There is a moment I have spent more than fifty years trying to describe and I have never gotten it quite right, though I keep trying. I was nineteen and standing on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon with a postcard in my back pocket that no longer had any purpose. My friend Butch was beside me, home from Vietnam and looking for whatever it was he had left behind when he shipped out. Neither of us said anything for a long time. There was nothing to say that the canyon had not already silently proclaimed. The earth opened up below us in bands of red and buff and green going down through two billion years and I understood more clearly than ever that I was a brief thing, and that being transitory was not a tragedy. I saw it as an invitation, the sheer joy of just living, the impossibility of being alive in the world.

We had hitchhiked across half the country to stand by the rim wall near the El Tovar Hotel with an inscription over its entryway arch, which I will always remember. “Dreams of mountains as in their sleep, they brood on things eternal.” Butch and I were too young to think in terms of eternity but we walked down into the canyon a day later on the Bright Angel Trail with cheap packs and cheaper boots. The temperature climbed as we descended, which seemed to me a violation of some geographic or meteorological rule I had learned in school. The canyon, though, does not care what you learned in school. Every switchback took us further back in time, through stone laid down by seas that dried up before there was anything on the planet with eyes to miss them. We slept by the river that had done all the carving, a bubbly, running ribbon of mighty water that still managed to look too modest for the work attributed to it. I lay awake in my bag on the soft sand of the river bank and listened to it move in the dark and thought that patience must be the most powerful force in the universe. I also thought about another teenaged boy a thousand years after me who might hear the same, endless force and flow of the Colorado, unchanged by the millennia.

The climb out the north side almost broke us. The switchbacks up the North Kaibab seemed designed by somebody with a grudge. Butch, who had humped a rifle and sixty pounds of gear through jungle heat, laughed at me when I stopped to gasp against the red wall of the canyon.

“You wanted to see the West,” he said. “Well, here it is. It’s mostly straight up.”

We ate lunch later that day in the lodge on the North Rim like we had conquered something, though the truth was closer to the opposite. The canyon had let us pass. That’s all that happened.

And then came the airplane.

It was a small craft that ferried hikers back to the south side, and it was the first airplane ride of my life. We took off into the front edge of a summer thunderstorm because the pilot said he had flown through worse and did not appear interested in our opinions on the matter. I remember lightning firing off inside the clouds like something alive was trapped in their turbulent movements. I also recall the little single engine Cessna dropping in the stormy air and my stomach arriving a half second behind the rest of me. And I will never forget looking down between the storm cells and seeing the canyon below us lit up in flashes, the whole impossible depth of it strobing in and out of the dark, ten miles wide and going on forever, and thinking that if this was how I died it was at least an honest way to go, killed by wonder in the sky over the most beautiful hole in the world. The trails we had hiked looked like narrow scratchings in the dirt. Butch never gripped his armrest once. He had already learned what fear was for and this did not qualify. When we bounced down on the strip near the South Rim he looked over at me and grinned for the first time since he had come home.

“Beats walking,” he said.

I have been back to that canyon more times than I have kept count of. I have hiked it and run it rim to rim and stood at overlooks with people I loved and people I have since lost. It has never once failed to level me, emotionally and physically. The view has outlasted marriages and presidents and the friend who stood beside me that first day, and it will outlast me too, which is the entire point. Some places exist to remind us of our size. Our brevity is what makes the eternal more beautiful.

Big Bend came into my life the same way the canyon did, when I was young and hungry to feel distance. You come at it from the north across a hundred miles of creosote and sotol and the Chisos Mountains rise off the desert floor like a story that seemed absurd when you heard it but you’ve finally decided to believe. The light out there does things I have seen nowhere else on this continent. In the late afternoon the Sierra del Carmen across the river turns rose and then violet and then a color that has no name because nobody needed one until they stood there and watched it and struggled for words. The Rio Grande slides through Santa Elena Canyon between walls fifteen hundred feet high, and at Boquillas the water runs green and slow past a Mexican village where a man used to sing across the river to travelers on the American side, his voice carrying over water that never understood itself to be a boundary.

I have gone back to that country my whole life the way other men go back to a home church. I have camped in the Chisos in weather that turned the mountains into islands above a sea of cloud. I have sat on the rocks at Boquillas Canyon at dusk and listened to a canyon wren pour its falling song down the cliff face and felt something in my chest unclench that I had not known was clawing at my heart. The Big Bend taught me the same lesson the canyon did in a different dialect of stone. You are small. The world is old. The universe has beauty and secrets you cannot comprehend. These facts are gifts.

Which is why what is happening out there now hurts my insides like a stone I cannot pass.

The contractor trucks have started arriving. The graders are blading roads through desert that took centuries to compose itself, because the soil out there is not really soil at all but a living crust that dies under a tire track and does not return in a human lifetime. Man camps are rising on land where the loudest thing for a hundred years has been wind through the ocotillo. A company holding billions of dollars in federal contracts is preparing to run a wall along stretches of a river that Congress once designated wild and scenic, which was our way of promising the future that some things would be left alone. The wall will stand in Boquillas Canyon, where the wren sings. Nobody crosses illegally in that country because the country itself is the wall, and it enforces its terms with heat and thirst and distance more honestly than steel ever will. Every person who loves Big Bend knows this. The people building it know it, too. The wall is not for stopping anyone. Instead, it’s for the cameras, a monument to fear erected in the one American landscape most likely to cure a person of trepidation.

I think about that nineteen year old in the tiny airplane, thrown around the sky by a thunderstorm over the Grand Canyon, too full of awe to be properly afraid. He believed, without ever saying it out loud, that the great places were permanent. That they were the fixed points and we were the weather. He was right about the stone. The canyon will be there and the Chisos will be there and the river will keep cutting long after the steel has rusted into the sand and the contracts have been forgotten by everyone but historians of our foolishness.

But he was wrong about something too, and it has taken me a lifetime to understand what. The land does not need us to survive. What needs protecting is the encounter. The boy at the rim. The traveler on the Big Hill who wants to cry at the world’s beauty. The song coming across the water at Boquillas. That is the fragile thing. And tragically that is what a grader can erase in an afternoon.

The stone will keep the long light. I am no longer certain we deserve to stand in its presence.

I have spent most of my working life in a state that practically invented the retail theft of elections and then perfected it almost as an art form. I still want to be careful about what I say about our history because Texans of my generation have a bad habit of treating stolen elections as little more than folklore. Their narratives involve a dusty anecdote about a mustachioed patrón in a county nobody visits. We did not create a template, but we know enough about how corruption is executed to speak with authority about the possibilities coming in this country’s direction for the midterm elections. What is being assembled right now for November 3 is not folklore, nor retail, and it is not being done in the dark by a courthouse boss with a bottle of ink. Take a close look because your democracy is being stolen in the open, on letterhead, with a docket number, and the men doing it are counting on the fact that we will not recognize a coup that arrives with a case caption.

Texans ought to recognize the architecture of a lie. Six days after the polls closed in this state’s Democratic Senate runoff of August 28, 1948, Jim Wells County sent Austin an amended return. Precinct 13, in Alice, had found 202 more votes. All but one or two of them belonged to Lyndon Johnson, and they carried him past former Governor Coke Stevenson by 87 votes out of nearly a million cast.

The names had been added to the bottom of the poll list in alphabetical order, in one hand, in one color of ink, while every name above them ran in the ragged inks and handwritings of an actual day’s voting. Some of the people listed said they had not voted. The last man written down before the additions said that when he cast his ballot, there was nobody in line behind him. Dozens of the names belonged to local dead. Stevenson drove down to Alice in late September with Frank Hamer, his old hunting partner, the retired Texas Ranger who had run Bonnie and Clyde to ground, and the two of them walked the main street past George Parr’s pistoleros to the bank where the poll list was kept. The manager let them take a look, but when he saw them start writing names down, he snatched the list back. Nobody ever opened Box 13, though, to count ballots because it was missing, and it still is. One of U.S. history’s greatest lies is contained in a round tin box that people in Jim Wells County will tell you was stashed in a meat locker, or auctioned off by a sheriff, or dropped in the Rio Grande.

And today it’s easy to speculate about what might happen because the lies are no longer hidden from us; they are fed to Americans as facts. The SAVE Act, for instance, has passed the House three times, April of last year, again in February, and again this month, when leadership stapled it to the defense authorization bill and also slipped a national voter-ID mandate into a bill about congressional stock trading. The law, if adopted by Congress, requires documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. The Brennan Center estimates 21 million voting-age citizens cannot readily produce a birth certificate or passport. The president has refused to sign unrelated legislation while trying to force it through the Senate, and he has said aloud what the rest of us were meant to infer: pass it, and Republicans will never lose a race.

On March 31, he signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to build lists of eligible voters and instructing the Postal Service to deliver ballots only to people on those lists. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia sued. A federal judge in Boston blocked the order. The First Circuit upheld the block, finding it would sow confusion and disenfranchise eligible voters. On July 27 the Solicitor General went to the Supreme Court on an emergency basis, ninety-nine days out, asking the justices to let it all take effect. The challengers’ response is due Monday, August 3rd.

And circulating alongside all of it, seventeen pages long, is a draft executive order, confirmed by the Washington Post, ProPublica, and Democracy Docket, that would declare a national emergency premised on the theory that China interfered in 2020, and use it to ban mail ballots, force hand-counting, and require every American to re-register. The president says he’s never heard of it. The men circulating it say they are coordinating with his White House.

The only case worse than that involves violence and revolution.

Suppose the court blesses it, come Monday. The executive order is not really a ban and has a kind of dark genius that doesn’t require eliminating mail voting to break the process. Nearly one in three Americans voted by mail in 2024. If DHS builds the eligibility lists, and the Postal Service delivers only to names on those lists, and the lists are built from citizenship databases already documented to generate false positives, then the failure mode is not a locked door and works silently. A ballot that simply never comes. Seniors along the border in towns like Weslaco and McAllen, who have voted from the kitchen table for two decades, wait, and check the mail, and wait. Some of them will drive to a precinct on November 3. Many will not because they are eighty-one, or working a double shift, or their daughter has the car. Turnout doesn’t collapse but quickly erodes, unevenly, in exactly the places where erosion changes outcomes.

The decomposition of the election gets worse when every mail-in voter who gives up on the envelope and shows up in person lands in a precinct staffed and provisioned for a normal midterm. Lines run four hours in Harris County, six in Maricopa in Arizona, maybe longer in the rain of Cleveland, and every hour of that line is a tax paid disproportionately by hourly workers who cannot afford to lose pay while waiting to exercise their franchise.

We can expect most states to refuse. This is the part that gives me something like hope and a touch of dread at the same time. American elections are administered by roughly 8,000 jurisdictions and 3,000 county clerks, most of them women, most of them underpaid, many of them Republicans who have been threatened for four years but are still showing up. Secretaries of state in a dozen states have already said they will not comply with any federal order from Trump, and blue-state legislatures have passed buffer zones barring federal immigration agents from operating within a few hundred feet of a polling place. Federal law dating to Reconstruction, written for precisely this, already bars armed federal men from the polls unless they are repelling armed enemies of the United States.

The dread is that a conflict between a president and 8,000 clerks does not resolve cleanly and manifests at individual folding tables, in church basements and school gymnasiums, at 7:15 in the morning, in front of people’s phones. They aren’t on the list. They don’t have birth certificates. Their maiden names are nowhere in the computer systems.

The Supreme Court closed the easy door in December, ruling against the Chicago National Guard deployment and reading the Guard statute as a backstop to active-duty forces rather than a supplement to civilian police. Guard units came out of Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland. They remain in Washington. What that ruling did was narrow the options to one, and the one that remains is the Insurrection Act, which Trump has wanted since 2020, and requires only a sufficiently photogenic disorder to justify. That is the whole problem. In a system this loaded, the disorder is not a risk of the plan, and is instead, a crucial input. The trigger has already been pulled once when in June, during New York’s primary, ICE agents confronted a poll worker outside a voting site in Syracuse. She said she felt intimidated. State prosecutors reviewed her claims and found them legitimate, but the story only made the trade press and vanished.

Put that scenario on November 3 in a county that is 92 percent Latino. Eight-fifteen in the morning, a strip-center precinct in Hidalgo or Cameron County in the Rio Grande Valley, a line out the door, and an unmarked SUV pulls to the curb. Four men in vests, no visible warrant, detain a man in the parking lot, a naturalized citizen, and it turns out by Thursday, a machinist who has voted in every election since 2004. Somebody films the confrontation. The line of voters watches him go into the vehicle. Half the line is mixed status: a citizen daughter, a resident mother, a cousin with a pending case. Understand what happens next, because it is not complicated and there is no requirement of anyone to be wrong. Nineteen people leave the line. By nine, the video has 4 million views. By ten, the no vayan messages are moving through WhatsApp faster than any county judge can correct them, across a region where a third of the electorate lives in a household with somebody who has reason to fear that unmarked van. Nobody has to be arrested to win. The van is the is a tool of the policy.

By noon it isn’t just the Valley. The digital fear has galloped off to Fresno and Phoenix and the Southwest Side of Chicago, and crowds are forming, not at the precincts, at the field offices, which is where crowds always form, because the precinct is where you were wronged and the field office is where you were wronged from. Counter-crowds arrive by two. Somebody’s rifle is visible by four. In November, darkness falls by 6:30, and night is the variable that turns a confrontation into a casualty. One death anywhere in America on that night, one, on a phone, in vertical video, and the President has his predicate to do whatever he wants and the country has its cause, and both sides will believe with total sincerity that they are the ones defending the Republic.

The worst part has not arrived yet. Not election night. The three weeks after, when the counts are contested, when DOJ subpoenas county clerks for prosecution under the SAVE Act’s criminal provisions, when a House majority sits unseated because certification is enjoined in four states. Democratic winners of congressional offices are unable to take their oath.

There is no other name for it other than a coup. The word people reach for is clearly coup, and the word might be imprecise, but the instinct is right. What is described here is closer to what political scientists call an autogolpe, a self-coup, in which a sitting executive does not seize a government he lacks but dismantles the constraints on the one he already has, which is what we’ve witnessed since Trump began his second term. Alberto Fujimori, in 1992, dissolved Peru’s Supreme Court and Congress and began ruling by decree. A coup rarely arrives with tanks but announces itself with an emergency declaration, a compliant court, and a legal theory just plausible enough that respectable people can say the matter is complicated.

I don’t offer this as a prediction. I hope most of it will not happen. The courts have ruled against this president on elections nearly every time; the justices may well decline to wade in three months out; you will likely know by the time this has been read. A great many Republicans vote by mail, though, and they may suffer broad electoral harm under Trump edicts. The hopeful note is that democracies fail less often than the people who love them fear.

But Texas taught me the actual lesson of Box 13, and it isn’t that a man stole an election. The great cultural horror was that everybody in Jim Wells County and the rest of Texas knew, and the results held anyway. Knowing what happened is not the same as proving, which was impossible with the missing Box 13. Proving is also not the same as stopping a crime, and the people who might have stopped it decided the fight belonged to somebody else. Eventually, though, it belonged to all of us when LBJ became president and escalated U.S. military presence in Vietnam, which led to more than 58,000 dead Americans.

This November, our tragedy might begin with the simple act of a woman clerk sitting behind a folding table at 7:15 in the morning, deciding whether it’s safe or even worthwhile to keep the doors open to voters.

“Whither thou goest, America, in thy big, black car into the night?” - Kerouac

In the spare shade of an old cottonwood, I reached into my backpack and pulled out a postcard bearing a picture of the Grand Canyon at sunrise. The image was a part of my emotional motivation to travel west. A pickup truck passed on the bumpy blacktop of the Old Lincoln Highway in Western Nebraska and the driver offered a wave. I was always afraid that Butch’s long hair and untrimmed beard might make us targets of angry rural folks but he had been to Vietnam and had seen enough horror that nothing in America had the power to make him frightened.

“How many times are you going to look at that thing?” he asked. “The picture will be faded by the time we get there.”

“The picture won’t matter once I am standing on the rim,” I said.

“Okay, but what do you suppose we do now?”

“Hope the bus shows up like that cop said it does every day.”

The walk north away from the Interstate took several hours and the sun seemed an angry thing out on the High Plains. A highway patrolman had written us tickets for hitchhiking on I-80 and had taken almost all of our cash. He had driven us across the bridge over the Platte River, through town and out to where there was only the road and the sky, and told us to get out and walk.

“There’s an old gas station out on the Lincoln Highway,” he said. “It’s closed up but the Continental Trailways bus will stop if the driver sees anyone waiting. Get going and you can take it on into Denver and get out of my state.”

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Butch had gotten two Army Surplus canteens before we left Michigan and we had filled them with water from the gas station by the Interstate. There were at least a dozen young hitchers hanging signs off the bridge over the divided highway with the names of their destinations scribbled on thin poster board. I did not understand how they might get a ride or where a driver was to stop and pick up a specific wanderer.

“Looks like we might be getting some company,” Butch nodded toward the east. “Isn’t that somebody coming or am I hallucinating?’

“What the hell?” I stood up and squinted into the hazy distance. “Looks like another backpacker.”

“Hope he doesn’t need any water.”

“Wonder how he ended up out here.”

“Probably the same bad cop that found us, found him.”

I walked out to the old gas pumps, rusted but still standing, and waited for the approaching figure. My thought was to be welcoming and make certain he knew we were no threat, but the July temperature quickened my thirst and I went back beneath the tree with Butch. Another twenty minutes passed before the lone walker came in off U.S. Highway 30.

“What you boys doin’ out in this here godforsaken place?” he asked.

“Waitin’ on a bus, we think,” I said.

“I reckon I will, too, though I ain’t got but a few dollars and I don’t think he’ll take me too far down the road.”

His age was hard to guess but he was likely in his sixties and his skin was brown and wrinkled from the sun as if he had been walking across the continent for years. The jeans he wore were shiny with dirt and grease and his tee shirt bore the faded image of a rock concert promotion. When he sat down I saw that he was wearing old running shoes that were worn through in the same two spots of their soles. No one spoke and the wind came up and an old metal Conoco sign creaked when it rocked against its hinges.

“You boys got anything to eat you might be willin’ to share?”

“Sure. I’ve got some nuts and dried fruit,” I said. “Let me just get it out of my pack.”

“That sure would be kind of ya. Wonder if you might let me have a sip from your canteen, too.”

“I guess so, sure.”

Butch was silent, which had become part of his personality after the war. There was some place he went in his mind that required his concentration and he did not engage with anyone during that time. I never bothered him about it as we traveled because he had told me enough stories about what he saw while walking point for his platoon in Vietnam that I understood he needed to fight off an internal and recurrent darkness. One image I knew he carried with him involved one of his buddies walking into a crossfire so intense that the bullets cut his body in half as he stood in a rice paddy, and his upper torso toppled over holding his weapon while his legs remained standing a few seconds before collapsing.

“What’s that there?” The stranger pointed at my post card on the ground next to my pack.

“Oh, picture of the Grand Canyon. It’s where we’re headed.”

“Can I see it?”

“Of course.”

He held it delicately by sitting it in his palm and stared at it for several minutes. His breathing was raspy and easy to hear in the lee of the old gas station. I kept turning my head away to avoid looking at the purple blood spots on his hands and arms but I could not mistake the clouds in his eyes.

“I never been there,” he said without looking up. “Always wanted to go. ‘Spose I’m not gonna make it now, either.”

“Why not?” He carefully returned the post card, treating it like a personal treasure of mine he was fearful of harming.

“I gotta get up north to Washington for the apple harvest to pick some crop and make a little money,” he said. “I’m not gonna be able to keep movin’ around like this. People don’t pick up scraggly old guys hitchin’ anymore. Besides, my back can’t take much more. I’m gonna need to find me a VA hospital to take care of me.”

“You don’t look so old to me,” I said. “You can still make it down to the canyon.”

“Oh, I’m tired.” He exhaled a rattly breath and looked off across the road, I thought trying to see something unnamed. “It’s in my eyes and my legs, mostly. I’ve got the South Pacific and Korea behind me. I don’t even know what it took from me, but it got somethin’. Can’t put a finger on it, though. Everything felt different to me when I got back. Nothin’ much mattered to me after all that.”

I did not know what to say. Butch showed the same kind of emotionless attitude about living after he returned from Southeast Asia and when I tried to talk to him about it he either walked away or told me to mind my own business. There had to be some value to their sacrifice.

“But you got to be a part of saving the world, right?” I asked.

He laughed. “All I saved was my ass, and maybe some of my buddies. But sittin’ here, a broke ass 67-year-old with no family, no money, not even a high school education, and nothing but a lot of low-pay and back breakin’ work behind me, I wonder if I should’ve even bothered.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Ain’t your fault. I think it’s maybe this country, the way things are set up. Some of us just don’t get a chance. But what do I know?”

Butch’s eyes had been closed like he was sleeping and his chin was near his chest but I saw him lift a lid and look at the old man.

“What’s your name?” Butch asked.

“Hawk. Ever’body calls me Hawk cuz of this ol’ beak of a nose I got here.” He touched it’s tip and laughed, softly.

“Well, good luck to you, Hawk,” Butch said, and closed his eyes again before finishing. “We are gonna be on that bus and gone when it gets here. Hope you get where you wanna go.”

“Me, too,” Hawk said. “But I got only four dollars and some change. Don’t think that’s gonna buy me much of a ticket.”

Only a few miles from where we suffered the sun, under a different cottonwood, another American son had divvied up a plenty with his fellow riders. Sam Bass, and the “Black Hills Bandits,” robbed a Union Pacific train bound from San Francisco to the East Coast in September of 1877. The $60,000 in newly-minted gold coins, found in stacked wooden crates, worth $1.8 million today, still represents the biggest train robbery in UP history; it was also the first.

Bass, who had been orphaned just as he entered his teens, had run away from his uncle’s farm in Indiana and drifted down to Mississippi and over to Texas, working horses and cattle. There were not many jobs he had not tried as he moved through the West but, whether it was cowboy or playing faro, even tending bar, Bass never stood still. The UP robbery was his biggest heist but when he went south back to Texas with his share of the loot, he resumed holding up trains around Dallas, which turned him into a bit of a Texas legend. His story has no happy ending, though, and he was brought low by the Texas Rangers in Round Rock and died on his 27th birthday from a bullet wound in his back, discovered dead and alone in an open field.

I had been reading tremendous amounts of Western history during my freshman year in college and had encountered the story of Sam Bass but the Big Springs setting did not enter my mind as Butch and I struggled to get closer to the Rockies. Nothing seemed to stop me from pondering unanswerable questions, though, and I constantly wondered how so much always seemed to go wrong. Too much good and hopeful often appeared to break. Beneath that cottonwood, hard by the highway, I sat with two combat veterans from different generations, who had been ruined by war. Back in Michigan, my father, was inexplicably violent toward his family, though no one had ever thought it might have been caused by his time in the European Theater of World War II as a sharpshooter. I blamed America, too, for unkept promises of fairness and equality and opportunity.

By the time I spotted the Trailways bus coming from the East, the sky was turning navy and orange and birds were making their evening songs. I went to the roadside with my backpack and waved at the shimmering headlights as they approached through the lowering darkness. Butch and Hawk stood up slowly and grabbed their gear to drag it across the dirt patch next to the gas station as the brakes hissed across the chip seal. I was first up the steps when the doors opened.

“How far can I get on twelve dollars?” I asked the driver.

“Ticket to Julesberg,” he said, and took my money. Butch was behind me, paid the same amount, and Hawk climbed slowly up to stand by the driver’s seat.

“I got four dollars,” he said, and showed the man his crumpled money.

“I don’t got no four dollar tickets.”

“What’s that mean? Can’t you take me down the road four dollars worth?”

“No, I can’t. I got to sell tickets between stops. Only way I can do it.”

I had taken a seat near the front and Hawk leaned forward and looked at me with a question on his face but I only had three more dollars and hoped to eat in the morning. Butch was already way to the back of the nearly empty bus. Hawk stood there a moment, maybe just a few heartbeats, picked up his dirty nylon bag, and moved backwards down the steps. In a few minutes, when the bus pulled off, I saw Hawk laying himself on the ground with his pack for a headrest. I fretted over how he might ever leave the old Conoco station.

