other decade. There was significant fighting between the Waco and Cherokee people during that time, but Dr. Pepper was not involved. Alderton didn’t create his drink until 1885, more than twenty-five years after the Waco were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma.

From Mount Carmel I headed northwest to my next destination — Homestead Heritage, a 500-acre farm operated by Heritage Ministries United. The group relocated first from New York City to Colorado, before moving to Texas in 1980. Today they sell high quality handmade goods and food to the public, and they teach traditional homesteading skills. Courses include such topics as carpentry, blacksmithing, animal husbandry, and soap-making.

Much of the grounds are open to the public, so I walked around the farm and the shops, where I admired the quality of their furniture and other wares. Before long I found myself in the blacksmith shop; one of the instructors came in and spoke with me for awhile.

We talked about farming, and land. I was still searching for a place of my own. We spoke about his courses, and the satisfaction we gained from working with our hands.

The blacksmith felt blessed to be part of a wholesome, insulated community. He was grateful for his healthy lifestyle. In the outside world, he said, all anyone was doing was taking drugs and having sex.

As horny and addicted as we all are, I wonder how we have any time left for doing wars and binging reality TV.

I steered the conversation back to blacksmithing. I’d recently made a few knives from old sawmill blades, and I was interested in developing my skills. He mentioned sex and drugs again. “Don’t forget rock ‘n’ roll,” I thought, but I was a guest in his forge, so I kept it to myself.

I sometimes question who is more obsessed with sex, the people supposedly having so much of it, or the ones calling it a sin. In an intentional community that emphasizes modesty as a defense against lust, sex was being brought up a lot, and not by me.

That aside, much of the Homestead Heritage lifestyle appealed to me, and I felt I could learn a great deal from them, should I ever decide to go back and take a class.

I left the farm and continued my journey around the state, with much more of Texas to explore. I had an interview outside of Austin the next day. I needed a job more than a paycheck, a foothold between one ledge and the next.

____

Most of my land sits atop a thick layer of limestone cement called caliche. In multiple excavations, I have yet to find the bottom of it, though I continue to try. Where it is close to the surface, the trees, unable to penetrate the hardpan, send out long, lateral roots, in search of moisture and nutrients. But eventually, they reach a size that the shallow soil cannot support, and they die.

Near my house, there is a pocket of deeper soil that holds a large huisache, probably the most attractive tree on my property. It is around two feet thick at its base, splitting into multiple trunks, and it stands close to twenty feet tall — an impressive height for a brush country shrub.

But the tree is in danger. As it has spread its branches, suckers have begun to pull nutrients away from its older growth. And in one of its trunks, there is a weak joint, where a crack has formed at the junction of two branches.

Ants are already entering the damaged area, and if left alone, the crack will worsen, leading to rot and termite infiltration. Similar problems await any area where exposed deadwood is allowed to remain on the tree.

I haven’t used my chainsaw in several months, and it won’t start. I suspect the gas has gone bad, so I dump it in my burn barrel and replace it with fresh fuel. It starts right up.

I make my way around the tree, removing all the suckering growth, being careful to cut close to the collar without damaging the main stem. When I reach the weak union, I choose to keep the more vertical branch and remove the other.

I start with a wedge cut just below the lowest extent of the crack, then cut down along the crack itself until I reach the back of my wedge. The branch falls fairly cleanly, and I remove any jagged material with another pass of my saw. The wood looks healthy. There was a little rot, but it was confined to the branch I removed.

The grass is taller under the tree, and the mosquitos are heavy in the shade. I slap my forearm, crushing a juicy one and releasing a droplet of blood — mine, probably.

It’s Sunday morning, but my contractors have come to work on the barn. They’re reinforcing the existing metal frame with oilfield pipe, to thwart the wind. The mosquitos are doing their best to make the men suffer, and they’re wearing as much clothing as the heat will allow.

I drag the branches I removed to a temporary road I cut in a few weeks ago, and pile them up, all facing the same direction. I wrap a heavy chain around one end of the pile, and hook it to my skid steer. Driving backwards, I drag the branches to the pond, where I remove the chain and use the bucket to push them to the edge of the water. This will become habitat for various aquatic residents and visitors to the waterside.

I leave my machine near the barn, so my workers can use it, and walk back toward the house, amid iridescent flashes of green and blue from racerunner lizards, abandoning their hunts to retreat temporarily into the low brush.

The cast iron handle on one of my hydrants broke a few weeks ago during a windstorm. I was able to find a replacement part; I’ll fix it this afternoon.

I need to cut the brush along the fence behind the house before I replace the barbed wire with the high tensile mesh I bought at auction.

There’s a utility pole I’d like to have moved; I’ll try to remember to call the power company in the morning.

I need to dig more caliche for the road.

I return to the huisache, its form is still pleasing to the eye. I’d like to shorten its branches, but it’s best if I don’t remove more foliage this year. Most of the ants have already left the wound, and the smaller cuts I’ve made will heal over quickly. These are short-lived trees; I will likely outlast this one, but its descendants will persist here for a thousand years.

A freight train blows its horn a few miles to the north; sometimes I can hear the iron wheels rolling along the tracks, until the sound fades into an infinity of wind through the brush, of hammers on steel, of insects and birdsong.

The job started as a case of mistaken identity. I’ve gotten a few jobs that way. “You work on mobile homes, right?” “Sure.” “That’s your job, fixing up mobile homes?” “I can fix mobile homes.” “But that’s not your main job?” It went on like that for awhile, and then, “Can you do drywall?” “Yeah.”

Conkle owned a few mobile home parks around the western US, and he and his wife spent their days moving from one to the next, living in a large motorhome. Before he got into real estate he was a first mate on a cargo freighter, and he still took a job on a ship from time to time.

That must be where he got his management style. On a ship, it makes sense to keep your crew busy with routine maintenance — cleaning, painting, minor repairs. But in a mobile home park, especially one as distressed as Conkle’s properties, there tends to be more work than there is time to do it all, so you have to prioritize.

I started with a bathroom remodel — really more of a total rebuild, because the floor below the tub had completely rotted out, as had some of the walls, and some previous repairs had not been done particularly well.

Before I could finish the job I was hired to do, Conkle asked me to repair the skirting on several homes around the park. This was the tenants’ responsibility, but he complained, “These people will never do it, so we just do it ourselves and I bill them for it.” A couple tenants weren’t happy with this arrangement and thought I was the right person to yell at about it, but it turns out that I’m not a very satisfying person to verbally abuse.

Next he had me build a storage shed, which I almost finished before he pulled me off to skirt another home. In that one I found a massive plumbing leak, filling the plastic sheeting under the house like a giant, upside-down waterbed. I poked a hole in the plastic to let the water out and told Conkle I wouldn’t touch the home again unless it was to fix the plumbing. It was likely that a large section of the floor would also need to be replaced.

Back at the original home, I finally got to finish the bathroom and then started rebuilding the roof trusses in the living room. Some of my tools were stolen from the job site, by a particularly stupid tweaker who was trying to use my drywall screw gun to make a repair on his car, and then became frustrated when he learned that the batteries on cordless tools have to be recharged. He hadn’t stolen the charger. I’m told he exclaimed, “I thought they were supposed to be cordless! What’s the point if you still have to plug in the charger?”

Without going into detail, I got my tools back. I’m also told the thief is now sober and doing well, and I’m happy to hear it.

Conkle came into the house one day to check on the project. We got to talking and it turned out he was from the same part of California where I grew up. I told him I used to go to punk shows in his home town. And then he asked the dreaded question, “Which groups did you see?”

He called them “groups.” We didn’t see groups, we saw bands. We didn’t go to concerts, we went to shows. I always hated talking about music with anyone outside of the tribe. If I told him he wouldn’t have heard of any of the bands, I’d sound like a snob. If I listed off a few of them, he’d ask more questions, and my answers would only be increasingly confounding. I opted for snobbery — one awkward moment and it’s over, versus one after another, and another …

Then he began talking about his tenants, and it was clear that he had only disdain for them. His attitudes, his phrasing, the way he talked about money — all suddenly familiar. “Ah, I know who this is,” I thought. I’d met this guy before, a thousand iterations of him.

I suppose it’s possible to run a successful business when you despise your customers, but why would you want to? It sounds like a miserable way to make money.

Across the road, a hoarder was being evicted and moved into an assisted living facility. The scene was at first heartbreaking, then disgusting. No one had been in the home in many years. Mountains of clothing, much of it never worn, intermingled with moldy, half-eaten sandwiches; years-old jugs of milk; envelopes full of cash; dead cats; jars of urine and feces.

Conkle wanted me to clean out the house, and it took all the restraint and self-control I could muster not to tell him to fuck right the fuck off. It was a job for a hazmat team, not a general contractor. So he hired a teenage kid to do it.

It took several days to get everything out of the home, and it filled two large construction dumpsters, which Conkle didn’t want to rent until the last possible moment, so he had the kid pile the trash on the ground, and then he hired an excavator operator to bring his machine and scoop all the garbage into the dumpster.

Dumpster rental: $50 per day. Excavator with operator: $180 per hour. In other words, for every two hours of excavator time you could rent the dumpster for a week.

Conkle also needed to install some culverts and dry wells for drainage. He’d originally tried to get me to dig the trenches for the culverts by hand.

Time to dig by hand: 8 hours at $25 per hour. Time to dig with an excavator: 5 minutes at $180 per hour.

Thankfully I helped Conkle see reason on that one. Besides, I still had a lot of unfinished projects around the property, and that was becoming increasingly frustrating.

When the excavator arrived, Conkle decided to have him clear brush and weeds from a mobile home pad, which was a much better job for a smaller machine. It took half the morning for him to realize he was wasting money, and then he was suddenly in a rush, grabbing any laborer he could find to get the culverts in the ground so the shovel operator could bury them before end of day.

When things didn’t go smoothly, Conkle panicked. He finally started doing math in his head. He began to tremble. He snapped at his laborers. They snapped back. And then, one of the funniest sentences I’ve ever heard on a job site: “This is costing me five cents a second!”

I wasn’t the only one who found it funny, and a beet-red Conkle stormed off his own job site in the grip of a mental breakdown. I wondered how many of these his wife had talked him down from over the years.

With the hoarder house emptied, Conkle wanted to remodel it and sell it. His concern was that if he demolished it, as he should have, he would be hit with all kinds of regulations, like asbestos abatement laws. A few coats of fresh paint would be much cheaper.

The house was still quite ripe with the disturbingly sweet smell of decomposing waste. I suggested that if he insisted on remodeling, he start by painting the entire interior of the home with Kilz, a brand well-known for its odor sealing capabilities, but Conkle insisted that any paint would work.

I ended up agreeing to do a little work on the house after it was painted. It still smelled bad, but it was tolerable. Conkle insisted on cutting corners. Some of his laborers and I began using his name as a verb for any half-assed repair. Leaky drain line? Conkle it with a little duct tape. You bought three different types of flooring at a surplus sale and don’t have enough of any of them to do the whole floor? Just Conkle them together, it’ll be fine.

After several months of moving me from one project to the next, without ever letting me finish anything, Conkle and Mrs. Conkle decided to go south for the winter. He wanted to wrap up our business arrangement, but he also wanted the first home I’d worked on completed. He had a buyer lined up, and he proposed a three-way trade.

I would complete the remodel and install a new roof on the home. Conkle would pay me for any unexpected repairs, as I was continuously finding new problems inside the walls and ceiling. I would provide the roofing materials at my own expense, but he would be responsible for all other materials. The buyer would give Conkle a sum of money for the home, and she would give me her travel trailer as payment for the new roof.

There were weather delays, but I completed the project. I took delivery of the travel trailer, and I emailed Conkle the bill for the unplanned repairs. The total was a little over $3,000. He pretended not to understand the bill.

