Nature’s Rx for the blues: a dog, a ball, and a beach. The soul’s recipe for positive pathways: water, sand, rock. The mind’s menu for clear mental skies: wind, leaves, rain.

In Manzanita, Oregon – a coastal town wedged between the Pacific and the forested brim of Nehalem Bay – we chased a memory. Precarious, chasing those, as Time is an excellent but impatient potter, always shaping and shaving and chipping away at the same clay. The key is grabbing a new mug. You can swig from familiar views, love how a place feels in the hands of memory, but you gotta be up for a new brew.

After being stuck three days in a Wyoming blizzard (which was kind of fun and definitely impressive in a holy-shit-this-is-some-crazy-winter-mayhem way), John and I were finally reunited with our wonderful Lulu in Oregon. Oh, Lulu. Our resident life-eater and world explorer, freshly back on American soil after a year in South Korea. I hugged her so hard I practically absorbed her back into my womb. And then Zelda arrived for the reunion, all the way from NYC. The view from our rustic little shanty was golden: a sacred sunset and eight to ten tiers of white frothy waves unfurling towards a wide dog-kite-human pocked beach. But having the family together to share it? Nothing better. Plus, Alex, Lu’s lovable boyfriend, was with us. Alex is like a bowl of cocoa: warm, sweet, and silky-souled. So with the five of us on the Oregon coast in the first shy peeps of Spring…. next level heart stuff. The last time we were in Manzanita was during the height of the pandemic, when Z, John and I roamed in an RV while shooting Hellbender, and Lu would visit and camp outside. We’d carved out some formidable memories back then, biking and hiking and digging all the happy dogs on the beach by day and dodging moon-lit jellyfish by night. So this time we opened wide and just let the coast and good company shove all its everything into us.

Once you hit the Pacific Northwest, you’re really asking for it, the whole opera of sea life, sky life, the amphitheater of mountain and forest. John and I were all in, so we left the girls and ferried to Vancouver Island, British Columbia – fulfilling a personal dream. We drove to the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve, which is the land of the Nuu-chah-nulth; is west of the glacial Strathcona peaks, and flanked by two wonderful towns, Ucluelet and Tofino. Ucluelet is smaller, and I would live there in a hummingbird heartbeat. It’s the kind of place little kids run around freely, taking classes down on the beach; everyone is out, rain or shine, on feet or two wheels or accompanied by dogs dogs dogs everywhere dogs! And whichever way you bob and weave, you’re just getting smacked left and right by the prettiness of it all: emerald coves, ancient cedars, trails a shimmery disco with trees all shagged out in mossy lime catsuits. In the air, a riveting scene of eagles, gulls and herons. And in the ocean…. ah, the ocean, that mysterious friend you can never truly know. At low tide my favorite thing to do is to gingerly creep onto the rocks and peek into all the dark crevices where orange and purple ochre starfish hide. It’s either highly romantic or deeply possessive, the devotion of their clasping, their long, slow, go-steady attachment. “Never let me go!” (But woe to the bivalve that crosses their path. The stars will use their suctioning feet to pry open the shells and insert their stomach inside. “Have stomach, will travel!”) I have another creature I’m geeking out on, too: the tunicate. First I found a small colony of bright orange “salps” – aka sea squirts, sea pork, and sea tulips! – clinging underneath a rock. Tunicates are called such because it’s like these tubular creatures are wearing a rubbery tunic with built in ventilation – like wearing a dress with two big arm holes and nuthin’ underneath, yahoo! When you see a certain species of tunicate on the beach, you easily mistake them for jellyfish: clear, gelatinous, deflated like a balloon, with a small hard red chunk inside, which is the guts. Sometimes they attach to each other in a massive long conga line that allows them to snake through the water. Under the same rock where the sea squirts were hanging out, I also identified a breadcrumb sponge, which looks like spilt thin white paint that defies gravity. The patience of sea life is epic, so much hanging and clinging as the water washes by.