Whenever you are heading west across the Plains states, there comes a moment when you sense, not even feel, the earth begin to rise beneath your wheels. There is no explaining the moment or the emotion but a traveler begins to become hopeful and in those rushing minutes a crooked profile moves across the Western horizon. When the Rocky Mountains come into view, even as a narrow, ragged trace across the seam between the earth and sky, the heart bumps its pace. The air coming over the Great Divide tastes cleaner and feels fresh, coursed over great snow fields and down impossible canyons out to where the long grasses wave. Being alive on the American continent is the easiest thing you have done, and the only question is what to do with that gift.

The mountains, you must decide, are either an obstacle or an opportunity.

Below us, just before the dune line, wild Mustang horses were grazing on the tall grasses bending in a morning breeze off the Atlantic. We were with friends on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, standing on a deck with coffee and watching the sun rise out of the sea. The summer weather and location were idyllic, and then the phone rang.

“He’s gone now,” she cried. “I lost my, boy. Oh, I can’t believe it.”

“What happened? I don’t understand what you are saying.”

“It’s Noel. He’s drowned and gone. They couldn’t save him.”

My cousin Bev had called from Newfoundland, crying, to tell us the horrible news that her only child had been swept into the Atlantic by a rogue wave. Noel, born on Christmas Day, had been sitting on a rocky ledge with two friends on a sunny August day in 1986 and had not moved quickly enough to avoid the water’s power. A trained lifeguard, he had saved several lives that summer of his eighteenth year, and knew to remove his shoes and heavy clothing for easier swimming as his friends ran for help a hundred yards distant at his grandfather’s house. Minutes later when they returned, Noel was gone, and a week long search by land, sea, and air, never found a trace of him or his struggle.

Noel grew up on the easternmost point of North America near the gun batteries overlooking St. John’s, Newfoundland’s harbor. His first love became the sea, the sounds and smells, rolling fog and rumbling ships shaking the windows of his room on winter mornings, the fish and fascinating creatures that lived in the salt water splashing along the rocky shoreline on his way to school. Noel had great expectations and wanted to become an oceanographer, which he intended to accomplish by getting a degree at McGill University in Montreal. He would have been the first of generations of our family to leave the island and get an education on the mainland.

My mother, too, had been raised among those Southside Hills, coming of age as history came pounding down the wharves outside her mother’s door. During the great wars of the previous century, St. John’s and its protected harbor served as a staging location for men and materiel bound for the overseas conflicts. My father’s orders as a soldier in the U.S. Army, to patrol the south side of the harbor as a military policeman during World War II, is how he met the girl who became his wife, and the mother of their six children. Pregnant and married at seventeen, young Elizabeth left for a sharecropper’s shack in the Mississippi Delta to wait for her husband’s return from the European Theater of combat. How could she know she was to become another storm tossed soul in the dramas constantly emerging on the rock where she was born?

Newfoundland’s geographic fate has kept it at the center of much of human history. Too often, the tragedies lead the island’s narrative, but there have also been great triumphs and advancements and the world has generally taken little note. Across the narrows from where my mother spent her youth, Cabot Tower sits atop Signal Hill, high above the ocean. The first trans-Atlantic wireless signal was received at the spot in 1901 by Guglielmo Marconi, sent via Morse Code from Cornwall, England. An infant industry of radio communications was given life on those heights. The ships sent searching for the OceanGate submersible passed within sight of the landmark as they departed St. John’s Harbor bound for the coordinates of the wreck of the Titanic with complex technology descended from that brief moment on a Newfoundland bluff.

Newfoundlanders are accustomed to their close community being filled with strangers from around the world, cruise ships and freighters, fishing boats, yachtsmen and wayfaring crews going down to the sea for adventure and income. Even though the Titanic’s tragedy was hundreds of miles off shore beyond the Grand Banks, the island became too closely associated with the sinking as a geographic marker, and later a staging point for scientists searching for the ship. The Titan submersible, carried past the narrows on a ship for a launch above the Titanic’s wreckage, now leaves its imprimatur of sadness on a people who have known too long and too well that the sea exacts a price for its glory and bounty, and preparation is the best hope for survival.

The captain of the Titanic, like the pilot and builder of the Titan, was brought to grief by hubris. The Titanic steamed almost full speed ahead into an ice field to make an impressive time in its first Atlantic crossing. Edward J. Smith, the skipper of the great ocean liner, wanted to improve on the overall time of another vessel of the White Star Line, so he sped into a sea of icebergs at 22 knots on a moonless night. The unsinkable ship was of a flawed design that did not seal off chambers of the hull from floods in separate sections. The Titan submersible, meanwhile, suffered the vanities of OceanGate developer Stockton Rush. His confidence in the integrity of his probe’s hull and comms systems despite criticisms by employees and external experts were certainly a part of the reason his vessel imploded and took his life and four others near the wreckage of the mythic ship. The Titanic is still counting casualties 114 years after she broke deep and took water.

I have wondered often about the Newfoundlanders down on Water Street going about their business and watching the mainlanders scurrying around with their technology and submersibles and big ideas. If you were born on that rock, you learned quickly the goal is to stay on the surface of the water, not consciously go below for a petty notion like adventure, or even a grander one like science. Newfoundlanders generally don’t see the ocean as a place for capricious endeavors. They take their sustenance from the deep, and the best information to be acquired is not what wreckage looks like on the sea floor, but where are the fish and how can they be caught.

Six years after the Titanic went down, there was another profoundly disturbing ship wreck along the Newfoundland shore. The SS Florizel, which operated between St. John’s, Halifax, and New York, went aground at full speed near Horn Head Point after departing St. John’s with 78 passengers and 60 crew. Weather had turned bad and visibility was almost non-existent. The captain had been trying to get his boat through ice in the dark and had the mistaken conviction he had passed Cape Race, which would have cleared him to open water for Nova Scotia. Instead, he took her into the rocks. Only 44 of the 138 passengers and crew survived.

Rescue efforts in the icy sea were perilous. One of the men trying to pull survivors from the rocks and debris was George C. Hiscock, my grandfather, still a private in the Royal Newfoundland Regiment and home from the Great War. George C., mentioned in a book on the tragedy, “A Winter’s Tale: The Wreck of the Florizel,” had been carried overseas to battlefields on the Florizel with 540 other volunteers from his island home. Private Hiscock was described as trying to row a dory close to the rocks in the surging sea ice to reach survivors. He must have wondered, at least momentarily, about the maelstrom of tragedies drawing the Florizel into her dark fate. She had also been dispatched in an attempt to save men stranded on the ice during the “Great Newfoundland Sealing Disaster” of 1914, which cost the island of 250,000 persons a total of 251 lives. The cultural and emotional devastation had not ended, though.

As England’s oldest colony, Newfoundland took great pride in serving the crown. When World War I improbably began, the king sent out word to the island for volunteers to muster up and serve in the European trenches. My grandfather became part of a legendary group of young men known to history as the “First Five Hundred,” and the “Blue Puttees,” who signed up to leave home and fight an enemy they knew nothing about in an unknown land where they would likely die for a cause they could not explain. The economy of the island was so poor there were insufficient funds to provide fully khaki uniforms and the puttees around their boot tops had to be made of denim, which gave them an iconic blue puttee look as they marched down to the docks while a band played a song of good cheer. The island, though, was about to sacrifice an entire generation of youthful intellect and energy as the Florizel shuddered into the open sea.

They went first to Gallipoli to relieve the Aussies, who were being slaughtered by “Johnny Turk.” The Newfoundland regiment arrived in time for winter and many of its troops froze to death before bullets could find them. Eventually, they were sent back to England to ready for an assault in the Somme River Valley in Northern France. They were ordered to dig in outside the village of Beaumont Hamel, near a ridge line occupied by the Kaiser’s soldiers and their machine guns. A sloping field of wire lay between British Expeditionary Force, which included the Newfoundlanders, Welsh Borderers, and Scottish Fusiliers, and when the orders came to go over the top, they were slaughtered. Of the 801 troops in my grandfather’s regiment, only 68 were able to muster the next morning on July 2, 2016. George C. Hiscock was one of the lucky ones, as am I, given the inescapable fact that my existence is a statistical anomaly of that war.

Grandfather had been “invalided out” of the service after being gassed at the Ypres Salient in France, and he was returned to his island home where everyone was stunned by the loss of so many young men, and the insensitivity of their commander who had told the media, “The attack failed only because dead men can advance no further.” In many ways, Newfoundland has not completely recovered from losing an entire generation that might have built a different future for the province. My grandfather, soon married and the father of four, tried being a merchant marine, and even went to the ice floes for the seal harvest. The wailing of baby seals with the blood and horror was intolerable after the carnage of France and he took a job in a pelting factory. Sharpening a knife on a wheel, his hand slipped and he cut his leg, which became infected. George C. Hiscock was dead of gangrene poisoning a week later at age 36, after surviving humanity’s deadliest days of combat at the Battle of the Somme where more than three million men fought and a million were either wounded or killed. Penicillin, which had been discovered and was beginning distribution, would have saved his life but had not yet reached the Newfoundland outports.

Both the association and proximity to these historic sadnesses has unfairly defined the island of Newfoundland. The Battle of Beaumont Hamel is appropriately memorialized but it has long been impossible to take a full measure of those lives not lived and what they might have meant. Another gathering of ships and technology and human resources on the docks at St. John’s Harbor to confront the second Titanic tragedy also resulted in global media racing to the city to write another sad tale. CNN’s Anderson Cooper was jetted north from Atlanta to anchor his evening newscast from the waterfront and Newfoundland once more became a global dateline for incomprehensible horrors, which subsumed a narrative of the inspiring international human efforts at cooperation to save lives.

Not even Cooper was likely aware that he was standing where it is almost certain the European settlement of North America began when explorer Leif Erikson is believed to have found safe harbor at the site of St. John’s. He is thought to have sailed down from a Norse outpost called L’Anse aux Meadows, a permanent early community on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, which served as a base for exploring rugged reaches of the continent a half millennium before the arrival of Columbus. International media also seemed equally oblivious when the great Russian and Japanese factory fishing ships had become so prolific at catching and processing cod on the Grand Banks that they had all but turned the Newfoundland staple into an endangered species. Bureaucratic nightmares developed before any Newfoundlander fisherman could get in his dory and go jig for a cod to feed his family because the government was trying to help the resource recover. Other countries had committed the crime of overfishing but the islanders were given the punishment.

When I think of my mother’s homeland down here in the Texas heat, I find my heart attuned to its people and hope that blood still runs in me. When the world was frightened by the events of September 11, 2001, tiny Gander Newfoundland gave back a belief in humanity. Thirty eight commercial passenger aircraft, inbound from overseas flights, were forced to land in Gander, a community of less than 10,000 souls. About 6500 people were stranded in a location that did not have hotels or restaurants to manage their numbers. No matter, word went out to “lend a hand, do what you can,” and homes were opened to strangers, schools and churches were turned into dormitories and cafeterias, and enduring friendships were formed.

A blog on the 9/11 Memorial website offers details:

“Area pharmacies filled prescriptions without cost, banks of free public telephones were installed so visitors could call home, and donations of toiletries, clothing, and food flowed in. Much of the food was stored at the Gander Community Centre’s ice rink, turning it into ‘the largest walk-in freezer in the country,’ according to Gander’s mayor, Claude Elliott.

“Once basic needs were met, the Newfoundlanders worked to entertain the visitors. They organized tours of the town, bowling matches, and concerts by local bands. Visitors also were introduced to regional cuisine, including stewed moose. When asked about their generosity, many residents responded that their efforts were not out of the ordinary. ‘For us, it was just every day,’ said Janice Goudie, a local newspaper reporter. ‘You don’t turn your backs on people in need.’”

The passengers did not forget the people of Gander, either. The crew and travelers on one flight established a scholarship for children in the area with $15,000 in donations, a total that has since grown to over a million dollars and provided assistance to more than 200 students. No one who has ever met a Newfoundlander on a street corner or in a pub was surprised by these developments. They would have only been shocked had things not transpired as they did in Gander, a community that serves as a last waypoint of overflight for outbound international planes from North America. Appropriately, perhaps, Newfoundland was also the departure point for the first non-stop Trans-Atlantic airplane flight by John Alcock and Arthur Brown, who endured 16 hours of mechanical and weather terrors in a refurbished World War I bomber. After leaving St. John’s, they finally landed nose first in a Galway, Ireland bog. Amelia Earhart, too, put the island in headlines when she flew out of Harbor Grace, Newfoundland, and became the first female to cross the Atlantic solo, touching down near Londonderry in Northern Island in 1932.

The Gander story was later turned into a wildly popular play entitled, “Come From Away,” the phrase Newfoundlanders use to describe outlanders either visiting or settling on their rock. The horror of 9/11 had been transformed into an inspirational tale by the kindnesses of Newfoundlanders for stranded strangers. My cousin, Mark Hiscock’s folk band, Shanneyganock, was asked to provide music for the opening night on Broadway. The play’s producer said the music for the show was inspired by Shanneyganock’s sound. Mark and his bandmates traveled the Maritimes and out to the provinces in the plains to sing for their homesick brethren. Happiness often has to be constructed from art when you are a Newfoundlander.

We can never seem, however, to avert our eyes from the tragedies. When I visited the battlefield of Beaumont Hamel in Northern France, I was stunned by the beauty and the silence as I tried to imagine what my grandfather and his comrades faced that morning. As the air slowly filled with birdsong, I walked among the trenches at the memorial site. Their edges were rounded by erosion and covered with soft green grasses. A few rusting artillery chassis were still pointed off to the German positions on Hawthorne Ridge and a giant caribou statue stood and faced defiantly in the same direction of the machine gun nests that had turned this grove to a killing field and a graveyard.

Sobbing as I walked past the graves of Welsh and Scots, I was approached by a docent from the museum. A young Newfoundlander serving in a summer job away from home, he asked if he might be of assistance. We talked, and I showed him the medal hanging around my neck given to me by my mother when I turned eighteen. My grandfather’s service medal on the front says, “For King and Empire, Services Rendered.” On the back, his name, “George C. Hiscock,” is etched with his enlistment number in the First Five Hundred, “N 297.” The docent held the medal gently in his palm and turned it over, studying it for some mystery he wanted solved. I told him it had never been off my neck, and never would be. He began sobbing without looking up, and softly excused himself from our conversation.

My mother’s life did not veer very far from the tragic Newfoundland script of her father’s. Though she lived a much longer time, she endured the kind of hardships that would have broken lesser spirits. After a few years of sharecropping cotton in the Mississippi bottomlands, my parents left for Michigan with my two sisters, looking for work in the booming industrial Midwest. Daddy got a job doing labor at the Buick Motor Division Plant and Ma carried burgers and open-faced sandwiches as a waitress in a short order restaurant. Her husband became violent, perhaps PTSD from the war compounding existing mental problems, and she eventually sought divorce after he was institutionalized a few times. Ma faltered, too, when brutal cancer rewrote her dreams. She lost the little coffee shop she’d owned for hardly a year, and the true love she had found with another man came to a painful end, but she never failed her six children, single-handedly making certain we knew we were loved while providing all she was able.

Ma spent some of her last years back on the island with her sister and two brothers and their families. She was there when I took my wife Mary Lou to Newfoundland and we ate giant lobsters, boiled in great cast iron pots, down by the ships, and we drove up into the Southside Hills to look out across that eternal expanse of water, still wondering about its glories and horrors. We also both got to know Noel a few months before he was reclaimed by the sea. Shortly after the call came to us on the North Carolina beach, we learned we would soon have a daughter and chose to name her Amanda Noelle, after the boy who loved the ocean.

Most of the ships that sought to find the Titan submersible over the Titanic are leaving for their home ports, departing St. John’s, possibly to never return. TV crews and writers are packed up and on planes to other datelines, and, in some fashion, at least partly oblivious to where they have been and what they have reported. There was simply too much to absorb in too short a period of time, but what a story they have left untold. Newfoundland, meanwhile, will also resume its role of being a stage upon which great historical accomplishments are played out while also serving as the rock against which history painfully beats itself. She is as hard and cold as a Maritime winter and soft and sweet as an innocent child. No one who has been there ever forgets that island, and those of us whose lives and families are connected to the isolated rock, define ourselves with a simple and unfaltering statement of pride:

I am a Newfoundlander.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The Boy Who Loved the Ocean

In Memoriam of Noel Hiscock, August 1986

by James C. Moore

You’re out there now on gabled winds

That shoulder gulls to finer heights

In every morning’s silvered mists

I’ll see your dance on water’s top

Where the ocean takes the early light.

You run the blue beyond my dreams

And own the sights I’ll never know.

Your storied home’s now distant shores,

The green of life between the rocks,

The mournful sound the foghorn blows.

I’ll hear your name on bounty’s wharves,

Your heart will furl their sails.

The stars that mark the way are you.

A sunrise calm will speak your love.

Your passage free their greatest tale.

I’ll climb for you the craggy peaks

And search beyond the shoreline’s clouds.

I’ll stride your race with aching breast

To give back your wins and keep your laugh,

The smiling way you made them proud.

I’ll take the pain god sends to me,

And pray one day I’ll understand:

Too much good he’d spent on you,

And in fairness called your spirit back

To spread more even all o’er the land.

Approaching Presidio from the north on Highway 67, there is a false sense you will arrive in a charming mountain village. Passing the silver mining ghost town of Shafter, as the road settles toward the Presidio Bolson drainage basin, the Chinati Range fills the distance to the west, marking the water course of the big river on the Mexican border. Ahead, a distant purple wall, visible even through the hazy summer heat, stands as a backdrop to the location known to historians, researchers, and locals as La Junta de los Rios, the junction of two rivers, the Rio Grande, and the Rio Conchos, which runs up toward the U.S. through the fertile bottomlands of Northern Mexico. La Junta is one of the oldest known habitats of humans in North America; archaeologists claim pottery shards and other detritus dug up through the decades put the time of early occupation at ten thousand years ago.

The Sierra Ricas, southeast of Ojinaga, have peaks approaching 8000 feet above sea level, and like the Chisos Range down river in Big Bend National Park, have pine and oak forests almost ecologically disconnected from the desert floor above which they hover. Mexico sets the Ricas in the Cañón de Santa Elena protected zone. The drainage basin, with its thousands of feet of sediment from ancient and historic floods, and the town of Presidio, are framed on the west and eastern sides by serrated mountain horizons and the cool air at those elevations fools travelers into thinking they are about to arrive in a pleasant escape from a desert day. Instead, the road takes them into a community frequently recognized by the National Weather Service as the hottest location in the continental U.S.

The glories of Presidio’s geography and history, I’m afraid, belie its attendant sadnesses.

“Always looks pretty from up here on the highway,” Gary said.

“Yep, but the perspective sure changes the closer you get,” I said.

“I’m looking forward to the River Road again.” The helmet head set made his voice as clear as if we were sitting across a table having coffee and talking. “But we need to ride up into the Chinati’s some time.”

“And get some dirt bikes and ride Pinto Canyon Road one of these days, too.”

We were motorcycling down from Marfa, America’s too cute town of artists, millionaires, and struggling service workers. The previous night we had camped and tried to sleep at what amounted to a KOA (Kampgrounds of America) for hipsters a half mile south of town. Our tents were put up free standing on a gravel and scrub weed surface, a privilege for which we paid $30 via credit card. The spot might have better served as a parking lot for the monied travelers burning a few hundred dollars a night to take their rest in teepees with wooden floors or refurbished mid-century travel trailers, often described as “darling.” Any REM sleep we aspired to was abbreviated by vehicles pulling up with lights blaring across the desert darkness and into our tents, which was only a prelude to howling coyotes, overnight truckers engine braking as they approached the village limits, and the soul-rattling wail of the Union Pacific train making its 3 a.m. passage through the Texas Trans Pecos.

There was also a brief session of projectile vomiting.

We had dined in the Paisano Hotel, often described with the modifier of “historic," more for the cast of movie stars who had resided there than for the architect Henry Trost, who had designed government buildings and hotels in the early 20th century from Tucson to Marathon, Texas. The restaurant, set against a calming courtyard with a large fountain, was named after the protagonist, Jett Rink, in Edna Ferber’s novel “Giant.” Stars of the eponymous movie, shot just outside of town, had stayed at the Paisano and gave the isolated accommodations a reputation closely associated with Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Dennis Hopper, and Hollywood’s biggest director at the time, George Stevens. The restaurant has never achieved any such greatness.

Gary, my long-time motorcycling pal, had decided he was going to pay for my birthday dinner at Jett’s. My resistance proved futile. I recall a juicy steak with an unusual jalapeno seasoning and jalapeno gravy over mashed potatoes and maybe even a jalapeno martini and a subsequent shot of tequila to cap the meal. The heat and spiciness of all food is measured in Scoville Heat Units (SHU), and the jalapeno is considered moderate with a level that ranges from 2500 to 8000 SHU, which is considerably milder than the habanero pepper that registers 100,000. My gastro-intestinal system was unable to make the distinction and was not fortified for such an assault, particularly when mixed with alcohol. In a few hours, I hastily unzipped my tent flaps and blew out a stream of a partially digested $100 meal into the desert wastes, an enduring travel memory and a graphic insult to my buddy’s kindness.

“Should we stop for the green chili enchiladas?” I asked Gary on the intercom.

“You tell me. We got time? You got stomach?”

“Not sure, if we want to make Terlingua by dark, and I do. Don’t want to ride the River Road in low light, and especially not in no light.”

“Yeah, but a town known mostly for its enchiladas and day time temperatures deserves a little love.”

“We better keep going, dood. It’s a long ride over there, and I’m not certain I’ve recovered from last night’s revery.”

Presidio began to look in spots like an un-zoned junkyard, empty warehouses, rusted automobile chassis, sagging fence lines, and storage tanks of various sizes and colors, led the way into town and the international crossing point. Border Patrol agents consider the assignment there to be almost a sentence of exile and live in groups of small, boxy houses with their families, unprotected from the sun, which becomes, after enough time, almost frightful to feel and see. Presidio struggles to be known as more than a lost outpost at the bottom of America but whatever bi-national charms it has tried to market will soon be overcome by the border wall. The federal government gave a no-bid, almost $2 billion dollar contract to a company to erect giant, metal bollards on the north bank of the Rio Grande. The graders and flat bed trucks and construction workers and engineers are already arriving daily from the ghost town of Lobo, upriver, where the detested resources, men, and materiel are being staged. The monolithic structure may reach across the city’s limits.

Ranch to Market 170, hugging the north bank of the Rio Grande east of Presidio as it crosses Alamito Creek and enters Big Bend State Park, offers an immediate lesson in geographic time with a young river cutting through an old volcano. The rider sees thorn and stone on the slopes set against a green ribbon of life at the water. Canebrakes stand up after you have passed farms drawing water to irrigate crops and then after a few more miles Chihuahuan Desert scrub proliferates. Lechuguilla spikes out of the rock, creosote bush perfumes the air after rain, ocotillo leafs out green within days of a shower and flames red-orange at the tips in spring. There is little alive that shows more stark beauty than a blooming ocotillo in the desert. Candelilla, the wax plant that supported a whole borderland smuggling economy a century ago, grows on the limestone ledges, along with prickly pear, cholla, sotol, agave, and chino grama grass on the slopes.

We rose on our motorcycles into the heart of the Trans-Pecos volcanic field in Big Bend State Park toward the Bofecillos Mountains, the eroded remains of a major volcanic center active roughly 27 to 28 million years ago. Nearly everything the road touches is its debris, which includes stacked lava flows, ash-flow tuffs, dikes, and volcanic necks. Colorado Canyon is a geological rarity, the only stretch where the Rio Grande cuts through igneous rock rather than the Cretaceous limestone that walls its other canyons, sawing down through dark lavas and welded tuff. The Hoodoos near the Big Hill are balanced remnants of the lava fields, sculpted by wind and water. The Rio Grande is a geologically youthful river that integrated the closed desert basins of this stretch of road only within the last couple of million years, which is why it seems to wander improbably through mountains rather than around them.

“I don’t think we’re going to make Terlingua,” Gary said.

“Not likely. Not sure I care. But not many places to camp after the Big Hill, except a commercial place in Lajitas.”

“There is that one RV park but they have grassy spots for tent camping,” he said. “And a big bonus is hot showers and a cold beer across the road.”

“Sounds like you’ve decided.”

“Yeah, it’s off season. I don’t think we’ll have to listen to RV generators running all night.”

“You’ve even written their marketing campaign.”