When we spoke on the phone, he tried to change the terms of our deal. He claimed he’d never agreed to pay me for the extra repairs. In effect, he tried to cut himself out of the equation entirely. So I put a lien on his mobile home park.

I followed all the correct procedures and notified him properly, but Conkle didn’t respond. He could have challenged the lien in court, but he missed his window. If he ever wanted to sell the property he would have to pay me. And as it turned out, he did want to sell.

Conkle rolled back into town and we had a tense conversation in the grocery store. By tense, I mean that I said bad words to him in front of a lot of other people. He was visibly rattled, and complained to other shoppers and store employees, but he had a hard time finding a sympathetic ear. I’m not the most friendly guy, but I have more friends than Conkle.

Ultimately he agreed to pay what he owed. We met at the bank the next morning. He wanted to watch me cash his check so I couldn’t claim he’d never paid. I’ve noticed that dishonest people tend to think that everyone else is also dishonest.

In the bank lobby, he was shaking, with tears in his eyes. Paying his debt was traumatic for him. I wrote him a receipt and filled out a form to remove the lien, but I made him file it and pay the fee, which also made him very upset.

Some time later I saw him in the hardware store with his wife. He avoided me, but she wanted a fight. I wasn’t interested. I’d already won. Her attacks devolved into her telling me I stank. I said she was probably right — I’d been cleaning the barn. The owner had a later conversation with them about what is and is not appropriate behavior in his store.

Conkle sold his trailer park for around half a million dollars. It should have sold for at least four times that amount, but he could never hold onto his tenants, so occupancy was below fifty percent. He couldn’t get qualified contractors to work for him because he didn’t pay his bills. He always cut corners when it came to maintenance and repairs.

Had he treated workers fairly and given tenants a good value for their money, people would have wanted to work for him, and his park would have been at full occupancy, at a higher monthly rate, like every other mobile home park in town.

Instead he’d saved thousands of dollars, and lost millions.

You might say he Conkled himself.

When I was a kid, most of our back yard was a steep hillside that we did almost nothing with. If I had it today I would plant avocados, assuming the HOA would allow it. But in those days it was dominated by three eucalyptus trees that smothered the hillside with bark and leaf litter; their roots secreted a toxin into the soil that prevented any native plants from competing with them.

Every so often the HOA would send tree trimmers to absolutely massacre the eucalypts, giving us the worst of both worlds — invasive trees that destroyed the local ecology and substantially increased wildfire risk, trimmed to their ugliest possible forms.

I want those trees dead.

I know the timber business, the trucking business, the paper business, and I have the added benefit of not caring where the trees go — whether they’re shipped to Chinese plywood mills or pulped locally for paper, or simply thrown into the ocean — as long as they’re dead.

The trees also take up massive amounts of water from the soil, which exacerbates drought conditions. In a wildfire, strips of eucalyptus bark, full of flammable oils, become airborne, drifting several miles and starting spot fires wherever they land. They also form massive pitch pockets that explode when they heat up, sometimes throwing fireballs a hundred yards or more.

You might think that trees that burn so readily would eventually be consumed by wildfires, problem solved, but the blue gum also has exploding seed pods that are heat activated, so for every one that’s killed in a fire, many thousands more can be planted in its place.

They may pose this same fire risk in their native Australia, but numerous ecological and environmental factors exist there to keep them in check. In California, the factors that would limit their dominance are all but absent. Those first seeds brought to North America in the 1800s have grown into the gift that keeps on taking.

If California doesn’t want to give me millions of dollars to wipe them out, they should still give it to someone. Such a project would create jobs and tax revenue for decades, significantly reduce wildfire risks, and allow for the reestablishment of native trees — trees that actually feed birds and other wildlife.

In some California communities, “environmentalists” have vehemently opposed the removal of eucalyptus forests, I suppose to prove that stupidity cannot be bound by ideology. People would rather have a forest of the wrong trees today than to wait fifty years for the right trees to mature, and I suspect that no amount of environmental, ecological, or economic benefit will ever change that.

It is, in fact, the reason the railroad companies planted eucalyptus in California in the first place, believing their rapid growth would provide a ready supply of railroad ties. Then they learned that the young wood warps, rots, and splits when you drive a spike through it, and the costly experiment was over. Then the trees escaped the lab.

Today, when I look at a eucalyptus monoculture, I don’t see a forest. I only see the cost.

I haven’t picked the book up in many years, but on occasion I will see an unknown bird and its name will simply come to me. More often, birds in real life look very little like their idealized illustrations, and identifying them takes a bit more work.

For that reason, other field guides followed. I became particularly fond of the National Audubon Society guides, which featured high quality, color photographs of every species. I had not only the bird books, but also guides to mammals, reptiles, and trees.

The stack of books traveled with me on every summer road trip, to be consulted after each animal sighting, or whenever a tree needed to be identified. My mother might have occasionally regretted buying them for me when I corrected her more colloquial nomenclature: They’re not blue jays, they’re Steller’s jays — blue jays live east of the Rockies. It’s not a chipmunk, it’s a golden-mantled ground squirrel. Those aren’t pine trees, they’re Douglas firs.

I must have been a treat.

I never stopped poring over field guides and other nature books, but where I eventually took issue with both National Geographic and the Audubon Society was in their narrow definition of “North America,” which they treated as the United States and Canada only.

NatGeo has since changed the title of its book to Birds of the United States and Canada, but Audubon continues to draw an arbitrary distinction that ignores a massive, and massively biodiverse, portion of the continent. It also ignores seventh grade geography.

At the risk of pedantry, I submit the following rant:

For anyone who doesn’t scour maps like I do, North America contains twenty-three countries, including all of Central America and the Caribbean, as well as territories like Puerto Rico and Greenland. And of course, Mexico is one of North America’s three largest nations.

Central America is not a continent; rather it is a region of North America. Mexico is not part of Central America, with the possible exception of the area east of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Five US states, six Mexican states, and Cuba share the Gulf coast, while several other states are heavily influenced by its weather patterns. Thirty-three US states, eleven Mexican states, and two Canadian provinces are part of the Gulf of Mexico watershed.

The eastern side of the Yucatán Peninsula is Mexico’s Caribbean coast, while Cuba is widely considered the northernmost island in the Caribbean. Thus the two countries with which the United States shares the Gulf are also part of the Caribbean.

It’s worth noting that the southernmost part of the continental United States sits around 564 miles south of Mexico’s northernmost point. In fact Mexico reaches fewer than 700 miles farther south than the continental US.

Much of the United States is closer to Central America than to Canada. My home in Texas is roughly the same distance from Canada as it is from Panama — Central America’s most distant country.

Florida is only about 90 miles from Cuba. The Bahamas are only 50 miles from the Florida coast in some spots, and that’s 50 miles east, not south — Grand Bahama has roughly the same latitude as West Palm Beach.

This is all to say that these are not faraway, separate places. We are one continent. We are inextricably connected. Birds know this, even if some of us do not.

More than a third of the bird species in the United States and Canada migrate here from Latin America and the Caribbean. Others have year-round ranges that extend past our southern border. I recall feeling surprised, and then a little stupid, the first time I saw a northern cardinal in southern Mexico.

Of the nearly 700 native bird species in Texas alone, all but eighteen are also found in Mexico or the Caribbean, or were historically found there. That’s over 97 percent. California has the most bird species in the nation, about 75 percent of which are also found in Mexico.

Mexico has over a hundred endemic birds — species found nowhere else on earth. Puerto Rico has almost twenty. The entire continental US? Fifteen. Despite its enormous land mass, Canada has no endemic birds.

Mexico and Central America are home to more than ten percent of the entire world’s bird species, despite comprising less than two percent of its land mass.

Panama alone hosts more bird species than the US and Canada combined, on a narrow isthmus smaller than South Carolina, making it acre-for-acre one of the most biodiverse nations on Earth. Costa Rica is similarly species-dense.

I could go on … and on … but instead I’ll simply say that the most ecologically rich parts of our continent are the parts that the nature guides are ignoring.

It’s easy to think the omission has little to do with wildlife, and more to do with the people who live, or don’t live, in those disregarded places.

Is Audubon is ‘othering’ about twelve percent of the continent, which also happens to be home to about twelve percent of the entire world’s biodiversity — you know, the thing they’re supposed to care most about?

Several years ago I contacted Audubon about this and to their credit, I received a response. I was told they simply didn’t have the resources to produce guides for those regions. They assured me that it had nothing to do with race, or culture, or the prevalence of spicy food.

But they do have teams working there, as they continue to publish data for regions that are much larger, much more remote, and much less ecologically significant.

There are Alaskan islands so remote that they’re much closer to Asia than to the North American mainland. They’re rightfully included in the guides.

So I’m left still questioning their priorities, and I’m frustrated, because I’d really like an Audubon field guide to the birds of the whole continent.

Given that every one of the seventy-plus bird species I’ve identified so far on my own property spends at least part of the year in Mexico, Central America, or the Caribbean (at least 24 of them even range into South America) — I think I’m being reasonable.

The haze burns off quickly as my adrenaline spikes. No one should be here. No one should ever be here.

I fumble for my pants. My heart is pounding, and I’m nauseous.

Another knock.

There’s no reason for anyone to be here. Anyone with a reason would call. Only a few people even know where I live.

I grab a pistol and step softly to the door. I look cautiously through the window. No one.

I open the door and step outside; the interloper must still be nearby.

I scan. Hand steady, index finger aside the trigger guard, ready.

To my right, a small bird flits from the side of the house to the utility pole by the well.

Another knock.

Scuttling around the wooden pole, a ladder-backed woodpecker. More knocking.

I am Wally Walrus.

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. My heart still thumps as I settle into the chair by the door. A second woodpecker appears. A pair.

The heat is already settling in as I run through the events of the last ten or twelve years. I’ve made enemies. I’ve become accustomed to threats.

The last time someone knocked on my door, it was a deputy serving me papers. Before that, a long string of tweakers and misfits looking for jobs, favors, fights. A cop notifying me that my brother was dead. A delivery driver with no way of knowing I worked nights and needed my sleep.

My last job was driving heavy haul in the Pacific Northwest. With a truck and trailer over 105,000 pounds, if I wasn’t well rested, I wasn’t safe. A knock at the door was never a casual break in my routine. It was a disruption of my sleep that put lives at risk, or the disruption of my life itself.

The jarring intrusiveness of a door knock, of voices outside, of a loud car stereo; the ubiquity of thieves and violent men — these factored heavily into my choice to live well outside of town, far from any public street.

But the past doesn’t stay put. It follows you to new places, into new stages. There is no such thing as a fresh start.

“It is what it is.”

Is it? I’ve always hated that phrase. It’s one of those inane truisms that need not be said at all, the dumbest of ontological assertions. I am what I am. A horse is a horse. It is what it is.

Trite and true as such statements may be, Pavlov would surely disagree. A bell is not merely a bell; a knock is not just a knock.

It isn’t what it is. It is what it was.

So here, half a mile from the highway, behind two locked gates, in a little house few people have ever seen, for a brief moment, a small bird made me think that my life as I knew it, or perhaps my life itself, was about to end.

Feeling foolish, relieved, grateful, I focused on my breathing, lowering my heart rate, settling my stomach. I put my pistol away and decided to drive into town for supplies.

As I stepped around the corner of the house, I flushed a cottontail from the clumps of grass along the skirting. Almost immediately, a Harris’s hawk appeared. Within seconds, she was joined by three others. They were hunting, but they stayed above the power lines; the rabbit was safe for the moment.

I’ve gotten to know this family well; their territory is a little farther up the access road. A pair of great horned owls controls the south end of the property, where my house is; territorial boundaries are somewhat fluid, but the hawks don’t linger around the house.

