OK: Roland the Roadie, a man whose soul had been pressure-washed by the sonic assault of a hundred death metal concerts, found himself back in the beige stillness of Kansas. Because, of course. For months, his universe had been a rolling thunder-dome of Marshall stacks, sweat-soaked leather, and the high-pitched whine of a tour bus generator. But now, in the quiet, his brain kept replaying the scene from Bethel, New York. Bethel! A name that was supposed to conjure images of peace and love and naked people in the mud. Instead, it conjured for him a single, vibrating image: one deeply patchouli-soaked hippie, a walking potpourri of BO and self-righteousness, lecturing him on vibrational energies.
The whole psychic episode had left Roland feeling untethered. He decided, in a moment of profound spiritual desperation, to reconnect with the simple carpenter from Nazareth he’d learned about in Sunday School. A tune-up for the soul. The first step, apparently, was having a beer in Kanorado with an old classmate, Buster was his name, but might have been Biff or Buddy or something equally percussive.
Buster was now full-on MAGies. That’s what he called it…Make America Great In Every State! He said it with the kind of thermonuclear conviction usually reserved for multi-level marketing pitches. He was a walking, talking embodiment of the movement… a cyclone of star-spangled certainty in a Cabela’s cap. Roland, who hadn’t been inside a church since Y2K, admired the dedication. He truly did. But a few things didn’t quite add up.
“So, help me out here,” Roland began, watching the condensation snake down his bottle of suds. “Jesus was all about welcoming the stranger, the whole ‘Good Samaritan’ bit. Now, how does that square with, you know, the screaming on TV about immigrants being an invading army of… well, Bad Hombres?”
Buster took a mighty pull from his beer, his eyes gleaming with the reflected light of a flatscreen broadcasting the gospel of NewsMax. “Roly, Roly,” he said, shaking his head with a sad, paternal chuckle. “It’s an invasion. The enemy within! You gotta protect your house before you can invite people over. It’s just common sense!” Roland wondered if the biblical Good Samaritan had checked for Roman citizenship papers first.
On they went. Roland brought up humility. The washing of the feet. The first being last and the last being first. A beautiful, revolutionary kind of logic.
Buster countered with a sermon on the Prosperity Gospel. Yessir! It was a whole new, New Testament, one seemingly ghostwritten by a real estate developer from Queens. Buster spoke of the President, a man so obviously blessed that his success… the towers, the gold, the winning… was a sign of divine favor.
“It’s a blessing!” Buster roared, a bit too loudly for a Tuesday. “You model the behavior of the blessed to get blessed yourself (Because God, you see, is a big fan of winners)! Damn the torpedoes!” He finished with a belly laugh that shook the barstool.
The conversation, naturally, turned to money. Out on the prairie, a lone steer bellowed for its evening feed, a primal scream from the feedlot heartland. “It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle,” Roland quoted, “than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
Buster’s face soured. “That’s communist talk, Roly. Wealth redistribution. That’s theft. And there’s a commandment about that one, an old one. A good one.”
And so on.
Roland pivoted to peace. “Love your enemies,” he murmured. “Be peacemakers.”
“You have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet,” Buster said with a shrug, finishing his beer. “It’s a simple recipe.” Roland felt a sudden, powerful urge to test the idea on Buster’s nose, but he resisted. He had, after all, sworn off violence after the “damn hippie” pepper-spray incident.
The final frontier was Truth itself. Roland lamented a world gone funhouse-mirror mad, an upside-down where experts were fools and feelings were “alternative facts“. Buster then launched into a magnificent, thirty-minute jazz solo of pure, uncut conspiracy, a verbal firehose of YouTube links and podcast prophets about how the only way to find truth was to “do your own research.” Roland performed a quiet face-palm, a gesture of complete and utter exasperation.
“Jesus challenged worldly power,” Roland said, one last gasp. “He taught that leadership was about service, not control.”
Buster saw his opening. “Exactly! He was against the Deep State, just like us!”
Roland drained his beer. It was over. He and Buster were standing on opposite sides of a canyon, shouting into the void. They lived in two different sectors of the multiverse, occupying the same space. An irreconcilable parallax view. He realized there was no argument to be won here, only a friendship to be cautiously maintained across an ideological event horizon.
He clapped Buster on the shoulder, managed one last drop from his beer, and walked out into the vast, starry Kansas night. Roland the Roadie resolved then and there to just keep living by the simple, baffling example of the Nazarene, hoping his friend might one day meet him somewhere on the spiral of spiritual originalism.
(A single spotlight hits an avatar, RONNIE HAYS, mid-60s, holding a worn acoustic guitar. He doesn’t play it. He just holds it like a shield or a piece of driftwood. He stares out, not at the audience, but through them.)
My pinkie toes. That’s what i remember about New Mexico. Not the Flagstaff sky, which was a shade of blue so deep i could’ve drifted upward into it forever. Not the train… a glorious old steam-belching dragon chuffing its way toward the biggest ditch on planet Earth. Nope… i remember my pinkie toes, both of them, singing soprano arias of pure, unadulterated pain inside a pair of waffle stompers that were just a whisper too narrow in the front. A purchasing error. A metaphor. I was trying to rise above the heat and the soul-choking smog of Albuquerque, to summit the Embudito Canyon Loop, but i was grounded by a millimeter of poor planning. C’est la. I turned back halfway up, defeated by footwear, then pointed Rocinante toward Georgia O’Keeffe’s ghost in Taos.
And like all of those “best laid plans”… a perfect day, ruined, setting me off on another journey altogether. You get those, sometimes. A gift. A trick. I was at Lake Wilson, back in Kansas. A limestone bowl of water so almost clear, like a dusty mirror on a rocky prairie. Not a breath of wind. The kind of day that makes you think the whole grand, chaotic carnival might just work out. And then the phone rang… a branch of the family tree just… fell to the grass… just like that… gone. The universe had provided a perfect day, and then, the bill. The HSoB tour was born right there, in the silence between the ringing and the news… an extended Bardo in motion.
Lake WilsonDusty MirrorRocky Prairie
And then, as if waking to a disjointed lucid dream, Cannery Row. Walking through the ghosts of Steinbeck’s worlds, smelling the salt and the history… beautiful. Then from the hand-held dream portal, i saw some new AI-generated video… something someone made with a sentence prompt. And soulless cartoon pop-stars with autotune larynxes, hitting all the right pitches on demand. Was this a dream, or were we building a world without flaws, without the shaky notes, without the happy accidents? A world of deus ex machina? A perfect, yet unrealized machine partnership? A place where my screaming pinkie toes would seem out of place.
What can we do? Here in the real(?) world… after the 2024 election, when the tectonic plates groaned and shifted rightward… a slow-motion drift that picked up steam with Bubba’s saxophone… and then poor Uncle Joe took to the debate stage like he was trying to remember where he’d left his tennis ball tipped walker… what do we do? I decided. I would be an anonymous troubadour… like Kwai-Chang Kane with a song list instead of Kung Fu. At worst, i’d languish in utter obscurity, singing to light posts and fire hydrants. At best, i’d become a gadfly on the rear end of a naked emperor’s pony. A tiny, buzzing annoyance for the forces of indecency.
Then came winter. The bomb cyclones and blizzards hammering the interior, but where was the Anonymous Troubadour? South Florida. All of January, February, half of March. I became a connoisseur of the Everglades, that “River of Grass.” Alligators sunning themselves like lazy, armored gods. The quiet hum of a billion insects. It was a primordial peace. Meanwhile, the forces of chaos were perfecting the art of “flooding the media zone.” A new outrage every hour, a new tweet to send half the country into a fit of cheering and the other half into a spiral of despair. The gasping death of democracy, playing out on a 6-inch screen with real life, ancient and unbothered, oozing by in a Florida swamp.
EvergladesSleepy GatorRiver of Grass
Then, Springtime in Foley, Alabama. A land of asphalt and every consumer convenience this roving malcontent could desire. Wide parking spaces. Good Wi-Fi. I almost stayed. But Mother Nature was cooking up her own brand of chaos. Springtime tornadoes, spinning up like God’s own potter’s wheel. I grew up believing this was a Kansas/Oklahoma thing. Now they were chasing me through the coastal South, as if to say, “You can’t escape the whirlwind, son. Not even here.”
On the way, i met a guy in a Louisiana dive bar who told me about Amos Moses, a local swamp-dweller who could allegedly dance with gators and heal the sick. A regular Cajun Jesus Christ. The New Apostolic Reformation had nothing on this guy. And while we were swapping local myths, the big, global myths were playing out in blood. The Holy Land, a place that’s anything but. Civilian casualties, famine, talk of ethnic cleansing and genocide. No easy answers, just the hard, cold reality of bellicose leaders discarding compassion like a soiled napkin. Even Israeli Jews were in the streets, screaming against their own government’s handling of the tragedy.
Amos MosesWhite Knuckle NightsLouisiana Bayou
We find our bliss where we can. A perfect song, a mineral bath. Oh, Sweet Golly Miss Molly, the mineral baths. Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Hot Springs, South Dakota. Sinking into that sulfur-scented heat, you understand that this isn’t indulgence; it’s healthcare. It’s sanity. Ancient Romans knew it. I was just catching up. And while i was soaking, trying to dissolve the knots in my soul, the ticker tape of modern U.S.A. life scrolled on. In the year of our lord, 2025, there would be over 300 mass shootings. Over 300 little holes punched in the fabric of the country, one for every day, it was getting harder to feel whole. A perfect day… then the bill. Maybe i should avoid consuming news for a while.
Turn the page, and the Appalachians… the rolling hills of the Virginias and Carolinas were beautiful and suffocating. But towns like Boone and Morgantown were so peak-and-holler infested, driving through them was like being on a roller coaster you can’t disembark. It gave me a strange kind of claustrophobia. And then perspective… the morning news from Ukraine. Atrocities that make the U.S.A.’s 300+ mass shootings look like kindergarten playground scuffles. It’s all a matter of scale.
Then Pennsylvania… Amish country. A different kind of rolling beauty, pastoral and profound. The horse-drawn buggies, the men’s beards, the ladies’ bonnets. It was like driving through a photograph from a hundred years ago. Strange and wonderful. And then, as if Stephen King had personally designed our itinerary, we landed in Horseheads, New York. A town named for the mountain of bleached horse skulls discovered by early settlers. They put the weird right there on the welcome mat. From Horseheads’ digital nomad-friendly library we planned several day trips. From the macabre to the hallowed… Woodstock and the Big Pink. We meandered through the forest and landed outside the house where The Band forged their sound. I just listened to the whispering pines. After that, to Hartford, to see Sam Clemens and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s next-door visitor’s centers, wrestling with the soul of America a century and a half ago. Some fights never end.
Sam ClemonsStowe Visiter CenterHorseheads Public Library, New York
Which leads us, of course, straight into the belly of the ailing beast: Washington D.C. The 250th birthday of the U.S. armed forces. The President wanted a parade, a big, gaudy show of military hardware down the Mall for his own birthday. In response, a “No Kings” protest was called. I went, expecting a worst case scenario, like Kent State, like Tiananmen Square. What did i find? Maybe a hundred people. Mostly old hippies, the very same tie-dyed specters Stephen Miller claims to be a clear and present danger to the republic. Lots of smoke. No fire. An insurrection of gray ponytails and Birkenstocks.
And the road goes on forever… stay tuned… much more to come.
(Ronnie Hays looks down at the guitar in his hands, as if noticing it for the first time. He strums a single, unresolved chord that hangs in the air, then begins to sing…)
I got a black bomb… It’s tickin’ away… I’m gonna take it out… On the Blue Highway.