Our tents were up before dark and we did not make it across the road for a beer. I’ve always had a bit of disdain for the Lajitas mockup of the West. They have built a golf course along the Rio Grande, using precious water to keep it green in the hot and rocky heart of the desert. Not far from the first tee box is a low spot in the river where General Black Jack Pershing crossed into Mexico with his troopers in a fruitless pursuit of Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary who had brought terror onto American soil with his attack on the border town of Columbus, New Mexico. Barracks where Pershing’s men were bivouacked have been restored and made into guest rooms costing more for one night than what Pershing probably earned in a month’s salary.

Light was suddenly flashing through the nylon sides of my tent. Gary saw it, too, and said it was nothing we needed to fret.

“That lightning must be a hundred miles off,” he said. “Doubt it ever gets close to us.”

“Sure as hell hope not.” I was dozing off, beat up from the heat and the wind and the miles just as heavy rain drops splattered against my tent. “This isn’t missing us. I think it’s going to get bad.”

“Maybe. I’m just gonna pull up my bag tight and see if I can sleep through it,” Gary said.

In minutes, water was flowing into my tent, zipped tight, and the wind came down off the mesas with a force that turned the nylon into a sail or an airfoil, either of which was certain to send me airborne.

“I’m outta here, Gary,” I said. “I’m running up to the club house.”

“You’re crazy.”

I was soaked before I took a step and the rain felt like ice pellets on my bare arms. Lightning was so consistent I was able to get enough flashing illumination to make my way across the campground and reach the front door of the nearest building, which was the club house. It was locked. Behind me, there were bright fluorescents in a laundry room and when I tried it, the door opened. The air conditioning must have been turned down to frigid. I was wet and shaking with the cold and laid down on a hard table where people folded their clothes. Sleep was impossible and I soon saw Gary leaning against the wind and torrents on his way toward the laundromat. If we had gone around to the other side of the clubhouse we would have discovered unlocked double doors and would have been able to enter and sleep on warm, dry, soft couches.

Instead, we stood and shivered in the AC, waiting for first light. My tent, I discovered, had been blown into a stand of prickly pear and the nylon was shredded on the needles, strands of orange fluttered in the breeze. The sleeping bag was gone with the storm. After gathering what was left of our gear, we packed our bikes and left for Terlingua. I had spent many enjoyable hours there on the porch of the general store, looking east to see the sunset put the Chisos Mountains aglow in often unknown coloration. The cinnabar mined in the hills along the river near Terlingua had provided mercury for bombs and less violent types of manufacturing. An international chili cook off had brought attention to the locale after the mines had played out and mercury had lost its utility for electronic switching. Where once hundreds had lived in chosen isolation there are now thousands, a dollar store, coffee shops, boutiques, and glass domes for rent on web sites that enable weekenders to lay abed and parse the constellations. In the end, all things become Airbnb, and money runs through it.

“Uh oh,” I said.

“What now?”

I was a hundred yards in front of Gary and had topped a rise before Terlingua Creek. The ranch to market road intersected the normally dry creek bed with a low-water crossing instead of a bridge since there was rarely moving, live water.

“It’s Terlingua Creek, man. You aren’t gonna believe it when you get over the hill. Looks to be at least five feet of water across the road. We aren’t getting through here today, that’s for sure.”

“Holy crap.” Gary stopped his bike next to mine and we walked up to the edge of the water and mud blocking our egress. “What do we do now?”

“Only option is to turn around and go back River Road to Presidio and up to Marfa and then head east to Alpine and home.”

“Kinda outta the way, though.”

I shrugged, pointed at the obstruction of the thoroughfare, put my helmet on, and got back on my bike. We went west, anxious enough to turn north that we did not even stop at the Big Hill for the traditional gazing and gaping at the scenery where the Rio Grande shrank and snaked into the horizon. An hour later we came upon Alamito Creek and graders trying to blade a clearance through the mud and gravel and rushing water that covered the chip sealed roadbed. A highway worker said they hoped to have traffic moving again by the end of the day. We rode back toward Terlingua, our third run on the River Road in 24 hours.

About twenty minutes to the east, mud and gravel had come down a talus slide and made a fifty foot wide mound across the two lane. There were tire tracks through it, probably a four-wheel drive, and there appeared to be some supportive hardness to the mess.

“What do you think?” I asked Gary. “Should we give it a try?”

“No other choices are there, except go back to Alamito and sleep by the road and wait for the water to go down.”

“Looks like if I can put my tires in the car tracks, I won’t sink into the mud.”

“Good luck. I’ll be here waiting and watching.”

The motorcycle, about 900 pounds with a full gas tank, sank into the mud up to the skid plate about half the distance across the muck. I teased the throttle and spun up mud, sinking deeper. I got off and walked back to where Gary was enjoying the scene with his kickstand down and helmet off.

“Got any ideas?”

“Wait for a new ice age, maybe?”

Thirty minutes passed before a pickup came around the mesa and stopped. The driver, white-haired and at least 70, got out and smiled.

“This the kind of excitement I was looking for when I retired,” he said. “I assume you need some help.”

“Yeah, but it’s going to need more than muscle to get freed up,” I said. “Any chance you’ve got chain?”

“Even better, I carry a nylon tow strap. Let’s get ya outta there.”

We hooked the strap around the bike’s frame, just behind the front fork, and he looped it through a hook on the back of his F-150. I was barely able to keep the bike from falling over into the mud even though he pulled slowly and with great caution. When I was out, Gary ran straight across the tire tracks without a problem. I’m sure he was smiling underneath his closed helmet.

By the time we returned to Terlingua, the creek was down and the road had been opened. There was still mud and gravel and some water moving but we were out of patience. After too much discussion, we chose to plow through and crossed without incident as a few other motorcyclists stood by pointing and laughing, hoping for our demise, I suspect. Running north on 118 toward Alpine, I remembered the time Jake and I were racing to avoid feral hogs in the ditches at dusk and we did not notice a line of thunderheads building in front of the sunset. We avoided the wild animals but the storm with hail the size of marbles caught us out in the open near Kokernot Mesa. We pulled onto the shoulder and waited for the rain to ease, but we didn’t mind being cold and wet.

Few things are more beautiful and memorable than standing in a rainstorm in the American West.

There were only a few U.S. flags on display in my neighborhood the weekend of our country’s 250th anniversary. Maybe it’s tired of doing too much work. Ever since the first version was stitched together, we have asked it, over and over, to mean something as it flutters off the beds of pickups and sweats on beer koozies and swim trunks and decorates front porches, government buildings, and office towers in great cities. A quarter of a millennium of the American experiment under that unifying symbol, and the question still worth asking as we look up beneath the fireworks is a simple one.

Whose flag is it?

For a decade now the answer has been allowed to default to one movement. MAGA took the flag in the same greedy way it has taken everything, loudly and without asking. The Trump movement wrapped itself in the cloth until half the country flinched at the sight of red, white, and blue on a front lawn. Democrats and progressives, however, are guilty of letting that happen. They ceded the most powerful symbol in American life to people who carried that same flag through the smashed windows of the Capitol, and then they wondered why voters believed the other side loved the country more.

I think we need to stop wondering and should get busy taking back our flag. We don’t need it as just a branding exercise because the honest history of this country says the flag belongs to the movement that actually built the America worth celebrating, and that movement was not conservative. It was liberal and progressive, and yes, it always has been.

Consider the accomplishments of liberal politics.

Women vote in this country because seventy years of progressive agitation, from Seneca Falls to the suffrage marches, dragged the 19th Amendment out of a reluctant nation in 1920. Black Americans vote because the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were signed by a liberal Texan president who told his aides he was handing the South to the Republican Party for a generation and signed anyway. That is what public service looks like. LBJ was a man spending his own political fortune to enlarge the country’s freedom.

Your grandmother does not eat cat food in her old age because Franklin Roosevelt built Social Security in 1935 over the screaming objection of conservatives who called it socialism. She sees a doctor because Lyndon Johnson built Medicare in 1965 over the screaming objection of conservatives who called it socialism. They were wrong both times, and both programs are now so beloved that even the people who inherit that opposition must lie about their intentions to touch them.

The concept of the weekend itself is a progressive invention. The forty hour week, the ban on child labor, the minimum wage, the legal right of workers to sit across a table from ownership and negotiate. Every one of those was won by the labor movement and its liberal allies, and every one was opposed at the time as an assault on liberty. My father, who worked an assembly line for 33 years, got health care, paid vacation, and a modest retirement pension because of his labor union, the United Auto Workers. The liberty in question during those struggles was really just the liberty of a twelve year old to lose his fingers while working in a Carolina textile mill.

The air over Los Angeles was once brown enough to taste. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire. Liberals, though, wrote the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act and created the EPA, and the smog lifted and the rivers ran clean enough for fish and children. Public schools, land grant universities, the GI Bill that built the postwar middle class, Pell Grants that opened college to the working poor. All of it progressive. All of it opposed.

And what about medicine. The National Institutes of Health, funded decade after decade by liberal majorities, gave this country the polio vaccine campaigns, the war on cancer, the antiretroviral drugs that turned AIDS from a death sentence into a managed condition. I am old enough to have had a few colleagues who died of AIDS. I recall when young men went home to small Texas towns to die and the government of the United States could barely say the name of the disease. Public research money, fought for by progressives, changed that. Lives measured in the tens of millions, extended and saved.

That’s two and a half centuries of accomplishments.

MAGA, in the meantime, has built nothing. What it has torn down is a daunting list. The movement offers grievance as a governing philosophy like the tariffs that function as a sales tax on working families. Or masked agents pulling people out of Home Depot parking lots. MAGA executes the dismantling of the research agencies that produced those medicines, the gutting of the EPA that cleaned the air, the legal harassment of the universities that educated three generations into upward trajectories. MAGA’s proposition is a story in which America was great once, before the wrong people showed up, and can be great again if we punish them.

The deliverance of that punishment appears to be the provenance of the Supreme Court, which was remade by three Trump appointments. Under the color of law in just the past weeks, in Trump v. Slaughter, the injustices overturned ninety one years of precedent and handed the president the power to fire the leadership of independent agencies, at will, converting the referees of American commerce into employees of one man. In Louisiana v. Callais, it raised the bar for proving racial discrimination in congressional redistricting so high that Alabama was permitted, within days, to run its 2026 elections on a map a lower court had already found racially discriminatory, a map that erases a majority Black district and scatters its voters across three others. Think about that act more closely; examine its evil. The Voting Rights Act, the crown jewel of the Second Reconstruction, hollowed out by judges appointed by a man who lost the popular vote. The Court then erased the limits on coordinated party spending in campaigns, opening the money spigot wider heading into the midterms.

Yes, the Court rebuked Trump on birthright citizenship, six to three, and good for the majority. But there was no legal jiujitsu even the most skilled racist opinion writers might deliver to undo an obvious element of the Constitution. A president of the United States, though, had signed an order attempting to strip citizenship from babies born on American soil, a right written into the Constitution in blood after the Civil War, and it took eighteen months of litigation to stop him. The rebuke is hardly the story. The attempt is the story. Every lower court that looked at the order called it flatly unconstitutional and he pressed it to the top anyway, because the project for Trump and his sycophants is not law. Their project is the acquisition of power and expansive wealth.

And while that project runs, the till rings.

The financial disclosures released this week show the president took in more than two billion dollars last year. More than 1.4 billion of it flowed from his family’s cryptocurrency ventures, the meme coin bearing his name and the World Liberty Financial operation, businesses that barely existed before he retook office and that flourished precisely as his administration pulled back regulation of the industry. Reuters found the family’s crypto ventures generated roughly 2.3 billion in income while outside investors, more than a million of them, lost almost exactly the same amount. His net worth has nearly tripled since 2024. He flies on a 747 handed to him by the Qatari royal family and says he will keep it after he leaves office. A Gulf investment fund tied to a foreign government bought half of the family crypto firm for half a billion dollars while he was president elect. There has never been a greater concept for influence peddling.

Set those actions against the tradition he defiles. George Washington refused a crown and refused a third term and went home to his farm. Harry Truman left the White House with an Army pension and drove himself back to Independence, Missouri, and declined corporate board seats because he would not sell the presidency. Jimmy Carter spent forty years after office swinging a hammer for people who would never own a house otherwise. Lyndon Johnson, whatever his sins, and they were many and manifest, used power to give things away. Voting rights. Medicare. Head Start. He died knowing the political cost and having paid it, looking across the Pedernales River from his ranch at the Stonewall, Texas schoolhouse where the first Head Start class was launched.

Trump uses power to take. That is the sum of what he is doing and we are watching as if we were helpless. The presidency, in his hands, is a licensing deal and the biggest royalty citizens of this country are paying might be the way our nation is shrinking from the world. The foreign aid apparatus that fed the hungry and fought AIDS across Africa has been dismantled. Alliances built over eighty years are treated as protection rackets. The research enterprise that made this country the magnet for the world’s best minds is being starved while those minds book flights elsewhere. For two and a half centuries the American flag meant something specific when it appeared abroad. It meant that somewhere across the ocean there was a country that, for all its hypocrisies, believed its ideals were for export. That meaning is being liquidated, the way everything else is being liquidated, for parts. A nation that stands for nothing abroad will soon stand for nothing at home. The two have never been separable.

These are just a few of the reasons we need to take back the flag. MAGA has turned it into a loyalty oath to one man. Instead, we should think of it as a receipt. I view it as the receipt for Seneca Falls and Selma, for the eight hour day and the polio vaccine, for Social Security checks and clean rivers and the GI Bill and the moon. Every one of those achievements was progressive and every one was called radical and un-American at the time. Every one is now simply called America.

Democrats and the left must stop treating patriotism like a costume that does not fit. Fly the flag and mean it. Claim the Fourth and mean it. Say out loud that loving this country and demanding it keep its promises are the same act, and have been since Frederick Douglass stood up in 1852 and asked what the Fourth of July means to those left out of it. His answer was not despair. His answer was that the Constitution, honestly read, was a glorious liberty document, and the fight was to make the country obey its own founding.

That has always been our fight but this time the battle for our soul has been joined against people who care only about money and power and are running our government. What got them there was not one election among many. A movement that captures the courts, buys the referees, redraws the maps, and monetizes the office itself is not planning to lose gracefully. The window for stopping it through ordinary politics is open, but windows close. The midterms this fall are not about tax rates. They are about whether the machinery of self government survives in working order long enough to be handed to our kids.

The people who built the America worth loving should not whisper about it. The flag was ours all along and was sewn by the movements that expanded freedom, carried by the marchers who were beaten for it, planted on the moon by a program a liberal president launched. The other side borrowed it and hung it off a gallows on January 6th.

Two hundred fifty years in, the flag still belongs to whoever does the work of the founding, not the undoing of its principles. We all should go do the work required to sustain freedom and our democratic republic, and we need to carry the flag with us.

To be more specific, Texas is quietly dismantling the First Amendment. The State Board of Education is preparing to vote on a mandatory reading list, part of about 200 passages that could become required reading in kindergarten through high school, with a reliance on Christian perspectives and no clear guidance on how to place the stories in historical or devotional context. Six-year-old children will be read picture books titled “Noah’s Ark” and “David and Goliath” in their English classes. High schoolers will be assigned the second chapter of Genesis, the one where God makes a woman from a man’s rib and calls her a “helper that was just right for him.” Moses will be taught not as the protagonist of a Bronze Age narrative of uncertain historical provenance, but as a figure of established fact, a man who parted seas and received the direct dictation of the Almighty on a mountaintop. Instead of education, this is Sunday school with a curriculum code attached.

Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University, told a Fort Worth TV station that the problem was not that the lessons were about religion. “The problem,” he said, “is the particular way in which these lessons teach about religion. These are lessons that play religious favorites, and that’s not what public schools should do.” One board member, a Democrat, noted that the inclusion of other religions in the materials was not an “adequate attempt to change that bias.” She was right. There is no Quran on the list. No Talmud. No Upanishads. No Tao Te Ching. Just the King James Bible and the English Standard Version, both of them distinctly Protestant texts, being inserted into the instruction of children whose families pray in mosques, synagogues, temples, and the great secular cathedral of the living room on a Sunday morning. Church and state are no longer separated in Texas; they are now conjoined twins.

Unless, of course, you are Muslim. Thirty minutes northeast of Dallas, a group of Muslim Americans has been trying to build a neighborhood. The East Plano Islamic Center proposed EPIC City, which is 402 acres, more than a thousand homes, a K-12 school, a mosque, a community college, sports facilities, and retail shops. But Governor Greg Abbott doesn’t like their religion so he has vowed to stop the project and signed a law “banning Sharia compounds in Texas.” He ordered a blitz of investigations by various state agencies into the mosque and the development, while Attorney General Ken Paxton filed two lawsuits aimed at ending the project. However, there are no indications that the organizers of EPIC City intend to operate under Sharia law. The corporation managing the development, Community Capital Partners, agreed to abide by the Texas Fair Housing Act and implement fair housing policies. A federal investigation launched at the request of Senator John Cornyn found no violations and was closed without action.

The developers said the community would be open to non-Muslims and that it would follow Texas law. They said that, repeatedly, to anyone who would listen. Imam Nadim Bashir, a Florida and Texas native who leads the EPIC mosque, told The New York Times that Abbott had created “unnecessary fear,” based on misunderstandings about Sharia. None of that mattered, though. The Sharia-Free Caucus in the Texas House boasts 38 members, all Republicans, led by Rep. Brent Money, who put out a statement declaring, “We will not stand idly by as Islamic influences seek to transform our great state into another conquered territory.” Muslim families building a neighborhood look to these men in the legislature like an invasion. An occupation. A civilizational threat requiring legislative warfare and multiple simultaneous investigations by the full apparatus of state power.

Certain invaders are welcome, though, if they worship the right deity and know how to ignore what is preached. Greg Abbott, on June 22nd of last year had not noticed an author of a bill had tucked into the state’s $338 billion budget a $60 million provision to allow Texas to participate in the federal Summer EBT program. The Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer program would have given qualifying families $120 per child to pay for lunches during the summer months. An estimated 3.75 million children statewide would have qualified. Abbott vetoed it, the only budget item the Republican governor vetoed out of a $338 billion document. The sole excision. The single line he found intolerable. Not a weapons contract or a pork barrel highway project. Food for hungry children during the summer. That was the thing the Texas governor could not abide.

Christina Morales, a Texas Democratic Representative, said, “Abbott just slammed the door on hungry Texas kids by vetoing summer lunch funding. This decision to hide behind federal uncertainty is morally bankrupt and shows he’s completely out of touch with struggling families across our state.”

The Christianity of Greg Abbott involves Bibles on classroom walls along with hunger for three and a half million children during the months when school cafeterias go dark. The man who would instruct a six-year-old in the Golden Rule would not spend sixty million dollars to make sure that same child could eat a meal in July.

The late Christopher Hitchens, who had the most magnificent contempt for exactly this kind of performative piety, observed that religion comes from “the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge.” He noted with characteristic precision that “the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.” He was not being cruel, just accurate.

The texts that Texas now proposes to use as the spine of public school English instruction were composed by people who believed the earth was flat, that disease was divine punishment, slavery was acceptable, women were property derived from a spare rib and should be subservient to their husband. These are not peripheral curiosities of the scripture. They are its architecture. To call Moses a historical figure in a public school classroom is to do something pedagogically dishonest and constitutionally dubious. Moses may have existed, but not likely. Historians argue. What historians do not argue is that he parted the Red Sea because there is no evidence that he did. The evidence for that is exactly the same as the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is none.

Sam Harris, in “The End of Faith,” put the proposition cleanly enough that it bears repetition in any discussion of state-sponsored theology. He wrote that religion “allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.” He was pointing to the peculiar social contract of faith, the way that communal belief insulates individual credulity from ordinary scrutiny. Tell a man his wife is cheating on him, Harris noted, and he demands evidence. Tell him the creator of a 14-billion-year-old universe sent his only son to be tortured to death for the sins of creatures on one infinitesimally small planet, then rose from the dead three days later, and evidence is suddenly beside the point. It is enough that the community believes it. It is enough that it is old.

These fanciful stories from the ancients are losing their grip on the young, and this is surely part of what is driving the Christian frenzy in Austin and Washington. There has been a 17-percent drop in the number of U.S. adults who say religion is an important part of their daily life between 2015, when it was 66 percent, and 2025, when it is 49 percent, according to recent Gallup polls. This is the largest Gallup has recorded in any country over any 10-year period since 2007. The percentage of Americans claiming no faith, a group known as the nones, nearly doubled in size from 2007 to 2022, going from 16% to 31%. Among liberals, 51% now say they have no religion, and only 37% identify as Christian, down from 62% in 2007.

The institutional church is not dying. But it is shrinking, and it knows it, and what you are watching in Texas is the political expression of that knowledge. When institutions feel their authority slipping, they reach for the law and then the classroom. Finally, they reach for the children. The Inquisition understood that much. The medieval papacy understood it. Greg Abbott, who is not a subtle man, understands it in his own base way. You cannot win the culture through persuasion when the culture is walking away. But you can mandate attendance. You can put the commandments on the wall. You can make a six-year-old read about Noah’s Ark in English class and call it “classical education.” And then maybe tell that child about the lunatics who are tunneling into Mt. Ararat in Turkey, convinced they have found the petrified bones of the ark.

Hitchens, whose absence from this world is an incalculable intellectual loss, also noted, with the acuity that made him so infuriating to the devout, that “what kind of designer or creator only chooses to reveal himself to semi-stupefied peasants in desert regions?” This is a question that ought to be asked in every Texas classroom that is about to receive a King James Bible as a primary educational text. The God of Abraham made himself known to illiterate herders in the ancient Near East, spoke through burning shrubbery, and arranged for his moral code to be chiseled into stone tablets on a mountain, and this is what the Texas State Board of Education, in the year 2026, has decided the children of Houston and El Paso and McAllen need to absorb as foundational knowledge. Meanwhile, the sixth-grade world cultures course that once introduced those same children to the civilizations of China, India, and Mesoamerica is being eliminated.

The virus, unstopped, will continue to spread East of the Sabine and North of the Red River until all of America is speaking in tongues like Trump’s religious counselor.

Greg Abbott signs a law against “Sharia compounds” because, he says, Texas will not tolerate a religion using property and community to impose its law on its residents. Then he installs the Ten Commandments, the explicit legislative code of a specific religion, on the walls of classrooms attended by children who did not choose to be there. Abbott panics about a mosque at the center of a Muslim neighborhood and deploys twelve state agencies against it. Then he calls a Catholic school’s presence at the center of a Catholic neighborhood “education.” The Cato Institute, not exactly an institution known for left-wing sentiment, noted that the Muslim-majority world itself is “considerably secular” and that fearing Sharia rule in America, “whose tiny Muslim minority makes up only 1” percent of the population, requires an elaborate departure from observable reality. That should be one of Abbott’s campaign bumper stickers: Vote for Elaborate Departure from Observable Reality.

But observable reality is certainly not the currency of this transaction. Fear is the currency, and, as any competent demagogue knows, is most effectively manufactured by pointing at the stranger.

Donald Trump must also be mentioned because the evangelical Christians of Texas, the voters who put Greg Abbott in the governor’s mansion and keep him there, who weep at revival meetings and demand the Bible in schoolrooms and call themselves soldiers in a culture war for the soul of the nation, gave their near-unanimous political devotion to a man who has been found civilly liable for sexual abuse by a federal jury, convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, who paid hush money to a pornographic film actress while his third wife was pregnant with his fifth child, who dismantled USAID and cut off food and medicine to millions of the world’s poorest people, and who told American evangelicals what they wanted to hear about Jerusalem and abortion and the godless left while running casinos, cheating contractors, and lying with the casual fluency of a man who has never needed to tell the truth to get what he wants.

That is the Christianity of the Texas Republican Party. Not the Sermon on the Mount or the feeding of the five thousand with loaves and fishes. They probably have never even heard the phrase “whatever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.” They are more comfortable at a convicted rapist’s campaign rally with a cross on the stage.

Sam Harris, scientist, intellect, author, researcher, wrote that our world is “fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education.” He wrote that in 2004. Texas is now making it curriculum, and our only hope is that elementary children are smart enough to reject the idiocy.

Hitchens, in one of his most devastating formulations, observed that “the person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted.”