I got into my car and headed up toward the highway; a roadrunner crossed in front of me and disappeared back into the brush. Doves and cowbirds perched along the power lines, as thrashers and flycatchers darted in and out of the thornscrub.

I stopped at the gate and waited for the dust to drift past before I opened the car door. Several green jays live in the brush near the gate, but I hear them more often than I see them.

Up the highway I passed vultures and caracaras on their search for roadkill; in the springtime, the turkeys would become careless, more concerned with mating than with the passing traffic, and they’d be added to the scavengers’ menu.

Ground doves and bobwhites gathered on the roadway; as I approached, they waited until the last possible moment to scatter.

In town, grackles picked dead bugs from the grilles and bumpers of parked cars, while a Cooper’s hawk perched on the cab of a nearby pickup truck, preparing to strike.

____

When I was a kid, Orange County, California still had orange groves. I spent most of my childhood living in my grandparents’ home in San Juan Capistrano, on a cul-de-sac in a subdivision sandwiched between I-5 and the railroad, on a hill overlooking a few hundred acres of orange trees.

Our backyard feeders attracted an impressive variety of birds, and I enjoyed trying to identify them. There were the usual finches, sparrows, and mourning doves, but the hummingbird feeder was where the real action was. It wasn’t unusual for several Anna’s hummingbirds to compete aggressively for access to the supply of sugar water, but an even greater treat was when an oriole would visit.

San Juan Capistrano is famous for its cliff swallows, so much so that they were a topic of a popular song recorded by The Ink Spots in 1940, and later covered by the likes of Pat Boone and many others.

When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano isn’t really about swallows; they’re a device to mark the passage of time. But I still enjoyed hearing Bugs Bunny sing about my home town in a couple episodes of Merrie Melodies.

Saint Joseph’s Day, March 19, is known locally as Swallows Day. The local legend, and a frequent subject of Warmer Brothers cartoons, was that the swallows returned each year from South America on that exact date, to a Franciscan mission founded in San Juan Capistrano in 1776.

The birds are central to San Juan’s identity, appearing on municipal signs, church bulletins, even lending their name to a notorious local bar. The name of my favorite taqueria, Las Golondrinas, is Spanish for The Swallows.

Every year I attended the Swallows Day parade, which featured marching bands, equestrian groups, and an impossibly large and often clumsy majorette team called the Silver Streaks. But my favorite part of the parade was the cowboy gunfights — costumed men firing off blanks and pretending to murder each other in the street, to the delight of thousands of onlookers.

Of course, the swallows legend is mostly nonsense. The birds do return every year, but not on the same day, not all at once, and not only to the mission. There is nothing especially unique about their migration — hundreds of bird species migrate between the tropics and temperate North America every year.

As a kid I was led to believe that swallows were strictly a San Juan thing; on summer road trips I was surprised to see huge nesting colonies under bridges and overpasses all over the western United States. It turns out you can see cliff swallows in nearly every part of North America. They even show up in Hawaii from time to time.

Amusingly, nearly every depiction of a swallow in San Juan Capistrano shows a bird with the deeply-forked tail of a barn swallow; while there are barn swallows in San Juan, the cliff swallows that made the city famous have square tails.

I was always more interested in the birds than I was in local folklore and small town identity.

Down the hill from our house, there was a large, vacant field. Most mornings, on the way to school, my mom and I would see a great blue heron standing in the grass. We’d always thought of herons as wading birds, and wondered why this one was spending so much time away from the water, until the morning we saw it eating a gopher.

At the end of our cut-de-sac, a small stand of eucalyptus trees was the communal roost for over a hundred turkey vultures. When I was given a telescope for Christmas one year, I only used it once to look at the stars before aiming it lower, to watch the vultures as they came in to land. I was fascinated by the way they made their way to their respective perches; their flight patterns seemed coordinated, almost like a busy airport.

Over time, we noticed a change in the birds at our backyard feeders — just as many birds, but less diversity, though a few new species began to make frequent appearances. Scrub jays were a welcome addition; less so the growing number of European starlings.

When I return to San Juan today, I barely recognize it. I have a hard time finding my way around a town I used to wander freely, through parks and alleyways, exploring creek beds and steep hillsides. I skateboarded through neighborhoods, and rode my bike to Doheny. It’s where I learned to drive. And to fight. I never knew its street names, only its landmarks.

It’s where I learned to see.

The vacant field, which used to host rodeos and carnivals when it wasn’t hosting a great blue heron, is now a private high school, named for one of the founders of the local mission. The citrus groves have all been replaced by medical offices. And as the last of the orange trees disappeared from the valley, so did the orioles from our backyard hummingbird feeder.

____

I had a busy summer at the equipment auctions, but hadn’t expected to win a 73,000-pound excavator. I’d been throwing in last-minute, lowball bids on all the machines that didn’t have major mechanical problems, and watching them sell for double, triple, even ten times my maximum bid. So I was surprised when I won the Komatsu for around $12,000.

I thought it was a fairly small machine, not a mini, but not gigantic either. Then I looked up the specs. Oops.

Once I got it to the ranch, it turned out to be a very capable machine. I had a few repairs done, but didn’t spend much, and ended up with something that could easily dig through the heaviest caliche — the layer of limestone cement that sits under most, if not all, of my property.

About a hundred yards from my house there was an old stock tank — a round basin surrounded by a berm — that probably once held water, but had become overgrown with mesquite and lotebush. I decided to use the excavator to clean out the basin, enlarge it a little, and turn it back into a pond for my ducks and geese.

The noise from my work attracted a Swainson’s hawk, hoping I would uncover a rodent den or a rabbit’s nest. She perched on the berm, mere feet away from the machine, not seeming to recognize that there was a human sitting inside it.

Once I’d dug out a fair amount of soil, I smoothed out the basin, using the excavator’s tracks to pack down the clay.

And then I turned on the water. Initially it didn’t hold much, but it improved over time. I bought a timer to help me ration water and keep me from draining my well, and then I set it incorrectly and drained the well anyway. Fortunately the pump wasn’t damaged and the well recharged.

I was more conservative with my water use after that. Fifteen minutes at the top of every hour was enough to keep the lowest part of the basin consistently filled, with about a foot of water at its deepest point.

I did not expect what happened next. Several species of diving beetles and other aquatic insects arrived almost immediately. As I monitored the water depth, birds came to drink and bathe in the new pool. Dragonflies of every color buzzed along the surface, dipping in to drink or deposit their eggs. Bees and butterfles pulled moisture and minerals from the mud.

I added a brush pile on one bank, which attracted more birds. I’d been keeping a list, but with water in the pond, I was adding new species every day. Painted buntings, blue grosbeaks, a black-billed cuckoo. I’d made several birding trips to the lower Rio Grande Valley, but I was seeing more species around my own pond.

The insect activity bordered on oppressive, but that brought several species of flycatchers.

I found animal tracks in the mud: deer, raccoons, and turkeys were all visiting the site.

Back at the house, the action was likewise intensifying. I’d recently hired some contractors to remove an old barn and replace it with a more modern poultry house. North of the barn site I had broken up some of the caliche to allow the trees and shrubs to root more deeply, and I’d seeded the area heavily with browntop millet, cowpeas, and native grasses. I rolled out and spread a couple round bales of mixed grass hay to give the seed a little shade and improve moisture retention.

Pyrrhuloxias, which look like the northern cardinal’s heavy metal cousins, raided my millet planting, joined by three kinds of doves and various finches and sparrows.

Three oriole species began making regular appearances around the house. One of my resident great-horned owls emerged one evening, only to be attacked by an oriole and driven back to the treeline.

The owls were among the first birds I saw when I moved in, stumbling across a nest site in my old barn. The nest wasn’t successful and the eggs were eventually eaten by raccoons, but the following year I was able to verify that they’d raised at least one baby at some other nest site.

One of the adult birds killed a rabbit just below my bedroom window. For a moment there was chaos — wings beating loudly against the wall, the rabbit squealing, the young owl begging to be fed, while the parents hooted to each other enthusiastically.

When I went out to investigate, a deer was snorting and stamping somewhere in the nearby darkness, and a flock of turkeys called from the brush.

I hadn’t seen the owls much since the demolition and construction started, so I was relieved when one of them appeared, though I always wonder how much of a threat they’ll soon pose to my chickens and other poultry.

On my porch there was a roll of welded wire fencing, stood up on end; the inside of the roll became the nest site for a pair of mockingbirds. I moved the roll slightly and strapped it to a post so it wouldn’t get knocked over. The birds didn’t seem to mind and the female continued to lay her eggs.

As the pond deepened and grew more biologically active, I added a few mosquitofish and fathead minnows, ahead of what I’d hoped would be a significant rain event.

The storm came early, without warning, and dumped over two inches of rain in an hour. When it had passed and it was safe to be outside, I went out to get a charger cord from my car, and then I heard what I can only describe as the mooing of a herd of alien cattle.

The sound was coming mainly from the pond, so I walked down to investigate. The water level had risen perhaps two feet, and it was full of spadefoot toads, which live most of their lives underground, dormant, until they’re awakened by thunder and heavy rains.

Their eggs hatched within a day, and the tadpoles grew quickly, from little black dots to an inch long in their first week. I never saw the toadlets leave the pond; one day, they were simply gone.

More storms came, and the pond filled a bit higher with each major downpour, and drained a bit slower. A second toad species, the Texas toad, also bred in the pond. I was never able to find them in the shallows, but identified them by their calls, which sounded almost electronic, so loud I thought they might damage my hearing.

I continued to monitor the nest on the porch; there were briefly four eggs, but one disappeared. Around the time I thought the eggs had been abandoned, I checked the nest and found a tiny chick, still wet from hatching. The other two hatched the next morning.

I took the excavator to a different part of the property to dig caliche for the roads. A white-tailed hawk appeared nearby, watching. A tropical raptor in the northern part of its range, and a larger bird than the Swainson’s hawk, I saw her often in the days that followed, sometimes at the caliche pit, sometimes near the house. I feared she might displace the pack of Harris’s hawks, until I saw them perched on consecutive utility poles along the access road, apparently unperturbed by each other’s presence.

My caliche pit filled with water, then drained, leaving behind a layer of clay on its walls. Perhaps this site would work for a larger pond. As with the first pond site, insects arrived quickly, and lizards and toads followed. I found myself seemingly in a race against the local ecology to develop the site before it could be colonized.

____

The millet is about two feet tall and the cowpeas are still growing well; various grasses and forbs have emerged from the clumps of hay I spread on the ground several weeks ago. There are patches of bare ground in need of more seed; I could leave them alone and let them fill in on their own, but a little more millet will jumpstart the process.

On the porch, the mockingbird chicks grew rapidly; in the first few days I rarely saw their parents, but they were clearly being fed. I took a photo of the nest once a day, to document their progress.

On day six their first pin feathers were coming in, and the adult birds paid more attention to my brief presence around the nest, though they remained remarkably tolerant.

By day thirteen, conditions had become so cramped that the nestlings were sitting on top of each other, and shortly after I took my daily photo, the first of them left the nest. The other two left a few hours apart on the following day, disappearing somewhere in the tall grass, in the brush, or amid my skid steer attachments. I watch the adult birds to see if they’ll reveal their children’s locations as they continue to feed and protect them away from the nest, but they aren’t giving up any secrets.

A pair of barn swallows that built their mud nest on the porch last summer have returned. Last year they raised one brood successfully, but their second one was killed by fire ants. The drought knocked down the fire ant population this year; they’ll recover, but with any luck my orange oil treatments will keep their numbers down, allowing native ants to recover and nestlings to remain unharmed.

I usually walk down to the pond twice a day. I check the water level, look for tadpoles and aquatic insects. I scan for animal tracks in the mud, and monitor the plants growing around the berm. I take a pair of cheap binoculars, and if the mosquitos aren’t too bad, I stay awhile to see what birds come to visit.