LISTEN: This is NOT just another travelog boilerplate.
No… we’re not even sure how that would go. Instead, these are fragmented impressions… mental snapshots from a recently released inmate of the professional hamster-cage! From the baker’s-dozen months spent on the road, impressions came fast, and furious, and much of this account’s details, admittedly, come from an overamped imagination. You see, Ronnie is a student of American Gonzo Journalism. He’s a hopeless optimist, idealistic to a fault. And though this brand of idealism drew some of Ronnie’s gonzo heroes to terminal cynicism, Ronnie’s not ruined yet. He clings to a measure of confidence that the slow, steady bending of humanity’s arc advances toward justice.
What follows is a brief summary of this frantic, glorious gallop through the sun-blasted plains, the rain-slicked coasts, and the very twisted, tangled Fibrillating Heart of our Divided Nation!
PHASE I (the great Kanorado-Kush Kingdom):
Gotta start in the Heartland, where the sun beats down like a vengeful god and the sky stretches on forever, a big, blue bowl of possibilities. We’re talking KANSAS, baby! The land of Oz and Dorothy and a whole lot of self-reliance, wheat, cattle, and grit. Some call it “flyover country,” those Manhattan-bound jet-setters, but they don’t know jack! Kansas loopers? They’re a different breed! Tough as old boot leather, polite enough to make you blush, and loyal as soldiers on night-watch in the foxhole. They’ll loan you a chainsaw, they’ll hunt for your lost dog, they’ll even spot you a smoky coffin nail if you’re down on your luck! But don’t forget… they believe in karma, and it comes back faster than a tumbleweed in a tornado! That’s right, justice delivered by a man of steel. And the whole damn state’s fighting over who gets to claim him…
Smallville is EVERYtown, Kansas!
Then, BAM! You cross the line and you’re in MISSOURI, the Show-Me State! But what’s showing ain’t necessarily pristine, unvarnished truth, no sir! John Steinbeck said it best: Pure objective observation? About as likely as a snowball surviving a Missouri summer! In other words, we see the world through our own tinted, yin/yang, magic eight-ball lens, and the best one can do is try to be fair, like a tipsy judge on a bender! These Missourians? A hearty bunch! Friendly as hound dogs with a belly full of barbecue, but with a healthy dose of skepticism that’s as down-to-earth as a hand-me-down Chevy pickup. And the political tension? So thick you could cut it with a butter knife. These days it seems the two sides won’t even talk to each other!
Now… hold on to your wallets, loopers, because we’re heading west! COLORADO! Land of the “Green Solution” and everything else! A playground for upwardly mobile yuppies with killer jobs and a penchant for yoga pants! But that privilege? It’ll cost more than a designer purse! But Ronnie Hays, bless his hop-soaked heart, he was down for the real deal. Every fragrant autumn, he’d don that pretzel necklace, the size of a Texas T-bone, and descend into the sacred, noisy, frothing bacchanal of The Great American Beer Fest! A communion of hops and happiness! Rocky Mountain High… Colorado!
PHASE II (The Great Plains and Sasquatch):
First up, NEBRASKA! A land where the motto on the flag screams “Equality Before the Law!” with all the subtlety of a neon sign advertising a discount root canal! It’s a relic, a dusty-corner piece of history from the Civil War, when they removed those “whites only” voting restrictions and welcomed newly emancipated African Americans! These days, they’re too busy extolling the virtues of “The Good Life” to dwell on any radical, progressive past!
Next, through the vast, empty sky of the Great Plains we find… SOUTH DAKOTA! Where Rapid City rolls like San Francisco with a giant grain elevator added for Midwest ambiance! The drive from Chadron, Nebraska to Rapid City was a technicolor dreamscape. Yellow wood-sorrel rippled across the rolling plains like a giant, undulating welcome mat punctuated by a playful thunderstorm featuring glimpses of blueberry sky and cotton candy clouds leaking a steady stream of nature’s own mercies. Ronnie’s initial plan was to hit a car wash in Rapid City to scrub the bugs off Rocinante’s snout, but Mother Nature, in all her benevolence, had already taken care of that with her pre-dawn van wash special. And for those wondering if we were ever going to find the hot springs, BINGO! In fact, it’s in the town’s name, “Hot Springs” South Dakota. The kicker? Ronnie met a retired park ranger while soaking in the steaming mineral water. Through the fog, Mr. Scotty spun a bizzarro story. Go HERE for the details.
Oh boy… egg on our face. You see, Ronnie has always confused IOWA with Ohio, so when he arrived in Ohio and learned it was the REAL “Buckeye” state, he felt some nostalgic pains for the days when publishers could afford fact-checkers AND copy editors. Anyway, the egregious error was corrected, and apologies to all Cardinals AND Buckeyes. Oh… one more thing. We think it’s important to note, among the hubbub over AI wrecking creative and journalistic landscapes, the abovementioned error (confusing Ohio’s with Iowa’s state mascots) was all-too-human.
ILLINOIS, the “Land of Lincoln,” struck a dissonant chord. A state where prestigious universities rub shoulders with soul-crushing property taxes, where the “Second City’s” sports teams inspire religious devotion amidst a backdrop of political chicanery. The summers, Ronnie discovered, were steam baths, the winters, cryogenic chambers… a climate that could curdle a saint’s disposition. Yet, there are glimmers of hope. Starved Rock State Park, a Xanadu of waterfalls and canyons, promise respite from the urban sprawl. The state boasts a pantheon of American icons… Honest Abe Lincoln, of course, but also Carl Sandburg, the bard of Spoon River, and Michelle Obama, a beacon of intelligence and moxy. Even Michael Jordan, the basketball demigod (and Bugs Bunny’s unlikely sidekick), hails from these plains.
On to Duluth, MINNESOTA. A granite jaw jutting into the maw of Lake Superior. Time is a river here, meandering leisurely through a landscape of pine and granite. The locals, bless their frostbitten hearts, seem to operate on a different clock altogether, a sundial perhaps, or maybe an ancient Norse timepiece that only reads ‘winter’ and ‘summer’. Our encounter across this land of sky and water began with the stories from Ronnie’s first college mentor. A woman of the theater. She’d painted the Twin Cities as a glittering metropolis of culture, a place where the soul could stretch its legs and breathe. And The Guthrie, a temple to the spoken word. But then, a siren song lured us to the heart of Minnesota, towards the iron-rich womb of the state, Hibbing. A pilgrimage, you see, to the birthplace of a bard, where we cleaned the laundry and stood on the shoulders of giants.
Ok… for Ronnie, INDIANA is a couple things on the surface, 1.) it’s the home base of one of his favorite authors, Papa Kurt Vonnegut, and 2.) the Indy 500 auto race. Now, these things might date Mr. Ronnie. After all, he can’t remember the last time the Indy 500 was headline news. And though Mr. Vonnegut has been gone since 2007, his work is still quite popular with readers around the world. Indiana is a state of contradictions. Its people are both fiercely independent and deeply rooted in tradition. They’re known for hospitality, but their conversations tend to revolve around the weather, sports, and the price of corn. There is a certain charm to their simplicity, a refreshing honesty in their lack of pretense. Yet, there is also a stifling provincialism, a fear of the unknown that limits their horizons. Indiana is a place where time seems to stand still. The past is revered, the future feared. There is a resistance to change, a stubborn clinging to the familiar. It is a state that is both comforting and claustrophobic, a place where one can find solace and despair in equal measure.
Now… after Ronnie’s frustrating experience with Indiana, with all those Mario Andretti wannabes humping his bumper, he was pleased rolling through Northern OHIO‘s green expanse. Sure, Cleveland’s urban freeways are fast-paced, but we didn’t hold speed-demons from their ultra-important destinations like those in Indiana. Anyway, the drive from Medina to Kent was a pleasure, but this was a pilgrimage of sorts. Ronnie felt obligated to stand on the hallowed ground where four students gave their lives for the cause of ending the Vietnam war. This event held special significance for Ronnie as he was just beginning to get glimpses of the adult world. He was 10 years old in 1970, and the US appeared to be a super-hostile place for youth. Granted, things could have gone worse. For example, in China when students forced the government’s hand, hundreds were killed in Tiananmen Square. That said, the Nixon Administration, the Ohio National Guard, and the Kent State ROTC, stepped over the line asserting their authority. In the end, Mr. Nixon paid a political price and the US finally withdrew military forces from the Republic of Viet Nam, all of this before Ronnie’s actual entrance into the dangerous world witnessed every day on his family’s TV screen at the dinner hour.
Then, on to MICHIGAN, a state so vast it often feels like it’s trying to encompass an entire continent. It’s a place where the earth, it seems, took a deep breath and exhaled a colossal, verdant sigh. A land of extremes, where the summer sun can bake you like a potato and the winter wind can howl like a banshee. Michigan is a state that demands respect. That said, we found parts of Ohio and Michigan “frighteningly beautiful”. Frighteningly, because driving on some of what William Least Heat-Moon called “blue highways”, in the lake-dotted double-canopy forests, gave us a serious case of the creeps… we’re talking “Chrystal Lake” vibes, where Jason or Sasquatch pops out from the woods to do malevolent things to whomever is unlucky enough to be within a hairy decomposing hand reach. Yes… uber creepy, but straight up gorgeous at the same time.
On to WISCONSIN, the “Badger State”, and from what we’ve heard about the winters here, well, if Honey Badger don’t care, neither does winter in Wisconsin. We landed in Fond du Lac working on the blog in the public library. Earlier, Ronnie was practicing his Dylan tribute song in the Lakeside park, which happens to be at the shore of Lake Winnebago. Granted, not nearly as enormous as nearby Lake Michigan, but enormous nonetheless, 215 square miles, or 137,700 acres, and is the largest inland lake in the state. It’s about 30 miles long and 10 miles wide. So when the locals at the park informed Ronnie the entire thing freezes over in the winter… enough to drive vehicles on, well, that puts it in perspective… it gets really cold here, and stays that way for a long… long… time.
Then, into the frozen plains of NORTH DAKOTA! A land of brutal, relentless winters that’d make a penguin question life choices! It’s a Coen Brothers movie come to life, a place where excitement is as rare as a warm day in February. After the thaw, no way can you get driver’s fatigue, because it’s straight up pastoral… beautiful! The state motto, in classic radio voice, declares “Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” But hold your horses, loopers, because North Dakota liberty isn’t exactly Park Avenue window shopping. It’s more like strapping yourself to a goddamn rocket and blasting off into the great, howling void. But… there’s a peace here, a vast emptiness that allows you to breathe, to hear yourself think. We know! We experienced it firsthand on that long, lonely, pastoral drive to Bismarck!
Onward through the fog…Rapid City, SDAre we there yet?
Phase III (West Coast Wanderings):
Now, pay attention, loopers, because this ain’t your typical road trip! This is a gonzo odyssey, a kaleidoscopic funhouse of experience! Out west we go, through the Oro y Plata land of MONTANA, where the ghosts of cowboys and prospectors still whisper in your ears, where Native American oral traditions echo through the canyons, and where real frontier stories echo in the wind!
And then WYOMING! A land of contradictions! The “Equal Rights” motto proudly proclaiming a progressive past while some grapple with its present-day relevance! Yellowstone leaves you speechless, while the wind in Riverton leaves you breathless… and possibly frostbitten! They cherish their independence and self-reliance, but there’s a growing discussion about higher education! It’s a land of Esther Hobart Morris and J.C. Penney!