The farewell has begun but religion’s recessional from the stage of American politics is much too pedestrian. Still, nearly a third of Americans now claim no religious affiliation. The young, by every measure available, are leaving the pews faster than the faithful can reproduce. The theocratic turn in Texas politics is not a sign of Christian strength but an indication of Christian panic. You do not need to put your sacred text on classroom walls when your culture already believes it. You mandate it when the culture is drifting away. You fund investigations of mosques when you need a visible enemy to hold the coalition together. You call a Muslim neighborhood a Sharia city because your voters need something to fear, and the old fears are wearing out.

There is a word for governing a pluralistic, constitutional democracy by the religious standards of one faith while persecuting adherents of another and it’s a word that makes Americans uncomfortable, because we were taught that it could never happen here. Texas and Trump are making a strong argument for updating that lesson plan. Though perhaps not the way they intend.

My father was getting older and I figured spending too much time alone in his house on the edge of the woods in Central Mississippi. I thought I might convince him to move back to Michigan and be close to his children and grandchildren. One October day in Texas with a dry wind blowing through the Hill Country from across the Edwards Plateau, I decided I needed to take at least one more ride up to my Daddy’s front porch and continue my attempt to understand him. There was probably little he remembered about his household violence through the accumulating years and a couple dozen electroshock treatments, but I wanted to have another conversation.

I already knew he was unable to remember striking his wife or children or how his whirling fists and slinging leather belts had terrorized the people he had said he loved. I suppose time wrinkles a man’s memory as much as it does his skin, but I saw Daddy’s lack of recall as a kind of grace. His reminiscences were hazy but gentle and carried him softly back to his boyhood in the South, and they created for him attentive, loving parents and a bountiful farm he happily shared with his siblings. He was often seen gazing into a blank distance and smiling, and I thought I knew what he saw out beyond the tree line.

I never stopped trying to repair whatever was broken between my father and me, though I had no idea what that was or how it had been damaged. I was never going to be the son who hunted and fished or took joy from the sound of a gun in the woods, but I still hoped there might be a chance he could come to appreciate his eldest son. As he sat the old wooden swing and the late afternoon sun splintered through the loblollies, I tried to begin a conversation that might have meaning. Daddy had his Mason Jar tumbler of whiskey with a few peppermint candies swirling in the glass and looked at me with a puzzled expression.

“You know, when I was comin’ up, buddy boy, horses could still fly.”

He looked at me, hard, and seemed to dare me to challenge his statement, which, of course, I did.

“Daddy, I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Hell, I mean what I said, that’s what I mean. Horses could still fly.” He ground his lower teeth hard against his upper dentures and pursed his lips like he was expecting me to provide evidence to prove he was wrong.

“Daddy, horses could never fly. That’s silly, and you know it.”

“Aw, hell, don’t tell me, buddy boy. Horses could fly when I was a boy.”

“Why would you say such a thing? Can you imagine a horse actually flying?”

“I don’t have to imagine nothin’, damnit.” He had only raised his voice slightly, as if he had at least learned how his angry baritone had frightened his children when they heard it coming down the hallway.

“Okay, then, tell me about the flying horses.”

“Ain’t nothin’ to tell but they flew. I done seen it. So did Poppa. He seen it all the time when he was a boy, too. We saw ‘em flyin’ every mornin’ when we went out to chop cotton. Pretty as could be. Appaloosas and mustangs and every kinda horse there ever was, except with big wings.”

“I’m supposed to believe my father saw horses fly?”

“I done told you that already, damnit.”

“Well, why aren’t they flying now?”

“They was just gettin’ to where they couldn’t do it any more when I was little. They did what ya call evolve away from it, is all. Spent more time on the ground and didn’t need their wings as much.”

He reached down slowly for his drink and turned his head away from me, disgusted, I thought, by my unwillingness to accept such an idea.

“Well, I’m telling you, horses can’t fly,” I said, softly. “They never could, Daddy. There are horses in mythology that have wings and flew, but those are just stories, and there has never been any such animal that lived on earth.”

“Aw, go to the devil; you don’t know what in the hell you’re talkin’ about. What do you think Poppa and I saw then? He seen ‘em before 1900 and I seen ‘em when I was comin’ up in the 20s.”

“I don’t know what he saw, or you. I have no idea.”

“You damn sure don’t have no idea. Cause I know what I know and I know horses used to be able to fly. Cain’t nobody tell me what I seen with my own two damned eyes.”

He threw back his head and swallowed a gulp of whiskey and looked at me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you’re right. I guess I need to do some more research. I never heard of horses flying but I suppose that doesn’t mean it’s not true. I’ll check it out.”

“You go ahead and do that, buddy boy, and you’ll find out what I already know.”

The pecans were falling early from the trees that year and we went out behind Daddy’s house and gathered a large bag. He walked me through his garden and explained what he had grown in each crop row that summer and told me about the boy who came to chop the weeds because Daddy was no longer able to swing a hoe. A healthy garden with good tomatoes and corn was always a matter of pride to my father and to be able to grow things well was an important measure of a man.

“You shoulda tasted my tamaters, buddy boy,” he said. “They was as big as my fist and the sweetest you ever did see. I had more corn than I could put back, too. I got a freezer full of it and gave the rest to some colored folks.”

Back inside, we cracked the pecans and spread their fruit across a cookie tin. Daddy got out a stick of butter and sliced thin pats to place on each pecan half and then he used a shaker to sprinkle salt across the top. As they heated in his oven, we shared the whiskey and he told me more stories of being a boy on a poor dirt farm during the Great Depression. The one he had been repeating since I was little was about a headless horseman my grandfather and he had come across one morning while taking a buckboard wagon loaded with hay into town.

“He had his hands up just like this,” Daddy said, holding his arms out. “But they wasn’t no hands and the reins was just floatin’ in the air at the ends of his sleeves. And right where his neck shoulda started and his head oughta been there wasn’t nothin’ but space and a big ole top hat was ridin’ in the air above the empty place where his head was supposed to be and he was ridin’ a big, ol’ painted mare in circles around a oak tree in front of a farmhouse. Poppa said, ‘Son, do you see what I see?’ And I told him, ‘I sure do, Poppa.’ He told me, ‘Don’t you ever talk about this to no one, son, ‘cause all they’ll do is think you’re crazy.’ I never did tell a soul, either, until Poppa died and then I told all y’all kids.”

“What’s that story supposed to be about, Daddy? Can’t be real.”

“I’ll tell ya what it’s about. It’s about we don’t know nothin’ about this ol’ world. They’s things we ain’t ever gonna understand and I reckon it’s ‘cause we ain’t supposed to.”

After eating the pecans, Daddy asked me to draw for him very hot bathwater and pour into it a bottle of vinegar and a half box of Epsom salts. Hot water and vinegar when combined with the salts, he had heard from someone in Starkville, was another reliever for arthritis that supplemented the whiskey and peppermint candy. My father’s bones and all their connective tissue had grown creaky and aching from the uncountable hours he had spent lifting bumpers out of a General Motors metal press and stacking them on wooden pallets. While he soaked, I wandered around Daddy’s cluttered and disorganized house and wondered how he made it alone, what value or purpose did he see in his isolated existence in these far woods, a thousand miles from his children?

My father had hoped he might have frequent visitors, but his children had busy lives and were inclined to spend their family vacation time in locations slightly more appealing than rural Mississippi. I was the closest to him, geographically, in Texas, and was rarely able to make the trip north for a visit. We had talked about his return to Michigan to spend time with his children and grandchildren and I was pleased when I later heard he had made that decision. Daddy found a small bungalow less than a mile from Ma’s old restaurant up by the Chevrolet plant, Joyce’s Coffee Shop, and a few more miles from the assembly lines where he had turned his muscles to the physical labor he had endured to provide for his family.

My last conversation with him on his porch in Sturgis was painful. I waited until he had finished a couple of whiskeys to get an honest opinion of what he thought about his life. There was a chance, I thought, he might speak of his behavior and what had made him angry or crazy, but I do not think he ever understood his own actions. My father was too trapped in the daily struggle of providing.

Was I supposed to offer forgiveness? Did he even know what needed forgiving?

“I just never had me a chaynch, buddy boy,” he answered. “The crops was never good enough down here to be a farmer and I never did make enough money on the line up north. I never got me a chaynch to do what I wanted.”

“I guess that was to be farmer?”

“That’s what I wanted when I come home from the war. But when I was up north, if I’d of had me some money I’d a bought some land around them factories and gotten rich. I wanted to buy that lot on the corner of Hill and Fenton Roads years before they’s anything there and now they’s a big ol’ McDonald’s and grocery store there. I’d a made a million dollars, buddy boy.”

“Did you hate working in the factory and building cars you couldn’t afford to own?”

“I hated a lot of stuff. But in them days we did what we had to do. The Buick job made the house payment and fed you kids. But that’s about all it ever did.”

“Do you regret going up there, Daddy?”

“Naw. I don’t think about it much. Wasn’t no point. I did what I had to do to provide. I had yer mumma and three of y’all kids and it was all the work I could get so I took it. That’s all. When there was six of y’all, I had more kids than I could afford. I never had time to look up and think about anything else. Besides, I didn’t have nothing to sell but my arms and my back.”

“You think things might have been different for you if you would’ve stayed in Mississippi and married a girl from down home?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I was ever gonna have too much just ‘cuz a the way I come up. We was raised to grow crops and take care a animals and they just wasn’t much use for that after a while. I reckon I was lucky I got one a them factory jobs in Michigan. I know it wudn’t a hell of a lot a money, but I did what I could, that’s all. I don’t know that I’d of had me any better chaynch down home.”

A few years after he had returned to Michigan, my father’s heart began to mark its final beats. I remember him swimming back and forth across the expanse of wide blue glacial lakes in Michigan to maintain his fitness in his sixties. Even when Daddy was working 12-hour days in the car factory, he often went outside in the snow and did curls with an old barbell he had been given and he frequently showed us his ability to do one-armed push-ups. His biceps always looked to me like fat hams and his physical strength was as frightening as it was impressive. His diet, however, was unrestrained, and Daddy consumed anything that might be fried or sugared, and his appetite was only becalmed before leaving for work by multiple eggs, giant rashers of bacon, ham, fried potatoes, buttery toast, and an endless flow of coffee. Eating was one of his great joys.

Heart failure began to affect the flow of blood and oxygen to his extremities and his doctors told us one of his legs needed amputation. I was at his bedside when he returned from surgery and the drugs were massaging a nervous system that had been pulled taut by his endless decades of worries and anger. He was still under the effects of narcotics when the intubation was removed hours later but he raised one of his mighty arms and pulled me close.

“I love you, son,” he whispered.

Those were words I did not recall ever having heard from my father. He had begun to tell his children he loved them as he aged, but usually in a general sense when there were at least a few of us gathered. I had no memory of his referring to me as his son and did not notice this absence until the term issued through his gasping breath. The words seemed so simple to speak. I wish I had heard them frequently as a boy but here they were, and no matter how much wrong he had done, I loved the sound of that sentence from my father. What son would not?

“I love you, buddy boy.” He did not seem to want to release his hold on me.

In his dreams, as he tilted slowly toward his end, Daddy had begun to be visited by his Uncle Horace, who had taken him hunting and fishing as a boy and who he had loved the way he would have liked to have loved his father. Horace was constantly gliding through Daddy’s sleep and telling him he was waiting for him and where they were going to find abundant deer and catfish and bass and the kinds of horses they were going to ride across eternity.

“I don’t know if I’m gonna see Momma and Poppa after I’m gone,” Daddy told me. “I hope I do. But I’m damned sure gonna be with Uncle Horace. Ain’t no doubt in my mind, buddy boy. He’s waitin’ on me right now.”

Before he was transferred to a nursing home for rehabilitation after the removal of his leg, Daddy pleaded with doctors to freeze the excised limb so it could be buried with him when he died. He was insistent that he go to the next place with all of his parts, the whole and robust man he had been when he walked through his troubled world. The doctors convinced him they were not allowed to preserve severed limbs and that God would make him complete again once he crossed over to whatever came next.

After making reasonable progress with rehabilitation in a nursing home, Daddy was transferred to a group housing facility where he lived in a private residence with other people dealing with infirmities. My sister Becky visited him often and he asked her to order him an inflatable raft because he intended to go fishing as soon as he recovered his health. Daddy had focused his contemporary dreams on an area north of Las Vegas, which he had decided was crossed by streams overcrowded with fish and there was rich soil to grow all the crops he needed to feed himself and visitors. No one was able to convince him that this spot on the map was a desert. Becky asked him how he might get himself into the blow-up raft with just one leg and Daddy took predictable offense at the question.

“I can damn sure figure it out by myself,” he said. “I don’t need no-damn-body, no way, no how to tell me how to do nothin’. I been gettin’ by just fine till now and havin’ one leg ain’t gonna change that.”

Only a few weeks passed before Daddy was exasperated by living in a home with what he considered older people in conditions he viewed as near imprisonment. He had not yet mastered the use of his hand-powered wheelchair but when no one was looking he managed to roll down a ramp to a sidewalk and disappear. Caregivers had no idea where he had gone but Daddy had always had strength and independence and he was having difficulty relying on other people. He was discovered many hours later a few miles from the home when someone had called to inquire about his identity after he had rolled up and asked for a drink of water. I expect Daddy was escaping westward toward his Eden in the Nevada desert.

A few days after he was returned to his group living facility, a caregiver found my father lying motionless on his side. His hard and love-starved heart had stopped and all of the fierce blood that had flowed through him had pooled along one side of his body. The muscles of Daddy’s arms had atrophied and shriveled and when he died, he had the same skinny bird-like appendages that he had carried around as a teenager. I still thought he looked like a giant, though, even in his final repose, just as he did when he was standing upright and daring the world to test him with whatever it wanted. He thought nothing but injustices came his way and he was determined to be stronger and larger than the wrongs constantly arrayed against him.

The part of my father’s life that I was proudest of was the time he had spent serving his country during World War II and I arranged for his casket to be draped in a United States flag. Daddy was buried off Hill Road, not far from the factory where he had worked and the house he and Ma had purchased when they were young and hopeful. I have Daddy’s flag in a triangle box above my writing desk down in Austin. He belongs to the soil of Mississippi but even in death he wanted to be near his children in Michigan because I believe he had at last come to know and love them and he wanted whatever there was to have of us even after his permanent departure. Daddy kept an empty space in the graveyard beside him for Ma, just in case the girl he never stopped loving chose, in the end, to come back to him.

One of his last statements to me revealed a perspective I could not have anticipated, which suggested to me my father sought a peace that went beyond his interpersonal experience, and that parting thought made me happy.

“I don’t have no regrets about nothin’,” he said. “I lived in the best times they was to live in. I seen human bein’s go from ridin’ in buckboard wagons to walkin’ on the moon. You cain’t see much more ‘n that, buddy boy.”

Thinking of him that way has given me a measure of peace, as a man who did not waste time second guessing himself, and who did not see the Buick car plant as a the force that killed him but as the fount of his livelihood and the opportunity he exercised to care for his family. Daddy and Ma scraped by on small collections of ten-dollar bills to make their $74 dollar a month mortgage payment, and often had to ask for government assistance, but they never stopped trying and their work was honorable. We were certainly not privileged but the rise of the automotive industry assuredly saved us from dirt farms and living as sharecroppers down in Dixie. There was more to our lives than would have ever been possible if Daddy had stayed in the South busting the soil with his muscled back.

I hope he left this world knowing he had made the right choice.

I know a spot on a red rock canyon in southeastern Utah where the Colorado River bends through geologic time to make its confluence with the Green River, and if you stand at the canyon rim at dusk and watch the light do what it does to sandstone, turning it from rust to copper to something approaching a fire before nightfall, you will understand, without anyone having to tell you, why this country was once worth fighting for. The canyon does not ask the observer’s party affiliation or demand a loyalty oath or your tax bracket or the last name of the president you voted for. The epic beauty simply exists, enormous and indifferent and heartbreakingly glorious, a fact of the earth that outlasted every empire that came before us and will abide long past whatever shambles we make of ourselves now.

We should be thinking about that canyon on the Fourth of July, 2026. We should also be thinking about the buffalo grass of the Flint Hills turning silver in an August wind, and the Pacific fog coming over the Marin headlands at dawn, and the red clay roads of Georgia leading up through longleaf pine to a sky so blue it seems painted by mighty gods. We should be thinking about the living inheritance of this republic, the national parks, the public lands, the rivers held in common trust for the children not yet born. We should be celebrating 250 years of the most improbable democratic experiment in human history.

Instead, eight of nine headline acts have pulled out of the official birthday concerts in Washington. The president wants to replace them with a rally. The man who is supposed to steward this moment has announced he would like a Make America Great Again celebration at the capital, because he is, in the end, incapable of conceiving of an America that does not center on himself. Leonard Steinhorn, professor of communication and history at American University, clearly explained this absurdity when he recently said, “In 1976, the bicentennial was about us. In 2026, it is about Donald Trump.” His assessment is terribly accurate even as a new poll has found that 69 percent of Americans believe the signers of the Declaration of Independence would be disappointed in the way their democracy turned out. We have arrived at the birthday party, and nearly seven in ten of us are already sorry we came.

I have spent decades writing about Texas and U.S. politics, which is to say I have spent much of my life watching democracy degraded by people who professed to love it. I covered the machine bosses of South Texas and the oil men of West Texas and the culture warriors of the suburban megachurches, Iran-Contra and lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and through all of it I believed that the American system, however battered and abused, retained enough structural integrity to survive its worst custodians. I am no longer certain that is true.

Madison warned us when he wrote that the absence of trust is, “The end of government. It is the end of civil society.” Washington, in his Farewell Address, told us that partisanship and distrust could unravel liberty more effectively than any foreign adversary. These were not idle cautions but prescient warnings from men had fought a revolution and then had the harder task of building institutions that would outlast their own ambitions. They understood that the republic they were creating was not a gift to be received but a discipline to be maintained, and that its survival depended entirely on the willingness of its citizens and their leaders to honor its covenants even when honoring them was inconvenient.

What is happening in this country right now is the systematic dishonoring of those covenants by the people entrusted to uphold them. The Department of Justice has been turned into a personal law firm for a president who views the law as an instrument of grievance rather than a guarantor of liberty. Inspectors general were removed in the night. Judges and their rulings have been defied, mostly without consequence. Allies have been lectured and adversaries flattered. The press has been labeled an enemy of the people and the Congress, that body Madison called the “deliberate sense of the community,” has mostly watched, applauded, and asked if there is anything else it can do in the service of one man’s self-glorification.

The best summation of this sad birthday event that I could find came from Lisa Gilbert, the Co-President of Public Citizen, who said, “Donald Trump and his henchmen have sabotaged what should be a unifying moment and appear intent on instead creating a highly divisive, corporate-funded, ideologically extremist exercise.”

On July 4, 2025, last year’s anniversary of this country, the president signed what he called, without apparent irony, the One Big Beautiful Bill. Nothing about it has been beautiful for the disadvantaged in this land of plenty. The Congressional Budget Office estimates it will cut more than a trillion dollars from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program over ten years, eliminating coverage for somewhere between 7.8 and 11.8 million people. The American Medical Association called it an outrage. Harvard health economists said it was devastating. Rural hospitals are already warning of closure. The elderly who depend on Medicaid to pay for nursing home care have also begun to understand that their government has decided they are an inconvenience. Children who have never known anything but health care coverage are about to learn the difference between a country that invests in its people and one that abandons them for a tax cut that flows upward to people who do not need it. In Texas, just one state in the union, we have 1.1 million children living without health care.

There is something almost medieval about the arithmetic of this. The bill cuts $1.1 trillion from health coverage for the poor and the sick and the old, and it uses those savings to extend tax benefits for the wealthy and was signed on the birthday of a nation founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. The irony was turned into policy.

There is now the matter of the war with Iran, which began with the certainty of men who had never read the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that was already effectively controlling and monitoring Iran’s nuclear development. Those uninformed U.S. leaders are presently in a desperate search for a deal that will require giving back everything we destroyed to get an agreement that will provide Iran more historic, economic, and political leverage. In 2018, Donald Trump tore up the Obama nuclear deal only because it had been negotiated by Barack Obama, and because his political brand required him to undo every accomplishment of his predecessor regardless of whether that achievement was working. National security experts across the ideological spectrum maintained that the agreement was, in fact, working as designed and Iran’s nuclear program had been constrained, enrichment had been limited, inspectors had access.

What happened next, after Trump’s denial of JCPOA, was entirely predictable to anyone who was paying attention, which evidently did not include the people making the decisions. Iran expanded its nuclear program dramatically and developed advanced centrifuges that enriched uranium to 60 percent, a short step from weapons grade. By the time the American and Israeli bombs fell in operation after operation named with the grandiose vocabulary of an action movie franchise, Iran had already built the leverage it needed to extract a better deal than the one we had torn up.

According to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, “The war handed Iran a weapon far more usable than nuclear weapons, which is control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which flows a fifth of the world’s oil and gas and a third of its urea fertilizer.” The experts now say that whatever deal emerges will need to be more robust than Obama’s, account for Iran’s improved technology, and will need to offer Iran economic incentives, because Iran is now negotiating from a position of strength that we handed them.

Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association said that Trump’s negotiators were “too incompetent and technically ill-informed to understand the significance” of what was on the table in the early rounds. The president, meanwhile, continues to insist that the Obama agreement was the worst deal he ever saw. A deal he is now trying to replicate at higher cost, with greater concessions, after a war that did not have to happen. The cruelty of this is not just strategic but is also immoral. The people who died in that conflict, American and Iranian alike, lost their lives in service of one man’s vanity.

I think often about the Rio Grande, and travel its reaches with great frequency. I have known the river most of my life, and understand what it means that we are now pulling people out of its water not to save them from drowning but to put them in chains. The crackdown on immigration that this administration has pursued, along with the Texas governor who imitates the cruelty with a Christian joy, has exhibited a relentlessness and a savagery that would have been unimaginable in any previous American era, and it has not made us safer. We are smaller, though, and have become the kind of country that separates families for the crime of wanting to live. We deport people to countries they fled at peril of their lives and fill private detention centers of campaign donors with human beings who have not been charged with any crime. America is building concentration camps. We used to put that kind of thing on the list of what we were fighting against.

The Founders were themselves immigrants to a land that already had people in it, a fact the birthday celebrations will not dwell on. But the myth they built, however imperfectly, was a story of refuge, the idea that people fleeing persecution or poverty could come here and be remade. Emma Lazarus wrote the words on the statue in the harbor, and we have spent 140 years arguing about whether we meant them and if we have been worthy of their promise. The current administration has decided that inscription was little more than a poet’s folly.

I cannot stop thinking about our greatest legacy, which is our national parks and the great geographic gift of our part of this continent. Since January 2025, though, the National Park Service has lost more than 4,000 permanent employees, roughly 24 percent of its permanent staff, gutted through DOGE layoffs, forced resignations, and buyouts. The Forest Service lost an additional 3,400. Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget proposed cutting the Interior Department’s budget by 30 percent, including a billion-dollar cut to the Park Service itself, with proposals to transfer some sites to state control, which in practice means commercialization or closure. At Yosemite this spring, entry fees went uncollected because there was no one to collect them. Lines to enter the Grand Canyon stretched for hours. Rangers who had spent careers learning the ecology of specific places were told their services were no longer required.

Naturalist John Muir wrote that the clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness. Teddy Roosevelt, who was many things that we might not celebrate today but who understood something about the land that most presidents never have, stood at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in 1903 and gave the gathered crowd ageless advice. “Leave it as it is,” he said. “You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.” Although I have visited almost all our major national parks, no place has filled me with as much of nature’s wonder and awe than the Grand Canyon. I have crossed it rim-to-rim on foot a dozen times, always grateful that Roosevelt’s vision included national park lands and his advice has governed our public lands policy for more than a century. This administration, though, is treating it as a suggestion made by someone who no longer has a vote.

Instead of thinking about our country’s natural glories and our shared citizenship this Fourth of July, we are confronted, instead, with having to contemplate Trump and his ego and what we have allowed him to do to us. “In 1976 it was about us and 2026 it’s about Donald Trump,” said Leonard Steinhorn, of American University. “And I think that’s a fundamental difference, and it may be why you’re going to have a very divided electorate on this celebration.”