I’d like to build a blind here, but it’s not my highest priority. I have other projects I need to finish first. The utility company wants to clear the brush along their right-of-way, so I’m installing a new gate to give them easier access to their lines.

I’m clearing paths of my own for new fences. I’ll bring my sheep and their guardian dogs soon, but I need tight fences to keep the dogs from roaming.

I’m conducting a survey of trees and shrubs on the property. Huisache, honey mesquite, wild lime, persimmon, lotebush, palo blanco, anacua, granjeno, guajillo.

Live oaks, pecans, cedar elms, and cypress are in the property’s future, but today I’m growing Texas sabal palms, Texas ebony, and anacahuita from seeds I’ve collected locally and in the Valley. I like to imagine what they’ll be ten, twenty, fifty years from now, long after I’ve been buried here myself, or in some other patch of living soil I’ve come to love as much as this one.

It’s hot today, but I’m wearing a thin, knit cap. I recently shaved my head and I don’t want my scalp to sunburn. I should just get a cowboy hat, but I can’t bring myself to do it. My style, or lack thereof, hasn’t changed in decades; identity is winning over utility. I’m still walking around the ranch in flip flops, pulling huisache thorns from the soles and flicking sand burs from in between my toes.

I look stupid when I’m bald, but it’s easier to shave my head a few times a year than to deal with barbers, and I like the way the hair feels when it first grows back — like velvet. So I wipe the sweat from my forehead and hope the insect repellant stays on the back of my neck, and I sit on the berm overlooking my pond, and I watch, and listen.

I learned to recognize the long, rattling croak of the lesser nighthawk before I ever saw one in the air, but after a heavy rain they’ll start feeding earlier in the afternoon, and they’ll still be active well into the morning. The larger, common nighthawk flies higher, and keeps more of a routine; I often see the same one heading north around dusk.

A utility pole just south of the pond is a popular perch for birds of prey, until they’re chased away by mockingbirds. Another species of woodpecker, the golden-fronted, has a nest inside the pole. They’re noisier and more visible than the ladder-backed woodpeckers.

Crickets and katydids in the brush begin to replace the chorus of daytime birds, and a few bats arrive to take flying insects from the air. The short, whirring calls of the pauraques begin.

I’ve seen the owls less frequently in recent weeks, but they’re certainly nearby. It can be hard to pick out their calls when there are so many doves around. I scan the top of the brush, hoping for a glimpse, as the woodpeckers chatter and continue their endless excavations.

A knock.

Peace.

I’d spent a couple years volunteering at a big cat rescue. I knew what tigers sounded like. And there was one on the other side of the river.

I’d just slid down the trunk of a fallen tree laid against a steep hillside, and landed in a tangle of rattan palms. I managed to keep from being too deeply impaled.

I was trying to get back to the river. The trail had become overgrown and the river was the only thing I had left to orient myself.

My trip had started a bit easier.

At the bus station in Surat Thani, I’d met a couple guys who drove me to Khao Sok, a little village on Thailand’s Malay Peninsula, and the gateway to a national park that shared its name.

In the coming days I’d learn that they were tattoo artists; they spent about seven hours applying a dragon to my arm with sewing needles tied to the ends of bamboo skewers.

It was the only time I was ever tattooed by two people at the same time. A third man held my arm steady and stretched my skin taut — a more receptive canvas.

Unlike the buzzing and the grinding feeling of a tattoo gun, I could feel every time the needles entered and exited my skin.

The four of us were arranged around a large, futon-type mattress, in a bamboo hut with holes in its thatch roof, and paintings of Bob Marley and Che Guevara on the walls. I watched geckos chasing insects across the ceiling as the needles popped in and out, in and out.

The guys arranged for me to camp on the lawn at an eco-resort for free, as long as I promised to only use their guide services and to have some meals in their restaurant.

I took a boat trip with their guide just to hold up my end of the bargain, but the rest of my time was spent hiking in the jungle.

The first day I went out, a village dog went with me. All I’d done was pet him, but that was all it took. His owner was certain I’d given him treats, but I had not. We’d just kind of clicked.

It was nice to have a companion, but hiking with a dog doesn’t make for very good wildlife viewing, so the following day, when he tried to join me, I insisted he stay behind, and he was smart enough to understand.

This time I took a different route, deeper into the rainforest.

The first leech I was aware of dropped from a tree and landed on the back of my hand. Many more would follow.

As I made my way up the trail, I found that if I took a break, hordes of leeches would immediately come somersaulting in my direction. Best to keep moving.

I reached a flat area with scattered, small trees and bamboo, where the air felt hotter, heavier, and the smell left no doubt — elephants had just been here. As much as I’d have liked to see wild elephants, I didn’t want to meet them on foot. I kept walking.

The leeches sat on the ends of twigs and on leaf tips, waiting for the next mammal to pass by. They can detect vibrations, body heat, carbon dioxide, and odors. I’d been counting them as I scraped them from my legs. Thirty-six, thirty-seven …

Their anticoagulant saliva left thin streams of blood running down my legs — trails for other leeches to follow.

Soon my earlier bites were drawing clusters of new passengers, arranging themselves around each feeding site like the petals of a flower.

Sixty-one, sixty-two …

By the time I heard the tiger, I’d already been fed upon for a few hours, and I was ready for it to stop. The one place the leeches couldn’t reach me was the middle of the river.

I walked out into the water, noting schools of Cyprinid fishes, similar to many I’d seen in my years working in a tropical fish store.

I found a large rock in the center of the river, where I could sit comfortably for awhile. I rolled up my pant legs and flicked away the last remaining leeches, and took a moment to relax.

Relaxation gave way to a stinging sensation on my upper, inner thigh — something between pain and itch, and it was intensifying.

I unzipped my pants and pulled down the waistband of my boxer shorts to reveal the biggest leech of the day, engorged, the size of a large grape, pulsating about an inch away from my left testicle.

Seventy-eight …

And then, the tiger.

It was time to go back. I left the relative sanctuary of the river and hacked through more jungle until I found the trail.

I didn’t stop to pick the leeches off until I reached a deep pool below a waterfall, where some tourists had gathered for a swim.

I waded to a large, flat slab where several of them were sitting, removed my boots and socks, and to their mild horror, I began flicking leeches from my legs.

Eighty-two, eighty-three, eighty-four …

As the airborne annelids landed on the horrified hikers, they shrieked and scrambled to escape. There were other waterfalls farther up the trail. This one was mine.

Alone, I stripped down and had a private swim before making my way back to the village.

I lost track of the leeches somewhere in the nineties.

Lar gibbons were well into their dusk chorus by the time I reached the edge of the village. My canine friend greeted me.

Back at the lodge, there was no hot water for a shower, only a bucket of water and a bowl to pour it over myself. I picked the last of the leeches from my body and did my best to wash away the blood.

My bites would take months to heal, whether they became infected from the leeches themselves or from all my scratching.

It was my first trip to the humid tropics, a blood initiation into the penetrating heat, the cacophony of birds and insects, and the intermingled scents of growth and decay that would draw me back for the rest of my life, and become the lodestar in my search for Home.

Tonight’s storm was not in the forecast. The rain wasn’t supposed to start for another twenty-four hours or so, but at around two AM, the sky exploded, violently.

The thunder awoke me about thirty seconds before it knocked out the power. I don’t know yet if it’s just a local outage or if it’s more widespread. I’m not going outside to investigate.

There was no advance warning, but now we’re under a storm alert that predicts 60-mile-an-hour wind and quarter-sized hailstones. It’s not a hurricane. It’s not the worst storm I’ve been in. It’s mostly passed already.

The lightning was like a strobe light. There was no counting the seconds between the lightning strike and its associated thunder peal — it was everywhere, lighting up the outside like flickering daylight.

My cats are handling it well. I have more cats than I’d prefer, but I trap them here whenever possible. The average lifespan of a feral cat is two to three years, but for an indoor housecat life expectancy is twelve to eighteen. I’m happy to spare them from the highway, the coyotes, or my neighbor’s shotgun. I’m also happy to spare my wild bird population from the cats.

So tonight I have two on my bed and one under it, and a feral tom in each of my two bathrooms. All of them have been in one of my traps at one time or another.

Bob showed up on my game cameras for a couple years before I finally trapped him. He had a tail for the first year or so, then I didn’t see him for awhile, and when he returned, he did not. My assumption is that he lost it to a coyote, but I’ll never know for sure.

Bob’s neuter appointment got me a call from Animal Control. Apparently he bit a vet tech through a heavy leather glove, puncturing the top and bottom of her thumb. Since he was a feral cat with no vaccine history, he had to do a ten-day rabies quarantine before he could be vaccinated. I was keeping him in the bathroom for awhile anyway, so this wasn’t a problem.

I like my vet, but I was pretty annoyed that Animal Control was called. I’m told it’s the law here. I haven’t verified that, but in this case it doesn’t really matter — Bob didn’t have rabies, he got vaccinated after his quarantine ended, and the officer never followed up with me.

I continue to believe that the less contact I have with law enforcement, the better, and that includes ACOs.

Bob will probably never be a house pet, but I’m slowly integrating him with the other cats anyway. I’ll build an outdoor enclosure soon, that will be connected to the house, and he can decide how much time he wants to spend in each area.

A few weeks ago, he managed to turn on the bathroom sink, and close the drain. So the sink overflowed and water spread through a significant portion of the house before I realized what had happened. The bathroom door was swollen shut and could not be salvaged. The laminate flooring all had to be removed, but it revealed more valuable hardwood underneath. This is the second time I’ve bought an old house and found good wood flooring hidden under a top layer of something cheap and ugly.

It was a stressful night, but I managed to stop the water before it got to my guitars and my mom’s piano. When I get ready to remodel the house, I’ll sand and seal the floors and end up with something much more attractive and valuable than I’d initially planned.

As for Bob, he got his sink removed and a screen door put on the bathroom. Now he interacts with the other cats through the heavy screen, and there’s no water for him to turn on. I put a table and a cat tree in there for him to use as he wishes.

____

It’s stopped raining, and the thunder is more distant now. Lightning isn’t illuminating the whole house anymore. The power is still out. It’s hot and muggy inside. Bob is calling to the other cats, maybe letting them know that he’s survived yet another trauma.

In the morning I’ll walk down and see how much water the storm added to the pond, and if the tarp stayed on my pallet of concrete. The forecast calls for several more inches of rain over the next ten days, but forecasts change by the hour.

Much of the millet and cowpeas I planted a couple weeks ago has already germinated, but this string of rainy days should really kick things off. The land is turning green again. It’s all alive.

And so am I.

Dave Mello of Operation Ivy fame joined his brother Pat and friend Gavin McArthur to form a power trio that blended punk rock with elements of ska, country, blues, and jazz. Dave and Pat were in Downfall together, with Tim ‘Lint’ Armstrong of Operation Ivy and Rancid.

The guys from Schlong also had a band called Three Finger Spread, a bluegrass band in the loosest sense, best known for their song Phone Me Bone Me, but mostly not known at all. Don’t let their obscurity fool you into thinking that when I joined a bluegrass band in the mid-nineties, we didn’t cover Phone Me Bone Me at the Sawdust Festival in Laguna Beach. Because I know you were thinking that didn’t happen, and you were about to feel really stupid.

The one time I saw Schlong perform live was at The Barn, on the UC Riverside campus. I hated Riverside shows in general, and The Barn specifically, but seeing Schlong made the irritation worthwhile.

When my friends and I arrived at the venue, the show was sold out, not because there were a lot of Schlong fans in Riverside — I think we were the only people there to see them — but presumably there was a more popular band on the bill, or maybe just a lot of college rock shitheads looking for a mosh pit or an unsuspecting coed to grope.