And what’s this? IDAHO! A land in need of some highway trash collectors! But the real star of this show is the stretch between Cody, Wyoming, and Idaho Falls! Yellowstone National Park! A geological freak show that would make P.T. Barnum green with envy! Mountains that scrape the underbelly of heaven, meadows bursting with wildflowers, and enough bears to staff a Russian circus! The only downside? No goddamn AT&T mobile service… stranded in the technological dark ages!
Onto the celestial paradise of UTAH! A land sculpted by a colossal stonemason, with towering crimson cliffs spilling out like a kaleidoscope on fire! The “Mighty Five” National Parks are a crown jewel collection fit for a psychedelic king! And the locals? A hardy bunch, the kind who’d build a log cabin with their bare hands and a smile! Sure, there’s a whiff of social conservatism clinging to the air, but it ain’t the in-your-face Bible-thumping you get down south! Just a politely phrased pamphlet tucked under your windshield wiper!
Phase IV (The Pacific Coast and Grand Canyon):
Good news, everyone! WASHINGTON STATE, a Pacific Northwest gem, offers a diverse landscape that’s as colorful as a Pollak canvas and as darkly fun as a date with Beetlejuice. First, Washington State holds a special place in Ronnie’s heart as he spent many a week in Spokane and Seattle either learning about the institutional food service business (four lifetimes ago) or tending to the computer networking needs of a western-region architecture/engineering firm, as well as a brief, but super-eventful romance with a Spokane co-worker (two lifetimes ago). And now… these reveries come crashing down on laundry day in Spokane. “Laundryland,” a facility filled with hungry hungry modern appliances. We ended up settling for the old-school machines because the new ones wanted SEVEN FREAKING DOLLARS for a single load. Now… we’ve grown accustomed to the already too high prices in Kansas, but a standard load to wash/dry was no more than five or six bucks, total. Now… these guys want even MORE just to do a single wash load (without bedding)… ARGH! Ok… rant over…
Heading down the coast, through the land of contradictions and extremes! OREGON! A place where the mountains are so tall they kiss the sky and the forests are so thick you could get lost for a lifetime! The sun shines one minute and then a torrent of rain, and you swear you see a Sasquatch lurking in the shadows! It’s a scene straight out of a nightmare, a testament to the raw, untamed beauty of this place!
And then CALIFORNIA! The land of pop culture and dreams!NorCal, where Eureka is a beach town crawling with former pirates. And Redding… like Garden City, Kansas, with palm trees! And then Steinbeck Country… Salinas! A weekend visit to the Northridge Mall where thousands of people, a rainbow of DEI, all having a grand time shatter the abandoned shopping center stereotype! An oddly refreshing experience for Ronnie, an average white male, being on the other side of the majority! Then down to SoCal, a place overrun with future Texans and Coloradans fleeing the high cost of living, the constant threat of earthquakes and wildfires, and the mind-numbingly long commutes! But let’s not forget the good stuff! Yosemite National Park, the birthplace of the film industry, and Silicon Valley! And Bakersfield! The home of country music legends Buck Owens and Merle Haggard!
And then, NEVADA! The Emerald City of the Desert! Las Vegas! Ronnie’s got a personal history with this place, a mountain of convention lanyards and memories of being propositioned by “escort” solicitors flicking cards in his face! It’s a land morphed from “Sin City” in the 1970s to a post-Y-2-K “Disneyland for Adults”!
And ARIZONA, a land where the sun beats down like a vengeful deity and the cacti stand guard like prickly sentinels. It’s a place where the Grand Canyon yawns like a cosmic chasm, a testament to the Earth’s ancient whimsy. But the beauty and awe-inspiring grandeur is only one side of the coin. This state is a microcosm of human endeavor, a place of both wonder and woe. Imagine Flagstaff, a city where the air is so crisp it could shatter glass. Then picture Phoenix, a sprawling metropolis where the heat shimmers like a mirage. It’s like comparing a snow-capped mountain to a fiery furnace. Arizona is a land of extremes, a place where the delicate balance of nature is constantly being tested.
A hiker’s lesson learned in NEW MEXICO: The waffle stompers Ronnie was counting on for long hikes in semi-challenging environments turned out to be unambiguous “cruel shoes”. This reality first emerged on the Grand Canyon “Bright Angel” hike, but became belligerently true, like the Kool Aid man, on the intermediate Albuquerque trail (Embudito). Did he make it to the summit? Hell to the no. Did he give it the ol’ college try? Sure, and this is where Ronnie FIRED the boots. His pinky toes, both of them were screaming the entire six mile trip (roughly half way to the summit). But no shame… it was a semi-challenging hike, and toward the end, his knees (those whiny little bitches) were singing harmony with the pinky toes. Ronnie resolved to engage the shoe experts at REI to hook him up with trail hikers a little less inclined to torturing the wearer. Oh… and a trek pole to make sure he doesn’t have to whittle a perfect stick a’la natural for knee-punishing descents.
Ronnie’s trusty mount.Looks yummy?Grand Canyon Old School
Phase V (Southern Comfort):
Alright, let’s dive into the heart of TEXAS, a place where the sun beats down like a jackhammer on your skull and the wind howls like a pack of Wiley Coyotes across the endless plains. As a lifelong Denver Donkeys fan, Ronnie has a personal vendetta against this state, courtesy of that Super Bowl debacle in ’78. But hey, even a man with a grudge can appreciate the bigger-than-life beauty of Texas. Picture this: a landscape painted in shades of burnt orange and turquoise, where weeds tumble and armadillos scurry. It’s a place where the only thing bigger than the sky is a ten-gallon-hat-wearin’ Texas oil-baron’s ego. And don’t even get Rocinante started on the heat. It’s like being trapped inside a giant oven, with more sage and fewer cookies.
OKLAHOMA, the Sooner State, Woody Guthrie’s stomping grounds, is a land where the contrasts are as stark as a prairie sunset against a storm-laden sky. It’s a place where the Wild West still whispers in the wind, where oil gushes beneath the earth, and where a Dust Bowl ghost haunts the plains. Imagine a state that birthed the Black Wall Street, a testament to post-slavery prosperity, only to see it crushed by a racist mob. Yet, today, it’s a tapestry woven with threads of Native American heritage, African American resilience, and the hopeful dreams of countless immigrants. Yet, from this crucible of contrasts, Oklahoma has forged a unique identity. It’s a land of country music legends, basketball heroes, and political figures who shaped the nation. It’s a place where the past and present collide, where hope and despair intertwine, and where the human spirit endures.
Onto ARKANSAS, home to several natural hot springs, many of which are open to the public. The most famous is Hot Springs National Park, which features 47 naturally occurring springs. Other notables include those found in the Ouachita Mountains and the Ozarks. Arkansas has a rich cultural history as well, with several famous landmarks. These include the boyhood home of Johnny Cash in Kingsland, the birthplace of Al Green in Forest City, and Billy Bob Thornton, born right there in Hot Springs. Ronnie has family from the state and they are doing quite well. They’re a hearty breed, known for their hospitality and their dry wit. They’ll welcome you with open arms, but don’t be surprised if they also give you a sideways glance and a knowing smirk. It’s a state where folksy wisdom and modern cynicism coexist.
Next up, GEORGIA… the home of former president Jimmie Carter. Do you remember Mr. Carter’s family business? That’s right, he was a peanut farmer. Peanuts are everywhere here in Georgia. For Thanksgiving, Ronnie and Rocinante were holed up in some backwoods Georgia manor, a relic of the Old South, courtesy of Ronnie’s kin who threw a Thanksgiving feast that would make a Roman emperor blush. The pièce de résistance? Peanut butter pie! Yeah, you heard right. A sweet and savory peanut butter pie. Only in the Peach State, where they grow enough peanuts to choke an elephant, and the peanut butter pie was a stone cold home run. If Ronnie ever hosts Thanksgiving dinner, there will be a peanut butter pie.
After a brief holiday stop in Savannah, Ronnie and Rocinante made a plan to escape the worst of 2024’s winter bomb-cyclones. So, Southward they traveled intending to follow the southern coastal towns. But then, waking from an overnight stay in Tallahassee enroute to Mobeele, AL, Ronnie opened his news feed to reports of Ol’ Man Winter reaching tentacles into his Midwest stomping grounds. This awakened a realization. Specifically, the point of this tour was to avoid any and all extreme weather, a priority for our van-life vagabond heroes.
Anyway, with time to step back and regroup. Hot Springs or Busk phases one, two, three, and four covered the West and the Midwest. Now, with winter bearing down, we found ourselves learning some Deep South lessons (HSoB Phase V), starting with Arkansas and Georgia. The lesson? It gets cold there too. Granted, we were confident about missing the snowfall, let alone all those bomb-cyclone blizzards, but, it wasn’t what we had imagined. Specifically, we expected nighttime temps between 40 and 60 with day temps between 50 and 70. Apparently we brought the 20s and 30s from Kansas along with us for the ride.
So there we were, a new “This Land” tour motto ringing in our ears: “Ever thus to the best laid plans,” like some cosmic Rodney Dangerfield whispering sweet nothings of misfortune. Or, as Iron Mike would say, “everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face.”
Now, for geography-minded loopers, Tallahassee is in the panhandle, East of St. Augustine, our first FLORIDA stop. Well, that’s in the North, and we needed to be heading South, waaayyy south, in order to avoid all hints of Ol’ Man Winter. So… yea… we had to backtrack a bit, a significant course correction. Spring Hill was the first stop enroute to Key West, all the while hoping for the best for friends and family up North.
Nearly three months in the southern tip of FLORIDA before embarking for the coastal South gave us a deep reverence for Mother Nature’s “River of Grass“:
Remember remember, the lessons of the wild, the delicate balance that’s easily disturbed. Remember remember, our schoolyard sorrow, the shattered peace, the pain of tomorrow. Protect this wilderness, protect these children, till silence swallows both… in a rolling river of grass.
And so… onto ALABAMA: We landed in Foley, en-route to Mobile. Our “boondocker’s workflow requires landing somewhere close to an urban center large enough for Planet Fitness without traffic snarls, but small enough for us to function at a pace suitable for wayfaring senior citizens. Foley, AL is perfect! Less than 50 miles from Mobile with all necessary accommodations located along a single boulevard. Once settled, we met some nice folks at the library and the nearby dog park. And some of the stories… well… For instance, this one fella, an Uncle Remus sort of elderly gent, told us he’d seen a Sasquatch stomping around Conecuh County. “A hairy beast hollerin’ and crossin’ roads like he’s late for supper.” He said. “Back in my day, we had ‘possums, maybe a bear. Now folks are scared. It’s prob’ly lookin’ for a decent sweet potato pie. Ain’t that somethin’?”
Now, they say MISSISSIPPI is a great place to commune with ghosts, that Mississippians love a good story. And so, in honor of the great state of Mississippi, here’s a real doozy of a ghost story. Mostly inspired by a dream from our first restless night here. For some reason, Ronnie awoke around 4:00am, probably from a limb scraping against the side of the van nudged by a gentle breeze (or something like that). Anyway, fragments of the dream are drastically embellished here… Enjoy!
On the road in LOUISIANA, Ronnie and Rocinante pulled into a mud bug shack for a bite before settling in for the night. Striking up a conversation with the bartender, Ronnie asked about all those Apostolic churches he was passing on the Louisiana back roads. In the next hour and a half, Ronnie got way more than he bargained for. The bartender had a mellow drawl Ronnie found mesmerizing… a combination of Southern gentry and creole. His ample snow white beard reminded Ronnie of those Park Avenue Santas helping New York parents discover the hopes and dreams of their little ones. He had the dark skin and flashing blue eyes of an avid sun worshipper, projecting the relaxed countenance of a lifelong beachcomber. His loose fitting color patterned shirt reminded Ronnie of African Dashikis, but the style was more like something you would expect to see at a Grateful Dead concert. The bartender seemed intrigued about Ronnie’s curiosity, and so began to unspool a strange tale of spiritual divergence in the great state of Louisiana.