I do not want to leave you in the canyon without the light, though, because the light is still there and always will be as long as the great world turns. Canyonlands National Park and the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone and Yosemite are all indifferent to our politics, and that is, somehow, both the saddest and the most hopeful thing I know.

This country has been in darker rooms and found its way to the window. We did not dissolve after the election of 1800, the most bitterly contested transfer of power in the young republic’s history. We did not fracture permanently after the Civil War, though the wounds of that conflict bled for another hundred years and, almost incomprehensibly, remain a suppurating injury. We did not surrender in the Depression. We did not disintegrate in Watergate, when a president who had abused every power of his office resigned because the machinery of accountability still worked, and the people still believed it should. In 1969, during the summer of a year that came after assassinations of great leaders and riot and a war that was devouring the country’s moral credibility, Neil Armstrong stepped off a ladder onto the surface of the Moon, and 600 million people around the planet stopped and wept and felt, for a moment, that we were still capable of the extraordinary.

I do not think the Moon landing healed America but I do believe it was a reminder of what possibilities lay before us and that we were capable of more than just recovery from harm. We should cling to that notion because there are still teachers in underfunded classrooms who are teaching children to read and to question and to want more than they were handed. There are still doctors in rural clinics who are treating patients who cannot pay, because the alternative is not treating them, and that is not a choice a doctor makes. There are still journalists writing about things that powerful people do not want written, in outlets that cannot always afford to pay them enough. There are still lawyers filing suits in courts that are still, however imperfectly, ruling on the law. There are still people standing at the borders of this country, not with weapons, but with water and food and the stubborn conviction that human beings deserve to be treated as human beings.

And there is still the land. I’ll always go back to those canyons or ride my motorcycle through the buffalo grass still bending in the wind across the High Plains. The Pacific fog still comes over the headlands at dawn, and the longleaf pine still reaches for the Georgia sky, and the Rio Grande still moves to the sea, however diminished, however contested, however burdened with the grief of everything that has happened along its banks. The land of America does not know what year it is and does not know about the heinous bill that was signed on its birthday, or the war that didn’t have to happen, or the 11.8 million people who will lose their health care, or the rangers who were fired, or the families that were torn apart at the border. Our beautiful and spellbinding geography simply endures, and in its endurance it offers us the only invitation that has ever really mattered.

We need to be worthy of this and start again. As Roosevelt pointed out, the ages have been at work on it, and we can only mar it, but we have not marred it beyond recovery yet. Two hundred and fifty years is not very long. The canyons are 70 million years old. Whatever we do to ourselves in the next few years, they will abide and outlast us. The question is whether we will survive ourselves and our choices, and whether the country we leave behind will still be one that deserves to stand at that rim and feel small and grateful and alive.

Happy birthday, America. I love you, and am grateful to have traversed your beauty and experienced your opportunities. We are sorry about the party. I am confident we will try to do better. We always have, eventually, and we have to believe we still can.

Why do voters surrender to such nonsense?

One lead example is a lack of health care insurance. Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the nation. No other state is even close to our sad statistics. In 2024, the U.S. Census Bureau confirmed that 16.7% of Texans overall lack health coverage, while 21.6% of working-age adults, more than one in five, have no insurance, nearly triple the rate in states like Massachusetts.

It’s worse if you are a child in this state. We have abandoned our young while marketing them as our bright future. Texas continues to have the highest rate of uninsured children in the nation, at 13.6% in 2024, up nearly three percentage points from just 2022. About 1.1 million Texas kids went without coverage last year, that’s nearly a quarter of the nation’s 4.6 million uninsured children. One state. One quarter of the country’s uninsured kids. A child born in Texas without parents with resources will be forced to depend on emergency rooms and charity care.

The remedy to this crisis, though, has been sitting on the table since 2010. The Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion would extend coverage to hundreds of thousands of low-income adults, people who earn too much for traditional Medicaid but too little to qualify for marketplace subsidies. Forty states and the District of Columbia have accepted it. Texas has not. Fifteen years of ideological obstinance dressed up as fiscal conservatism, while working Texans bleed and rural communities collapse.

From 2013 to 2020, Texas had the most rural hospital closures in the country, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report. Doctors continued to leave areas with hospital closures, giving people even fewer options for care. In communities where the local hospital was often the largest employer, the emergency room, the obstetrics ward, and the only place within sixty miles to treat a heart attack, the doors simply closed. A state legislator from San Antonio, the lone Republican defying his party after it voted down a Medicaid expansion bill, said, “Unfortunately we are stuck in a decade-old narrative that has forced the closing of many rural hospitals and less access to physician care. Fiscal conservatism was denied today.”

Fiscal absurdity would have been more accurate. Texas Republicans denied billions of dollars in federal Medicaid matching funds, money Texas taxpayers had already sent to Washington, in order to make an ideological point about the size of government, while their own constituents drove four hours to the nearest emergency room and their hospitals went dark. That is not governance. It’s more like cosplay governance, wearing that rodeo belt buckle the size of a hubcap while your neighbors go bankrupt from a hospital bill.

But, hey, if you think that’s ignorance, consider our public schools in one of the fastest-growing states in the union. The population is surging, cities are expanding, suburbs are metastasizing across formerly agricultural land at a pace that strains infrastructure and schools alike. In any rational governance framework, a booming state invests in the public institutions that give that growth meaning, roads, water, and above all, schools. Texas Republicans, true to their idiotic ideology, have chosen a different path.

In 2025, the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 2, establishing what they have branded the Texas Education Freedom Accounts program, a $1 billion school voucher scheme that allows families to use public taxpayer dollars to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, transportation, and other education-related costs, with awards averaging about $10,000 per family. The price tag, of course, is not expected to hold there. The $1 billion cost for the first biennium is expected to balloon to $7.9 billion by 2030–31, all while traditional public schools have seen their per-pupil funding dwindle under the pressure of inflation with minimal increases from the state. Districts across the state are firing teachers and closing campuses.

The promise from Governor Greg Abbott was that this was for the poor, for families trapped in failing schools, for those who needed options, which was inane and disingenuous spin. The experience of other states tells the true story. In North Carolina, which has a similar voucher program, a 2025 state report found nearly 90% of voucher recipients were already in private schools after income limits were lifted, with participating families earning nearly twice the typical household income. It is, as critics said it would be, a subsidy for the wealthy to keep doing what they were already doing, paid for by the public schools their children do not attend.

In rural Texas, the consequences are already visible and they are not abstractions. Education researchers have described the coming impact on small-town school districts in terms that ought to stop a reasonable person cold. One education researcher described voucher findings from the last decade as “catastrophic,” citing learning loss comparable to the impacts from COVID-19 and Hurricane Katrina for students leaving public school systems. The communities that thrive around their schools, and in rural Texas, those schools are everything, the football team, the band, the pride, the reason people stay, and the town may not survive without them.

Meanwhile, the Republicans who voted for this program continue to talk about parental rights and educational freedom, as though freedom were a concept that applied only to parents with means and mobility. The parents of a kid in a two-stoplight town in the Trans-Pecos, with no private school within fifty miles, have been offered a check they cannot spend on anything real, while the legislature drains the institution that actually serves their child. And yet rural Texans have voted consistently and overwhelmingly for Republicans tearing apart the state’s institutions.

In fact, conservatives have decided, after due consideration of all the state’s other lingering issues, that what public schools most urgently need is a sixteen-by-twenty-inch framed copy of the Ten Commandments on every classroom wall. Governor Abbott signed Senate Bill 10 in June 2025, making Texas the largest state in the nation to impose such a mandate. Texas lawmakers had already required classrooms to hang “In God We Trust” signs in 2021, allowed unlicensed religious chaplains to supplant mental health counselors in public schools in 2023, and approved new Bible-infused curriculum materials in 2024. The march of Christian nationalism through the Texas school system has been neither subtle nor slow.

When Democratic lawmakers proposed that the bill include moral and ethical texts from other faiths like Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, to reflect the actual diversity of Texas children, those amendments were rejected. One faith. One set of commandments. On the wall. Every day. For children of every background, every tradition, and none.

The hypocrisy compounds itself the moment you turn your eyes toward how Texas’s political leadership has treated its Muslim residents. Texas politicians have investigated a planned Islamic community called EPIC City in North Texas, alleging without evidence that it would be governed by Sharia law, running investigations that have so far turned up no wrongdoing. One political consultant described fears over Sharia law as the new border, a political lightning rod capable of energizing Texas voters almost instantly.

In sum, though, my state requires Christian scripture in every classroom while its politicians gin up hysteria over a Muslim community that has committed no crime, violated no law, and poses no threat. The same lawmakers who invoke religious freedom as their reason for posting the Ten Commandments treat the existence of Muslim Texans as a sinister conspiracy. When a Texas high school recently had students handing out free Qurans, it prompted an official investigation. A student named Kennedy Williams, expressed the hypocrisy very clearly. “I find it really weird,” he said, “that they are kind of pissed about it since we’re forced to have the Ten Commandments in every single classroom.”

While they are working to ruin public schools and chasing Muslim ghosts, Texas Republicans are also wasting millions on the fraud of voter fraud. Ken Paxton used the full resources of the Texas Attorney General’s office, staff, investigators, subpoenas, press conferences, to hunt for the massive voter fraud he assured Texans was corroding their elections. He filed lawsuits. He issued warnings. He challenged ballot counts. He tried to get the Supreme Court to throw out the electoral votes of four states after the 2020 election. And he wouldn’t stop. After the millions in taxpayer dollars spent and the years of investigation, the documented cases of coordinated voter fraud in Texas remained vanishingly rare, individually prosecuted, statistically irrelevant to any election outcome.

What the investigation did produce was a $6.6 million judgment against Paxton, paid by Texas taxpayers, after several of the whistleblowers who reported him to the FBI successfully sued him for wrongful termination. And Paxton’s impeachment trial, where the Republican-controlled Texas House voted 121–23 to impeach him, cost Texas taxpayers over $5 million, the majority spent on lawyers and investigators.

So the man who claimed to be the guardian of the people’s money spent the people’s money hunting a phantom, got impeached by members of his own party, and left Texans with an $11 million tab for the privilege of his tenure. Then he announced he was running for Senate.

The curtain still has not come down on Paxton’s theater of the absurd. He is, by any conventional measure of political viability, a man who should not be electable. He was indicted in 2015 on felony charges of duping investors in a tech company, a case that dragged on for nine years before ending in a pretrial agreement requiring him to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution and complete community service and legal ethics education. He was impeached by his own party’s supermajority in the Texas House. He was acquitted in the Senate, where his wife, Angela, sat in the chamber through testimony about his alleged affair as his mistress waited in the Senate’s foyer. Angela was recused from voting on her husband’s fate, but after 38 years of marriage, she filed for divorce on what she described as “biblical grounds,” adding that “in light of recent discoveries” she did not believe it honored God to remain in the marriage.

A man who preaches family values. Whose party posts the Ten Commandments in schoolrooms. Whose political identity rests on the foundation of Christian morality. Divorced on biblical grounds by his own wife, who sat through a Senate trial about his affair and found out there was more she didn’t know.

Paxton’s opponent in November is James Talarico, a Round Rock native, eighth-generation Texan, former public school teacher, Harvard-educated policy thinker, state legislator, seminary student, and devout Christian who drives a Chevy pickup and wears Lucchese boots. He credits his minister grandfather for instilling in him the principles of Christianity, which he applies to politics, and hopes one day to become a pastor. He is not a caricature of coastal liberalism. He is, in almost every external way, a Texas Republican’s idea of a Texas Democrat, which is to say, indistinguishable from a Texas Republican until you read the policy positions.

Talarico’s primary victory speech barely mentioned Donald Trump. “We’re done being divided. We’re done being played,” he said, invoking his Christian faith and promising a politics of love. “We’re not just trying to win an election. We are trying to fundamentally change our politics.”

The structural mathematics of a Texas Senate race remain forbidding for any Democrat, though. Republicans have won every statewide election here since 1994. The party apparatus, the donor class, the rural media environment, the gerrymandered psychology of the Texas electorate, all of it tilts hard against a flip. Paxton, though, is not a typical Republican candidate. He is a man with a criminal record by any reasonable definition, a pretrial diversion is still an admission of culpability, an impeachment, an affair, or two, a divorce on biblical grounds, and a Trump pardon from federal corruption charges doing the work that acquittal could not fully accomplish. He is carrying more baggage than the average Greyhound bus station.

There are sane Texans who will not tolerate these depredations on our state. And we keep asking why our fellow Texans continue returning to the ballot box and handing power to people who have demonstrably failed them? Why does the man with the highest uninsured rate in the country keep getting reelected? Why does the attorney general who wasted millions of dollars on a phantom voter fraud investigation win a Senate primary?

Part of the answer is the basic machinery of single-party dominance, gerrymandered districts, suppressed turnout, a media landscape that amplifies grievance and minimizes accountability, a Democratic Party that has not built the infrastructure in this state to consistently compete. But that is not the whole answer.

The rest of the answer is something darker and more durable and that is the successful substitution of cultural identity for material interest. Texas Republicans have spent thirty-four years telling a significant portion of their electorate that the real threat to their lives is not the closing of the rural hospital, but the teaching of evolution. Not the uninsured child, but the transgender athlete. Not the corporation drilling on their land, but the immigrant crossing the river. They have replaced governance with theater, and a significant number of Texans have decided they prefer the show and keep buying tickets with their votes.

James Talarico appears to understand this. His campaign is built on the wager that enough Texans are tired of the theater to elect something real. The bet is audacious and it may even be correct. But the state of Texas has been making the other bet for thirty-four years, and the outcomes include more than a million uninsured children, hospitals gone dark, schools defunded, rivers of taxpayer money flowing to religious academies and crooked attorneys general, and a Senate candidate who had to be pardoned before he could run for office.

My love for Texas is, personally, greater than my disdain for its politics. Our history, geography, weather, landscape, and, yes, the people, still make this a great state. But greatness is not the same as governance, and somewhere along the way, the people running this place confused the two, or, more likely, knew exactly what they were doing to disassemble the social contract and tear it up. The voters of Texas will, meanwhile, have a choice in November between a man who embodies confusion and immorality or a man who is offering to end it.

Whether they take it is, as it has always been, entirely up to them

When Interstate 75‘s construction began to rise up through Central Michigan, my fascination with roads became almost feverish for a boy. The idea was exhilarating to me that the same slab of concrete running near my neighborhood could connect me to California or the Rocky Mountains. Nothing more was needed than wheels and an engine and fuel. The Interstate Transportation and Defense System was conceived by an American president who had led the nation to victory in a great war, and he envisioned a time when our country might be under further attack and would need to be able to move men and materiel for defensive combat. Instead, we spent decades building a network of roads that became a kind of economic circulatory system.

While I was early dreaming of where southbound roads might take me, my father was a bit befuddled by the new “superhighways.” The infrastructure of every location he had ever lived was laid out with right angle intersections of two and four-lane roadways and there were generally stop lights and signs to control traffic flow at intersections. Using an on-ramp to merge with high speed traffic on an interstate was a process he was unable to process. Before his first time on I-75, I tried to make Daddy understand that he had to accelerate as he went down the ramp so he could ease over into the passing traffic. Instead, he rolled slowly down with his blinker flashing, and when we reached the bottom, he came to a full stop and looked back over his shoulder for a break among the flow of oncoming vehicles. I knew enough to keep my mouth shut without offering further guidance as an eight-year-old.

The idea of the interstate system was entrancing for quick travel but I grew more enamored of the roads through small towns and how those connections informed life and commerce. The divided highways offered speed, and gas, food, and lodging, but as we rolled through the hills of Kentucky and Tennessee on narrow state roads, making our way to Mississippi, even a child saw the culture and how the miles altered expressions of business and public art. I am certain these modest experiences of travel to visit my father’s family in the Mississippi bottomlands were what birthed my interest in the “Mother Road,” Route 66. Author John Steinbeck had used the phrase in his 1939 masterpiece, “Grapes of Wrath,” trying to describe the critical nature of the highway to survival by the Dust Bowl diaspora making their way to California.

"66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land,” he wrote. “Highway 66 is the mother road, the road of flight."

I read of Steinbeck’s Joad family when I encountered his novel in high school and developed an urge to travel Route 66’s full 2448 miles from Chicago to the Santa Monica Pier in California. With neither money, nor a vehicle, I convinced a boyhood friend, Butch, recently returned from Vietnam, to join me on a hitchhiking adventure down Route 66. I assumed his long hair and beard were going to be impediments to drivers picking us up from the road’s shoulder but once we found the old alignment near Springfield, Illinois, we had little trouble getting lifts and spent only two nights sleeping in the brush by the side of the road before we had crossed Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Sections of the historic pavement had been covered over by interstate construction by the early 70s but local municipalities had pressured the federal government to leave till last the connections that bypassed their main streets and downtowns.

In Arizona, we were dropped off on a painfully hot sidewalk on the east side of Winslow. The sun was directly overhead and there were no shade trees nearby and while we were trying to decide what to do next a pickup stopped. The driver did not get out but simply looked into the bed of his truck and motioned with his eyes for us to jump up, which we did, gladly. The road noise and wind were too loud to have conversation in the back of the pickup, so we did not talk but we watched the broken white line’s hypnotic visual beat. When the driver stopped to let us off, we were only about five miles west of Winslow. We jumped down and he waved as he turned down a dirt road to the south toward the Mogollon Rim. Night rolled up slowly from the east but I saw the lights of Winslow behind us starting their flickering against the dark. The horizon to the west was a low ragged line made by distant mountains and there was a faint glow of yellow behind the ranges.

“Just great,” Butch said. “Another night of sleeping in the dirt next to a highway.”

“What the hell else are we gonna do?” I asked. “Hopefully, we’ll get a quick lift to Flagstaff tomorrow and then we can head on up to the canyon. Need to get an odd job or two to get some food money.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Butch was usually quiet even when we were boys and whenever he smoked the weed that he carried in his backpack he took on a kind of deep silence that was private and made me worry and it was a part of why I asked him to join me on this trip. I think he had slept enough nights outdoors in the Vietnamese jungles and had no patience for desert heat and dust.

“I think we’ve been pretty lucky to get rides for 1500 or so miles and get where we are,” I said. “Look at us. I sure as hell wouldn’t give us a ride.”

“I’m going to try to sleep,” Butch said, “since I expect to spend the entire day tomorrow suffering in the Arizona sun.”

He went down below the Route 66 pavement and laid out his sleeping bag and started rolling a joint to smoke before he nodded off. There was not a lot of traffic that night but we saw headlights reaching out across the desert along Interstate 40, which stretched east and west a few miles south of the old road where we were about to camp. The sky was black as the edge of the universe and made a great bend of stars. They appeared unfamiliar to me and I watched them trying to see if there was evidence of the Earth moving beneath the heavens.

The morning sun in the summer does not let you rest late in the American West and as we climbed up to face the flow of westbound traffic an aged Chevy truck edged onto the shoulder. The driver swung out of his seat and came around to the tailgate as we approached.

“You boys looking for work?”

He was tall and his jeans were shining in the early light. The old baseball cap he was wearing had the insignia of some Major League team, but it had been worn off by dirt and time. Long strands of wiry black hair hung from under the cap’s edges and almost reached the shoulders of his denim shirt.

“I guess we kind of are,” I said. “But we’re mostly hoping to get to the Grand Canyon and do some hiking.”

“You need money for travel, don’t you? I don’t think you’d be out here hitchin’ if you had much money.”

I looked past him and saw two children leaning against the rear window in the cab of his beaten down pickup. They were as brownish as the bondo on the truck’s fenders and were smiling brightly and made me worry less about the man’s intentions.

“What kind of work?” Butch asked.

“I’m building a house.” He took off his cap and dragged his fingers through his greasy hair and looked at his dusty work boots. “I can’t afford a full-time crew to help me. I need some boys like you to fire the kiln and make some bricks. It’s an adobe house. You interested?”

“What’s it pay?” I asked.

“I can do three dollars an hour.” The man shrugged. “That’s it. But you can pitch your tents at our place, and we’ll feed you three good meals a day. My wife’s a good cook and you can take my truck into Winslow at the end of the day, if you want.”

Butch and I looked at each other and agreed without speaking. We put out our hands to shake. We thought anything was better than sitting on the blacktop in the July sun and waiting for another vehicle to stop. I only had eleven dollars left and we both needed money to continue traveling through the summer. Our plan had always been to find piece work along the way and this job had simply rolled up in front of our extended thumbs.

I jumped into the cab of the truck and Butch settled into the back. The little girls were both about five years old and ignored me as their father slipped behind the wheel.

“I’m Robert,” he said. “I’m a Navajo, full-blooded, but Christian.” He put out his hand and it was coarse as old wood.

“Oh. Okay.”

“I think it’s obvious that god put you out there on the side of the road to help me finish our house. We’ve been living outdoors a long time.”

“Sure.”

Robert stayed on the blacktop for almost half an hour and then turned north in the direction of a far plateau. The road was a simple track of dirt, and dust spun up tiny tornadoes behind the truck. We drove for twenty minutes or so and did not talk much over the rattling of the truck and I was relieved when a canvas tent and the rough frame of a house came into view. A flap of the tent opened and a small woman with thick legs stepped out holding a baby. The two little girls next to me jumped excitedly and said, “Mama, mama.” Rips in the sun-faded vinyl of the truck’s bench seat appeared to lengthen.

The location was ideal for building a home. The red walls of a mesa were close to where the house’s foundation had been set and they offered protection from north winds. The rock face extended to the southwest and provided a natural leeward position to hide from western rain and snowstorms. Robert had also poured the slab to make the front of his home face the sunrise. Sunsets off the back porch might be obscured as the sun moved north of the mesa in the summer but autumn and winter views were likely to be spectacular.

“This is where god put us,” Robert said as we climbed out of the truck. “It’s a good place to live.”

“Yep, it is.” Butch dropped his backpack on the ground and looked around for trees but there were none. He did not care for trees after Vietnam because too much could be hidden in a jungle. “I like it here.”

“Hello. I’m Cecilia.” Robert’s wife smiled and waved a hand at us as she held the baby. “Are you hungry?”

“Yeah, we are.” She had caught me looking at a table with rice and beans and corn tortillas.

The names of Robert’s family did not sound Navajo, but we did not think about that and ate the warm tortillas that we had smeared with beans and rice. Robert stacked wood in the kiln and began to stoke a fire. After the flames had begun to grow, he came over and grabbed a few tacos and went back to work the blaze. The day was already growing hot and we worried about working constantly around flames while dealing with the desert sun. When the fire was finally crackling, Robert got some more tacos and then he went to an old cement mixer and pulled a rope to start the motor. He poured buckets of water into the opening as he chewed his food.

“You boys ready to work? Might as well get paid for today.” Robert hollered over the noise of the tumbler.

He explained how to mix the mud and sand and water and straw, how to pour it into a mold, and when the brick form was to be placed in the kiln for baking. Cecilia watched from in front of the tent. Her skin had the color of someone who lived constantly under the sun. We were unable to determine if she was a Navajo. She had managed to work Jesus into our brief conversation while we ate and was curious about how much we thought about the Son of God. We were not thinking about Jesus and only wanted hot food in our stomachs and also a little money in our pockets.

Robert stood next to Cecilia and watched us as we began to mix, mold, and bake the adobe. His two children played around the front of the tent on the hard, red ground. After about a half an hour of drinking coffee and scrutinizing our nascent skills, Robert opened the door of his truck.

“I’m going to work,” he said. “I won’t be home until around dark. Just keep making bricks. I’ll pay you cash for every day. You can take off whenever you want. But I hope you’ll stay and help us.”

He had suddenly left us alone with his family, complete strangers, and trusted us to stir mud and straw and bake adobe to help the completion of his home construction and we were still working when Robert returned that evening. Cecilia was standing over a propane stove finishing preparation of a meal. He motioned for us to stop and sit at the wooden picnic table. Robert pulled out several crumpled bills and smiled.

“The lord provides,” he said as he handed both of us thirty dollars in tens. The skin of his hands was cracked and there was grease or dirt under his fingernails. His name was stitched in red lettering across a white oval above his shirt’s breast pocket. Butch and I smoothed out the wrinkled cash and folded it into our wallets.

“I prayed for you boys to appear, and here you are. I don’t know what further proof we all need of the presence of the lord.”

I got up and walked over to the kiln to check the fire. The temperature was dropping quickly and because our first night in the desert had been cold, we planned to spread our sleeping bags near the kiln.