Getting into sold out shows was never especially hard. We found the band in the parking lot, with a friend of theirs who introduced himself as Fuckin’ Wayne, and we asked if they could get us inside. They suggested we each carry in one of Dave’s drums and then just walk down to the floor and stay there — a tactic we’d employ a few more times in the coming years.

The crowd booed the band and part of me was glad they didn’t like it. As a young guitarist I was thrilled with Gavin’s phrasing and use of harmonics.

After their set we joined the band and Fuckin’ Wayne in a green room of sorts — an unused classroom in a portable.

We hung out and talked shop a bit; Gavin’s sister, Melissa was also there, and AJ was smitten when he learned that she was the singer for Raooul. She would later go on to be featured on Schlong’s Punk Side Story, their 43-minute version of West Side Story.

We talked about bands we liked, about the East Bay punk scene, and the perils of masturbating with shampoo. “I pissed fire for a week,” Gavin warned us.

I don’t remember how it started, but at some point Fuckin’ Wayne took out his penis and started chasing AJ and me around the room. I was immediately reminded of the moment I first realized my parents were fallible.

I was two years old, and had just finished peeing, while my older sister stood at the bathroom sink, washing her hands. I looked at her, and I had an idea.

“I’m gonna pee on you! I’m gonna pee on you!”

She shrieked, then ran, and I chased, yelling, “I’m gonna pee on you I’m gonna pee on you I’m gonna pee on you …”

The fun ended quickly when I was snared by one of my parents and given a spanking. It was one of the only times I was ever spanked, and I had tried to explain that clearly I wasn’t really going to pee on my sister — I had already finished peeing. But they spanked me anyway, and it was then that I knew they had the capacity to be wrong.

Back in shit-stinking Riverside, Fuckin’ Wayne settled into a chair. “This is my penis. It’s small, but it’s mine.”

Gavin sneaked up behind him and dumped a bucket of ice onto his lap, but Fuckin’ Wayne merely piled the ice cubes around his shrinking dink and wiggled it like a cold worm.

____

The next weekend I ran into Fuckin’ Wayne at another show. “Fuckin’ Wayne!”

“Oh, hey guys … Hey … Is it true that I masturbated in a bucket of ice cubes? I don’t remember any of that night.”

“Yeah, well … Not successfully …” I answered.

Wayne apologized, which was totally unnecessary — he was neither the first nor the last person to chase one of us with his dick out.

He said it was nice to meet us again, and that if we ever wanted to get in touch, we could mail him at Guttermouth’s PO Box.

I never saw him again, but I hope he’s well.

“It’s not usually like this,” I assure my friend, Brent.

It’s a weeknight and none of our other friends have made the trip from south Orange County to LA, but it’s also Brent’s first show. He’s on edge, and I wonder what I’ve gotten him into. We’re an odd pairing; I’ve recently dropped out of college and he’s barely fourteen.

Apart from the bands, we’re the only non-skinheads in the room. Neo-Nazis and SHARPs make up the rest of the crowd — rivals who look alike, but have very different ideologies, and are eager to fight for them.

Caught in the middle is the big guy at our feet — the swastika-shaped scar on his arm and the remnant of an “SS” on his neck tell one group he’s abandoned them and the other that he can never belong. The scars look less like professional tattoo removal, more like cigarette burns.

As Old Nick and Game Face play their sets, skirmishes break out continuously, but no one takes such a string of beatings as the skinhead without a tribe. Whether by sheer force of will or whatever drugs he’s on, he never stays down for long. He keeps antagonizing the crowd, no matter how many times he gets punched in the face, thrown to the concrete floor, or kicked in the ribs.

Tonight’s music is decidedly un-skinhead, but ritual takes precedence over esoterica. It’s hard and fast and loud enough to keep the crowd energized. Brent and I might be the only actual fans in the room, but we’re not asserting ourselves; we’re just taking it all in.

We met at church as little kids, and became friends in our teens. Neither of us is especially hard core; we’re just goofy, suburban kids who like punk rock. My tattoos are images from the Bible, and Brent doesn’t have any of his yet. We don't drink or smoke; we don’t have girlfriends, or any idea how to get them.

I’ve been in some fights, but not tonight. These are our bands, but we feel like tourists. If you saw us two years earlier you’d have found me riding the bench at a prep school basketball game, and he’d have been practicing his magic act or making videos with his action figures.

The show tonight is almost certainly illegal, in a burned out restaurant with a growling, smoking generator outside for power, and bands playing at floor-level in the corner of the room. It’s volatile, but something holds the evening together, keeps it from deteriorating into complete chaos.

Despite the two warring factions, no knives or guns are drawn, and no scuffle ever escalates into a brawl. The bands and their equipment are mostly untouched. It seems that some unwritten social contract informs the collective behavior of the crowd — they know that if they take the fighting past a sustainable threshold, the music will stop.

And so as Jeff Caudill sweetly sings, “Fill your shoes with summer; untie the laces of your soul,” bald heads, clenched fists, and Doc Martens thump and swirl around the concrete room.

When the music is over, it’s late, and Brent and I walk back to my green minivan, parked on a nearby residential street. It feels eerily quiet, given what we’ve just taken part in, but that doesn’t last. We are soon accosted by a street dog — a scrawny border collie mix, barking and lunging at us in the way that herding dogs sometimes do.

Almost immediately I notice a smaller dog, something fluffy and white, dirty, with a slight limp, making larger circles around the two of us. Then I look to my right, and on the lawn in front of one of the old houses lining that street, there sit three more dogs: a German shepherd, a Rottweiler, and one of the biggest pit bull terriers I’ve ever seen. These three are silent. Stoic. They watch us calmly, to see what we will do.

This new situation unfolds in mere seconds, but I know we’re in trouble. I may live in the suburbs, but I come from the farm. I practically lived in the doghouse as a kid, and not much has changed.

By my twenties I’ve had my share of dog bites. I haven’t been in this exact situation before, but it’s not entirely unfamiliar.

I tell Brent to keep walking normally, as I remove my favorite green sweatshirt and begin to challenge the border collie, swinging the garment like a weapon, stomping my feet, and doing whatever I can to appear the aggressor.

A few more seconds pass, though they feel like minutes; the three dogs on the lawn stand, nearly in unison, and trot off in different directions. At the same time, the border collie and the fluffy white dog also leave us.

Moments later, down the lamplit street, we see all five dogs converge back into a single unit, and head off around the corner and out of sight.

____

Nolan had the best parties. It seemed like his parents were always out of town; to be honest I never saw any evidence that he even had parents. Most people called him Norm, but I never knew why, so I only called him by his given name.

He gave me my own erstwhile nickname, Minivan Steve, to distinguish me from the other Steve in our circle, Steve-O (no, not that one), and because I drove my mom’s forest green Dodge Caravan. I hated the nickname, but it stuck, and eventually I opted to lean into it.

The minivan itself bordered on iconic. It saw its share of reckless driving and off-road adventures; I should have lost my license, maybe been arrested, but somehow my friends and I all survived the minivan days mostly unscathed, and the van allowed us, at least seven at a time, to travel all over California.

Nolan’s house was on a deathly quiet suburban street, inside a gated community. For those who didn’t have the gate code, it was still easy to get into the neighborhood by parking on a side street and hopping the wall. I never once saw any of Nolan’s neighbors, and somehow no matter how many kids were crammed into his house, or how loud our bands played, no one ever called the cops.

And it’s not like we were well-behaved. We were teenagers. We were loud. There was alcohol, cigarettes, drugs. There was nudity. Things were peed on. Sometimes people were also peed on. And the neighbors stayed sealed up in their cookie cutter houses, behind well-maintained lawns, inside a gated compound that we all entered and exited whenever we pleased.

We were a heterogeneous assortment of punks, rude boys, ravers, goths, and hippies; skaters, stoners, straight edgers; freaks who defied labels, and normal kids who didn’t feel very normal.

Nolan’s house was a place to experiment without fear of judgment. We formed impromptu bands, sometimes only hours before we were to play. Minivan Steve and the Plymouth Voyagers was a duo with my friend AJ; we asked Ben to sit in on banjo so we could play a bluegrass version of Crass’s Bloody Revolutions, in which I cut my lip with a Jew’s harp. (At the time I thought it was called a juice harp, in reference to saliva, or in my case, saliva mixed with blood.)

The Winnebagos were thrown together at the last possible minute; I appeared as a seven-foot-tall, 500-pound clown with a massive, cone-shaped head I’d made from papier-mâché and chicken wire. A Shakespearean ruffle topped a red and blue polka dotted fat suit, sewn for me by my grandmother. He began as a cartoon I’d been drawing of a smiling, suicidal clown, happily finding increasingly elaborate ways to off himself; now he existed in real life, in Nolan’s living room.

I do not recall what songs we played.

A spare bedroom had been designated as a backstage area for that evening’s entertainment, and to get backstage you needed a pass — a photocopy of Joel’s penis, which he’d smashed against the glass of a Xerox machine. The pass was to be hung around the neck with a length of yarn; I did not relish the adornment, but I did need to go backstage to get into costume.

Mike from Blasphemous Penis was there that night; he said he’d enjoyed my performance, and I felt gratified, as he was one of the weirdos who’d first inspired me to do something avant-garde.

Nolan introduced me to Denny’s as a late night hangout, as opposed to the family diner it had always been during more civilized hours. He could often be found there at two AM, drinking coffee and drawing in a notebook. The servers all liked him, which wasn’t surprising; he was always kind and gentle, and I never heard anyone speak ill of him.

On the way home from shows in LA, north Orange County, San Diego, or Riverside, Denny’s became a mainstay of our routine, although we occasionally changed things up and went to IHOP or Norm’s.

Large meals were consumed, along with milkshakes and countless coffees and Cokes. Voices were raised, and messes were made. There were pranks, and general indecency. Sometimes we stayed until the sun came up.

Our favorite waiter was Dave, a mischievous imp who delighted in bringing us free milkshakes, with the caveat that he got to choose their custom ingredients, ranging from exquisite to ghastly. The apple pie milkshake was divine; cream of broccoli, demonic — for days I was stricken with sickening, fart-mouthed belches.

One night Dave made us sundaes with butter instead of ice cream. Another night, a pair of miniature milkshakes that appeared to be chocolate chip, eagerly consumed by two novitiates, until they began to sense something was off, and one scooped half a sausage link from his cup.

We learned that Dave had a girlfriend and a young daughter at home; at the time we didn’t know anyone that young who had kids, so we were surprised, but failed to grasp the gravity of the revelation.

We were chaos agents. We had nowhere to direct our energy, and no idea when to stop. I can’t say we were responsible for getting Dave fired, but we certainly didn’t help his cause.

Thankfully there was always another Denny’s a mile or two down I-5, so he got to have the same job, and we got to keep our favorite waiter. As Dave was fired again, and again, he moved a little farther down the freeway, and we followed him.

When he reached San Clemente, there was effectively nowhere else to go. Camp Pendleton broke up the suburban sprawl and cut off the string of Denny’s locations that ran the length of the county.

The San Clemente Denny’s had a stone accent wall that was hard to resist; it only took us literally climbing the walls, and my friend Ryan showing his penis piercings to another group of diners, to get Dave fired from his last Denny’s. We felt guilty, but probably not guilty enough.

Months later some friends and I walked into a Marie Calendar’s for a Sunday lunch, and there was Dave. He was not happy to see us. We quickly assured him that we would behave, and asked to be seated with a different server. That was the last time I saw him. If he was fired from that job, it wasn’t our fault.

Saturday afternoons were a good time to go to Vinyl Solution in Huntington Beach to buy records and pick up flyers for upcoming shows. If they liked you at Vinyl, they’d let you use their legendary David Lee Roth-themed bathroom. If they didn’t like you they’d play Throbbing Gristle’s Hamburger Lady on a loop until you left the store.