Of course, death is always on the prowl, too. On that same rock, a romp of otters left a massacre of mussel shells, and I watched one otter grab a fish. A. The slimy green-purple-pink anemones bask in the sun until the tide tucks them in and their pretty frilly mouths sting and capture prey. Sea cucumbers will eviscerate their own organs if doom is a done deal. When I’m lucky enough to be saturated by Nature, I find the balance comforting. Life and Death; some of the loveliest sights a marriage of the two. On the beaches, massive sitka spruce and cedars wash up, all wave-whipped smooth like a carrot, and eventually the sun bleaches them grey, their bones stacked in curly knots where birds rest and nest. In the forest the Spring rains are lacquering the trees that drink the soil that eats Winter’s waste. Flowers peak then fade, while the tiny young leaves open and stay, fine with themselves, with their stamina, with their gentle grading through the greens.

Am I feeling wistful? Yup. Sentimental? You bet your bottom sand dollar, I am. I’m feeling lucky, too – to live and work on the road for a while, with the one I love, visiting the ones I love, and loving where we find ourselves in the Pacific Northwest. I even love the cold waters that burn and numb my body; they make me feel alive. And I’m thinking of death, sure, because friends are beginning to slip away at a steadier pace. It’s kind of like looking at the ocean: You figure you’ll see a seal or dolphin, maybe a whale; you just never know when; and it’s always a meaningful encounter when you do. It’s a reminder to look, see, and feel. That when you look out your window at a phantom mist swooping down a breakneck chasm of conifers onto a vibrating sea sheltering all the chaos and colors we cannot see…. Well, you just say, Okay..

Sometimes you find yourself at home away from home.  

When we showed up in Colorado Springs, we met the directors of Six Feet Under Horror Festival – a title that is all the more apt when you learn that these guys are forensic pathologists.  Leon and Dan and his cool wife, Sarah, took us to dinner in Garden of the Gods (which itself feels like a hellish paradise, as if the sky gods dribbled red clay from their hands to make big mud castles on the earth below.)  It’s really fun when you can sit at a table over dinner while talking about the human anatomy in ways that are surely not appetizing to many.  But for horror filmmakers (and those who do autopsies for a living) it’s as easy as “please pass the butter.”  So Dan and Leon made this a dinner to remember, and John and I found ourselves enchanted by these charismatic docs who, after spending their days scientifically exploring dead bodies, still have space in their hearts (and a healthy sense of humor) for the blood, guts, and wicked offerings of horror cinema.  And when Leon, the county coroner, invited us to join him at the morgue on Monday, John and I were like, “Is it Monday yet?”  

Not yet.  First, the fest.  
6 Feet Under invited us out to Colorado to present two of our horror features, The Deeper You Dig and Hellbender, plus our Yukon/Alaska short Ever and  a short we act in, Miltown.  Even before the projector sparked up, the CO Springs horror crowd welcomed us with wide open arms.  It’s funny: with our first feature back in 2010, we set out to make a ghost story, and yet we weren’t quite ready to explore the darker corners of our imagination.  But when we were?  It felt like home.  Not only within those shiny webbed narrative corners, but within the crowd that loves them.  And now we’ve found another home 6 Feet Under,  where the dirt cradles our heads, the beetles clean our bones, and …. where we hope to be invited back to screen Where the Devil Roams and Hell Hole with some new forever friends and genre comrades!

And cut to:  EXT. County Morgue.  Morning.  Monday!

I’ve always been fascinated by human anatomy, and it’s been a dream to sit in on an autopsy.  Having the chance to do so – legally! – was lucky and fascinating; a day that John and I will never forget.  

The deceased at a county morgue are there because of a dubious death or a crime scene.  The first surprise: it’s not a slow, dramatic process in a dark room under a tiny spotlight the way you might see in a TV show or movie.  It’s more like a hive dance, several techs buzzing around, business-like, doing their precise jobs – and often using tools you’d find in your kitchen or garden shed.  There was no easing into the dance here.  In heavy stillness bodies waited; knives were sharpened ; exploration began.  In full visceral glory.  

I cannot quite grasp the intricacies of a human body – how all the pieces grow and culminate in a system of bones that move and blood that circulates and invisible signals that shoot from here to there to make bones move and blood flow and breath get breathed….. and the connection of organs that, like the techs, do their job again and again until they don’t.  For instance, the brain.   When I was homeschooling Zelda in 7th Grade, I had her use a cauliflower as a stand-in for a brain; painting its functional regions and cutting it open.  And let me tell you, the curly paths of a cauliflower are not that different looking from the creamy, pale folds of a brain.  And yet that organ is orchestrating everything from our attics – and it’s covered with the thinnest, hard paper-like covering (the dura mater – thanks, Dan!) and then bone, then skin, then hair if you’ve got it.  That’s it.  We are tough; we are vulnerable.  We are complex, yet simple.  We are animated, and then we are still. 