Now… there we were… Memphis, TENNESSEE… home of Graceland and, if we may be so bold, some of the worst highways and city roads poor Rocinante was forced to endure on this tour. We didn’t hit a tire killer, but that’s only because Ronnie practices hypervigilance when traveling Tennessee roads. In other words, he’d seen this show before… he came prepared. That said, we had a super pleasant stay in Memphis. Not all of the roads were peppered with tank-traps. For example, the eastside Germantown area is quite nice. It reminded Ronnie of some of those old money neighborhoods in Kansas City. Anyway, on laundry day, waiting for machines to do their business, Ronnie struck up a conversation with one of the patrons. We’ll refer to him as Ronnie’s “laundromat companion” (LC). After some brief introductory exchanges, Ronnie’s LC launched into a string of Music Biz-related anecdotes, slightly embellished here.
Phase VI (East Coast Shenanigans):
Now, after a springtime tour of the coastal south, we headed North, a furious, fevered dash to the final HSoB phase, East Coast and New England. Starting in the Carolinas, and the Virginias. Along the way, Ronnie confessed to feeling like an exposed nerve. It may have something to do with the change of scenery. After all, as a Kanorado native, Ronnie’s comfortable with wide open spaces and alpine mountaineering. But starting in North Carolina, approaching the beginning humps of the Appalachians, Ronnie started developing a contracting state of claustrophobia. This sense of dread actually started earlier, in South Carolina, with conjured imaginings of what it would be like to navigate congested urban sprawl nestled amongst relentless steep grades, up and down and up and down, trying not to ride the brakes but sometimes unable to avoid it. Then what do you know? The two West Virginia college towns Rocinante stumbled into (WVU and Fairmount State) presented conditions exactly like Ronnie’s worst roller-coaster imaginings.
Ok, let’s take a high-speed, neon-lit, pinball-machine journey through the CAROLINAS! It’s a two-state demolition derby of contrasts, a sociological smackdown, a… well, you get the picture. First, the cities! NORTH CAROLINA, with its Chapel Hill, that bastion of Ashville cool, where the air crackles with Ph.D. energy and the bookstores overflow with Derrida! SOUTH CAROLINA? They’ve got… GreenvUlle! And Columbia, where the statehouse gleams, the humidity clings, and the barbecue joints are serious business! The music scene? Oh, sweet home Carolina, the music! Up north, it’s flutes and dreads, the earthy strum of acoustic guitars, the faint, sweet smell of patchouli oil wafting through the co-op. Down south? It’s hiking gear and bandanas, the twang of banjos at a bluegrass festival, and enough Realtree camo to outfit a small militia! Religion? North Carolina, with its burgeoning tiny home communities, whispers of Zen, and a general suspicion of anything too… organized. South Carolina? Mega Churches! Sprawling complexes with parking lots the size of aircraft carriers, where the faithful gather in their Sunday best to hear the good word, amplified to stadium levels!
To be clear, Rocinante is no stranger to mountaineering. In fact, she was literally born in Colorado Springs, her first initiation over Independence Pass through the valley of the Roaring Fork northwest of Aspen, where Owl Farm, Hunter S. Thompson‘s redoubt sits. A gorgeous, exhilarating trip and Rocinante handled it without a hitch. Now, this is all familiar territory for Ronnie, a native of Kanorado. He’s seen it all, from Black Bear Road to the high plains of Western Kansas. That said, it’s hard for our heroes to stay focused traveling through VIRGINIA as the lush Edenic land goes on and on and on. Our heroes made a point to stay on what Heat Moon dubbed “Blue Highways” and by arrival in Waynesboro, Ronnie was overwhelmed with the beauty of Virginia’s interior. So much he began to doubt his ability to return to the flatlands. But we digress… the story of Virginia is one of stark contrasts, of light and shadow, of triumphs and tragedies, all woven together to create a snapshot as compelling and enduring as the land itself.
And neighboring WEST VIRGINIA… a veritable Janus of banjos and 5g smartphones. Even before the rabble in Philadelphia started their tiresome bleating about liberty and taxes, this land of craggy peaks and shadowed hollers harbored a glorious dichotomy. On the one hand, rugged frontiersmen, creatures of axe and rifle, suspicious of anyone wearing hats indoors and whose idea of polite conversation involves hitting the spittoon bullseye. Folks of fierce independence mind you, who’d sooner wrestle a bear than abide a revenue agent or a banker.
Alright, alright, alright! Ronnie and Rocinante started this tour from the great state of Kansas, and in his stompin’ rock-n-roll salad days, Kansas was famous for springtime tornadoes. Well, times change, people change, and apparently weather patterns change as well. For instance, here in the Southeastern states, March and April 2025 subjected Ronnie and Rocinante to three, count ’em, three white knuckle evenings where one eye was on the online tornado trackers and the other on streaming movies. Two of those evenings featured sirens screaming, “take cover people, a funnel has been spotted!!” And so… with interrupted sleep comes memories of crazy dreams… here’s one for KENTUCKY.
Onward through the fog… the extent of Ronnie’s personal history withPENNSYLVANIAis from the dark days of the 1980s. A time of self-discovery, good times, and madness. Ronnie and a few other lost children formed a brief tribal bond, and one of those lost children was a native of Pennsylvania Amish Country. So… rather than dig up a bunch of boring travel-blog fare, let’s relive a version of this story. Without further adieu, the saga of “Dangerous Dan, the Sonesta Stud.” WARNING – nearly all of the following names and places have been changed in order to avoid future heartbreak or litigation. Consume at 2025’s level of truth-decay.
Ok… Ronnie wants to share another vivid dream. This time accompanied by a lone, mournful saxophone moaning a melody from some vaguely familiar smoky jazz club. The scene is a dusty phantom TV studio at night with the sound of a flickering fluorescent light, buzzing like a trapped fly. The dream conjured a vision so preposterous, yet so uniquely American in its blend of earnest naivety and jaded cynicism, that it deserves attention. To the mournful strains, a debate between two ladies, from drastically different eras, denizens of that diminutive state of DELAWARE. A place known for its accommodating incorporation laws and its haste in jumping on the Federal bandwagon.
MARYLAND and DC? The decision to plant the nation’s capital in the embrace of Maryland was a stroke of genius. It was an implicit recognition that the strength of this republic lies not in its ability to enforce a bland uniformity, but in its capacity to absorb and celebrate its manifold diversities. The future of this nation, if it is to have a future worth mentioning, will not be found in the sterile pages of Project 2025, but in the noisy, vibrant, and gloriously untidy reality of places like Maryland. Let the hollow sycophants preach their gospel of homogeneity; the rest of us, the free human beings in this republic, will continue to draw our strength from the rich and fertile soil of our diversity.
Now, if you want to understand the United States of America, and you’re in a hurry, you could do worse than look at CONNECTICUT. It’s a real grab bag of a place. It’s got all the shiny things and all the sharp, rusty things America keeps in its pockets. It’s a place of beautiful, brilliant minds, some of which are put to work making new and interesting ways to blow people to pieces. We imagine old Sam Clemens would have a thing or two to say about it. He’d look at the internet, where everyone has a megaphone and no one has an editor, and he’d probably light a cigar, pour himself a whiskey, and rack the billiards. He might have watched that movie, “Idiocracy”, and said, “They got it mostly right, but it should have been sadder.” He knew the score. He knew that human genius was a beautiful and dangerous thing, like a bottle of nitroglycerin. You could use it to help prevent a heart attack, or you could use it to blow up the world.
NEW JERSEY gets a bad rap. A real thumping from the wits over in New York, the titans of 30 Rock, who probably only ever see the bits that look like the inside of a vacuum cleaner bag… all that industry flanking the Jersey Turnpike. “Garden State,” they call it. And you drive past refineries that look like metallic dinosaurs coughing up their last, and you wonder about the gardener. Blue state. Thoroughly blue. But even in the bluest of states, you’ll find some folks trying to repaint the town red. Some genius, some absolute card-carrying comedian without an audience, tried to change the name of little Clinton to “Reagan”. Reagan, New Jersey. You can’t make this stuff up. The universe just hands it to you on a slightly greasy, very confusing platter. Who needs The Onion when you’ve got municipal politics?
Now when Ronnie thinks of VERMONT, his brain immediately goes to Senator Bernie Sanders. And why not? The man, with his rumpled suits and his waving arms, and the voice of gravel mixed with moral indignation, is practically a walking, talking, quintessentially American ideal. He’s the guy who reminds you of what Grandma told you about doing the right thing, even if nobody else is. He’s a fearless avatar, this Sanders, straight outta Vermont. And Vermont, well, it’s got this weird, similar history: secular, sure, but with a moral compass that points due north; revolutionary, absolutely, but grounded in a kind of unvarnished pragmatism that’d make a brick wall seem flighty.
Then after some missteps in Pennsylvania and Delaware, NEW YORK! Everybody’s got a New York story, right? A slab of concrete crammed with eight million other schmucks all trying to get somewhere faster than the next guy! And the subway? A moving petri-dish filled to the rim with way too much humanity and the distinct aroma of “what the hell is that?” So, hunkered down in Horseheads, a name that just rolls off the tongue and lands in a pile of “what the hell”, a place with a Stephen King-esque backstory that just puts the weird right out there on the welcome sign, we compose our New York yawp.
And what’s this? These postage stamp states… NEW HAMPSHIRE and RHODE ISLAND. On New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, they call it… the “World’s Worst Weather.” Hurricane-force winds every third day. Through the years, more than a hundred visitors underestimated that fury, and now they cant. Little dwarf trees, all matted and gnarled, like angry bonsai. So it goes. And the Old Man of the Mountain, a face carved by nature itself, watched over Franconia Notch for ages. Then, one day in May 2003, poof! Gone. Just like that. And Ronnie thought Kansas had windy days. And Rhode Island? A place so steeped in its own absurd contradictions that its best legacy is a perpetual punchline delivered by a cartoon with a metric ton of ironic jokes! Peter Griffin himself, lampooning the place he inhabits! A place called Providence that was founded by a human who was probably too goddamn weird for the Puritans! “Rogue’s Island,” they called it! More like Rage Island!
Then Tewksbury, MASSACHUSETTS? Ronnie’s eyebrows shot up like a rocket. What the Sam Hell? Serendipity, it seems, often arrived in the guise of a geographical screw-up. For lo and behold, a stone’s throw from their new, accidental roost, stood the Tewksbury Public Library, and just beyond its brick façade, a short, almost ominous stroll away, loomed the Tewksbury State Hospital, its Gothic spires reaching for the heavens like skeletal fingers, steeped in a history as thick and dark as molasses. SERENDIPITY NOW! A drumroll, please, for the universe’s peculiar sense of humor. Like the Pilgrims, their faces grim with conviction, seeking a place to worship God without all the fuss and bother of the Old World. They clambered off their creaking wooden ark, the Mayflower, and promptly set up shop in Plymouth, a desolate spit of land that would forever be etched in the annals of American myth. A mere decade later, in 1630, another wave, an even more earnest phalanx of Puritans, arrived, their heads buzzing with the grand, almost hubristic idea of building an “ideal” religious society, a shining city upon a hill. They called their settlement the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a name that would eventually be swallowed by the booming metropolis we now call Boston.