“Look at all you have done today.” Robert nodded in the direction of the bricks we had spread on the other side of the tent. “This is not by chance. This is what god has planned. My family is grateful to you and the lord.”

“We just needed to make a little money for traveling,” Butch said. “How many days do you think you’ll need us?”

“There’s a lot to do.”

“Well, sure,” I agreed. “But we can’t be here all summer.”

“We’ll take care of you. You’ll eat well. And there’s always my truck for trips into town. Thank the lord.”

“We’ll get your bricks done, and maybe start with the walls,” I told him. “But we can’t stay all summer.”

Butch looked at me and was close enough to hear the conversation. The offer of Robert’s truck did not stop us from immediately feeling trapped. We had only a vague idea of the distance back to 66, but we knew how long it had taken for us to reach the construction site from the old highway riding in the truck. I wondered how Robert might react if we left. One of his daughters came over and climbed into his lap and his gentleness with her eased our increasing apprehensions.

For five days we worked without rest in the high desert sun of Arizona. Robert came home each evening and was thankful for progress and then he offered us a nightly wad of wrinkled bills. He paid without fail. Butch had asked for use of the truck the two previous nights and was told by Robert that it was not running properly, and he did not want to risk an additional trip into town. I began to worry.

“I’m pretty much ready to get the hell outta here,” I told Butch. “This guy talks about Jesus every night and he keeps us trapped in a box canyon. We’ve got enough money. It’s time to go.”

“If he won’t let us use his truck, exactly how are we supposed to get out of here?” Butch asked. “Are we going to walk to Flagstaff?”

“I don’t know. But I’m leaving. This guy’s religion and everything else is just starting to feel weird.”

“Like I said, how in the hell are you leaving?”

“Walking, if I have to.”

Butch had kept his sleeping bag pulled up over his head as we talked. Wood that was aflame in the kiln collapsed into embers and snapped loudly.

“Okay, so we need to leave,” he said. “If he won’t give us the truck tomorrow night to go to town, that’s a bad sign. We’ll walk out of here after they have all gone to sleep.”

“How many miles do you think it is back to the black top?”

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll just walk it.”

By the time the sun was turning faded and odd Arizona colors on Friday evening, we had begun to raise the walls of Robert and Cecilia’s house. A crude slurry had been used for finishing and Robert was very happy with what we had stood up. Butch asked about taking the pickup into town for a weekend dinner but Robert again suggested the engine was running roughly and he did not want to add the mileage of an optional trip into Winslow. He said he hoped to have it fixed in the coming week. Presently, he began a recitation about the mysterious ways of the lord and randomly quoted scripture.

The fire was burning loudly late that night as we rolled our bags and tied them to our packs while Robert and his family slept in their tent. The desert blackness was shimmering over our heads, made deeper by the new moon’s cycle, and was dimly lit with crystalline, white dots. Carefully, we walked out of the beautiful canyon onto the red dirt of the lane and did not look back until we were at least a mile from the yellow glow coming from the kiln.

“He’s going to get up in the morning and come get us in his pickup,” I said. “We aren’t going to get anywhere. We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t have a gun. The lord’s gun, of course.”

“Just shut up and keep walking,” Butch told me. “We’ll get out of here.” He was swinging his arms and keeping his focus on where his feet were falling. He knew about productive marching. “We can be to the blacktop before daylight if we don’t waste our time bitchin’ at each other and we just walk.”

The tiny colored lights of Winslow were smudged across a distance of many miles and there was no way for us to estimate the expanse of desert we had yet to cover. We were certain to still be walking in the morning and Robert was likely to come upon us as he was driving to his job. While I was looking at Winslow’s glow Butch pointed away from the city in the direction of the southwest. Minuscule headlight beams bounced against the night and moved slowly across the faded seam where the desert and the sky came together.

“That’s either 66 or I-40,” he said. “We might as well walk straight in that direction and we can avoid going into Winslow. We’ll hit 66 first.”

“Across that fence? Into the desert?”

“Got any better ideas? I don’t know what else to do,” Butch said. “It’s either that, or just sit here and wait for our pal Robert because he’s going to find us on this path if we don’t get off of it.”

He started toward the barbed wire. We checked our water bottles to make sure they had not fallen off and then we threw our packs over the fence and struggled to avoid getting snagged on the wire as we climbed into the open range. For the next six hours, we picked our way through the prickly pear and sage, pulling cactus needles from our legs, stumbling over rocks and cutting ourselves on ocotillo while trying to measure progress in the direction of the far highway. Before the eastern sky had begun to brighten, we heard the sound of engines and tires across a roadbed. We were finally on the shoulder of Route 66, standing in front of our packs when the orange circle of the eastern sun moved slowly skyward.

“All right,” I said, “now let’s hope the lord inspires someone to give us a ride so we can escape from one of his servants before he comes to get us.”

A blue Buick Riviera stopped almost as quickly as I had made my little sarcastic prayer and the driver energetically went to the trunk and opened it for our backpacks.

“I’m going as far as Needles,” he said. “Where are you fellas headed?”

“Flagstaff or Grand Canyon,” I answered.

“I’ll get you to Flag, then. Jump in.”

He was wearing navy slacks and black loafers with tassels. His shirt was powder blue and the thin blonde hair was combed back from a low forehead. I thought he looked like a salesman because he appeared to not yet be forty but had the fleshy middle of a person who had spent a lot of time traveling, sitting, and eating. I was in the front seat again and Butch was expecting me to manage the conversation, but I did not have a chance to find a subject before the driver spoke.

“How are you boys with the lord?”

“Um, I don’t know,” I sighed. “I guess we’re just traveling and not thinking about stuff.”

“Well, it’s an important question, you know. Our faith.”

I turned my head to the back seat to see if there was a reaction from Butch and discovered that he was rolling a joint. He might have been planning to smoke it in the car because he had returned to that place where he did not care what other people thought.

“We aren’t thinking about our faith right now,” I said. “We think a lot about food and water and sleep and getting a ride somewhere. We want to see the country.”

“Well, I should tell you about my faith then. My faith is so strong I believe I can close my eyes, take my hands off of this wheel, and the lord will steer my car.”

I saw Butch in the rearview mirror as he sat up straight, but he did not put down his rolled joint, and I now certain he was going to light up.

“Well, faith is a powerful thing,” I said. “It can probably accomplish almost anything, don’t you think? It doesn’t really need to be proved.”

“It can even drive my car. You boys don’t believe me, do you? Looka here.”

“Sure, we do,” I said. “We really and truly do.”

“Just watch.”

I did not want to watch. We were in the right lane. As he rolled his head back and closed his eyes, the man driving the car slowly lifted his hands from the steering wheel and laid them in his lap. I reached halfway across the front seat and prepared to return the vehicle to its lane when it began to drift. Fortunately, he was driving a new car and the wheels were aligned and the tires were straight and true and balanced accurately and we held a line for almost a mile before the car began to move to the left toward passing traffic.

“Isn’t that amazing?” He put his hands back on the steering wheel and turned to look at his passengers. “Isn’t the lord amazing? I prayed for him to take the wheel, and he did.”

“Yes sir,” I answered. “He sure is amazing.”

An eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer with a chemical tank mounted on back whirled past doing about eighty miles an hour just as he had taken control of his vehicle back from the lord.

“Pretty amazing,” I whispered to myself.

Stretches of Route 66 kept connecting to I-40 and we saw the dying motels and restaurants and tourist attractions along the nearly abandoned road. A few businesses were still functioning but most of their customers were flying by at seventy miles an hour and were oblivious to the past and the romance of slower travel. The bypasses of the downtowns were the last sections to be completed, and some communities would not survive the diversion.

The lord’s disciple let us out in the middle of Flagstaff at the Southern Pacific rail station. The railroad’s right of way ran very close to the course of Route 66 and we had seen several long trains crawling across the southwestern landscape and they had been made almost tiny by expanses of sky and earth. A hamburger place was having a special on a bag full of burgers and Butch went across the street while I sat on the bench in front of the station and gazed morosely at the 200-foot-tall ponderosa pines on the side of the mountain range north of Flagstaff.

“You suppose we’re going to have to deal with the lord in the bottom of the Grand Canyon?” I asked Butch when he returned.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But if he’s going hiking with us, I’m going to see if he’ll carry my pack.”

The Mother Road was net yet a half century from its 1926 commission that summer Butch I went a wandering in our heedless youth. I do not think he has ever been back and I heard he has lived his life in the east. My compulsion to know that road has not ended. I have never stopped returning to Route 66 on motorcycles and cars and trucks, staring out the windows of jetliners at 35,000 feet, looking for stretches of history that have outlasted 70-80 mph speed limits and the misguided notions of man.

There ought to always be that one last road to run.

Every generation of Americans has faced the moment when the republic their ancestors bled for demanded something of them in return. The Civil War generation answered with rifles. The Greatest Generation answered on the beaches of Normandy. Our generation’s test is more mundane in its theater but no less consequential in its stakes. Ours happens at the voting booth, the county courthouse, the state legislature, the school board meeting held on a Tuesday night in a church gymnasium that smells of industrial cleaner and old folding chairs. The founders called it self-governance. What we are about to decide is whether we deserve it.

We have to begin by acknowledging the fact that Republican Party and its bastard child MAGA must be destroyed. I don’t believe there is a common ground on which to meet. I’ve not met a single MAGA maven who thinks anything their president has done is wrong. They consider him God’s imperfect messenger, which is why they and their party must be destroyed, not just defeated. Whatever comes next for conservatives cannot look anything like the current totem pole around which they dance. The language of polite political commentary has spent thirty years dancing around this conclusion while the patient bled out on the table.

The party cannot be reformed, rehabilitated, or reasoned with. Its current form is a political form of ebola to the American experiment, and the MAGA movement that seized it must die alongside it, defeated so thoroughly, at so many levels of American government, that those who survive are compelled to either build something genuinely new or accept permanent irrelevance. The founders warned us about the hijacking of democratic institutions by men whose appetite for power exceeded their reverence for the law. Hell, they didn’t just warn us; they begged us to be diligent, aware, and involved. We should have listened to history instead of 30-second TV commercials without basis in fact and funded by corporate interests.

But we are here now, and here is what here looks like.

The Trump administration has set aside $1.776 billion in taxpayer money to compensate people convicted of attacking the United States Capitol. The dollar figure is a message, and an insult to what’s left of our democracy. Researchers at the Council on Foreign Relations confirmed it immediately. The name of the fund is a winking salute to the rioters who stormed the building chanting “1776,” who carried flags bearing that number, who drafted planning documents titled “1776 Returns” while laying out schemes to seize federal buildings and force a new election. These are the people who beat police officers with flagpoles. Who smeared feces on the walls of the People’s House. Who erected gallows outside and chanted for the hanging of the Vice President. And the President of the United States, on the first day of his second term, pardoned over 1,500 of them, wiped out $1.3 billion in court-ordered restitution they owed their victims, and then built them a tip jar with your money.

One of those pardoned men, Andrew Paul Johnson of Florida, went on to molest two preteen children. He allegedly tried to bribe one of his victims with promises of a Trump payout, telling the child he was owed millions for his heroic service on January 6. Former federal prosecutors called the fund a signal to the MAGA movement to commit crimes for Trump and then get paid. That is their covenant and the Republican Party in the spring of 2026, and every elected Republican in America has looked at it and decided they can live with it. Not one of them has stood up and said otherwise. The silence is its own answer, and why the GOP, which enabled our current crisis, must cease to exist.

This did not happen because Donald Trump is uniquely monstrous, though, demonstrably, he is. This has transpired because the Republican Party built the road he drove in on and bought him a luxury vehicle to steer, and he kept turning it to the right. Decade by decade, trade by corrupt trade, the GOP sold the Lincoln legacy for the Southern Strategy along with fiscal responsibility for tax cuts engineered to make billionaires weep with gratitude. A constitutional backbone bartered off for an executive power theory so expansive it would have made Richard Nixon blush. The Republican Party’s commitment to democratic outcomes disappeared the moment enough of its voters decided that democracy was only legitimate when they won.

Trump didn’t hijack this party. He just stepped in front of everyone that was marching it toward a moral and political cliff. The tariffs are the clearest proof of what MAGA immorality has produced. Without a vote of Congress or a public debate or a shred of economic modeling that survived contact with reality, Trump launched a trade war against the entire industrialized world, a war of pure choice born of vanity and his pathological need to be seen as the toughest man in every room. Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics spent a year watching the data and then stated it with the clinical disconnect that economists reserve for things they find almost too depressing to quantify. The tariffs, he concluded, have done “significant damage to the economy.” A huge portion of American families are living in recession conditions. JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs have said as much. The chief economist at UBS colorfully insisted America was hacking off its own limb. Even Ted Cruz, a man who has spent his career treating his own dignity as an optional accessory, admitted that if the tariffs sank the economy, the 2026 elections would be a “bloodbath” for Republicans.

They sank the economy and the blood is running in the bathtub. My belief is that what decides whether we survive as a nation depends entirely on if the American people are paying attention. What Trump and his authoritarian lickspittles are hoping is that the voters have made their peace with the long, grinding numbness that comes from being horrified but without the power to change anything. Fascists and all authoritarians count on that public weariness like it’s their pension.

The SAVE Act, meanwhile, reveals what Republicans plan to do when they conclude the political winds are about to shift. Sold as a safeguard against non-citizen voting, a crime so rare that investigators in Utah, Louisiana, Texas, and Nevada found essentially zero verified instances of it, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act is the most transparent voter suppression scheme since the poll tax, and considerably more sophisticated. The Brennan Center calculated that over 21 million Americans lack ready access to a passport or birth certificate. Roughly half the country doesn’t have a passport. Seventy million women whose married names don’t match their birth certificates would face bureaucratic gauntlets just to exercise the franchise they were born into. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund called it Jim Crow 2.0, and the label hums like a tune for the times.

The House passed the SAVE Act 220 to 208. Zero Republicans dissented. Zero. The party looked at a bill designed to strip millions of eligible citizens of the vote and every single one of its members decided that was just fine. The Republican Party, having run out of persuasive arguments for its agenda, has decided that the cleaner, final solution to save its failed polity, is to shrink the electorate until the remaining shreds line up with MAGA. Disagreement is viewed as a disease. This is the move of a party that has stopped believing in its own ideas and started believing only in its own survival, and the pathological lying of its leader.

The MAGA movement, though, will only outlast Trump if we let it. The personality cult structured around grievance, sustained by manufactured outrage, and wielded against the very institutions it claims to revere, must not be allowed to survive. If conservatism is to have any future in American politics, MAGA and the current GOP must self-immolate. Not even its ashes should be allowed to be blown into the wind. MAGA will not moderate when Trump leaves the stage because it was never about him, though he is the most useful vessel American resentment has found in a generation. The resentment predates him, however, and will survive him, hunting for its next container, which we can anticipate will be younger, more disciplined, more familiar with the machinery of government that this administration has been quietly disassembling. The time to defeat it is now, before it learns everything it needs to know, and much of that responsibility lies with the people who have allowed Trump to do what he wants without consequences.

Trump has killed American conservatism and replaced it with a political cult that serves his ego and wallet. A new GOP, which will take a generation or two for viability, must be a conservatism that truly conserves things. Institutions. Democratic norms. The rules of engagement that allow a free people to disagree without one side deciding the other side shouldn’t be allowed to vote. A party that competes for the public’s trust rather than engineering its own majority through suppression and intimidation. A party that would never, under any conceivable set of circumstances, write checks to the people who attacked the Capitol. That party is worth building, but it will take time, and the first requirement is to dismantle and burn to the ground the MAGA movement and the GOP that enabled its ascension.

The men counting on our exhaustion right now, who set up the slush fund, passed the voter suppression bill, blew up the global trading system on a whim and left us holding the bill, they are betting that we are tired, and, of course, we are tired of their evil and greed. They aren’t too worried though because they believe cynicism has won and that we have concluded the whole enterprise is rotten and there is no point in fighting a rigged game. Damn sure seems that way, doesn’t it?

Despair is not wisdom, though, but they have turned it into a weapon they are pointing at all of us. We are the consequence they fear. The question that remains, the only question that has ever really mattered in a democracy, is whether enough voters will show up to put an end to the depredations being visited upon a once hopeful republic. We need to vote like the union depends on it, because it does.

And the people trying to stop us know that better than we do.

A ribbon of chip seal comprises a narrow roadbed that traces the U.S. Mexico border from Study Butte to Presidio, Texas. People who ride motorcycles consider it one of the top ten routes in North America because it rises, turns, declines, and twists through an archaeological landscape almost beyond time. A pull-out atop what locals call “The Big Hill,” affords the traveler a view of the Rio Grande, draining toward the Gulf from somewhere on the other side of the desert’s horizon. The scene always suggests to me that what we humans think we know about existence is beyond our ability to understand, but certainly accessible emotionally. You will want to cry at the world’s beauty the first time you look across the water course to the west.

Designated by the state highway department as Ranch Road 170, its highest pass on the Big Hill is second only in elevation to the road on the top of McDonald Observatory at Mt. Locke in the Davis Mountains. I always stop at the pass and stare out at the river and the epochs of time recorded in layers of stone 1500 feet high on the Mexican frontier, the lava fields and great mesas cast upon the Texas roadside. The Rio Grande looks small and still from that altitude, and our species seems even more insignificant. The Big Hill on RR 170 will be the terminus of the federal government’s border wall before construction begins on the east side of Big Bend National Park in Boquillas Canyon and along stretches of the Rio Grande designated part of our national Wild and Scenic Rivers, which used to be protected from such degradations.

To even imagine looking upon a wall on the Rio Grande from the Big Hill is an insult to our history and humanity. No one crosses illegally into the U.S. in this country. That level of adventurousness generally ends in death from dehydration or starvation. Snakes, prickly pear, ocotillo, mountain lions, and bears await anyone who survives the lack of food and water.

I remember a stop on my motorcycle on the Big Hill a few years ago in January. As I put the kickstand down on my bike, I glanced at the temperature gauge, which read 99 degrees. The overlook is probably my favorite spot in Texas. I was, as is always the case, entranced, when a large man with a goatee and a small dog on a leash appeared beside me. He, too, had just read his truck’s thermometer.

“Good lord,” he said. “We’re in the middle of winter. What the hell is it like out here in the summer?”

“Hotter,” I told him.

“Well, I damned sure wouldn’t be riding out here alone. I haven’t seen another vehicle in almost an hour.”

“It’s all part of why I come here,” I said.

He shook his head, got in his four-wheel drive Silverado, and drove off toward Terlingua. I rolled on westward to Presidio. The stranger’s amazement was understandable, though. Outsiders see the border region as inhospitable, and, in fact, there are few locales in the U.S. more dangerous to lone travelers. A long-time Big Bend resident I spoke with later almost overstated the matter and made me wonder about the individuals who had settled on the river’s banks 150 years earlier.

“I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the mortal risks of living out here, even now,” he said. “Back then you really were on your own. A snakebite was usually death. Running out of water while riding twenty miles to your neighbor’s? The same thing.”

There is a persuasive case to be made, though, that civilization in the U.S. part of the North American continent began on the Mexican border in a place called La Junta de los Rios, which makes the act of building a barrier there dramatically uncivilized. La Junta is where the Rio Grande and the Rio Conchos out of Mexico meet at what is now Presidio and Ojinaga, Mexico. The flood plains at that confluence have sustained agriculture for millennia. Archaeologists say the site is the oldest continually cultivated location in North America. The first humans arrived somewhere between 8,000 and 6,500 BC. They hunted javelina and rattlesnake and mountain lion. They ate fruit from the prickly-pear cactus and were eventually replaced by the Cochise culture around 1500 BC. The Cochise planted corn and built jacales, low-slung huts, from ocotillo sticks and mud. The Mogollon people followed. Then the Anasazi. Then the Spanish.

The first non-Indians to see La Junta were three Spaniards and one African. Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca led them after surviving a shipwreck off the Texas coast and traveling overland for six years. In 1534 he recorded for the Spanish crown that the La Juntans had the best physiques of any people he had encountered and that they lived in houses that looked like houses. He wrote of the Jumano people that they “best understood us and intelligently answered our inquiries” and called them the cow nation because buffalo were slaughtered in great numbers in their territory.

That account was written nearly three hundred years before the appearance of two veterans of the Mexican American war of 1848. The land had not changed. The danger had not diminished. The only difference was the ambition of the men who came to La Junta. Ben Leaton and Milton Faver changed the American West and turned the border into a place of commerce, and crime.

They knew they were choosing a land that could kill them. Desolation and poisonous reptiles were not the greatest danger. The mountains and deserts were roamed by the fiercest Indian tribes north of the Rio Grande. The Comanche Chief Baja Sol was said to consider the presence of Anglos and Mexicans a crime punishable by death. He killed so wantonly that Chihuahua narratives of the period say it took courage just to whisper his name. Mescalero Apache were equally vicious. Both tribes raided Mexican cattlemen without mercy. They came down from the mountains and killed the herders and left with live animals and butchered beef.

Various Mexican authorities attempted to end the raids by offering bounties on Comanche and Apache scalps. Two men who turned this into a profitable enterprise were a crazed Irishman named James Kirker and former Texian independence fighter John Joel Glanton. The mercenaries quickly realized there was no effective way for the Mexican government to determine the origin of a scalp. They began killing peaceful sedentary Indians. Then they murdered most anyone they encountered. The Glanton Gang almost certainly served as the literary device Cormac McCarthy used to tell what may be the first honest story of the Old West in his novel “Blood Meridian.” I had packed the book in the panniers of my motorcycle and was rereading it for the fourth or fifth time on that trip.

Spanish missionaries had long attempted to convert the Jumano, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche to Catholicism. They consistently failed. There was little incentive for the tribes to stop the depredations against settlers. The Indians ranged widely through the surrounding mountains and canyons after mastering the horse and they killed and robbed with impunity and rode away without fear of pursuit.

Before Manifest Destiny turned its attention north toward the High Plains, the Rockies, and the Pacific Coast, a version of the American West was already being assembled in this microcosm along the Rio Grande. The river crossing served as a funnel that forced together dreamers and outlaws and bounty hunters and adventurous settlers and people carrying secrets they hoped to forget. The river united them; it did not divide. Out of their midst legends emerged that were less compelling than the realities that have never been widely told.

Part of those origin stories were written by Ben Leaton. An historic fort bearing his name sits on Ranch Road 170, hard by the Rio Grande, a few miles east of Presidio and is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The yellow adobe walls are nearly three feet thick and stand twenty feet high. Leaton built it because he understood that when Comanche and Apache attacked out here help was somewhere beyond a horizon no one could see.

The only certainty about the fort’s origin is that Juan Bustillos built a small adobe on the site and in 1848 sold it to Leaton and his wife Juana Pedraza, whom he had met in Chihuahua City. Immediately, Leaton ordered peons and a few slaves to expand the structure into a forty-room el fortin. He intended to establish a place of commerce and sanctuary. First renderings of the history described a 15th-century Spanish mission on the site. Catholic church archives in Mexico City contain no record of any such outpost.

A Texas Parks and Wildlife manager gave me a tour. “You’ll notice how each room flows into the other,” the guide explained. “Leaton did not want any of his family to be trapped if Apache or Comanche got inside the walls. He designed the floor plan for escape.”

Leaton had reasons beyond Indian raids to be conscious of escape routes. His only known photograph shows a man about six feet tall with a long white beard. He was a scalp hunter. He traded guns to Indians who brought him stolen cattle for resale. He forged deeds to acquire property. He robbed travelers. The Mexican government paid him fifty dollars for each scalp he delivered. There are certain to have been Comanche and Apache who conducted business with Leaton a few days before he killed them and sliced the skin from their skulls.

But Leaton was not merely a criminal. He had experienced the high deserts during the Mexican American War, and he understood what was coming. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 had opened commerce between the two countries. Freight wagons were expected to eventually move between San Antonio and Chihuahua. Leaton’s fortress was ideally positioned as a sanctuary and retail operation along the Rio Grande. He had arrived hundreds of miles and decades ahead of the westward expansion he knew was coming and he intended to profit from its arrival.