After Leon made his first examination of the day and determined the cause of death, he then showed us the rest of the facility, which was equally fascinating.  This included the Bones Room, where a tank filled with maggots and beetles cleans bones the good old-fashioned way.  There’s an Evidence Room, which is a sad place.  There is Toxicology….  It’s like biology class on steroids.  It’s a big swig of Well, OK.  It’s grim and honest; exciting and sobering; tremendously wild and there you go.  

Grateful for the experience (and to the bodies themselves), we said our goodbyes, got in our car, shared a kiss (grateful to be this side of six feet under), gassed up, and, still wide-eyed and totally wowed, began driving north towards our big beautiful life-eater, Lulu.  Oregon and bone-crushing hugs, here we come!

The Rockies are flexing their snowy biceps on the horizon. As we approach Colorado, the Kansas plains are beginning to swell with golden grassy mounds here and there, thin snakes of snow nipping at their ankles. To the left and right earth-anchored cows mingle with sky-whipped windmills – the old mills frozen in rusty peace, the new ones like metal soldiers flicking butterfly knives in the blue. John’s Kickass Playlist scores the kickass views as the West gallops ahead and we follow. You know when you find yourself waving at antelope that you’ve crossed over.

John just said, “If I’m reincarnated, I wanna be a tumbleweed.” I’d say it’s already in our DNA, as we make our too-many-times-to-count trip across the continent. We left New York a week ago, making a fun stop in Cincinnati, hitting Horror Hound to see our buddy Jay Kay’s short film and saying hi to Greenlandian actor Anders Hove, there for the Subspecies: Blood Rising premiere. (Hove came to Serbia this winter to make a cameo in Hell Hole and it is …. memorable! Can’t wait to work with Hove again.) Then we stayed the night in a Victorian bed and breakfast along the Mississippi in southern IL. Lovely; like stepping back in time. Except I’m not sure if Victorians (known for zipped-up, quiet discretion) got busy like our room neighbors…. without a care for acoustics…. taking the occasional breaks to pick up calls from their kids: Oh. Yeah. Mmm. Ringaling. “Hi Bunny! I miss you, too!How was school today? Let me talk to gramma. I love you, too, sweetie!” Oh, oh, yeah…. Ring-ring. “Hi, honey. Go to sleep, hon’. Miss you, too…..” Oh. Oh. Mmm….. Well good for them. (Did I mention John hates bed and breakfasts?)

Next stop: Kansas City, MO. We really liked this city, its antiquated square brick and stone buildings, its friendly people and great culinary offerings. Unfortunately, our car got busted into there, which is a shitty feeling. Hopefully someone is enjoying my wardrobe and John’s wawa pedal and half a mic stand. And it’ll be cool if 50 people are walking around Kansas City in H6LLB6ND6R t-shirts, because those got nabbed, too. (We are headed to a Con.) But heaven help the thief who reads my notebook with a whole lotta variations on Devil mythology, the 7 Deadly Sins, how to slay with originality, considerations on wendigos, golems, and selected demons at large, and your run-of-the-mill everyday dark forces that make for good horror movies in the works. Good luck there.

So yeah. We are on the first leg of a 2+ month trip: first to hit the 6 Feet Under Film Fest in Colorado Springs. (They’re screening a double feature of The Deeper You Dig and Hellbender and also some shorts: EVER (the short we shot in Yukon and Alaska) and Miltown – a fun short John, Z and I act in directed and produced by our pals Connor Martin, Chris Beyrooti, and Yale Slaughter. Then….

Then we get to see LULU! After almost a year teaching English in South Korea, traveling to Japan, Singapore, Bali and Vietnam, Lu is back on American soil, and we are dying to see her. And her lovable boyfriend, Alex. In Oregon! Then we bum around the Northwest while John edits our Serbian creature feature Hell Hole (a fun one, folks!) and we hold our breath until we can announce big plans for our newest feature, Where the Devil Roams. We are very stoked to get this one rolling! More on that to come, plus other fun news on the horizon….. Zelda is happy at college in NYC, and with every mile we are cooking up new storms to capture on film. Thank you, road. Thank you, wheels. And thank YOU, dear reader.