And then there’s MAINE! The final stickpin on this quixotic tour! The land of sprawling nothingness and the occasional Dunkin’! Bangor? A bust! A Gordian knot of SUVs and pickup trucks! Ronnie felt like a single, tangled strand of dental floss in a Sasquatch’s beard! Downtown felt less like a literary pilgrimage and more like the prelude to a particularly grim Edgar Allan Poe story! The meander back south was a blur of paranoia and close calls, a truly unsettling, unforgettable vibe of a state where you “can’t get there from here!”
Better bring a compassAnd so… it begins…DC Congressional Reading Room
And so, alas, the road calls, that siren song of adventure echoing in his ears! that siren song of adventure echoing in his ears! Ronnie’s homing pigeon instinct has them headed back to Kanorado. A break for tending personal business! After that, it’s the final leg, the grand pilgrimage back to the River of Grass! The salt air and the gentle lapping of the waves will serve as the backdrop for the main event, the book, the reason for this grand odyssey! Working title? One Year on the Road: Searching for the Fibrillating Heart of our Divided Nation! A grand ambition, indeed.
Stay Tuned… much more to come.
Onward through the fog… Rohlfie
This land is your land… This land is my land… From California… To the New York Island… From the Redwood forest… To the gulf stream water… This land is here for you and me!
It was 2:00 P.M., give or take a minute, on an ordinary Tuesday, though in the suffocating maw of Northern New England’s July “Heat Dome,” nothing felt particularly ordinary. The very air hung thick and greasy, a humid shroud draped over the land, making even the squirrels pant like Alaskan Malamutes at Disney World. Inside the tin-can confines of Ronnie’s trusty, but un-air conditioned mount, Rocinante, a veritable bake oven on wheels, Ronnie noticed the cabin batteries sputtering, their digital readout fading like a bad dream. Keeping the provisions from turning into a science experiment in this hundred-degree crucible was draining the lifeblood right out of them. And when that happens, a drive, an hour or so, a nice little constitutional for the battery, that’s the ticket.
So, off they went, Ronnie at the helm, the digital siren song of Siri’s perpetually inebriated sister (known in these parts as Google Maps) croaking directions. The mission was to find the nearest watering hole for their dwindling provisions… a grocery emporium with a filtered-water refill station, a veritable oasis in this overheated landscape. Mission accomplished. The electronic drunkard was commanded to lead them back to their pre-designated encampment. But alas, Siri’s drunk sister, in a fit of digital delirium, delivered them not to the sylvan serenity of their New Hampshire hideaway, but to Tewksbury, Massachusetts.
Tewksbury, MA? Ronnie’s eyebrows shot up like a rocket. What the Sam Hell!? they weren’t done with New Hampshire yet! The verdant hills of Derry, still echoing with the ghost of a post unfinished. But by then, the sun, a malevolent orange eye in the hazy sky, was already dipping low, casting long, bruised shadows. Backtracking? Forget about it. The die was cast. And besides, they had everything they needed to finish the New Hampshire dispatch right here, right now, in this unexpected patch of overheated forest. Serendipity, it seems, often arrived in the guise of a geographical screw-up. For lo and behold, a stone’s throw from their new, accidental roost, stood the Tewksbury Public Library, and just beyond its brick façade, a short, almost ominous stroll away, loomed the Tewksbury State Hospital, its Gothic spires reaching for the heavens like skeletal fingers, steeped in a history as thick and dark as molasses. SERENDIPITY NOW! A drumroll, please, for the universe’s peculiar sense of humor.
Now, pull up a folding chair, pop a squat, and lend an ear, because we’re about to embark on a journey, a rollicking, rambunctious ride through the peculiar, the profound, and sometimes downright preposterous tapestry of this place called Massachusetts. It’s a land of “firsts” and “extremes,” as some folks are fond of saying, and if you ain’t careful, it’s liable to give you a case of psychic whiplash just trying to keep up.
Way back, long before your great-grandpappy’s great-grandpappy even thought about being born, this neck of the woods hummed with the quiet rhythm of life, home to a diverse tapestry of Indigenous peoples… the Wampanoag, the Narragansett, the Nipmuc, and a slew of others, their names whispered on the wind. They dwelled in ingenious lodges called wigwams, conical cocoons of bark and hide, or sometimes in grander longhouses, sprawling communal abodes, all under the watchful eye of their sachems, leaders who could be as easily a woman as a man, which just goes to show you some things ain’t so new under the sun. Why, the very name “Massachusetts” itself is a linguistic echo, plucked from the Massachusett people, a tribute to their enduring presence.
Then, in 1620, like a scene out of a stained-glass window, along came the Pilgrims, their faces grim with conviction, seeking a place to worship God without all the fuss and bother of the Old World. They clambered off their creaking wooden ark, the Mayflower, and promptly set up shop in Plymouth, a desolate spit of land that would forever be etched in the annals of American myth. A mere decade later, in 1630, another wave, an even more earnest phalanx of Puritans, arrived, their heads buzzing with the grand, almost hubristic idea of building an “ideal” religious society, a shining city upon a hill. They called their settlement the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a name that would eventually be swallowed by the booming metropolis we now call Boston. They even had what some historians, with a twinkle in their eye, refer to as the “First Thanksgiving,” a three-day bacchanal of feasting and goodwill after their initial, hard-won harvest. Now, whether that was a true act of profound gratitude or merely a darn good excuse to eat till their britches burst, we can’t rightly say, but it’s a yarn woven tightly into the fabric of American lore.
These Puritans, bless their earnest, God-fearing hearts, were mighty serious about their faith. So serious, in fact, that if you didn’t quite see eye-to-eye with their rigid interpretations… folks like the fiery Anne Hutchinson and the stubbornly independent Roger Williams… they’d politely (or perhaps not-so-politely, depending on the day and the prevailing winds of theological disagreement) suggest you try your luck elsewhere. And that, loopers, is how the feisty little state of Rhode Island got itself started, by gawd. It seems religious dissent, coupled with a hankering for a bit more elbow room, were quite the potent forces for colonial expansion back then.
Plymouth, MAMassasoit, Wampanoags’ SachemPlymouth Rock (allegedly)Mayflower II (definitely)
And let’s not overlook a grim chapter that unfolded in Salem, a town that earned itself a dark and indelible reputation for a spell of mass hysteria that involved accusations of witchcraft swirling through the air like a noxious fog. It just goes to show you what happens when folks get themselves all riled up, gripped by fear, and start pointing accusatory fingers. A truly grim chapter, that one, leaving a stain on the Puritanical ledger.
Now, fast forward a bit, through the sleepy colonial years, to the late 18th century, and Boston, like a coiled spring, begins to flex its muscles, asserting its destiny as the “Cradle of Liberty.” See, after the French and Indian War, a bloody, protracted affair that emptied the British coffers, the Crown decided it was high time the colonies, those spoiled colonial brats, paid their fair share. Massachusetts, being a feisty, independent-minded sort, didn’t much cotton to that idea. There were protests, simmering resentments, a bit of a ruckus in 1770 that went down in history as the Boston Massacre, where redcoats, those lobster-backed soldiers, fired into an angry crowd. And then, in ’73, those rascals, dressed like painted Indians, tossed a whole heap of tea… crates of it, a veritable harbor-full… into the frigid waters of Boston Harbor. The British, naturally, got their knickers in a twist, their royal temper flaring like a bonfire, and slapped Massachusetts with a series of punitive measures known as the Intolerable Acts. Well, that just poured gasoline on an already raging fire, and pretty soon, firebrands like Samuel Adams and John Hancock were stirring up so much trouble, so much revolutionary fervor, that it lit the fuse for the American Revolution in 1775. Massachusetts, it seems, was always good at getting things started, a perpetual instigator of change.
And speaking of rebellions, after the hard-won victory of the Revolution, a fellow named Daniel Shays, a weathered veteran of that very war, led a populist revolt from 1786 to 1787. They were disaffected, as the fancy folks in powdered wigs would say, burdened by debt and taxes, and they even tried to seize a federal armory in Springfield, a dramatic, ill-fated gambit. Now, this Shays’ Rebellion, as it’s known, didn’t exactly succeed in its immediate aims, but it certainly put the fear of God, or at least the fear of anarchy, into the fledgling nation, convincing everyone that the Articles of Confederation were about as useful as a screen door on a submarine. So, with a sense of urgency, they decided to draft a brand-spanking-new Constitution, a gleaming blueprint for a more perfect union, and Massachusetts, being quick on the draw, ever eager to be a pioneer, was the sixth state to ratify it in 1788, cementing its place in the grand experiment.
Now, this Massachusetts, it’s always been a veritable hothouse for big thinkers, for minds that dared to gaze beyond the mundane. It was a hotbed for the Transcendentalist movement, a philosophical ferment that preached the gospel of intuition, individual experience, and a deeper, almost mystical connection with nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Boston boy who preferred the quietude of Concord’s leafy lanes, pretty much cooked up this whole philosophy, like a gourmet chef perfecting a new recipe. And his pal, Henry David Thoreau, that rugged individualist, spent a year roughing it in a little cabin at Walden Pond, living simply, observing the world, and writing about it all in prose as clear as spring water. Seems they liked to contemplate the universe, those two, and then tell everybody about it.
When the storm clouds of the Civil War gathered, Massachusetts, ever on the vanguard, was front and center, a tireless drum major in the parade for the abolition of slavery. It was the first state to muster itself a Black regiment, the 54th Massachusetts, a bunch of brave souls, sons of freedom, who went on to earn themselves some serious glory. And not content with just freeing folks from the shackles of bondage, in 1852, Massachusetts became the first state to make sure every child, rich or poor, got a bit of schooling. Compulsory education, they called it, and it just shows you they were always ahead of the curve when it came to smarts, ever eager to enlighten the populace.
And speaking of smarts, after the two big global conflagrations, when the smoke cleared and the cannons fell silent, eastern Massachusetts, which used to be all about the greasy gears of heavy industry, decided to give itself a radical makeover. It transformed itself, like a caterpillar into a butterfly, into a service-based economy, with all sorts of government contracts, private investments, and gleaming research facilities popping up like mushrooms after a spring rain. And the Route 128 corridor, that ribbon of asphalt winding through the suburbs, well, that became a regular parade of high-tech companies, a silicon valley of the East, all snatching up the bright young graduates from the area’s many fancy universities… places like MIT, where they’re so smart, they taught the world to ditch clunky analog media for the sleek, ethereal wonder of the “digital.”
Mass. Ethnic DiversityHenry David Thoreau’s Cabin SiteMITBattle of Lexington
Another feather in its progressive three-cornered hat, Massachusetts, ever the trailblazer, was the first state in the whole U.S. of A. to legalize same-sex marriage in 2004. They decided, plain and simple, after much deliberation and legal wrangling, that excluding loopers from civil marriage simply wasn’t constitutional, a blow for equality that reverberated across the nation. See? Extremes and firsts, a constant dance.
And they’ve got more famous literary figures than you can shake a stick at… from the colonial verses of Anne Bradstreet to the whimsical rhymes of Dr. Seuss, with the brooding prose of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the exquisite introspection of Emily Dickinson, and the epic seafaring tales of Herman Melville thrown in for good measure. It’s a regular literary jamboree, this place, a veritable feast for the word-hungry soul.
