Mother Nature

HSoB: Notes From the Road (pt1)

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

(The spotlight fades to black.)

This Land: Vermont

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!

This Land: Florida

Ok, Loopers, next stop, Florida, that dangling chad of a state, where the sun shines so bright you half expect to see Jesus himself waterskiing across Tampa Bay! Now Ronnie has some personal experience with the sunshine state. There was that six week high-tech bootcamp in Daytona. There was that corporate convention/retreat in Orlando, and Ronnie also has friends living in various Florida locations, Ft. Myers, Miami, and some little town in the panhandle. That’s right, Ronnie is uniquely situated for van life. He doesn’t have to hunker down for the winter or desperately scrounge for shade in the summer because he has friends and family from Washington State to Florida… and speaking of…

THE GOOD: Florida, where the manatees are loose, and so are the tourists. And beaches? Oh, they got beaches, miles and miles of ’em, the kind of white sand beaches that make you wanna ditch your shoes and do the Macarena, even if you don’t know how. Springs bubbling up from the earth like some kind of primordial jacuzzi, clear as gin and twice as refreshing. Everglades? Yep, got those too, a swampy wonderland where alligators lounge like they own the place (and they probably do). Wildlife galore, from pink flamingos strutting like they’re on a catwalk to manatees cruising along like underwater blimps.

And the weather? Forget about it. It’s like Mother Nature cranked the thermostat to “eternal summer” and then lost the remote. No state income tax either, which means more clams for your pocket and more margaritas in your belly. Theme parks? They practically invented the things. Disney World, Universal Studios, places where dreams come true (or at least your credit card takes a serious hit). Toss in some cultural diversity, a dash of history, and a sprinkle of those warm mineral springs in North Port, and you got yourself a cocktail of a state. Oh, and don’t forget the colleges, little intellectual oases scattered across the landscape like so many palm trees.

THE BAD: But hey, even paradise has its downsides. Like hurricanes, for instance. Those swirling cyclones of doom that can turn your beachfront condo into a pile of matchsticks faster than you can say “Margaritaville.” Then there’s the humidity. The kind of humidity that makes your hair frizz up like you stuck your finger in a light socket and your clothes cling to you like a lovesick octopus. And let’s not forget the environmental concerns, the creeping threat of rising sea levels, the pollution, the constant battle to preserve what’s left of this fragile ecosystem. It’s enough to make you wanna trade your flip-flops for a pair of waders and join the Sierra Club.

THE UGLY: Now, brace yourselves, folks, because it’s about to get real. Traffic. Congestion. Gridlock. Call it what you want, but it’s the kind of automotive apocalypse that makes you wish you’d invested in a helicopter. Cars piled up like a demolition derby, horns blaring, tempers flaring. It’s enough to make you want to abandon your vehicle and join a colony of hermits living in the Everglades. And then there’s the high cost of living. Rent, mortgages, groceries, it all adds up faster than a politician’s promise. Suddenly, that dream of owning a beachfront bungalow starts to look about as realistic as a unicorn riding a rollercoaster.

WHO’s WHO? Florida, land of sunshine and eccentrics. Hemingway, the literary lion, holding court in Key West with a daiquiri in one hand and a marlin tale in the other. Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the environmental crusader, fighting to protect the Everglades with the ferocity of a mama bear defending her cubs. Literary seminars in Key West, where wordsmiths gather to dissect prose and pontificate on the meaning of life. And the music scene, a veritable melting pot of sounds. Lynyrd Skynyrd, belting out Southern rock anthems that make you wanna raise your fist and chug a beer. Tom Petty, spinning tales of heartbreak and highway dreams. Creed, with their angst-ridden grunge, and Yellowcard, adding a punk rock twist. Jim Morrison, the Lizard King himself, leaving a trail of poetic chaos in his wake. Ariana Grande, the pop princess with a voice that could melt glaciers. And Zora Neale Hurston, weaving her literary magic with words that paint a vivid picture of Florida’s soul.

So there you have it, loopers. Florida, in all its glory and its grit. A state of contrasts, a land of extremes. Case in point, the apparent grip Christion Fundamentalists have on the state’s politics. At the same time, voters enthusiastically embrace morally ambiguous leaders such as Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump. Cognitive dissonance at its finest. Anyway, love it or hate it, you can’t deny Florida is one hell of a wild ride.

Onward through the fog… RH

From Saint Auggy……
To Tallahassee…
You’ll see the fire ants..
Prolificacy…
And like the bears in…
Yellowstone grassy…
Don’t look FL Man in the eye.

Loopcircus