When you’re happy, art’s hard. That’s what John said when I was struggling to kickstart this final post from our 5 months on the road. And he’s right- our time rolling around in the Wonder Wheels has left us giddy and full-bellied from the fall-to-winter feasting on America. We gobbled up a good chunk of this place and got sauced on the sights. Hey, when a crumbling desert mesa tosses you a biscuit, you take a bite; when the Oregon Coast offers you a drink, you hand it a glass. (And when the Rockies raise a giant, iron fist, you say, “Which eye?”)

But for Nature, art is neither hard nor easy. It’s just another day at work. She clocks in, gets to it, hangs her labors on the wall and doesn’t charge a fee to take a peek. What a peach. It was good to step inside and go from room to room in her American gallery: Northeast to Northwest to Southwest and home. A good chunk, yeah, but a nice size to chew on. It’s like a thumbnail on Earth’s hand. But an outstretched thumb can take you far, and this trip…. ah, this trip….

To put it into perspective: Yesterday I dug a black shard of cactus thorn out of my leg – and I was thrilled. It was there for more than a month, still hard and persistent like the Chihuahuan desert that raised the cactus that grew the arm that launched the thorn that stabbed my leg. I remember the moment it speared me – and this makes my heart wag! We were hiking in Big Bend National Park, racing the setting sun…. and the sun won…. so we were navigating the dark, and the sneaky sucker got me. It was painful, even shocking, but I loved it. I hope the scar sticks around to remind me of that wild, star-flared, chilly dark desert night.

I hope for many things: That somewhere in the northwest, beached jellyfish are still catching the moon, lit up like lanterns in the wet Pacific black. That winds are rising like witches from the top of the White Mountains.
That the silky, grey sand from the Salish Sea still hides in my shoes. That the ghosts of highways haunt my heart. I hope the inky Sawtooths nip at my thoughts and the soft, wheat-whipped prairies sweep my dreams.

If the memories flicker and fade, luckily we’ve got our film H6LLB6ND6R as a moving monument of our adventures. As always, the road is the best location scout. You just have to wander down one. So thanks, America. (And thanks, John-Z-and Lulu, for making the wandering so much fun!) Perhaps art isn’t always hard when you’re happy.

***And thank YOU for drifting with me as I explored our ride in words. Much appreciated. All my love. – Toby

Arizona.

The desert in snow.  Like a sea on fire or a tree growing on a rock, some things just don’t seem to mix.  And when they do, it’s weird.  A little jarring. The kind of thing that can alter the DNA of one’s perception, which is always a good thing.  Please, give me that.  Crack me open and pour in a cup of Never-seen, a hunk of Unknown, and a dash of “Huh?” 

When we pulled into Dead Horse Ranch State Park in Cottonwood, Arizona,  the terrain was a familiar Sonoran desert scene: dusty, crusty brown, and fringed in the muted grey-greens of juniper, sagebrush, and puffy cottonwood trees.  We rode our bikes up-down-all around a high loop in the Coconino National Forest (a desert forest!), during which I learned I am a royal chickenshit when my bike finds itself on anything other than pavement or dirt.  (Hell, thy name is Gravel!) But when not terrified by the natural rollercoaster of rock, sand, and eye-gouging shrubbery (my heart going full steam lub-dubbery), it was a desert ride to remember.  

By evening, winds stoked angry clouds, and the first flecks of snow began to whirl like ash from a white scalded sky.  The heat from the desert day shrank lizard-like into the cold desert night, and by morning the DNA of my perception had changed.  The desert in snow.  A strange marriage of star-crossed lovers fully draped in a veil of white.  Cacti transformed into funny whiskered snowmen; yucca into narwhals, their shoots piercing a sea of sparkling fluff.  And in Sedona – striking, vibrant, sexy  Sedona- the red cliffs and ragged mesas looked like massive hunks of half-eaten Devil’s Food Cake, white icing dripping down the sides.  

Snow aside, the desert is full of characters.  You could write a classic Western opera on the cacti alone.  You’ve got your saguaro, tall and proud, like a hydra-headed sheriff. The deputy might be a squat, jovial barrel cactus.  Then there’s the ocotillo, your villain, all spidery and barb-wired, with its sneaky thick-fingered sidekick, the cholla, quick to stick with daggered burrs.  The Joshua trees are your preachers, arms raised in prayer for the souls of the sinners.  And the prickly pear are your busomy damsels flashing their purple succulence, batting thorny lashes.  Coyotes hide in the wings crooning a sad, hungry ballad, and hawks saw thin rusty chords in the rafters.  Winds jangle like spurs.   