Huntington was a weird town. It had the to-be-expected surfer dudes and burnouts, and plastic people spilling over from next door in Newport Beach, but you might also run into early-day UFC fighters like Tank Abbott. I once saw Tito Ortiz take a verbal lashing from a Denny’s waitress over skipping out on his bill the night before; I recognized him from a VHS tape I’d just seen of him pounding some guy’s face in.

Huntington and Newport were also a hub of militant white nationalism, where wealthy men in their mansions held the reins of skinhead groups in the streets.

An underlying threat of violence was ever present in the punk rock scene all over the state, occasionally breaching the surface in terrifying and very personal ways. South Orange County’s beach cities were certainly not immune, and we sometimes went to great lengths to find respite from that tension.

But safety from one set of threats often meant exposure to others. Most suburban neighborhoods weren’t like the one where Nolan lived — calling the police was practically a reflex for some residents, and even white kids from the suburbs knew to be afraid of the cops.

Our county lockup was as dangerous as any state prison. I managed to stay out of jail, at least in those years, but I never felt entirely safe. But if no place was safe, that also meant no place was off limits; my friends and I could go anywhere.

We went to punk and ska shows nearly every Friday and Saturday night, and sometimes on weeknights or Sunday afternoons; I have no idea how many times we saw some of the local bands, like the now-almost-mythical Suburban Rhythm, but it was enough that we knew all their songs before we ever got hold of a single recording.

One night at 8-1/2 in Fullerton, Frank from Voodoo Glow Skulls changed the lyrics to their song, Mr. Bossman, in tribute to the little person who had been running around punching us in the balls all night. “Fuck you, Mr. Wee Man!” (Yes, that one.) Nicknames have a way of sticking, whether you want them to or not.

Smalltime local bands were our staple fare, but the bigger acts were always around, and sometimes smaller acts got big right before our eyes. The first time I saw Green Day, they were opening for Bad Religion. The second time, Bad Religion opened for them, and Billie Joe spent their entire set spitting on the audience, who in turn spat back onto him. AJ and I left before they finished their set, feeling a little sick, and a little sad.

Things were changing; an underground music scene that was once a refuge for us had been discovered by bros and meatheads. During a Game Face set at The Ice House, I was jumped, not entirely unprovoked, by four Sublime fans. They pulled me onto my back, and two of them restrained my arms while a third one choked me from behind. The fourth one straddled me and punched me a few times in the face before my friends had time to react. My attackers quickly disappeared into the crowd. Game Face was one of our bands. It was still our scene, for now.

It certainly wasn’t its first, but punk rock was having a moment. Most of the bands we liked had already broken up, or were simply eclipsed by more radio and MTV-friendly acts like Blink-182 and The Offspring. We increasingly found ourselves going to see opening bands and leaving early, or skipping local punk shows altogether in favor of something newer.

Emo had made its way to California from the east coast, and Sage was booking bands at the Huntington Beach Library — a smart move, because if you’re looking for a meathead-free scene, a library is about the best location you can choose.

The performances were intense. The band members didn’t look like punks; they wore sweaters and skin-tight pants, and their music was heavy, more technical, lacking a lot of the familiar punk rock slop we’d come to know. And the vocals hit hard. Those shows were more about expression than performance — no one was putting on a giant clown suit there.

Alongside the emo bands came a new wave of indie rock acts; most came out of the punk tradition, usually looking to expand their musical horizons. Some had an obvious ‘punk with a softer side’ sound while others were throwbacks to bands like The Stones and The Velvet Underground. Our tastes expanded, and diverged.

No band I’ve ever listened to has had so heavy an impact on me as Jawbreaker, and many of my friends feel the same way. They were there when we first started looking beyond the radio and MTV for new music, and they only got better with time. Bivouac was always my favorite album, but that doesn’t diminish the records that came later. I truly love everything they ever recorded.

When Jawbreaker signed with the David Geffen Company in 1995, there was some concern among our ranks, but it was overshadowed by the feeling that they deserved the recognition. We were happy for the band, for the million dollars they’d been paid, and we eagerly awaited their album with DGC.

Dear You was not a disappointment. Yes, it was very produced. It was clean, and tight. But the band stayed true to themselves. They kept all the dissonance and the thoughtful, challenging lyrics that had always made them great. They gave their rough edges just enough polish to get them on MTV, but not enough to make them palatable to our parents. I would certainly have preferred something more raw, but I still think it was nearly perfect.

In May of ‘96 we headed to LA to see them with Jawbox at Jabberjaw. In a dangerously hot, packed room, our bodies pressed against friends and strangers, we watched our favorite band perform. I have almost no memory of the set itself, but I remember the room — the heat, the sweat, the heaviness of the air and the euphoria that only a great live show can deliver.

Afterward, my friend Mike interviewed singer and guitarist Blake Schwarzenbach for Geek America, a zine he and some other friends had started. It would be the last Jawbreaker interview for quite some time. The band played six more shows on their tour and then broke up.

I remember thinking how perfect their timing had been. They’d done one major label release, taken their money, and quit. No second record — they didn’t need one. Dear You could stand on its own. They didn’t diminish the success of that album by releasing a string of increasingly weaker ones. They didn’t overstay. They quit, perfectly, beautifully.

Blake went on to form Jets To Brazil, in my opinion one of the best indie bands, ever.

The split means even more to me now than it did at the time. It wasn’t the end of a band so much as the end of a stage in our lives, giving way to the next. The parties at Nolan’s house, the late nights at Denny’s, the HB library shows, the trips to Vinyl Solution — it was all ending.

My friends all had cars by then; they didn’t need to be chauffeured around in my minivan. They were moving away, or moving on. I returned to college soon afterward, first in Santa Barbara, then leaving California altogether.

Nolan and I lost touch. I’d always been one of the kids who didn’t quite fit anywhere: a farm kid in the suburbs; a Christian kid in a secular music scene; drug-free but not straight edge; punk-adjacent but never punk rock. Nolan had created a place where I fit. But our paths had diverged. The last few times I’d seen him, he’d been dropping a lot of acid, to the point that even the people taking drugs with him were getting worried.

One night I walked into a Denny’s in Dana Point and found Nolan working there as a waiter. He didn’t recognize me. “It’s me, Minivan Steve.” For a moment he seemed to have a faint recollection, and then it was gone.

____

Sometime in the mid nineties a group of us made a pilgrimage to Berkeley, California. We’d been to San Francisco a few times, but this would be a shorter trip; we’d make the six hour drive to Gilman Street, stay a few hours, and then head back home.

924 Gilman Street is a legendary address in punk rock history; what CBGB was to the East Coast, Gilman is to the West, but unlike my visit to CBGB, I had no trouble getting into Gilman before I was twenty-one.

Gilman is a small warehouse club operated by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization — an all-ages venue with a culture that values independent music, community action, and a DIY work ethic.

We didn’t know any of the bands playing the night we went; it was some kind of crust punk affair, the room awhirl with gigantic, spiked mohawks and leather jackets adorned with formidable arrays of framing nails protruding from their cuffs and shoulders. These were mostly for show, but not entirely — it was an anti-racist and antifascist institution, and there were always some who didn’t appreciate what the collective was doing.

A group of neo-Nazi skinheads famously attacked the club in the late eighties and were defeated and repelled by the Gilman Street punks, but there was always the chance of a recurrence.

Inside the club, we looked with a bit of reverence at the graffiti on the walls, left by bands we loved, who had played there in the early days. “Sweet Children” was spray-painted prominently across a rafter near the center of the room.

The show that night was more about the crowd and the place than the bands that played; the music was nothing special, but the visual spectacle was unforgettable. After the show was over, people hung around outside the venue. A Black kid with a nearly-two-foot-tall mohawk got into it with a similarly clad white guy; they took turns knocking the shit out of each other while some bystanders looked on, and others seemed not to notice. Minutes later, neither having prevailed, they sat on the curb with their arms around each other’s shoulders and shared a beer.

We lingered at the edge of the crowd and watched these street dramas play out for at least an hour, until most of the crusty punks had dispersed to the various squats and underpasses where many of them slept at night. It wasn’t uncommon for kids to make their way to Berkeley with no money or connections, and assimilate into its community of youth without traditional housing.

As we headed south on Interstate Five, a thick Tule Fog slowed our progress to a crawl; it was daylight before we reached Orange County. We would talk about the show for years to come, though we could not recall the names of any of the bands that played.

Years later in Fort Collins, Colorado, I was hosting a crust punk show in a venue of my own. It was a somewhat tamer event than that night at Gilman — the same fashion aesthetic, but with more women in the crowd, most with tattooed chests and various piercings. I remember wondering where they’d all come from, why I’d never seen them around town or at other shows.

It was one of the better crowds I’d had at Fig Tree, named after a massive ficus I purchased from a local nursery, that was slowly dying due to the lack of appropriate lighting in the room. It was to become a metaphor for the venue itself.

I had tried to recreate the organizational structure of 924 Gilman Street in a warehouse I’d rented in a Fort Collins industrial park, but it was proving to be a challenge. I formed a board of directors, but none of us knew how to run a nonprofit.

And Fort Collins was not Berkeley. The local music scene was surprisingly good for a city of its size, but without closer proximity to a larger population center, it was tough to get enough bands on the stage.

The scene kids were different, too; they hovered around the edges, not confident enough to approach the stage or dance without someone else doing it first. For performers it felt like cold indifference.

The best nights I had weren’t the punk and indie shows, they were a hip hop event and a small rave that weren’t attended by a single one of my volunteers or board members. Crowds packed the place, and spent hundreds of dollars on bottled water, Gatorade, and Red Bull. If I could have held those events every week I would have.

That’s not to say that we didn’t have some good punk and indie shows, or that the kids didn’t like the place. It just wasn’t consistent.

I tried to incorporate things I’d picked up from various all-ages clubs in California: free shows every Wednesday night, cheap admission other nights, and in between bands the only music allowed over the PA was James Brown, Johnny Cash, or Frank Sinatra. A few people complained about that, but they were wrong.

Ultimately what killed Fig Tree wasn’t the local culture or the geography, it was me, and the fire department.

My own band played there too often, and for too long. I maintained too much control, and we never made the transition from something I was personally bankrolling to a real collective. It was a nonprofit in theory only; there was no real governance.

A couple volunteers and I had built out the venue with no permits, and we didn’t have the paperwork we needed to open to the public. It only took one complaint to put me on the Fire Marshall’s radar, and one scorched electrical outlet to shut things down entirely.

When 924 Gilman Street was converted into a music venue, it had widespread community and local government support. I did not have that in Fort Collins, nor did I know how to go about getting it.

I was also living in the building. When the fire department shut it down, they told me I couldn’t continue to sleep there, and the local cops would come by at all hours to make sure I wasn’t inside. I blacked out the windows and hid the best I could, but I couldn’t hide indefinitely.

As the cops and the fire department pushed, I was also being pulled in a different direction. After college I’d gotten involved in animal rescue. I had a locked room in one corner of the warehouse where I kept a 750-gallon turtle pond and some large snakes, including a thirteen-foot reticulated python.

She sent me to the hospital late one night. She bit me on the wrist, tearing skin and grinding fangs against bone, and then constricted me. I escaped and the snake was unharmed, but I had a golf ball-sized hematoma and some mild tendon damage; I got a lot of extra attention in the ER.

A separate cage in the reptile room housed a five-foot canebrake rattlesnake that I’d taken from a defunct wildlife education program back east; when people lingered too long after a show, I’d bring the rattlesnake out and the kids would all run for the door.

Essentially everything happening in the space was illegal, but having never fought City Hall before, I was naive. I never imagined anyone would care what I was doing, but clearly some people did.