His neighbors did not share his confidence. When I topped that mountain pass and looked down at what Leaton had called his opportunity, the view did not suggest the remotest prospect of prosperity. There was no vegetation beyond ocotillo and prickly-pear cactus and scattered cottonwoods down by the river. Summer temperatures consistently reached 110 degrees. The air lacked even a trace of moisture for long months. The only sign that humans had ever traversed the region was the caliche roadbed I was riding along the Mexican frontier.

The Comanche and Apache pressed their claim to this land with considerable violence. Both tribes considered it their territory. Leaton’s horses and cattle and mules were constantly being stolen from outside the walls where they grazed. After a series of thefts and raids Leaton decided to try a peaceful approach to end conflict with the Indians. Mrs. O. L. Shipman, who lived nearby in Presidio del Norte, told the story years later to a newspaper.

“He invited the chiefs to dinner inside the fort,” she said. “These were the Comanche everyone knew were doing the stealing and killing down there. I suppose Ben thought he might buy them off by offering a cow or two every now and again.”

A feast was spread along a great table in the main dining hall. Whiskey and wine were poured freely. Huge beefsteaks were seared and laid before the chiefs and many of their braves. Leaton later told friends that he believed the evening had been a great success and that an understanding had been reached and there was even a distant possibility of friendship.

“Unfortunately,” Mrs. Shipman said, “the next morning his campesinos came in to tell him that when the Comanche left the night after the meal, they took with them many of Ben’s mules, horses, and cattle. Maybe the Indians had no idea that what they did was wrong or that it was at least a rude way to treat your host. There’s just no way to ever know.”

Lacking any cultural context for Leaton’s interpretation of their behavior, the Comanche had no cause to be suspicious a few weeks later when they were invited back for another dinner. The rancher had been trading guns for horses and cattle with them for months and they were accustomed to frequent interactions. Food and drink were again plentiful. The natives were quickly inebriated on Leaton’s peach brandy.

They would not have noticed the new wall built along the edge of the courtyard. The previous gathering had been held indoors but this was a warm evening, and the table had been spread in the open air.

“There were cannons behind that wall,” Mrs. Shipman said. “The military had sometimes used the fort as a garrison and for storage, so Ben had a couple of small cannons available. When the Indians were sufficiently drunk he and his family and workers left the courtyard and he gave the orders to open fire.”

The explosions burst through the facade and massacred the Comanche lingering over the table. The few still writhing after the cannon shot were gunned dead by riflemen stationed along the parapets. The number killed was not recorded. Leaton’s problems with the regional tribes temporarily abated.

The duplicitous dealings of Ben Leaton were not unique in La Junta. Murders and deception were nearly daily commerce. The baronial fort was his statement of intent. He was announcing to Mexicans and Indians alike that he intended to control cattle and commerce in the valley where the two rivers joined. He could not have anticipated that another American had arrived with even grander ambitions.

Ben Leaton was not destined to become the great cattleman of La Junta. That role belonged to a diminutive stranger who never talked about his past and arrived in the borderlands under circumstances that were curious at best and criminal at worst.

Milton Faver is believed to have run away from home in West Virginia as a young man and made his way to St. Joseph, Missouri, intending to join a wagon train bound for Santa Fe. Instead, he is said to have gotten into a gunfight and killed a man in an argument over a woman. Rather than await trial, he jumped his horse and rode alone into Indian territories until he signed up to fight the war in Mexico. When the war ended, he mustered out near Chihuahua City and drifted east toward the Rio Grande.

I got snatches of the family story from one of Faver’s descendants after tracing them to California.

“We know what happened,” Margaret Bustillos said. “There’s no secret about it. He told the story to his wife Fracesca, and his son Juan and Juan shared it with all seven of his children. Juan’s children are our parents and so that wasn’t that long ago. Anyway, we saw nothing wrong with what he did. That’s how it was back then.”

What Faver did next was improbable. The man who arrived in Chihuahua City pushing a handcart to sell produce through the streets somehow transformed himself into the most successful cattle rancher in the borderlands. He launched a mercantile supply business in Ojinaga and Presidio and used the proceeds to buy land on the U.S. side of the river. He gathered up cattle. He built the first of his three forts at Cibolo Creek.

Faver’s story was connected to the historic trade routes that threaded through the region. The Camino Real ran north from Chihuahua City to present-day Santa Fe. The Santa Fe Trail of U.S. westward expansion intersected with his commerce and may well have saved his life more than once.

I have always been more drawn to Faver’s story than Leaton’s. There was a small number of historical records regarding the cattleman in the archives at Sul Ross State University in Alpine. He lived and thrived in isolated country at a time when there were not even tax records to confirm a man’s existence. I had ridden my motorcycle out to Alpine to look for enough material to consider a book about Faver. There was not sufficient documentation to fill a morning. There were indications of surviving descendants, and I intended to pursue them. What I found in California only confirmed what I suspected. This was a man who had deliberately erased his tracks.

But the descendants remembered the cattle drives.

It was almost certainly Faver who created a kind of template for the cowboy when he decided to push cattle on long drives north to markets in Santa Fe. He delivered beef on the hoof to Fort Davis, the isolated and westernmost U.S. military post of his era. He had driven cattle overland as far as New Orleans. His long-standing agreements to supply Fort Davis with beef and other goods likely sustained his remote operation through years when other men would have quit.

He was said to have had as many as 100,000 longhorns on his vast holdings, which also included orchards and sheep and goats and farm produce. His influence on the growth of the West was thought to have reached as far as mid-twentieth century Hollywood. The TV series Rawhide featured a trail boss named Gil Favor (sic), and cowboys singing about following Mr. Favor through hail, wind, and weather.

When his son was mustered out of the Confederate Army in San Antonio after the Civil War, Faver took a train from a nearby town to escort the young man home. He was so disturbed by the train’s speed and movement that he bought two horses upon arrival and rode back to Presidio with his son across hundreds of miles of open desert through the Trans Pecos and Chihuahua Desert. He never rode a train again and did not live long enough to understand that the railroad made his cattle drives obsolete. In fact, the railroad that made every drover’s cattle drives fanciful.

When Faver died in 1889 he was buried in an adobe vault at Cibolo Creek Ranch. The ranch fell into disrepair over the following century until Houston businessman John Poindexter purchased and refurbished it. Cibolo Creek is now a luxury resort where rock stars and movie stars and Supreme Court justices seek privacy in the grand isolation that Faver built with a handcart and a herd of longhorns. Ghosts of history seem to ride an eternal range out there.

Every American cowboy is a cultural descendant of the Vaquero. The Vaquero was a cattle herder from the Iberian Peninsula brought to Mesoamerica by Spanish priests establishing missions in Mexico. Vaqueros managed herds and rounded up strays and fixed fences and handled the birthing of calves. They were hired hands. They were tired and hot and dirty on a rich man’s hacendado. There was nothing romantic about their days.

That changed with the Mestaneros. These were vaqueros who roamed the plains and broke wild Mustang horses and drove them to markets in Northern Mexico and California and Texas. The Mestaneros were the first cattle drivers in the American tradition. But the idea of pushing cattle from places with no buyers to places with customers did not fully emerge until the post-Civil War era in Texas.

At the end of that war young men returned to Texas and found estimates circulating that there were possibly more than two million wild Longhorn cattle roaming along the Rio Grande. Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving and Jesse Chisholm are usually credited with the idea of rounding up those cattle and pushing them north to railheads for delivery to eastern markets. The Goodnight-Loving Trail rose through West Texas and New Mexico to Denver and Wyoming. The Chisholm Trail crossed Texas and Oklahoma to Kansas’s railheads.

West of those historic trails, the cowboy rancher appears to have initially emerged in a place considerably more remote and more dangerous than anything the Chisholm Trail had to offer. The men along the Rio Grande were ex-military or fugitives or mysterious individuals who spoke multiple languages and expressed neither nationality nor loyalty to any laws other than those they wrote and enforced themselves.

The first cowboy was the man who initiated the concept of a cattle drive. He pushed great herds of animals from remote locations to markets where they could be sold. He did it without law to protect him and without roads to guide him and without the certainty that he would survive the journey. He operated according to principles he invented as he went along. That is not the story Hollywood told. Hollywood needed a white hat and a clear villain. The men along the Rio Grande wore no white hats and were frequently their own villains.

The national psychology has largely cured itself of guilt associated with the mass killings of Indian tribes that made the cattle drives and Western expansion possible. The iconic cowboy endures as a good guy who only shot people who needed shooting. The story was never that clean, though. The cowboy was mostly a man who did whatever was necessary to survive and maybe make a little money. His principles often weakened when circumstances required it.

Ben Leaton massacred Comanche guests at his dinner table. Milton Faver killed a man over a woman and fled across Indian territory to escape prosecution. Both mustered out of a war against Mexico and used the territory that war had transferred to the United States as raw material for personal enrichment, which might have also been considered, in different times, as economic development. The cowboy mythology absorbed men like these and turned them into something the country needed. That transformation says more about the country than it does about the men.

I always remember rolling off that mountain pass at the Big Hill and gaining speed on the descent toward Presidio. The lava fields spread out on either side and the Rio Grande cut through escarpments and into a hazy western distance. Canebrakes and reeds stood up improbably from the desert scrub just past Alamito Creek. I thought about the Comanche and Apache and Jumano who had moved through this landscape on foot and horse. I thought about Cabeza de Vaca walking through here for six years after a shipwreck. I thought about Faver pushing a handcart, and Leaton building his fort.

Today, instead, I am thinking about a wall.

In the annals of broadcasting, there has never been a more misguided juxtaposition than a beer and pizza joint next to a radio station. When I parked my roommate’s Buick Skylark in front of the cinderblock structure that housed the tubes and wires that comprised KCUZ-AM radio, I was only marginally more interested in a job than I was in the quality of the pepperoni at the adjacent enterprise. I had abandoned graduate courses in literature at Arizona State University to pursue a job in broadcast journalism and had no way of knowing I was doomed, at least for a few years, to being a disc jockey, trying to assert a clever personality that was not a reliable part of my character. Harry Chapin’s song W.O.L.D. was blasting away on every radio station in the land and was detailing a future where I would be alone in the dark behind a control board tossing off lines like, “Hey, I’m playin’ the hits while you’re sprayin’ your pits this morning.”

There was work, though, in the White Mountains of Eastern Arizona. The station was a 1000 watt daytime broadcaster with an ID that played at the top of every hour, proudly bragging that it was, “Music for all of Greenlee County, Eastern Arizona and Western New Mexico, provided by K-CUZ, 1490 on your AM dial.” I learned later that Spanish explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado had come up through the same mountain passes in 1540 looking for the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola, built of gold. I doubted, when I looked at the facade of KCUZ, I was going to have any more luck finding fortune than the failed explorer, but at least I got to drive a misfiring Skylark instead of sitting a horse.

The receptionist, a local blond beauty, snapping gum, took me back to meet the general manager, who I had mailed a tape and resume’ to express interest in employment. Roy was wearing a blue cardigan sweater with gray slacks and looked like he was going to be departing for the tee box as soon as we had finished our conversation. No golf course existed in those mountains, though. Instead, he overwhelmed me with enthusiasm, asked a bit about my background, and then whether I was ready to join their on-air team. Of course, there was no “team” yet, and I was the first announcer he had interviewed. A student from Morenci High School, just up the mountain from Clifton, the station’s location, did the afternoon broadcast slot and Roy managed the first half of the day. There must have been a tower of long-playing albums stacked somewhere to consume the hours.

“Well, what do you think?” Roy asked. “You wanna be a part of what we’re doing here?”

“Is that an offer of employment?” I asked.

“Yeah, I liked your tape. You’ve got an education. We could use you.”

“My experience is limited to college radio. The tape I sent you was produced for me by a DJ at the Buck Owens station in Phoenix. He charged me $50 and made me come in after midnight for the production.”

“Doesn’t bother me. Sounded good. You want mornings or afternoons?”

“What’s the pay?”

“Not much. I can only do $100 a week, but if advertising takes off, as we are confident it will, there will be decent raises all around within six months. The Phelps Dodge copper mines are booming right now. See no end in sight.”

My first thoughts when I heard the number for my pay were about the four years of undergraduate education followed by a year of grad school, which I did not finish because I decided it was time to grow up and find a job. I was tired of living off pocket change.

“Well, okay. I guess that’ll do for now,” I said.

“Excellent.” Roy stood and offered his hand. “Can you start next week?”

“Actually, Roy, I could’ve started this afternoon if I’d brought a change of clothes.”

My curse, I realized as I drove back down to Phoenix to tell my roommate I was leaving for a little town nobody had ever heard of, was that I was always worrying about money. My parents did not have much as laborers with six children and they even fought over where they would find the $65 dollars for the monthly mortgage payment. As I was scratching out stories on a Big Chief tablet in elementary school, I knew I wanted to be a writer, something far different from my mother and father, but I also understood at a near-cellular level I needed money. Becoming a starving artist had limited appeal. After high school, though, I began envisioning a cold water flat in New York City, hanging out with other bedraggled authors, waiting tables and writing dark novels in our off hours, talking in coffee shops about the importance of literature and the absurdities of haiku. My degree in journalism meant I might have an ability to earn a decent wage, though, while I wrote in evenings and on weekends, which is the brilliant rationale that led me to the obscure endeavors of KCUZ radio and $100 a week.

I had a burning ambition to have more than two pairs of pants and two shirts to wear to school, which led me to begin my work life in my early teens in a scatalogical pursuit. A veterinarian up on the highway in Michigan near the AC Delco spark plug plant needed his dog and cat cages cleaned out on weekends. His daily helper, understandably, wanted time off to clear his nostrils. My job was to chase the animals out of their cages, remove the soiled newspaper laid across the bottom, dank with urine and feces, hand scrub the cage, and replace with fresh newspaper before returning the animal to its confinement. I counted 36 cages I had to scour. Upon completion, I turned on a hose and chased cat and dog turds across the floor with a stream of water that dumped into what the vet told me was his “honey pot.” I still gag with the memory.

I must have smelled like I was qualified for my next employer because I was hired to jump into a ditch ten to fifteen feet deep and assemble pieces of crock pipe together to link households disconnected from their septic systems and hook them into the city’s new sewer line. There was no OSHA to oversee safety protocols, which meant the backhoe operator, my bossman, dug a deep gash in the earth and ordered me to jump into it as he dropped the crock pipe sections down to me. My job was to soap up the male end, and yes, the jokes proliferated from above, and shove each one into the female flange of the previous crock. These were the years when I learned the physics of the gravitational and administrative fact that “all shit flows downhill.”

Everyone who works in America believes in the mythology of the dream, that if they put in sufficient effort they will be rewarded with success in the form of cash or comfort. Few people in this country have ever entertained the notion that our capitalism is a failed construct. Those lying in the ditch on the side of the road are victims of their own inadequacies. America did not fail; they did. I have never met two people who worked longer or harder hours than my parents; my mother slinging burgers at truckers and factory workers and my father lifting bumpers out of a metal press to be delivered to an automotive assembly line. In the winters, when I was a boy, I sat with my brother and two youngest sisters in Daddy’s old Studebaker as he walked picket lines during union strikes, trying to get more health care and retirement benefits. The breaks he took were to come back to the car, start the engine, and turn on the heater to warm his four children before he switched the ignition off, left us in the cold, and returned to carrying his picket placard along the sidewalk, chanting for fairness, as the snow blew sideways, stinging his face and eyes with icy pellets.

My turn joining the American work force felt no less desperate up in those Arizona mountains. Tom, Tim, Steve, and I were on the air less than a year before the commodity prices of copper began to fall. The mines up on the mountain in Morenci had begun laying off workers, who slowed the buying of their own commodities at the grocery stores and hardwares and restaurants and gas stations. Even though the radio station’s air time was so inexpensive we used to tell potential advertisers they could easily afford our commercials because our rate card was simplified to “a dollar a holler.” I was still managing on my $176.43 take home pay every two weeks and shared an $80 a month apartment with Tom, the afternoon DJ, up on one of the switchbacks across from the radio tower. A rented apartment at $40 per person was still a bargain anywhere in the country.

“Had an interesting exchange with Ira today,” Tom said. His voice always struck me as composed of a strange mixture of gravelly and in a single monotone.

The station had signed off at sundown as required by its license, and we were, as was our custom, splitting pitchers of beer and slices of pizza on the deck next door. The restaurant’s location remained mysterious to me because there were no other businesses on that side road and anyone wanting their pizza had to drive or walk to get to their counter and order.

“What about?” I asked. “I don’t think he’s ever done much more than grunt in my direction since we all started.”

“Well, he suggested the four of us head down the mountain and get jobs at stations in Tucson.”

“Hilarious,” I said. “Does Ira think we’d be up here if we could get gigs in Tucson?”

“I don’t think he thinks anything about us,” Tom said. “But it was a warning. He said more layoffs are coming at Phelps Dodge, and he didn’t know what his cash flow was going to be like from month to month.”

“It’s already pretty desperate around here,” Tim said. “We had a guy on Tradio today who was trying to sell a plastic, hand-cranked ice cream maker. He only wanted $4. Kept calling me back all day to ask if anyone had called in and asked about it.”

Tim was not the sensitive type, and had a personality as sharp-edged as his angular face suggested, but he was visibly saddened by the conversation and how humbling it must have been for the man to make such a call. I thought it had t o have hurt to let his voice be heard on the radio by his friends and neighbors.

“Man,” I said. “I hope he got the money. He obviously needs it.”

“He did get it,” Tim said.

“Somebody came by the station to buy it?”

“No, I bought it. Told him I was an ice cream freak and didn’t have the money to buy an electric one. It’s cracked on the side and doesn’t seem to crank. Anyway, he was pretty depressed looking and beaten down and thanked me over and over and over since I gave him five bucks instead of just four.”

“Oh, man,” I said. “Was he working at the mine?”

“Not any more. Got laid off two months ago when the slow down started. Said he had three kids and his wife cried all day and they had no idea what to do next. No family anywhere around.”

Steve, who was our sports guy, tossed back the rest of his beer and stood. “Well, I know what I’m going to do,” he said. “I’m getting out of here. No point waiting on the inevitable. I’m heading up to Page to see if I can get a job at one of the stations there and spend my life on vacation on the big lake.”

There were no good-byes from our colleague. He went out the screen door into the Arizona sun and never looked back at us, as if we were part of a bad dream he was awakening from. The old man tossing pizza dough by the oven like he was on the Appian Way watched him depart with an expression that he might have been wondering how we had offended our buddy. None of us three ever again saw or heard from Steve. We quickly, however, began to formulate our departures. Tim just left, too, unannounced the next morning, headed home to a place he had never even mentioned.

"Well, you wanna jump in the Gobbler and travel the country looking for radio stations where we might land jobs?”

Tom had given his Ford Falcon pickup the nickname because he viewed it as a turkey, a mechanically failed machine, as inept as a living creature that was known to drown itself by looking up into the rain.

“Sure, why not?” I said.

“I’m gonna ask Earl if he wants to tag along. He just lost his job at the station down in Casa Grande.”

“Okay, but aren’t there just two seats in the Gobbler?”

“Yeah, we’ll put a lawn chair in the back and take turns sitting in it.”

“Sounds safe.”

In 48 hours, we were gone, our last checks from Roy and Ira cashed and the station feeling like a house abandoned by a disinterested family. When we went out the door, I turned and saw on Ira’s face the lines that communicated he was wishing he were young again, and Roy’s wincing and wondering what the hell he was doing with his life at a corn popper radio station on the edge of the American Outback. Outside, Earl jumped up into the bed of the Falcon where he had tied the aluminum legs of the nylon lawn chair to cargo loops along the railing. Our duffel bags of clothes would serve as pillows when needed and a styrofoam ice chest was loaded with soda, beer, and water.

In what seemed like minutes, we had crossed into New Mexico and were coming up on Silver City. We turned south to catch the interstate toward El Paso and were consumed by a dust storm with the air so thick with dirt that zero visibility forced Tom to pull over. Earl demanded to be let into the cab and we squeezed together breathing dust and sweating on each other, unable to roll down the window for relief. The Gobbler struggled to start after the storm, probably because the air filter was brown and clogged, but we got it running and puttered into a gas station outside Lordsburg to clean the truck and ourselves. We still had time to make our destination for the day, the Guadalupe Mountains, where we unrolled our sleeping bags beneath the shadow of El Capitan just as the last long light of the West lit the rock face with a shift of orange and yellow.

Three days later the faltering Falcon delivered us unto the Red River Valley in northwest Louisiana. Redbud and magnolia trees were in full bloom along the river and we rode through pecan bottoms in cool spring shade. Earl demanded to have his seat back in the truck bed as we passed through red pastures of Indian Paintbrush, violets, and buttercups in an almost unreal spray of color across the landscape. The scenery did not change as we arrived in Natchitoches, bought a loaf of bread and lunchmeat and sat on benches beside the river eating bad sandwiches. Tom had grabbed a copy of the local newspaper and was so smitten with the little town that he was scouring the want ads for jobs.

“Y’all aren’t going to believe this,” he said. “But there’s an ad in here for a radio station that says they have an opening for three announcers.”

“What? Here in Natchitoches?” I asked.

“Yeah, and if these call letters are correct, I think it’s on the main street up the stairs behind us. Pretty sure I saw them when we parked.”

“Let’s go get our tapes out of the Gobbler and knock on their door.” Earl threw half his sandwich in a trash can and started up the concrete steps, not looking to see if we were following.

The general manager was kind and enthusiastic when the receptionist took us to his office. I had the impression we might have been a vision of answered prayers. After telling us about his three DJs who had quit at the same time, without explaining why, he took our tapes and resume’s and asked us to come back in a couple of hours after he’d had a chance to listen and go over our backgrounds. Back on the river bank, Tom started looking in the paper again for apartments and small houses to rent. There were none even remotely affordable, which, it turned out, did not matter.

“I want to thank you fellas for stopping by,” the general manager said after we had returned. He had never given us his name, nor did he seem to know ours even after the previous introductions by his receptionist and the resume’s he had supposedly read.

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks for meeting with us. Seems like an opportunity and our good luck to come into town when you need people.”

“Yes, yes, your timing is good,” he said. “I was wondering, have y’all heard much about this new computerized broadcasting?”

“I read something about it,” Tom said. “Seems kind of crude and impersonal to a local audience, to me.”

“Maybe a little bit. But I gotta tell ya, I’ve been weighing the pros and cons, and after listening to y’all’s tapes, I think I’m gonna go with the computer programming to play music and do weather.”

I was stunned. Tom was angry. Earl stared at the floor. Our meager broadcast skills had just prompted a small town station manager to chose a machine over humans. Even if we were unsophisticated and rough-hewn as professional DJs, we were still upright on two legs, breathing and talking and could read the news and weather and introduce records.

“You sure that works?” Tom asked.

“Yeah, I saw a demo. The music’s all recorded onto a cartridge and there are electronic cues that prompt the carousel to turn and play the next record. I think that’s the direction I’m gonna go. I think it might be the direction the industry goes, too.”

A diminutive man with thinning hair in a blue button-down collared shirt, he rose and offered his hand from behind his desk. I shook it, but Tom and Earl were already out his office door. Back outside, we sat the Gobbler’s tailgate and pondered what was next.

“We aren’t ever going to find three jobs at one station,” Earl said.

“Not likely,” I said. “So, I guess let’s just stop looking, and try to have fun with what little money we have left.”

“And do what?” Tom asked.

“Let’s go to Florida. Spring break starts down there in a few days. And they let you sleep on the beaches in some of those towns. Also, there are girls in bikinis.”

“I guess that settles it, then,” Earl said. “We’re off to the Sunshine State. Isn’t that what they call it?”

“Yeah, it is,” I said. “Let’s just go and see what happens.”

I drove and the Gobbler ran more smoothly than it had since we’d left Arizona, as if it were equally as excited about our destination. We got our first view of the Gulf of Mexico down along the white sands in Mississippi and grew more hopeful with every mile we moved eastward. Work could wait, a little while. It was always out there somewhere. We just needed to find it.

America was, after all, the land of opportunity, wasn’t it?

A Port in History’s Storm

Perhaps nowhere on this planet has there ever been a greater demonstration of hubris than off the coast of the Island of Newfoundland, and its two greatest examples are the Titanic and the Titan submersible. The works of man are often brought asunder by nature and poor judgment, and Newfoundland has been frequent witness. I’ve long been fascinated by my mother’s homeland, where she came of age before leaving for America. The place its residents frequently refer to as “The Rock” has seemed to have more than its share of tragedy.