Of course there’s more to Arizona than its deserts.  There are some cool towns we love revisiting, like Jerome.  Built up high on a mountain overlooking the Verde Valley, it’s a strange kind of slinky, living ghost town, all switchbacks and steep streets lined with both galleries and crumbling facades.  And then there’s Bisbee, an artsy old mining town near the border of Mexico. The massive red open copper mine could swallow whole the charming historic district.  Haunted hotels, cracked walls, and antique shops stipple the spindled town, its tiers spun out and stitched together by thousands of stone steps that zig and zag up the mountain like ivy. 

We’ve got another ghost town (or two) on our horizon.   In Texas!  We’re headed to Big Bend along the Rio Grande.  More desert opera.  Maybe a tarantula or two.  Big skies and brazen stars.  

The Pacific Northwest is demanding. Rain and wind hammer the coast and gnaw at our little home on wheels. Washington looms like a masthead over its gusty, water-bound corner of the country, and the wet drama is captured in names that all make sense: Deception Pass, Dismal Nitch, Cape Disappointment. It’s easy to feel the haunt of ships and souls lost in the deep dark drink. This place is wild. Unpredictable. It has a pirate heart. While we sleep the Pacific swallows massive trees, plays with them its mouth, then spits them onto the shore. I can hear the boom and crunch, the beaches a pick-up-stick display of dried grey bones.

In a state that isn’t shy about its natural gifts, Washington’s Olympic Peninsula is especially talented. The Pacific Ocean pummels its western edge, muscles its way through the Strait of Juan de Fuca (nudging Canada above), eases into the Salish Sea, and finally sinks into the Puget Sound. In Port Townsend, a lovely town in the peninsula’s top right corner, we watch river otters, sea lions, and orcas just a stone’s throw from the trailer. The views here make you feel like you’re plopped inside a giant caldera, distant snowy mountains puckered around the watery town on all sides: the Cascades and Mount Baker, the Olympics, and Mount Rainier shining like a silver yolk in the faraway sky. And then there are the rainforests: fuzzy, lush, dripping in hot forest breath, steeped in fog.

After two months in the Northwest we are pretty much addicted. Washington and Oregon are iconic, like eagles perched high up on their wild edge of the country, and we are easy prey, happy to be hunted and ripped all to love-pieces. We flit between parks on both state coasts and it never gets old. And we can see Lulu. She comes to us; we go to her. It’s an odd but beautiful bonding in the time of Covid: campfires and rooftops and virtual hugs. Love always lurks in all the things we cannot see or do.

So we’re shooting and living. The Wonder Wheeler leaks, her furnace broke, and sand has found a forever home in the cracks, but she keeps on rolling. And, thankfully, so do we.

P.S…. there’s a rich indigenous life on the Olympic Peninsula. I covered some of the Makah’s cool seafaring history in my previous 2010 blog:
We were rooted in the Olympics of WA like its native Sitka Spruce.   Not ready to leave yet, we visited the Makah Museum, which taught us that the coastal Makah and Orvette tribes were tough whale and seal hunters.  They would sail out in groups of eight on boats carved out of entire tree trunks, and each man had a job, one of which was to dive in and sew the whale’s mouth shut so it wouldn’t sink.  (When sharks arrived, the hunters would toss rocks off the boat– a tactic that seemed to distract the sharks and send them chasing the rocks down.)  Everything they caught they’d eat or use:  seal bladders for bags, intestines for bow strings, sewed up seals for floats to tow whales back to land…. Fascinating stuff!

Is there a happier sight than a dog and a ball on a beach? A sexier view than a hot peach sun setting over a wet denim ocean? A silkier song than the hush and coo of waves whispered through the teeth of grassy dunes? Think monster crags that stand in the surf, and the herby, almost medicinal air of evergreens.
Or moss, the shag carpet of choice, bearding trees in minty around-the-clock shadow, mushrooms sticking out like fleshy warts.
This is the Oregon coast. It’s big, it’s beautiful, it’s bound to break your heart. Even as you’re standing right there with it, its lush green arms wrapped around you, the ghost of its looming absence is already haunting you.