With my venue shut down, my band struggling, and a growing desire to work with animals full-time, I packed up my reptiles and my newly adopted puppy and left Colorado, briefly returning to California before moving to the Pacific Northwest.

____

One of my college professors talked about how he’d stopped playing the guitar for many years while he prioritized family and career, and how he’d recently picked it back up for Sunday morning church services. I’d been playing for about ten years at the time, and told myself I would never do what he had done. But by 2013 I hadn’t touched my guitars in about a decade.

I’d been working mostly full-time in animal rescue and advocacy. I’d gotten better at fighting City Hall, but there wasn’t much time for anything else. Burnout was looming.

In more than twenty years of living in the Northwest, I went to exactly three music events in Seattle. The first was a Mogwai show during which one of my dogs at home had died; after that night I struggled for years with the idea of doing anything for my own enjoyment, even for one night. Whenever I did leave, the last twenty minutes of my drive home were always dominated by feelings of dread.

Years later I would go to a rowdy party with a bunch of all-girl roller derby teams, where the girls sang karaoke with a live band. Sometime after that I went to see some old friends and their band, The Donkeys. Part of me wished I was still performing, but I still didn’t have much desire to see live music. It no longer felt like my place.

Then I went through a period of personal turmoil, and when that happened, I was compelled to take my guitars out of storage and write songs again. I’ve never been a prolific songwriter, and my pattern of only being able to write when I’m unhappy makes the successful completion of a song a mixed blessing.

It took some time for the callouses to return to the fingertips on my left hand, and my singing voice was shaky from lack of use, but little by little it all came back. I was also happy to discover that I could do things with a phone or an iPad that I’d have needed a home studio for in the early days.

That I could write and record music without anyone else knowing about it was liberating. I shared a few songs with a couple people, but for the most part I told no one what I was doing.

When my personal life stabilized I stopped writing new music, but I continued to play the guitar, and to improve my skills. I even bought some new instruments. And I kept fine tuning the songs I’d already written.

Music was part of my daily life again, and I no longer felt like I had to choose between two passions. I could be more than one thing.

In 2022 my friend Jason bought tickets to see Jawbreaker with Jawbox in San Francisco. The band had been doing reunion tours for several years, but I hadn’t seen them play since ‘96. It was the Dear You twenty-fifth anniversary tour, and I decided to fly to San Francisco for the weekend.

It was the first event of any kind I’d been to post-COVID. I was pleasantly surprised by how cool and well-ventilated the place was.

The opening act was a standup comic with no connection to the Bay Area punk scene. It was a weird choice and he wasn’t very good, but the crowd was rooting for him. He’d have been booed off the stage in the old days, but this was a more grown up, more civilized gathering.

Jason joked that Jawbox’s bassist looked like a soccer mom, and I noted that all the male band members were just as unassuming. There was nothing about any of them to suggest they were in a punk band, but I loved that they could play their music without putting on a fashion show.

Over the years, countless bands and performers have looked the part and failed to deliver. This was the inverse, and the notion that the band had families at home made their performance feel more authentic to me, not less. These were real people, not rock stars.

As Jawbreaker walked onto the stage, the phones all came out. Smartphones weren’t around when I was going to shows every weekend, but now they’re ubiquitous. I found myself inadvertently reading short people’s texts over their shoulders. Jason’s wife was bitching him out for not calling her all day, and he was rightfully apologizing; a woman in front of me was telling her kids to brush their teeth.

We stood in the center of the floor, where the sound quality is usually best. A big-haired woman passed in front of us, her hair blocking our view and tickling my arm for a moment before she moved on. The room was crowded but no one was pushing me, or getting their sweat on me. People moved through our orbit, but there was no jostling for position.

Jawbreaker added a second guitarist to help round out their sound, and it was working. The last time I saw Blake perform was with Jets To Brazil in Denver, and I recognized his white Les Paul. Did I forget that he was left-handed, or had I never noticed?

The band played almost everything from Dear You and some older favorites like Boxcar and Want. I loved it when they played Parabola; it’s a bit of a departure from most of their catalog, but that bassline …

Watching Jawbreaker play again, I was aware that I was having a new experience of the band; the raw exhilaration and hyper-vigilance I used to feel at shows had been replaced by a sensation I’ve only recently learned to recognize — peace.

I also loved being back in San Francisco, even if it had changed a lot since my youth: fewer aggressive panhandlers and more women in yoga pants. I adjusted.

When I’m in a bigger city I look for food I can’t find in small towns, but Jason has a sensitive stomach. We made good compromises, but I wanted to push harder, so I decided to take another trip to the city on my own.

Months later I flew back to San Francisco and took the BART train to Powell Street Station. I stopped for awhile at Powell and Market to watch some street drummers, and a few weirdos dancing to their music. I ate at a Japanese restaurant before walking to the Beresford Arms, the historic old hotel where I was staying. This was more like the San Francisco I remembered from my twenties, with street performers and homeless encampments.

My first night I saw Hatebreed; I hadn’t been to a hardcore show in over twenty years. The crowd was a mix of older and younger people; I was familiar with their music, but not enough to know the songs by heart.

Hardcore crowds are a special kind of community; the music may be angry, but the atmosphere is all unity and positivity, and that hasn’t changed in the last two decades. Seeing gray-haired men dispense with any sense of middle-aged decorum to shout along with the lyrics was oddly touching.

The next day I walked around the city and ate spicy food. That night I saw The Flaming Lips — a very different animal from the night before. For The Lips I had a balcony seat, which gave me a good vantage point to take in the spectacle. You don’t so much watch their show as you let it wash over you.

I left the theater feeling grateful that this thing I had given up years ago to focus on other passions was available to me again.

Today, in my fifties, I go to punk shows, hardcore shows, psychedelic rock shows. Tickets cost ten times what they used to, so I’m not going every weekend. The green Dodge Caravan is long gone, and I no longer live near any close friends, so I’m often going alone or planning travel strategically to coincide with tour dates.

I’m a lifetime removed from the tiny, crowded venues, the illegal shows, the fights, the antics, being unfettered and unconcerned. I have to remind myself that I was never as happy in those days as I remember being. Or maybe I was happy, but I hadn’t yet learned to appreciate it.

I remember the chaos of empty parking lots, the run-ins with police and security guards, late nights at Denny’s and all the places where we were banned from returning. I remember Nolan’s house, those bright, brief moments that hang like framed photos on the walls of my mind.

____

It’s the Fall of 2025 and I’m at the House of Blues, on Disney Way, in Anaheim, California. This is decidedly not my kind of place, with its overpriced pseudo-Cajun restaurant-bar, and a second, more exclusive lounge with a more confusingly cosmopolitan menu.

But it’s the first night of Jawbreaker’s new tour, and I’m there with some old friends. Brent picked me up from my motel up the street, with Greg, who I haven’t seen in more than twenty years. We meet Kevin, who worked on my band’s album in the late nineties and has gone on to do much bigger things with much bigger artists.

Inside we run into Justin; he used to play drums in a hardcore band, and now he’s a suburban soccer dad; he looks good, less intense than I remember him. His own kid wasn’t interested so he brought his neighbor’s son with him. There are a lot of kids here.

Steve-O didn’t want to come. He was at the Jabberjaw show in ‘96 and is happy for that to be his last memory of the band. I can respect that, but I’ve now seen Jawbreaker more times in my late forties and early fifties than I did in the nineties.

The Get Up Kids are opening. We’re calling them ‘The I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up Kids,’ but we’re laughing as much about our own age as theirs. They sound just like they used to, but they’re playing all the songs from an album they released after I lost track of them.

In between bands we’re talking about what kids today are into, and wondering if they’re having experiences like we used to, and like our parents had growing up. What are the events shaping them now? What stories will they tell in thirty years? We hope they’re getting into some trouble, but we’re struggling to imagine how.

Jawbreaker takes the stage and they’re still a bit rusty, but it’s the first night of the tour and they don’t all live in the same state anymore, so some rust is to be expected. Brent and Kevin tell me the mix sounds like shit, but I suggest they loosen their ear plugs slightly, and that seems to help.

I never used to wear ear plugs, but I adopted the habit out of necessity when I started working with industrial power tools and shooting guns; I’m happy to be protecting my hearing, and I wish I started doing it sooner.

The band plays The Boat Dreams From the Hill; they play Fine Day for the first time in thirty years, and follow it up with Boxcar. They play Parabola; Brent loves that one as much as I do. In a surprise twist, they play a song we’ve never heard, called Invisible, and close with the sweetly sentimental Kiss the Bottle. It’s a short set, twelve songs, no encore.

It’s a weeknight, and Brent and Greg have work in the morning, so as much as I’d like to find some diner to hang out in, it’s not happening. They drop me off at my motel, but I’m restless. I have a rental car, but I decide to walk instead.

As I wander I think about the events in our lives, specific dates or moments, that change us, often abruptly. Our perspectives shift; trajectories change. We wake up.

It’s September 4. On this date in 1997, a Thursday like today, I witnessed a terrorist attack in West Jerusalem. Eight people died and hundreds more were injured. Its anniversary nearly escaped me this year, but as I walk the wide, weirdly sterile streets around Disneyland, I remember.

Today was better.

I have a few game cameras placed around the property, but I set up this particular one to keep an eye on some farm equipment. I soon discovered that the site was popular with the local deer, but that was somewhat expected — this ranch is rife with white tails, along with plenty of wild turkeys and coyotes.

The feral hogs were a surprise. In the three years since I bought the place, I’ve rarely caught any hogs on camera. I see their wallows and the disturbed soil where they’ve been rooting, but not often the animals themselves. I startled a group of them in the brush one morning, and was thankful they ran in the other direction.

A group of hogs is called a sounder, but I usually just call them a herd, and a herd of feral hogs can kill a man.

I could carry a sidearm, but by the time the situation was desperate enough for me to need it, I doubt it would be of much use. Besides, I’ve never found a holster I liked for my .45 Colt, and frankly, when I carry a pistol I feel like I’m either being paranoid or cosplaying as some kind of Texas gunslinger.

Unlike my Colt, the cameras are motion-triggered, and they send pictures to my phone in real time. The first clear shots I got of a hog were of a single, large boar. I saw him on multiple nights, in between deer sightings, but he never lingered.

Then I decided to put out some hay; we’ve been in a drought for months, and the deer were starting to look pretty lean, so I thought I’d supplement their rations to carry them through until the rains return. I went down the highway a few miles and paid about eighty bucks for a round bale of some of the worst hay I’ve ever seen. When I unrolled it off the back of my truck, I expected an immediate spike in deer activity.

That spike never came; deer traffic remained steady. What changed was the hogs. Within a few weeks, I stopped seeing solitary boars; an entire herd showed up instead. They nosed through the hay, even playfully tossing it up in the air. One night the camera sent almost two hundred pictures over a six hour span; other times the herd moved on more quickly. But for the past few weeks, they’ve returned nearly every night.

And one of these nights, when I’m more settled and I’ve had some time to prepare, I’m going to trap the entire herd.

I don’t hate feral hogs. They’re survivors. Pigs typically struggle in arid climates and extreme heat, but feral hogs thrive in South Texas, where we’ve had no significant rain in months, and where my first summer here saw more than eighty straight days above a hundred degrees. The hogs I’m seeing every night, and the dead ones on the side of the highway, are healthy and fat, at least before they meet the front end of a truck. The only impact the drought seems to have had on them is that there are no piglets in the herd, only adults and adolescents. That’s a common physiological response to drought, and we’ll see plenty of babies once it starts raining again.