But let’s not get too puffed up, too self-satisfied, because even a place of such soaring highs has its crushing lows. And we’re not just talking about the low-down, gut-punching feeling you get when you see your quarterly property tax bill. The very place where this post is composed, this serendipitous stopping point called Tewksbury, whose State Hospital looms a short, somber walk away, started out as an almshouse back in 1854. It was a place for the poor, the sick, and later, the pauper insane, their minds adrift on stormy seas. A good many of its early residents were immigrants, especially the weary, hopeful souls from Ireland, fleeing famine and despair, and a full third of ’em, heartbreakingly, were children, their young lives touched by hardship. Why, Anne Sullivan, the remarkable woman who later taught Helen Keller to see the world with her mind’s eye, spent some of her own formative, often brutal years there. Discussing her time in the Tewksbury Hospital, she said, with an almost chilling detachment,
“Very much of what I remember about Tewksbury is indecent, cruel, melancholy, gruesome in the light of grown-up experience; but nothing corresponding with my present understanding of these ideas entered my child mind. Everything interested me. I was not shocked, pained, grieved or troubled by what happened. Such things happened. People behaved like that—that was all that there was to it.”
A chillingly matter-of-fact observation, a child’s stark assessment of a stark reality.
And if that ain’t enough to give you the shivers, to send a cold whisper down your spine, up to 10,000 souls are buried in the woods nearby, their final resting places marked only by tiny, anonymous numbered metal laurels, like miniature tombstone epitaphs. Most of their stories are lost to the mists of time, devoured by fires that consumed the early records, leaving only a spectral void. Some folks even whisper that the place is haunted by ghosts… friendly specters, they say, ghosts that have even infiltrated the hallowed halls of the library, no less. Benign ghosts, they say, and that’s a comfort given all the suffering that surely took place there.
Tewksbury Benign ghostsTewksbury Hospital Admin. Building10,000 Numbered GravesTewksbury 1907Hell is for ChildrenTewksbury Campus Tunnels
So there you have it… a tiny taste, a mere morsel, of the peculiar grandeur that is Massachusetts. Ronnie, ever the wanderer, says he’d love to hang out a while longer, to savor the coastal sights, to stroll the hallowed grounds of the MIT campus, perhaps even touch the very bricks where a nation was born. But alas, the open road calls, that siren song of adventure echoing in his ears. Two more states to go (Maine and Rhode Island), and then, like a homing pigeon, it’s back to Kanorado to take care of some of Ronnie’s personal business. After that, it’s the final leg, the grand pilgrimage back to Florida City, where the salt air and the gentle lapping of the waves will serve as the backdrop for the main event, the book, the very reason for this grand odyssey. Working title, you ask? One Year on the Road: Searching for the Fibrillating Heart of our Divided Nation. A grand ambition, indeed.
We’ll see you in Rhode Island.
Onward through the fog… Rohlfie
You can’t just breeze by… Massachusetts… The highs are too high… The lows are cavernous… The nation’s birth pangs… The death of innocence… Behold… the city on the hill.
On a July Monday in the year of our lord, 2025, Ronnie and Rocinante woke up to a new day, in a strange land. And with all apologies to the natives, it appears they brought the Kanorado weather with them. Average July temps in Derry New Hampshire (no, not that Derry) is between the upper 70s and mid 80s. Today, it’s 92 with tomorrow’s forecast predicting temps up to 96! Fortunately, no one in the Derry Public Library knows it’s Ronnie’s fault… woo hoo!
Anyway, New Hampshire, the Granite State. The first to weigh in on the various candidates making bids to run the most powerful nation on the planet (till it’s not). These loopers are fiercely independent, proving themselves resilient and worthy from the jump.
On January 5, 1776… long, long ago, the cantankerous loopers of New Hampshire decided they’d had enough of old King George. Wham… first colony to declare independence! Nearly half a year before those other guys got around to signing the Declaration. Brave souls, or maybe just impatient.
“Live Free or Die!” It’s what they say.
Established in 1629, named after some place in England… typical. Then came the British troubles. In 1774, before most folks even knew what was what, New Hampshire jumped the gun seizing Fort William & Mary, just like that. Two years later, they had their own government and constitution. First again. No dilly-dallying for these loopers.
“Live Free or Die!” Sounds about right.
Later on, when the big American family squabble happened, the one they called the Civil War, New Hampshire was all in for abolition. Thirty-two thousand soldiers, give or take a few, marched off to fight for the Union. After that unpleasantness, boom… factories everywhere! Textiles, shoes, paper. The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Manchester was the biggest cotton mill on the planet. Can you imagine? Then came the French Canadians, by the droves. Now, a quarter of the population has French-American blood. And these days, New Hampshire is rich and smart. Go figure.
“Live Free or Die!” A mantra, if you will.
They’re not big on religion here. Least religious U.S. state, they say. Staunchly libertarian, they won’t be taking orders from priests… they really like their freedom. A Pew survey in 2014 showed that thirty-six percent here were part of the fast growing demographic known as the “nones“. Thirty percent Protestant, twenty-six percent Catholic. Not many Mormons or Jews. They don’t go to church much, these New Hampshirites. Only fifty-four percent are “absolutely certain there is a God,” compared to seventy-one percent elsewhere. Curious, isn’t it? Oh, and here’s a kicker: New Hampshire is the only state to have a woman governor and two women as U.S. senators. There’s another kick in the agates for the patriarchy.
“Live Free or Die!” And make room for the ladies in your ol’ boy network.
Now, before all the European colonizer hullabaloo, the Abenaki tribes were here, minding their own business. Different cultures, different gods, but same language, mostly. People were living near Keene up to twelve thousand years ago! Imagine that. You can commune with the sacred spirits in the White Mountain National Forest, winding through the Appalachian Trail.
“Live Free or Die!” A long, beautiful nature hike.
On Mount Washington, they call it… the “World’s Worst Weather.” Hurricane-force winds every third day. Through the years, more than a hundred visitors underestimated that fury, and now they cant. Little dwarf trees, all matted and gnarled, like angry bonsai. So it goes. And the Old Man of the Mountain, a face carved by nature itself, watched over Franconia Notch for ages. Then, one day in May 2003, poof! Gone. Just like that. And Ronnie thought Kanorado had windy days.
“Live Free or Die!” Until you can’t.
Lakes, ponds, rivers, streams. Eight hundred of the first, nineteen thousand miles of the second. Hard to keep track of all this windy river vertigo. Sometimes state boundaries get bungled. New Hampshire and Maine had a little squabble over the Piscataqua River boundary, specifically some islands. The Supreme Court said Maine owned them. But New Hampshire still says the naval shipyard on Seavey’s Island is theirs. Stubborn, these Granite Staters.
New Hampshire has the shortest ocean coastline in the whole darn country, eighteen miles. Blink and you miss it. Hampton Beach, where folks go to get sunburned. And the Isles of Shoals, nine tiny islands offshore. Four of them are New Hampshire’s. Poet Celia Thaxter had an art colony there. And Blackbeard, the pirate, supposedly buried treasure there. Treasure and art. A strange combination.
“Live Free or Die!” For rum, booty, and framing services perhaps?
“Live Free or Die!” Or at least, take it with a generous sense of humor.
And with that, again we point out the fact that New Hampshire’s average July temperature ranges from the mid-70s to mid-80s. As this entry gets logged the thermometer is in the mid-80s, on the way to a high of 96! Now without sounding like a total narcissist, Ronnie is rehearsing excuses in case anyone were to irrationally put the blame on him and Rocinante for bringing the Kanorado “Dawg Days” all this way north. You gotta admit, it is an astonishing coincidence. On the drive from Burlington VT to Derry, NH, the conditions were gorgeous. Light rain and upper 60s to mid 70s. Ronnie was breathing a sigh of relief for getting away from the punishing Kanorado summer heat, only to find he had apparently brought his customary suffering with him, to the astonishment of the Yankee natives.
PS: There is a silver lining… Ronnie always manages to find one. That being, evening temps cool down significantly so that Ronnie’s able to switch the ceiling fans off around 10 or 11 P.M. as they aren’t needed for the rest of the night. So… there’s that.
Onward through the fog… Rohlfie
You won’t get far… In the Granite State… With Shuck and Jive… They can’t relate… First to weigh in… On the Presidential Race… Live free and chalk it up to fate.
So… after a brief hiatus from the HSoB tour (Dry Tortugas, baybay), Ronnie and Rocinante pointed the grill due North landing them in historic and spooky (see below) Burlington, Vermont. Now, because Mother Nature has a wicked sense of humor, the first night in this northeastern woodland was accompanied by the infamous “heat dome“. That’s right, temps in the 90s, not cooling down till the wee hours. Of course, Ronnie remains humble, and Rocinante snickers beneath her breath as she’s not bothered by the varieties of biological temperature sensitivities. Ronnie expects the dome to move on soon, and he’s finding the Burlington library facilities among the best yet encountered. In fact, there is only one library in which he has experience that compares with Burlington, in Topeka, KS.
Now when Ronnie thinks of Vermont, his brain immediately goes to Senator Bernie Sanders. And why not? The man, with his rumpled suits and his waving arms, and the voice of gravel mixed with moral indignation, is practically a walking, talking, quintessentially American ideal. He’s the guy who reminds you of what Grandma told you about doing the right thing, even if nobody else is. He’s a fearless avatar, this Sanders, straight outta Vermont. And Vermont, well, it’s got this weird, similar history: secular, sure, but with a moral compass that points due north; revolutionary, absolutely, but grounded in a kind of unvarnished pragmatism that’d make a brick wall seem flighty.
But hold your horses, loopers, because even the best of us, even Vermont, has got some unsightly warts. And these aren’t just little pimples, these are the kind of warts that make you wince.
First off, let’s talk about the Native Americans. The Algonquian-speaking Abenaki and the Iroquoian-speaking Mohawks. They were here, for ten thousand years or more, minding their own business, probably inventing things we still don’t understand. Then the Europeans showed up. And now? Poof. All but extinct within the territory. This, my friends, is not a testament to good neighborly relations. This smells of something far nastier, a militant exercise of racist policies, right down to the bone marrow. And get this: Vermont, with a population that barely scrapes a million souls, is one of the least diverse places you’ll ever lay eyes on. But, and here’s where the whiplash comes in, Vermont was the first state to abolish slavery. The first! They even had safe houses along the Underground Railroad, helping people escape the horrors of coerced servitude. Now, put that next to zero federally recognized tribal associations or reservations. It’s enough to make a progressive-minded person feel like they’ve just been spun around in a washing machine. Vertigo, indeed.
And then there’s the whole women’s suffrage thing. Vermont was ahead of the curve, letting women vote in town elections back in 1880, decades before it was a national thing. Good for them, right? Pat on the back, Vermont! But wait, there’s more. In 1931, this enlightened state became the 29th to pass a eugenics law. Eugenics! Sounds like something out of a bad science fiction novel, doesn’t it? They sterilized people in institutions, people they’d decided were “degenerate” or “unfit.” They said they had permission, but documented abuses, folks, documented abuses. Two-thirds of these procedures were on women, and wouldn’t you know it, poor, unwed mothers were prime targets. There’s a debate about the exact numbers, but most happened between ’31 and ’41, though some went on as late as 1970. So, yeah, light and darkness, yin and yang, the whole cosmic shebang. Vermont embodies it all.
This, loopers, is why Ronnie, with his pragmatic Kanorado heart, loves the place. It’s got guts. It’s got flaws. It’s got character. To understand it better, we gotta dig into the dirt a little.
Let’s talk about Ethan Allen. A farmer with dirt under his fingernails, a writer with some philosophical thoughts rattling around in his head, a military man, and a politician. He’s the guy who practically invented Vermont, and he’s famous for snatching Fort Ticonderoga during the Revolutionary War. He was a land speculator, got into some scrapes with the law, and next thing you know, he’s leading the Green Mountain Boys, who basically ran New York settlers out of town with a campaign of intimidation. Then he gets himself captured by the British, tossed on some Royal Navy ships, and eventually swapped in a prisoner exchange… what a life.