Our favorite thing to do on the Oregon coast is ride our bikes on the beach. When the tide is out, the tire patterns on the hard damp sand make me smile, reminding me of old good friendships: the lines run side by side, then converge, cross, then join again. John, Z and I go for beach rides in the morning, the late afternoon, and even under the starry night sky. We chase the shiny edges of the ebb-and-flows, dodging jellyfish glittered up by the moon, our wheels making a soft “shluss” in the thin surf. John says, “Is this romantic enough for you?” I say, “It is.” Z feels it too, because as she comets by she sings she loves me even more than the ocean, and I’m guessing that’s a lot. Sigh.

Of course the thing we love most about Oregon is Lulu, who lives in Portland. Seeing her here – so independent, hardworking, and ever adventurous in the city and beyond …. blue eyes twinkling above her mask and body strong like a bull’s…. my heart just flops onto its back, holds its sides, and rocks with ache. It’s not a bad ache. More like a love sickness that can’t be quelled. Or a rip in the ol’ ticker, raw and swollen open from adoration…. a small tear that can’t be stitched, so it stays open, like a gill, letting all the big love seep in and out.

Meanwhile, Zelda turned 17. She’s sitting alone under a tree sketching, curled over a pad with pencil in her long graceful hand. And now the ache returns, this time to be that lucky paper, or perhaps the pencil, bent to the wise hand’s will. 17, with the aim of an arrow. Now she’s waking a napping Lu, cocooned and warm in her blue hammock, and I can hear them laughing in the Oregon sun. The sweet ache again. It twists and pulls like taffy in my belly…. so much sugar and a salted joy. It’s a heady swoon, like falling from something sky-high into something bottomless and true.

Today is Halloween, my favorite holiday of all. It’s fun giving nightmares their due; fun getting spooked by shadows and creepy things under a stark moon as the days trip ever closer towards winter. Of course much, much scarier things lurk around the globe these days, and they’re not so much fun. But this post is about love. And beauty. And as I sit here in a state park along the Pacific coast, where fires have dulled and the air cleared; where dogs grin, all wet-whipped from the waves; where strangers wave hello as they walk by, or from their morning-dewed tents, or lifting their noses from books they quietly read outside their motorhomes…. I’m less scared, and more hopeful. Less bitter; more inspired. Not empty, but hungry for more.

Good to Be Bad(lands) and Why Oh Wy-oming

The Badlands of South Dakota are cool in a dusty, rusty, ruthless I-only-smoke-Marlboro Reds-and-nothing-green-survives-my-burnt-crusty-stare kind of way. It’s as if primary colors were outlawed then banished from the landscape, leaving behind long gnarled fingers of grey rock that jut out of a beige dry land. Sometimes blocks of earth fall away as if the sky had boots and stomped the earth in random fits. You can’t help but think of sagging, weathered sandcastles, lonely remnants of a dinosaur’s playground.
We hiked in, and as the sun began to sink behind a jagged skyline, we set up to shoot. You’d think it would be easy: dark edges against a pumpkin sky. But we couldn’t get the shot.
The Badlands scoffed at a close-up, and the camera got shy. But it was cool. The Badlands are really a teaser for what lies West…..

Wyoming. And the sovereign badassery of Yellowstone and Teton National Parks and the all-around vastness of everything in between.

Yellowstone is a huge natural amusement park full of endless attractions. Upon entering from the East through the Shoshone Forest and Absaroka Mountains, we were greeted by a lone bison strolling all hunchbacked and casual smack-dab down the middle of the road. Soon the bison and elk were on constant display, although we didn’t see any grizzlies this visit. The wind is bearlike, though, and it riles the massive Yellowstone Lake into an angry ocean. Rainbow colored thermal pools smoke…. mud pools bubble…. fumaroles spit, hiss and thump…. and geysers burp straight up to the sky. Steam and the stink of sulfur bathe your face. It’s a strange kind of beautiful Hell. And then you find yourself jaw-dropped and head spinning by a carousel of new views: snow capped mountains lording over wide bison-flecked valleys, waterfalls crashing, rivers cutting through rocky canyons, cliffs hanging out with eagles…. Damn, it’s good.