I have to admire their ability to survive, but wild hogs don’t belong here. They’re the remnant of domestic pigs first brought to this continent by Spaniards some five hundred years ago, their population built from escaped and abandoned animals, and later modified by the deliberate release of Eurasian wild boars to be hunted for sport. What has resulted is a landrace — an animal now perfectly suited to this environment, and being continuously honed and improved by the unique set of pressures inherent to this place.

Texas has a time-honored tradition of releasing exotic wildlife for short term amusement, with little thought given to long term consequences, but no invasive species has had so deleterious an effect as the feral hog — a creeping ecological destabilization, echoed across the American South, and inching its way ever northward.

To cope with the problem, the state of Texas has devised a very Texas solution — there is no bag limit on hogs, and no limit on when and where they can be hunted, or on what methods and hardware can be employed.

Years ago I read an article extolling the virtues of hunting Texas hogs from the back of a moving Jeep, with a spotlight and a machine gun. That would not have been my first choice. Most of the hogs escape and become more elusive. Those few that are killed are full of bullets, with meat already degraded by their hormonal response to being terrified and injured. Of course, it was never about making a meaningful dent in the hog population, or even about meat. It was about spectacle.

I recently spoke to a contractor whose brother-in-law hunts with dogs. Indeed some exceptional canine bloodlines have been developed specifically for hog hunting, but the ultimate result is that you can only take one hog at a time, and in the process, dogs are maimed and killed. The impact on the hog population is not so much negligible as beneficial — the system simply selects for greater strength, speed, and explosive violence. Even as hunters breed increasingly better dogs, they’ll never match the hogs’ reproductive rate.

The hogs are winning.

As for my role, I’ll continue to observe them, and when the time is right, I’ll trap the whole herd at once, kill them humanely, and use every part of every animal. It isn’t pretty or clean, but it’s the best response to a problem with no comfortable solutions. In harsh environments, waste and excess are anathema, and half-measures come back to bite you.

____

“Prolonged periods of drought punctuated by heavy flooding” — I don’t remember where I read that description of our local climate, but it stuck with me. This is a place of extremes. Nearly every plant that grows here is covered in sharp thorns. The area is famously rife with rattlesnakes. Since moving here I’ve been stung by scorpions, attacked by Africanized bees, and mobbed by countless colonies of fire ants.

It’s a place where wildness reigns, where coyotes yip and yowl at all hours of the day and night, and from every direction. For ranchers, near-constant pressure from predators makes raising anything smaller than cattle a challenge.

And then there are the bail-outs. Having been tasked by the governor with enforcing federal immigration laws, on top of state and local codes, the cops are always vigilant. When a plate number doesn’t match its vehicle, the lights come on and the chase begins. The pursued go bombing down ranch roads, crashing gates and flattening fence lines in a desperate effort to evade capture.

I share an access gate with a couple of neighbors, and it’s designed with bail-outs in mind; it breaks cleanly and predictably, and is easily repaired. One neighbor who’s been here longer than the rest of us jokes about putting a sign on it, telling people to hit it in the middle, so it breaks in the right spot.

All that, and herds of ravenous wild hogs in search of an easy meal …

But I chose this place, not in spite of the challenges, but largely because of them.

____

A few years back, in the midst of significant social turmoil around American policing, I noticed a common theme emerging — that being a cop was a dangerous job, and that we should therefore be grateful to those who choose it, and cut them some slack. There were troubling implications, but I also wondered, how dangerous is policing, really?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics published that information. “Police Officer” didn’t crack the top twenty most dangerous jobs, with occupations centered around logging, trucking, construction, and farming carrying significantly higher fatality rates. It’s not a competition, and it doesn’t minimize or rationalize the tragic loss of a loved one, but it does provide context.

When I tell someone I’m a farmer, I’m rarely asked if I worry for my safety. And yet, as I scrolled through the list of America’s most dangerous jobs, I found that not only did I have one of them, I was regularly engaged in nearly half of them.

I realized that it was statistically more dangerous to be me than a police officer.

That was an important realization. I needed to confront what it was that drew me to dangerous work. It wasn’t a fluke. I had a pattern.

I don’t have a death wish, and I’m not an adrenaline junkie — for me, adrenaline signals very real danger. I dislike the rush when it comes on, and I hate the fatigue that follows.

Still there is something viscerally satisfying about driving a 105,000-pound truck, knowing my way around a chainsaw, or working with a large animal that wants to kill me — not seeking thrills, but rather, competence. Feeling the weight of the work without being crushed by it.

Doing dangerous work safely isn’t about exerting power and control, it’s about recognizing where real power lies, where control is an illusion. It’s about working within natural systems instead of against them.

A lot of people want a house in the suburbs, a manicured lawn, a regular nine-to-five. They want security, predictability. But most security is merely theater, and predictability is overrated. Prisons are predictable.

There is clarity in obvious danger. In the suburbs, danger is random and unexpected, but on the farm, I know what kills me. I can see it. I can mitigate risk in a meaningful way.

The suburbs are chaos posing as order. Wild places are order that only looks like chaos, and once you’ve internalized that, systems that disrupt that order become psychologically untenable. They feel false, disconnected.

So I choose connection, to put my hands into the dirt, but why I chose South Texas dirt came down to something less ethereal, more utilitarian.

____

I had spent a few decades in the Pacific Northwest, much of that time in the nonprofit sector — a system of undue constraints and unfair expectations. I was always fighting, always exhausted. My successes were ephemeral; my failures were catastrophic.

In the background, as it all played out, my joints began to ache. I began to tire of being cold and wet. I craved real food. And slowly, those things became more important to me than winning battles.

Energy became a resource worth protecting. Priorities shifted, and new goals emerged. Superficial relationships faded away as I nourished only the ones that truly mattered. I picked up the guitar I’d put down a decade earlier. I took up woodworking again; I built a cabin. And I started raising chickens.

With chickens came systems. Better feed meant better eggs to eat. They had to be housed in a way that aligned with their biology. They had to be protected from raccoons, hawks, and stray dogs. Their behavior had to be studied, understood, not merely accommodated, but stimulated.

After chickens came ducks, then turkeys; Guinea fowl; geese; pigeons. Each new addition brought new complexity to the system. My passel of aging rescue dogs made mixed-use facility design challenging. The unplanned arrival of a pet pig complicated things, but she also became a companion for misfit roosters who fit poorly into other parts of the system, and a fierce guardian of baby ducks and their hyper-vigilant mothers.

A feral cat moved into the barn and provided rodent control in exchange for the security my rescue dogs afforded her. I trapped her, had her spayed, and when she eventually stopped killing rats, she became a pet.

As my beloved rescues succumbed to old age, Livestock Guardian Dogs — LGDs — took their place. They educated me, and they awoke in me a thirst for more knowledge about their behavior, their origins.

When the first sheep arrived, the eldest of the LGDs had just passed away. One of my great teachers and greatest friends, he also exposed where I was lacking and demanded my accountability.

Animals, and dogs in particular, changed me at the near-molecular level. They changed the way I spoke; the way I moved through space and time; the way I processed information; the way I dealt with anger. They reminded me that most things worth doing are hard, but that well-designed systems make hard things achievable.

With new knowledge and skill sets came new interests, and travel opened up new possibilities. I began developing systems that integrated farming, forestry, and animal welfare; construction, conservation, and culture. It became my goal to implement those systems someplace farther south, where my joints didn’t ache and my clothes weren’t always damp.

I wasn’t seeking a change of scenery, mere relief from discomfort, or the satisfaction of my entrepreneurial urges — I was searching for a radical lifestyle change.

It was a trip to Central America that ultimately brought me to South Texas. I had saved money by flying out of Vancouver, but that also meant that between the extra driving, hotel stays, and border crossings, I’d added nearly two full days to my trip. So as I sat on a plane in Houston, having already cleared Customs once, and knowing I’d have to do it two more times before I could go home, a thought occurred to me: “If you lived here, you’d be home now.” And at that moment, Texas became part of the plan.

I started exploring outside Austin, but it wasn’t long before I began to drift south, where the climate, the price of land, and the culture were all a better fit. Austin tries too hard, while San Antonio doesn’t care what you think, but down here, in the middle of South Texas Brush Country, those distinctions are irrelevant.

It’s small town life that’s big city-adjacent; an hour to the beach and an hour and a half to the border. It’s remote, but it’s convenient. There’s isolation when I want it, and connection when I need it. This place has everything I require, until it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, it’s easy to get away. I’ve flown in and out of six different airports here, and there are others I haven’t tried yet. For my forays into Central America, one of my best options is to cross the border and fly out of Monterrey.

I have good access to labor, with a strong resident workforce and guest workers from Mexico. It takes some local connections to tap into those resources, but I’m finding my way.

Finally, I could not describe this area without mentioning that the Mexican food here is very good. Elsewhere in Texas, Tex-Mex prevails, and I’ve always preferred less Tex, more Mex. But here, the dominant flavors come from Jalisco, and for me, that means it’s comfort food.

Severe climate. Relentless biological pressure. Inhospitable soils. Socioeconomic friction. These things make the South Texas Brush a perfect laboratory to stress-test regenerative systems.

It is precisely its less-than-ideal conditions that make it ideal for me, at this exact moment in time. I’m unlikely to live long enough to see all my work pay dividends, but my intention is to make this land productive — not to restore it to what it once was, but to allow the land to tell me what new thing it should become.

If that sounds abstract or silly, let me explain.

There was a time when this place was a savannah, much like you picture when you think of the Serengeti or the Maasai Mara, and it was shaped by similar forces — periods of heavy rainfall and drought, massive animals, and wildfire cycles that thinned the brush, but left the largest trees intact.

Some forces that still exist across much of the African continent are no longer present here. The woolly mammoths are gone. The bison are gone, too. Our natural wildfire cycles are suppressed. And as a result, we are dominated by thorny brush.

The situation wasn’t helped much in the mid-1800s when Richard King drove more than 100,000 cattle here from Mexico, with their bellies full of mesquite pods. A local legend, slave-owner, and war profiteer, King isn’t solely to blame for turning South Texas into Brush Country; governments, armies, other ranchers, big game hunters, climate change, and even a Mexican volcano played their parts.

Regardless of the specific mechanisms involved, the bison herds and the wildfires won’t be back anytime soon, and the systems we create here, if they tried to mimic those ancient forces of nature, would not be sustainable — not on my seventy-five acres, and certainly not at scale.

What I do here must be new.

____

Texas has always been different from other places, in oftentimes confounding ways, among them a long history of ceding civic responsibility to a private sector that tends to prioritize profit over public trust. Historically those abdications have led to things like weak power grids, a dearth of public lands, and the near-total displacement of indigenous populations.

Wildlife is managed mostly by private landowners. One of my neighbors culls deer with the health of the herd in mind, while another shoots anything that moves. Imbalance is inherent in a system where management means very different things to different people.

To some, it means shoving nature into boxes; extracting resources for short term material gain; approaching biodiversity as a shooting gallery instead of the natural consequence of healthy land.

For them, management means releasing axis deer and blackbuck into the brush, and shooting coyotes on sight. It’s forcing the illusion of abundance, and never achieving the real thing.

But for others, management means having more questions than answers; accepting that not everything can be fixed. It’s learning to divert threats, not eliminate them.

It’s recognizing that the most inhospitable soils can be made fertile with a few, simple interventions, and understanding that the most productive site on your property is meant to be a forest, not a cornfield.

Management is listening, observing, taking lessons from unlikely sources. It’s banking the countless, small failures that teach us how to succeed.

It’s accepting that feral hogs are here to stay, and regarding them as a valued resource: genetically, a landrace perfectly adapted to this place; structurally, a test of our systems; economically, a source of protein that requires virtually no inputs.

When we stop bending nature to our will, abandon extraction for regenerative investment, accept that we have much to learn, and let the land tell us what it wants to become, even feral hogs are teachers.

It’s two AM, and the hogs are back. School is in session.