And this Allen fellow, he wrote a book, a controversial little number called “Reason.” He was no Christian, he said, but wasn’t sure he was a Deist either. He just wanted good sense and truth to flourish. He believed that if folks just used their brains, they’d get rid of superstition and have a better understanding of God and their obligations to each other. Sound familiar? It should.
Because from the very beginning, a beacon for human dignity, you’ve got Bernie Sanders, a modern analog to Allen. He stands for something. Yet, Vermont itself remains this sparsely populated, homogenous woodland, a place that could confound even the wisest of philosophical thinkers.
And what about Vermont’s cultural output? Well, you got Phish. A jam band. From Burlington. Known for their musical improvisation and their fan base. The East Coast’s Grateful Dead, essentially. Make of that what you will.
Feeling dizzy yet? Hold on to your hats. In the 21st century, Vermont decided to double down on its progressivism. In 2000, it was the first state to introduce civil unions. Then, in 2009, it was the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, and get this, they did it without being forced by a court. They just did it because they thought it was the right thing to do. And on January 22, 2018, Vermont became the first state to legalize recreational cannabis through legislative action. The ninth state for medical marijuana. And who signed these laws? A Republican Governor!
So, there you have it. Vermont. A place of contradictions, a place of pioneers, a place that sometimes gets it spectacularly right and sometimes gets it spectacularly wrong… c’est la!
And now, Ronnie, not ready to leave this place, is planning to attend some of the local “ghost tours,” cos you know, that’s one of the driving motivations of the HSoB tour. For example: Lake Champlain, bordering Burlington, Vermont, is steeped in maritime history, shrouded in tales of shipwrecks and ghosts including, but not limited to the schooner Sarah Ellen, lost in 1860, has been linked to a legend known as the Champlain Witch. The steamboat Water Witch sank in 1866 during a gale after being converted to a schooner, is another ghostly story of tragedy on the lake. This one has the captain’s youngest child lost to the depths.
Lake Champlain has claimed over 300 shipwrecks, many of these sacred zones are considered inhabited by spirits of those sleeping there. Some of these are included in Vermont’s Underwater Historic Preserve System made accessible to certified summer divers. And some of these divers have reported spooky experiences, including cold waves and strange noises near the wrecks.
Don’t worry, Ronnie won’t dive… hell, he didn’t even go snorkeling at Dry Tortugas. Something about taking off the glasses stops all thoughts of exploring the murky depths. Without the glasses, he feels like a slightly less animated Mr. Magoo.
Onward through the fog… Rohlfie
It may be micro… More trees than Glasgow… Green Mountain country… It’s where the syrup grows… It’s Lake Champlain… And its ship wreck ghosts… All part of American Ideal!
Well well well, we’re still on the road. This week… West Virginia. We’re finding the fun has dwindled a bit. At times Ronnie confesses to feeling like an exposed nerve. It may have something to do with the change of scenery. After all, as a Kanorado native, Ronnie’s comfortable with wide open spaces. But starting in North Carolina, approaching the beginning humps of the Appalachians, Ronnie started developing a contracting state of claustrophobia. This sense of dread actually started earlier, in South Carolina, with conjured imaginings of what it would be like to navagate congested urban sprawl nestled amongst relentless steep grades, up and down and up and down, trying not to ride the brakes but sometimes unable to avoid it. Then what do you know? The two West Virginia college towns Rocinante stumbled into (WVU and Fairmount State) presented conditions exactly like Ronnie’s worst roller-coaster imaginings.
Now, the other side of Ronnie’s Kanorado upbringing leaves him no stranger to mountaineering. And, truth told, our heroes have learned to keep up with the locals. But there ain’t no autopilot moments like those on the prairie, and Ronnie’s exposed nerve feeling keeps interrupting the vagabond felicity. So, this brings us to what appears to be a recurring theme investigating West Virginia’s general “vibe”. From readings and conversations, Ronnie has detected a more than usual sense of bi-polar contradiction, set in some of the most beautiful, lush country our heroes have yet encountered.
West Virginia! A veritable Janus of banjos and 5g smartphones. Even before the rabble in Philadelphia started their tiresome bleating about liberty and taxes, this land of craggy peaks and shadowed hollers harbored a glorious dichotomy. On the one hand, you had rugged frontiersmen, creatures of axe and rifle, suspicious of anyone wearing hats indoors and whose idea of polite conversation involves hitting the spittoon bullseye. Folks of fierce independence, mind you, who’d sooner wrestle a bear than abide a revenue agent or a banker.
Then, cheek-by-jowl with these noble savages, you’d find the seeds of a peculiar sort of… let us call it genteel indolence. Picture the languid river valleys, where the air hangs thick and sweet as overripe peaches, and where ambition rarely stretches beyond a decent slash of corn liquor and a comfortable spot on the porch swing. Folks who view haste as vulgar and consider vigorous debate over the proper way to cure tobacco the height of intellectual ferment.
Enter the great unpleasantness of the Revolution, and West Virginia, bless her conflicted heart, found herself straddling the fence like a hound dog caught in a barbed wire. Still part of greater Virginia, she sent forth her share of flinty riflemen to give the Redcoats a proper thrashing, a surprising burst of collective energy. Yet, even amidst the patriotic fervor, one might suspect there were plenty of mountaineers more concerned with deer season than the pronouncements of some powdered wig in Williamsburg.
The Civil War, naturally, only amplified this delightful schizophrenia. Brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor… a perfect illustration of a populace simultaneously capable of profound loyalty and stubborn contrariness. One faction, fiercely attached to the traditions (and peculiar institutions) of the Old Dominion, marched off under the Stars and Bars. The other, smelling a chance for their own patch of sovereignty and perhaps harboring a lingering resentment for the tidewater gentry, cast their lot with the Union. The result? A bloody, internecine squabble fought amidst some of the most gorgeously indifferent scenery on the continent.
And now, in this glorious age of the World Wide Web, this bi-polar beast roars on. You have pockets of genuine, unadulterated Appalachia, where decent 4g access is as mythical as the Sasquatch, and where the most pressing technological concern is whether the battery in the coon-hunting flashlight is still good. Here, the ancient rhythms of the land persist, the wisdom is passed down through generations of storytellers, and a firm handshake still means more than a thousand likes or shares.
But then, just over the next ridge, you’ll stumble upon a Starlink antenna sprouting from a double-wide, its tendrils reaching out to the digital ether. Here, the denizens are just as likely to be scrolling through TikTok as whittling a piece of wood. They’re ordering drone parts on Amazon while simultaneously canning beets according to a recipe passed down from their great-grandmother. They’re arguing about cryptocurrency on Reddit while their hound dog snoozes by the wood-burning stove.
It’s an all too human mess, this West Virginia. A land where the echoes of Daniel Boone‘s long rifle mingle with stock-ticker notifications. A place where the fierce independence of mountaineers clash with the modern craving for instant gratification and online validation. It is, in short, a microcosm of the American condition, amplified and seasoned with a healthy dose of mountain stubbornness and a suspicion of anything invented after the Mason jar. Long may it remain so, a testament to the enduring human capacity for glorious contradiction.
As for OUR contradicted heroes, they’ll keep pushin’ on. Ronnie’s “exposed nerve” will surely abate. And just as well as the worst is yet to come. In fact, we’re told Blue Highway windshield time in Upstate NY and further North amounts to traveling up endless claustrophobia-inducing tree alleys. It’s funny because delusional Ronnie thought he would NEVER miss driving on endless prairies, but here we are. He probably just needs a reminder that flatlander driving very often includes bucking white-knuckle gale-force head and cross-winds… and that ain’t no fun neither.
Onward through the fog… RH
It makes you dizzy… Blue Highway shizzy… In West Virginia… You can get busy… And take a page from… The Tao Te Ching… This too will pass… And equalize.
To be clear, Rocinante is no stranger to mountaineering. In fact, she was literally born in Colorado Springs, her first initiation over Independence Pass through the valley of the Roaring Fork northwest of Aspen, where Owl Farm, Hunter S. Thompson‘s home redoubt sits. A gorgeous, exhilarating trip and Rocinante handled it without a hitch. Now, this is all familiar territory for Ronnie, a native of Kanorado. He’s seen it all, from Black Bear Road to the endless prairies of Western Kansas. That said, it’s hard for our heroes to stay focused traveling through Virginia as the lush Edenic land goes on and on and on. They made a point to stay on what Heat Moon dubbed “Blue Highways” and by arrival in Waynesboro, Ronnie was overwhelmed with the beauty of Virginia’s interior. So much he began to doubt his ability to return to the flatlands.
Anyway, let’s try to scratch the surface of Virginia, warts and all. The name whispers of a land steeped in history, and since Ronnie has no personal memories here, he’ll have to rely on the testimony of others weaving a tapestry with threads of glory and shame, beauty and brutality.
THE GOOD: In the nascent days of the Virginia Colony, a spirit of enterprise, however fraught with unintended consequence, took root. Brave souls, lured by the promise of land and opportunity, crossed the vast ocean, establishing settlements like Jamestown. Here, amidst hardship and uncertainty, the seeds of a new nation were sown. Think of the fortitude of women like Pocahontas, who, whether through romanticized legend or historical fact, stands as a bridge between two worlds, a figure of diplomacy in a time of great tension. The fertile soil yielded tobacco, a golden leaf that fueled the colony’s growth and prosperity, laying the foundation for a burgeoning society. Later, Virginia became the cradle of revolutionary thought, birthing patriots like Washington and Jefferson, whose eloquent pronouncements on liberty and self-governance echoed across the land, ultimately shaping the destiny of the United States. The establishment of institutions of learning, like the College of William & Mary, fostered intellectual pursuits and contributed to the development of a uniquely American identity. Even in later years, the spirit of progress continued, exemplified by the tireless efforts of individuals like Booker T. Washington, born into slavery in Virginia, who rose to become a beacon of hope and advocate for education and self-reliance for African Americans across the nation. His work at the Hampton Institute and Tuskegee University stands as a testament to the enduring power of human aspiration in the face of adversity.
THE BAD: Alas, like the shadow that invariably accompanies the light, Virginia’s history is not without its darker chapters. The very prosperity of the early colony was built upon a foundation of injustice: the brutal exploitation of the land and its indigenous inhabitants, and the abhorrent institution of chattel slavery. The arrival of enslaved Africans marked a profound and enduring stain on the Virginian narrative, a contradiction to the lofty ideals of liberty espoused by its leading figures. The echoes of the lash and the cries of the oppressed resonate through the centuries, a stark reminder of the inherent cruelty and inhumanity of this system. Even the allure of the land led to conflict and displacement, as the relentless westward expansion often came at the expense of Native American tribes who had called this land home for generations. The seeds of division sown in these early days would ultimately contribute to the cataclysm of the Civil War, a bloody conflict that tore the nation asunder and left an indelible scar upon the Virginian landscape.
THE UGLY: Beyond the grand narratives of heroism and injustice lie the more granular, often overlooked aspects of life that reveal a less romanticized past. The harsh realities of colonial life – the disease, the famine, the constant threat of conflict – painted a grim picture for many early settlers. Imagine the squalor of early settlements, the precariousness of existence, the ever-present specter of illness claiming lives with cruel indifference. Even the pursuit of wealth could lead to avarice and exploitation, as individuals sought to amass fortunes at the expense of their less fortunate neighbors. The social hierarchies, rigidly enforced, often left little room for advancement for those born into less privileged circumstances. And let us not forget the presence of those who operated outside the bounds of law and decency, preying on the vulnerable. While not directly a Virginian, the infamous pirate Blackbeard, with his fearsome reputation, certainly cast a shadow over the coastal waters, a symbol of the lawlessness that could occasionally disrupt the ordered (or disordered) affairs of the colony. The tales of his depredations, though perhaps embellished over time, speak to a certain brutishness that existed on the fringes of society.