En route to The Tetons we wound through the striking Owl Creek and Wind River Mountains. The winds turned fierce and we found a ranch to host us for the night. Parked outside the horse and bull arena, for three hours the trailer shook and rocked through a downright dirt and sand blizzard. Then the winds calmed and we were surrounded by a psychedelic sunset and miles of sagebrush hosting horses and playful fluffy-butted antelope at home on the range.

100 miles west we were eye-slapped with our first view of The Grand Tetons, which roughly translates to The Big Tits. Oh, those frisky French. The more elegant Shoshone name for them translates to Hoary-headed Feathers. Either way, they’re unmistakable: dark, stark, stabbing the cloud cover with sharp brilliant white snowy peaks. The Snake River slithers at their ankles, spilling in and out of Jackson Lake. Dark shadows reveal themselves to be moose hulking beneath the pines, in heathery meadows. Oh, and in Jackson you can find the best croissant this side of Paris, Z says. (Persephone Cafe- thanks Nancy Lee!)

OK! On to Idaho and Craters on the Moon! Thanks, Wyoming. Ding!Ding!Ding! You’re the champ.

Here’s the lowdown on the slowdown.

It’s about a bone-straight country road, flanked by legions of corn stalks grayed and at post-summer rest, their papery swords bent by the winds. It’s about faded metal water towers, all long neck and fat head, proudly mouthing small town names like Sun Prairie, Baraboo, and Jolley. It’s about soft peanut butter and jelly sandwiches assembled on a dusty gravel shoulder that smells of cow and dirt and is kind of nice. It’s about feet on the dashboard and wind in hair; about singing to the radio and sharing apples. John horse-gobbles them down to the core – my favorite part- which I then gnaw into a heart-shaped nub. Zelda studies quietly in the backseat. Weeds tumble across the road like feathers. Windmills tickle the horizon. Watching the views sprawl outside the car windows John says, “America’s just so fuckin’ big.” Z turns down the music and says, “I’m gonna write my history essay.” I say, “Good luck.”

Indiana, Illinois, Iowa. Heartland; hard land. The Wonder Wheels like the long flat roads, but not the occasional strong gusts. Strange how they can make a 5,000 pound trailer wobble and reel while the watching cows stand solid and, uh, un-mooved.

As we head west, chasing the sundown, I can’t help but feel like happiness is a road. Or a cloud. Or an old truck rusting in a field. Sometimes you need some space to feel small. To slice through stillness with a set of wheels and a pair of eyes. Tonight we’ll reach South Dakota. The West with its big beauty dangles like a tasty carrot, and the ache of anticipation is like waiting for a second kiss from the person who knocked you out with the first kiss. A little dizzying, a little scary, a lotta thrilling. I like it.

Nature has the best breath. And in late September Maine it smells of pine, rain, salt, seaweed, and sweet decay. If you can pull your peepers away from the water (nonstop ocean, lakes, coves, and those pretty bogs – you know, the kind of low wetland riddled with thin steeples of grey dead trees that always catch your eye), the forests are holding their own. Ferns are the woodland jewels, all flashy in their burnished gold. And mushrooms, the earth’s great coexisters, hang nonchalantly off logs or pop out of the mulch with a sleepy wet yawn.

It rained most of the time we were there, but rain and Maine suit each other. The mist hugs the coast and kisses your face so tenderly. Makes you all giddy. We stayed near Belfast on Swan Lake, then closer to Acadia National Park. Acadia…. I mean, come on. Be still, my sea-swollen heart. We like to get around on our bikes, so we rode around some lakes and through the woods to the ocean. The rocky coast had slipped on its silkiest veil of haze and draped itself in long beads of slimy weeds and shards of pearly shells. Z and I took off our shoes and donned our black Hellbender dream-clothes, and John shot us on the rocks against the grey dull sky.

Maine marks the end of our first stint on the road. I think we’re getting the hang of pulling the Wonder Wheels. Z has been able to keep up with remote schooling. Autumn in the northeast has tattooed its image into our memories. Kind of comforting, the death of a leaf. And with the wet weather, ten days of dirty duds, and popcorn kernels hiding in the creases of our bed, the trailer is even starting to feel a little lived in. Which feels good.

Next? Another stunning corner of the country: the Northwest! That ought to throw some major eye-pie our way. But the sweetest sight to see out West? Our lovable Lulu Em!