BELIEVE IT OR NOT: Now, let us turn our attention to some of the more curious and perhaps less widely known aspects of Virginia’s history. Virginia once boasted a significant wine industry in its early days, with attempts made to cultivate European grape varieties. Though these initial efforts met with limited success, they speak to the early aspirations and diverse ambitions of the colonists. Furthermore, consider the intriguing stories surrounding the Lost Colony of Roanoke in present-day South Carolina, a mystery that continues to baffle historians to this day. The disappearance of an entire settlement, leaving behind only the cryptic word “Croatoan,” fuels speculation and whispers of unknown fates. And who would have thought that Virginia played a crucial role in the development of early American literature, with figures like William Byrd II chronicling colonial life in witty and insightful prose? These lesser-known facets add layers of complexity and intrigue to the well-trodden paths of historical narrative.
GHOSTS: Ah, and now we venture into the realm of shadows and whispers, where the veil between worlds is said to thin. Given its long and often turbulent history, it is perhaps unsurprising that Virginia is rife with tales of spectral encounters. Ancient plantations, witnesses to generations of joy and sorrow, are often whispered to be haunted by the lingering spirits of those who once walked their halls. Tales abound of disembodied voices, unexplained footsteps, and the spectral apparitions of former inhabitants, forever bound to the land. Civil War battlefields, soaked in the blood and anguish of a nation divided, are said to echo with the cries of long-lost soldiers, their restless spirits forever reenacting the tragic events of the past. Even the coastline, once frequented by pirates and privateers, holds legends of ghostly ships sailing through the mist, their spectral crews guarding long-lost treasures. Whether these tales are mere fancy or hold a kernel of truth, they undeniably add a certain mystique to the rich tapestry of Virginia’s past, a reminder that perhaps some echoes of history refuse to fade entirely.
Jamestown Church (restored)BlackbeardBooker T. WashingtonPocahontasRoanoke
Thus, we have traversed the variegated landscape of Virginia’s history, from its promising beginnings and noble aspirations to its darker realities and enduring mysteries. The story of Virginia is one of stark contrasts, of light and shadow, of triumphs and tragedies, all woven together to create a snapshot as compelling and enduring as the land itself. And with that Ronnie and Rocinante bid Virginia fare well setting a course for neighboring West Virginia.
Onward through the fog… RH
From the strife of Jamestown… To Colonial Union… The nation’s birth pangs… Start in Virginia… And though the land was… Abundant paradise… Independence came with a heavy price.
I’d like to start this missive with a shout of gratitude to a few organizations. First, every public library in every town. So far, i have yet to be turned away for lack of digital nomad-friendly workspaces (WiFi, power, comfortable tables/chairs). Next, Cracker Barrel. Often, strangers in nomad vehicles are not welcome for overnight stay in commercial parking lots. But not with Cracker Barrel. THANK YOU! And finally, though there is a nominal monthly fee, Planet Fitness has been a godsend for those of us who can’t go more than a couple days without a shower…. thank you twice over!
RocinanteDanger Will Robinson
Now, transitioning from the professional treadmill into the ranks of fixed-income retirees has been a real eye opener for me. Things that would go unnoticed due to keeping head down and focusing on professional and parental knitting suddenly become glaringly obvious. For example, our nation’s once-proud melting pot has grown somewhat less tolerant of the stranger. Especially if the stranger is not of self-sufficient means. Intolerance and xenophobia have grown more and more common, and the problem isn’t confined to the United States, it’s a growing worldwide, human problem. Apparently, when we feel threatened, or fearful, we tend to default to selfish countenance, we struggle putting ourselves in the stranger’s shoes, we tend to point fingers and search for ready scapegoats.
And the unwelcome strangers are not only immigrants and refugees. We are strangers to each other over political, religious, or ideologic differences. And due to a lack of empathy in the wake of fear and threat, we find it difficult to agree or compromise on any topic of contention. This, despite the fact that the Internet has opened potential communication channels to literally anyone in the free world. Ironically, this hasn’t remedied the feeling of disconnection from one another but has exacerbated it. Thanks a lot, Al Gore!
I’ve heard of studies indicating the number of folks claiming to have no friends tripling over the last thirty years… ZERO friends?!?! Astounding! Another crowning irony in an age of social media where so-called “friend connections” can number in the thousands. Some say there is a loose correlation of social media exposure and loneliness. Of course, correlation isn’t causation, but so what? If there’s even a remote chance these correlations are indeed causal, should we not try a little harder to address them?
Even more troubling is a deeper correlation causation question originally posed by a truly loathsome individual. Recent tragic events have shone a light on the ideas espoused by the infamous luddite, Dr. Ted Kaczynski. That industrial society, mass-production culture, explosive urban sprawl, is a sickness whose only cure is the revolutionary rejection of industrial/technical society. And if violent means is necessary to bring this about, it is the obligation of right-minded revolutionaries to do what is necessary. Of course, we know how Dr. Kaczynski’s story ends. Unfortunately, there are folks out there who believe he was onto something, and some have put his ideas into action.
I cannot agree with the revolutionary luddites. I’ve been a techno-optimist for the entirety of my professional life. Unfortunately, exigencies of capitalism have tainted the affirming potential of global connection, democratic computing power, even machine intelligence. And so, at the end of my professional life, i’m forced to rethink these 5th Estate Evangelical tendencies. The baton is passed to the next generation of techno-optimists and i hope we can come to some sort of compromise between the needs of individuals and the needs of the commons before these revolutionary luddites blow up any more cyber confidence.
Kurt Vonnegut addressed the malaise of loneliness decades ago. He diagnosed our sickness and offered a remedy. He argued the tradition of rootless nuclear families was woefully inadequate to the task of providing human companionship. Specifically, ladies need lots of other ladies with whom to talk about anything and EVERY thing. Men need buddies with whom to punch in the arm and go do guy stuff with. Preferably away from the gaggle of ladies. He urged us to actively seek and spend as much time as possible with our “Karass” (extended families). They can be fraternal, they can be professional, they can be familial, but by surrounding ourselves with people who love and identify with us, perhaps we can cure this creeping cancer of loneliness and alienation.
If nothing else, this could give our kids a fighting chance of growing up with confidence and functional social skills. Seriously, Mom and Dad in the nuclear family arrangement only have each other for adult company? Dad doesn’t want to talk about EVERYTHING, and Mom doesn’t want to get punched in the arm bouncing around in a dune buggy. And what of the Moms and Dads who have concluded their union a mistake, and now don’t even have each other? Yes! This is a sickness. Bad for Mom and bad for Dad. As for the kids? Well many end up like the stranger. Ghosts, aimlessly wandering the Earth. Alone, ruminating society’s problems instead of practicing joyful follies with other like-minded imperfect human beings.
You may have heard of “The New Apostolic Reformation” (NAR). This is an antidemocratic movement at war with the secular order designed by our nation’s founders. They say the traditional family is the fundamental unit of God’s perfect order. But this “traditional” arrangement to which they refer is a patriarchal construct, and in the US, it should be glaringly obvious this male-supremacy arrangement has failed to deliver adequate human companionship and fellow-goodwill.
Mr. Vonnegut was right. Unfortunately, we are at a transition crossroad, and though the NAR believes they will dominate future cultural evolution on the coattails of the MAGA libertarian movement, what they don’t take into account is that the top of the MAGA food chain is populated by billionaires all about self-interest. They will abandon the NAR as soon as they come to cross purposes. As well, demographic trends simply can’t support a theocracy of any stripe. I hope saner heads prevail and we rethink what it means to be part of a traditional family with the aim of inclusion. Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Mormons, and Secular Humanists all together in a mega-karass where no one is the stranger.
Greetings, loopers! Get ready for another thrilling installment of “This Land,” where objectivity goes to die a whimpering death in a ditch (much like my dignity after that 20 minute wrong turn incident in Topeka). John Steinbeck said it best: pure, unvarnished observation? About as likely as a snowball surviving a Missouri summer. We all see the world through our own warped filters, loopers. Mine happens to be a yin/yang magic 8-ball reflecting the contrasting hues of Kanorado. But hey, i try to be fair! Like a tipsy judge on a bender – i may be biased, but i’ll listen to all sides (within reason, and as long as you don’t ask me to sit through a “Flat Earth” Power Point presentation).
So, Missouri. The freaking promised land of rolling green hills and enough oxygen to make your head spin! Unlike the treeless plains of western Kansas, this state’s a veritable Garden of Eden. The Ozarks, with their mountains, lakes, and caves, are like nature’s amusement park. Mark Twain practically trademarked the entire state with his literary genius, and even Walt Disney (yes, that Walt Disney) hailed from these parts.
Speaking of Missourians – a hearty bunch, these loopers. Friendly as a hound dog with a belly full of barbecue, but with a healthy dose of skepticism. Hospitality? Legendary, especially if you find yourself in the sticks. They’re as down-to-earth as a hand-me-down step-side Chevy Pickup, fiercely proud of their state, possessing an almost religious love for the great outdoors. Think Tom Petty’s “Won’t Back Down” cranked to eleven, with political tension so thick the sides don’t even talk to each other any more. Summer’s a scorcher, mind you – hot enough to fry an egg on your forehead, and humid enough to make your hair frizz like a poodle in a hurricane.
But hey, gotta hand it to them – Missouri’s economy seems to be humming right along. Soybeans, corn, livestock – they got their ag. schtick down. Manufacturing? Yup, especially in cars, aerospace, and enough food processing to feed a Texas hoedown. Healthcare’s on the rise, and Kansas City’s a financial hub that could make Eric Trump blush.
Now, the downside. Public transportation? About as reliable as a politician’s promise. Crime? It’s a thing, especially in the bigger cities. Diversity? Not exactly a kaleidoscope of cultures, loopers.
Speaking of Show Me State loopers, my attempt to interview some good citizens at Missouri Western University went about as well as an oboe at a heavy metal concert. Nobody wanted their cake holes anywhere near my microphones, which left me feeling about as welcome as a tax collector at a poker game. Finally, after some sage advice (courtesy of the university library staff, bless their tight-lipped souls), i ventured to the public library. Managed to snag a few interviews, though one lady spoke in hushed tones that would make a Trappist monk squint (blame it on the hair-metal 1980s).
The big question? What does the state motto, “Show Me,” mean to Missourians? Answers were as scarce as hen’s teeth. Though a transplant from New York named Barb Read and a true-blooded Missourian, Jenn Wildhagen, did offer some insight. Maybe the reluctant ones needed a bit more convincing before spilling their guts to a stranger sporting ambisonic microphones attached to AKG studio headphones (cue the “Show Me” part). But hey, they did remind me their state animal is a mule, a stubborn, stalwart creature if there ever was one. Seems fitting, doesn’t it?
So there you have it, loopers. A whistle-stop tour through the Show Me State, a land of contradictions as vast as the sky. Until next time, keep your eyes peeled and your cynicism in check. This American odyssey is far from over.
And finally… the point of all this wrangling. My personal experience as a Kanorado native, some light research queries, and conversations with the above willing participants informs the lyric of this, my next Hot Springs or Busk tour appended verse to Woody Guthrie’s timeless classic “This Land”:
So bring your A-game… When you cross the river… Cos in Missouri… You’ll be the giver… You can’t just waltz in… And get those sound bytes… Show Me folks… Will need the 4-11.
Loopcircus 