My grandfather, who I never met, survived history’s deadliest battle at the Somme in World War I, but was taken from his family by a simple slip of a knife. His great grandson, my cousin, was lost to the sea by a rogue wave come ashore on a sunny August day of 1986, and just last year another of his great grandsons was a victim of a tragic accident. He had become a cultural folk star for his music, which had inspired the sound track for the wildly successful “Come From Away” on Broadway and beyond.

I have been even more fascinated by the Titan Submersible sadness than that of the Titanic. Oceangate’s CEO, Stockton Rush, might have reconsidered his adventuresome nature had he more closely studied Newfoundland and the toll the sea consistently demands, and gets. There have been times it has felt like it was an island at the center of the world. The history of the place has been as triumphal as it has tragic because it has been elemental to great human achievements like trans-Atlantic flight and radio communications but also at the center of the humanity’s two great wars. I’ve never visited Newfoundland without feeling both the hope and the suffering of the people who call it home. The piece I wrote about it after the Titan went down was a meager attempt to make sense of it all and try to acquire some context. You can read it here.

Looking for Mr. Brautigan

My love of motorcycles and writing have driven me on adventures both wonderful and foolish. One of the first was with my boyhood friend, Butch, home from Vietnam and “lookin’ for his fun.” I just wanted to travel, and write, and read great books in epic locales. Our first cross-country trip turned into a solo ride for me and a fanciful attempt to find and meet Richard Brautigan, a poet and novelist of the late 60s and 70s who lived and created in the relative obscurity of Big Sur, California. This is the story of me leaving Butch behind in LA to ride off seeking a literary hero, or two.

On Writing and Being

People who write consistently as part of their lives tend to do so because they must. Not writing is not an option. I can remember trying to put stories down with my #2 pencil on a Big Chief pad, and being afraid they might be read, the wrong compulsion even for an elementary school scribe. I don’t think I’ve ever awakened to a day where I did not contemplate what I was writing that day or what subject I might take on the next day or next week or next year.

There are, of course, good, talented, and even great writers, and that latter category is rarefied air, especially in the age of the internet when writing has become commodified. Anyone can put up a Substack like this one and crank out “content” and “anyone” often does. Sifting through the literary and linguistic debris of the web is no simple task, which is why it might take exceptional skill to rise beyond being more than digital keyboard bards. That’s what Cormac McCarthy did with his singular focus on his work. He seems, like V.S. Naipaul and E. Hemingway to have never made a dollar that did not originate from his prose, a level of courage and discipline that will recommend him to history. I think there is immortality in his books, and his determination to live just by Writing and Being.

Thanks for reading, or just checking out, Texas to the World. If you’re not a subscriber, consider signing up. You can also just tell a friend. Looks like after five years, I’ll keep banging away. - JM

Our carburetors had to be opened up for the engines to get us up the Front Range. We had just entered Rocky Mountain National Park and were already angling upward toward the Great Divide and there was not enough air mixing with the gas we were burning. The motorcycles sputtered approaching the highest elevated paved road in America. There was concrete beneath our wheels that was taking us to a height of more than 12,000 feet above sea level, up where the air was so thin trees were unable to grow. Butch was out front on his shining new Triumph Bonneville 650, blue on white, and I was struggling to stay apace on my used and battered 450 Honda. We had come across Iowa and Nebraska from Michigan and at every gas pump we lost ourselves in talk of mountains and roads winding to the top of the world.

I wanted to see if the country was as big and open and free as it appeared on the old black and white westerns my father watched to escape the agonies of the assembly line, and Butch, I was certain, hoped to not think about the war that had killed all his Army buddies but not him. Not even a leech had landed on his skin, and the why of it was mystifying. I stared at his long hair, pulled upward into the slipstream, curling out of the back of his helmet, and wondered if anything important inside of him had broken or become dislodged. There was nothing delicate about my friend; he came from a strong Italian family of five boys who were slinging hammers and wielding shovels in construction before they were even teens. Whatever war might have done to him was not visible to me, but I probably was not the best observer of subtleties while intoxicated by the open road.

Up we rode, into the face of a July snowstorm coming across the Never Summer Mountains to our west. Our gear was inadequate to protect from such cold and we were lucky to arrive at the Alpine Visitors Center without having slipped and fallen. The snow was not wet and heavy and quick to melt, which might have been expected of a summer flurry, and we were forced to wait out the white wind blowing across the peaks. I had wanted to find the back roads on the other side of the Divide and run up to the headwaters of the Colorado River. My imagination had us following the river course all the way to Mexico and camping on a beach at the Gulf of California but the weather at altitude was too much of a challenge. On the steep switchbacks, we came across evidence there were smarter motorcyclists and took a picture of a beautiful bike that had been abandoned to the unseasonable squall.

In a decade, I was living in those mountains and also giving up a motorcycle to the snow. Heading eastward on the interstate, I sat a Harley Sportster, riding foolishly on a Thanksgiving weekend errand. Blowing snow began to make drifts and I knew I was doomed to leave the bike by the roadside or give up my trip to Omaha, but I needed to say things to my love, and they had to be in person, not over the phone. I put the kickstand down on a flat rock, and stuck my thumb out into the wind, hoping to get a ride to the bus station in Denver. When I finally came down from the mountains, the storm had caught up to the Continental Trailways bus I had boarded and we shuddered and crawled through the dark to a closed I-80 in Big Springs, Nebraska. Thanksgiving dinner in a truck stop cafe booth was meatloaf, mashed potatoes, a side salad, and coffee, $4.99. I ate sullenly among strangers, spending the holiday wondering what kind of man I was becoming.

My job that fall was to wander the Intermountain West with one of the best cameramen in the TV news business and write stories about issues and history and characters who defined what it meant to be Western in a modern world. The Hotel Colorado, which became the Western White House during the administration of Teddy Roosevelt, was my home. I saw the president’s picture on the hallway wall each morning when I left for work, a paradox of a man who loved the natural world as much as the risks and glories he perceived in war. Outside the window to my room were the Glenwood Hot Springs where Doc Holliday had come seeking the curative waters to end his consumption, and just beyond the clouds of steam, the frothing rapids of the Colorado glowed in starlight. An open window let me fall asleep to the subtle rumble of the mighty flow running down to the Grand Canyon. Every snowflake, melting and trickling down rock, rushing to a creek, fed the eternal river.

Even then, though, there was reason to worry that there might be forces that outstripped the power of the Colorado. A short drive downstream, the Exxon oil corporation was investing a billion 1980 dollars to build a town on Battlement Mesa for workers it planned to hire for oil shale recovery. Before a drop had ever been captured, there were rows of homes on paved streets, a grocery and drug store, a hospital, community center, golf course, and gas stations. Because this was oil shale, and not shale oil, the science behind refining from the rock involved strip mining and digging deep shafts into the ground. The rock is a marlstone, which contains kerogen, a precursor to oil. The ore must be heated to 750 degrees Fahrenheit to extract the petroleum liquid, and the energy consumed in that process is close to being greater than what is generated.

I rode an elevator platform 2000 feet into the dark earth with Interior Secretary James Watt, who spoke hopefully of a refinement of natural resources that seemed illogical and ruinous. Exxon was getting permits to begin strip mining, too, and Watt said it was possible 400,000 barrels a day might be delivered along the river’s bank. The town across the river was being developed to house 25,000 workers who would confront and create the problems of high water usage, significant power consumption, and carbon emissions. The cost was too high, however, and the project was abandoned. When the technology improves, though, the corporate interests will be back, and they will gash the hillsides with giant machines, pollute the air and water, and turn a profit. The Piceance Basin in Western Colorado will not be permanently ignored because it contains an estimated 1.525 trillion barrels of oil, a staggering figure, according to the Colorado Geological Survey.

I spoke often with the people who lived downstream from the Colony Shale Oil Project and none had confidence their water and forests and hills would survive the vast extraction. Most of them had moved to the geographically isolated town of Grand Junction, and the idyllic communities up on the mesas like Fruita and Palisade, to evade the grinding machines of cities. The Gunnison and the Colorado Rivers came together in their valley and the mesas were green and flowering with peach and apple orchards. They were 400 miles from Denver and just under 300 from Salt Lake City and did not expect to be overrun by the driving wheel of progress. An escape from shale oil was just a temporary reprieve, too, since the Piceance Basin is also a prolific natural gas preserve and includes more than 3000 functioning wells. Exploration is slowly slipping westward from Glenwood Springs and Garfield County down the river valley toward Utah.

I was thinking of the West’s greater problem as my friend Shaw and I rode our motorcycles south of Grand Junction and up into the Colorado National Monument, maybe the most stunning of America’s parks. The Colorado River system has been under stress for years and in the first quarter of 2026 has dropped to only 36% of capacity. The snowpack has reached the lowest level on record, and two of the most important reservoirs in this country are alarmingly low. Lake Powell in Arizona has a quarter of its storage capacity with projected inflow for the critical April-July window to be at 27% of normal. By late summer, it’s high water mark is expected at 3900 feet above sea level, which means Glen Canyon Dam’s hydro generators might not be able to make electricity. Lake Mead, below Powell on the Colorado, has one third of its storage capacity and is expected to reduce hydro power later this summer by 40 percent. Some of the 40 million people in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Diego and beyond, who rely on the river, may face blackouts this summer, and not a drop to drink.

Water is the new oil.

Colorado National Monument

We continued pressing westward and picked up Utah’s Route 128, which traced the river’s course through red rock canyons and beneath ancient epic mesas. The Colorado still spoke there of its endless epochs of power that had been carving the Grand Canyon further downstream, before cities with millions of inhabitants began diverting the water for lawns and car washes and golf courses and irrigation to grow food crops to feed the overpopulated masses. This looked like a spot sufficiently remote that the builders of vacation homes might never pour concrete in sight of the river, but development and growth are our chosen curse in America, and little is safe from scheming profiteers. I have ridden in all the lower 48 states and have constantly confronted the puzzlement of how a land so geographically blessed can be supremely cavalier regarding its grandest gifts.

The Colorado River Along Utah Rte. 128

We went south out of Moab toward Monument Valley because Shaw had never seen the Grand Canyon and my two dozen visits with rim-to-rim hikes and runs made me a convincing claimant of expertise. I was not certain how to feel when I discovered that one of the country’s most iconic roadways had been renamed after a movie character who loved shrimp, but the view was unchanged, and, as always, emotionally charged with almost incomprehensible feelings prompted by the grandeur. The heat across the high desert was nearly debilitating in our run to the North Rim and we sat for lunch in the lodge at the same table I had occupied after concluding my initial 1970 crossing from the South Rim. A dry wind was blowing from the west, exacerbating the drought, and a few days after we left a fire raced across and burned to the ground the 100-year-old lodge, which had been built by the Union Pacific Railroad to get more tourists to the canyon’s north side.

Friends have insisted I am being unreasonable to fret about the canyon’s future but there are monied forces with political power that consistently talk about a new dam where the Colorado exits its palisades. Everything we thought eternal is becoming uncertain. Our culture is transitioning from custodial to unabashed opportunism and unconstrained greed. National parks are at risk of becoming strip mines and oil fields. We have chosen leaders, too, who make decisions based on the denial of climate changes caused by the works of man even as legendary forests burn through the West and wheat and corn crops wither across the Great Plains in recurrent, rainless springs. What politician is aware that it takes a century for vegetation to grow back in the desert? What country, what people, would stand back and let this all happen?

Colorado’s Million Dollar Highway, June 2025

The United States of America, my country, the land that I have loved despite its imperfections and failings, a nation that has long projected itself as the gold standard of democratic governance, economic freedom, and human dignity, is not. We now face a reckoning that our political class has proven either unwilling or unable to confront, and voters who have lost control of the government, or are choosing not to exercise it. The evidence has accumulated across decades of policy failure and institutional neglect, and it paints a portrait not of a shining city on a hill, but of a society in measurable, documented decline. No rational person can consider our present circumstances and consider otherwise.

On any given night, approximately 700,000 Americans sleep on the streets. We might reasonably expect such a situation in a developing economy that is still finding its footing, but in the wealthiest nation in the history of human civilization? Alongside the unhoused, in the shadows of that wealth, four in ten American adults cannot absorb a mere $400 emergency expense without borrowing money or selling something. There is no denying that is a financial fragility that exposes the mythological nature of American middle-class prosperity. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders has repeatedly pointed out the contradictions presented by this nation’s great wealth and dramatic poverty, “We are the wealthiest nation in the history of the world,” he has said, “Yet we have more income and wealth inequality than almost any other major country.”

The American healthcare system certainly deserves a chapter of its own in any honest audit of our national failure. Medical debt has become the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States, which is a distinction shared by no other developed nation on earth. I came close to personal bankruptcy during a series of nine complex eye operations because I was self-employed and could only afford casualty insurance, which left 70% of costs as my burden. Consider insulin as another example of our health care’s abominable delivery system, a drug invented in 1921 and deliberately not patented by its discoverers so that it would remain affordable; it now costs American patients more than a monthly car payment. People ration it and often die managing shortages.

Meanwhile, women experiencing miscarriages have been left to deteriorate in hospital parking garages because physicians, paralyzed by the legal exposure created by sweeping abortion restrictions, have delayed or withheld standard obstetric care. There are cities here in Texas that have tried to make it a crime to drive through their jurisdictions if you are taking a woman to another state where abortion is legal. Also in Texas, your neighbor can sue you for $10,000 if they discover you have assisted a woman in getting an abortion. The anecdotes are too numerous to list or detail but they are documented, recurring outcomes.

The nation that calls itself “the land of the free” also incarcerates more of its own citizens than any country on earth, which means more than China, more than Russia, and more than North Korea, yeah, North Korea. Approximately two million people are currently held in American cages, and roughly a quarter of them have not been convicted of any crime. They await trial. They remain imprisoned, in many cases, because they cannot afford bail. It is, in effect, a wealth tax on liberty. Here in Texas, we disproportionately imprison Blacks at a rate ranging from 1600-1900 per 100,000. Hispanics are incarcerated at 500-700 per 100,000 while Whites are 300-400 per 100,000. The disparity is much more stark when it is considered that Blacks make up only around 12% of the Texas population and Whites are around 40 percent, which means, bluntly, if you are Black in Texas you are much more likely to end up behind bars than a White person.

The data on American longevity tells what might be our saddest story. Life expectancy in the United States is declining in a reversal almost without precedent in the developed world. The U.S. now records an infant mortality rate worse than Cuba’s. Dr. Ashish Jha, former White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator, confronted our great failing with a scientific bluntness. “The United States spends more on healthcare than any other nation and gets worse outcomes,” he said.

The paradox is structural, has no connection to misfortune, and is, instead, a consequence of deliberate political choices.

In American schools, children rehearse responses to mass shootings between academic lessons, conducting active shooter exercises as routinely as fire drills. The nation’s minimum wage has not increased in fifteen years. Teachers hold second jobs to make rent. Veterans, having returned from twenty-year wars, sleep beneath bridges. And the nation spent, by conservative estimate, a trillion dollars prosecuting a war in Afghanistan, a country that did not attack us. That war ended in the early hours of a summer morning, with American forces withdrawing without notifying our allies, and leaving behind the chaos we had promised to resolve. In our present vile pursuit of immigrants, we are rounding up Afghanis who put their lives at risk by helping our troops in exchange for legal residency here. They face almost certain death in deportation to their home country.

I can’t prompt these hypocrisies without bringing up Greenland. Any comparison between that island of happy folks and this troubled land is supremely audacious. Greenland operates with universal healthcare and citizens receive free college education. The incarceration rate is among the lowest in the world. No one in Greenland goes bankrupt because they became ill. No one is turned away from emergency care because an insurance company issued a denial. To characterize such a society as poorly run, which our president did from his position on a pedestal of institutional collapse, can hardly be considered a political critique but something more like gaslighting or projection.

I’ll mention also NATO because the current resident of the gold-trimmed White House is threatening to abandon the treaty that has held together the Post War world. The claim that the alliance failed the United States and it was absent in a moment of need sort of demands a confrontation with historical record. Following the September 11 attacks, NATO invoked Article 5 of its founding charter for the first and only time in the alliance’s history. The use of the charter in that manner was for this country. Soldiers from dozens of member nations deployed to Afghanistan, fought alongside American forces, and died in a war that was not theirs. Non-NATO nations, including those as distant as Australia, committed troops and resources for twenty years in solidarity with an ally. The alliance did not abandon Americans and their defense. The US, however, left, unilaterally, without notice, in the middle of the night, and our allies had to absorb the consequences.

We were once a great nation that genuinely aspired to lead but in an angry political process filled with lies, accusations, and corporate cash, we abandoned introspection and stopped looking honestly at ourselves. Our problems cannot be blamed on fate or geography. They are the consequence of choices made by elected officials, sustained by political inertia of our citizenship, and obscured by nationalist mythology that has turned the phrase “American exceptionalism” into a punch line. Americans have long refused to own our history; we first deny it and then rewrite the parts we don’t like. Even if we could find a mirror big enough to reflect all our contradictions and hypocrisies, I suspect we no longer have the courage to look into it, and confront our truth.

My pal from the track team, Bill, had a new four-wheel drive vehicle called a Bronco. His family owned a carpeting and furniture business in the booming factory towns of mid-Michigan, which meant they had the means to buy him the latest in automotive technology while he was a sophomore in high school. Bill’s 1967 Bronco was from the second year of production by Ford Motor Company, and he was constantly asking his friends to go “four-wheeling.” There were endless tracks through the north woods but when the riots began in Detroit, he thought it would be interesting to drive into the city to see what was happening, and, foolishly, three of us agreed.

We got close enough to see the smoke, some flames, random gunfire, endless sirens and a few police cars fly by toward the inner city. There was a quick consensus from ignorant young teens that we were ignorant young teens and we turned around and headed back to the safety of the suburbs where we lived, which were, during that era, all white. The Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts had been passed by Congress but little had changed for Blacks in America. They were dying in disproportionate numbers in Vietnam and endured unemployment of double digits in a thriving economy. Economic and cultural bombs that had been ticking for decades blew up and set the Motor City to flame.

The U.S. was hardly four years removed from the murder of its president on the streets of Dallas. Texan LBJ, not yet suspected of being complicit in a conspiracy killing of JFK, had taken up some of his predecessor’s causes, and a big one JFK had decided to abandon, which was the War in Vietnam. Boys a few years ahead of me in high school were being drafted after their birthdates had been pulled from a tumbler by a man in a suit on TV. The saddest lottery ever devised was sending its winners off to die in a war without purpose. When Detroit blew up with social unrest, those of us coming of age thought everything about our country was coming undone.

And then came 1968.

The fires got hotter. All America was burning, politically, economically, with literal flames, and not just Detroit. In the span of sixty-three days that spring, we lost both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Francis Kennedy, two men who, whatever their flaws, carried inside them a vision of the country as something generous and redeemable. King fell on a motel balcony in Memphis on April 4th, cut down at 6:01 in the evening while the sanitation workers he had come to stand with were still on strike below. Kennedy was killed in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles just after midnight on June 5th, moments after winning the California primary, still damp from the crowd’s adoration, filled with the energy of hope from a people he had just left.

The country did not even know how to grieve so much loss, so it convulsed.

Cities burned after King’s murder, Washington, Chicago, Baltimore, Louisville. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August became a television spectacle of police batons and tear gas, of young people bloodied on camera while delegates argued inside. The Vietnam War was consuming fifty thousand American lives and the moral credibility of an entire generation of leadership. Lyndon Johnson, exhausted and broken, had already announced he would not seek reelection. The architecture of the American consensus, built so carefully since the New Deal, and cemented by the sacrifices of World War II, was cracking at every joint.

I still view that time as the most traumatic single year in modern American life. I had the sense that no matter how hard I studied and worked that when I was ready for college and a job, there would be little left of my country to offer me a future. If I could not get a student deferment, I would be drafted. Growing up in a disadvantaged family, LBJ’s Great Society had kept us in food, modest health care, and then college grants, scholarships, and loans. After investing in my future, I dreaded the idea of being sent into combat to die and waste the government’s investment in me. The irony was rich with stupidity. Getting a university education seemed almost meaningless and did not proffer hope.

And then, a month before I was to leave home to start college, on a Sunday evening in July, something happened.

Neil Armstrong stepped off a ladder onto the surface of the Moon. It was 10:56 PM Eastern time on July 20th, 1969, and six hundred million people, a number the world had never before assembled around a single event, watched it happen on flickering black and white screens and color consoles in probably every country on the planet. A man from Wapakoneta, Ohio, stood on another world and spoke back to ours.

Whatever you believe about government, about institutions, about the capacity of collective human endeavor, that moment was real. The footprint was more than just an impression in moon dust. The flag, however symbolically complicated, stood for hope against claims from Southeast Asia of oppression. For a country that had spent the preceding year watching its best aspirations shot down on balconies and in hotel kitchens, its cities touched to flame and violence, the Moon landing was something the national psyche desperately needed, which was a proof that we were still capable of the extraordinary.

It did not erase 1968. It did not bring back King or Kennedy or the fifty-eight thousand names that would eventually be carved into a black wall in Washington. I was thankful to LBJ for his Great Society but I could not forgive him for Vietnam. But that summer when my countrymen stepped onto the Moon, I felt there was evidence that our American project, however battered and betrayed by its own worst impulses, still had within it the capacity to do something that had never been done before in the history of the human species. We could be a hell of a lot greater than the chaos that was filling my young man’s field of vision.

The Moon did not heal America, though, but it reminded us that we were healable.

Our second Moon trip here in the spring of 2026 might not have the same symbolic power to motivate change. The wounds we presently suffer are different in texture but familiar in origin. If the late 60s was when the American construct was fractured, we may have arrived at a time of broken bones. The institutions that survived 1968 are being dismantled with a deliberateness that the chaos of that year never quite achieved. The difference between then and now is that in 1968, the system was being attacked from outside by those who wanted it to live up to its promises. In our current crisis, America is being hollowed out from within by those who find its sacred covenants to be inconvenient.

Donald Trump’s second administration has prosecuted a campaign against the architecture of American democracy with a thoroughness that would have seemed impossible to anyone watching the evening news in 1969. Federal agencies gutted. Inspectors general removed in the night. The Justice Department weaponized against political opponents with a brazenness that Nixon, for all his crimes, managed only partially and in secret. The press labeled an enemy of the people. Judges defied. Treaties abandoned. Allies lectured and adversaries flattered.

The language of the authoritarian playbook is not new. What is new, however, is how little resistance it has encountered from the institutions designed to resist it, and the voting public that feels hopeless and frozen in a frightening democratic stasis. In 1968, the trauma was acute, sudden, violent, and visible. Bullets and fire. In our present moment, the trauma is chronic, the low-grade fever of a democracy running hotter than it should, its defenses compromised, citizens exhausted by the daily effort of maintaining outrage in the face of an administration that has made the outrageous routine.

And yet.

There are things worth looking at if you can bear to lift your eyes from the wreckage. In 2025, a record number of Americans ran for local office for the first time. School board seats that had been uncontested for decades drew three and four candidates. Town halls that once struggled to fill a room turned people away at the door. The machinery of participatory democracy, rusty, imperfect, exasperatingly slow, is being oiled by people who had previously left it to others.

The courts, for all their political coloring, have not entirely collapsed. Judges appointed by both parties have issued rulings that surprised those who expected pure deference. The constitutional architecture, strained as it is, has not yet given way entirely. This is not nothing. In fact, in the current climate, I consider it quite a lot.

The press, diminished, disrupted, financially precarious, is doing some of the most consequential accountability journalism in its history. Reporters are documenting in real time what previous generations had to reconstruct from archives. The record is being kept. I am certain that matters more than we may know right now.

And there is this, which may seem small but is not. Americans are talking to each other again. Not always kindly, not always productively, or with civil tongues, but neighbors do discuss differences of opinion across fences and in grocery stores and at the edges of Little League fields. I view them as the halting, uncomfortable conversations of people who are trying to find each other in the dark.

What the Moon landing gave America in 1969 was not optimism, exactly; to me, optimism is cheap and requires no evidence. What we got from that gray and black film and sending our local boys to the stars, was wonder, which is the older, more durable emotion that does not deny difficulty but insists that difficulty is not the whole story.

We do not have a Moon landing to point to right now. NASA’s Artemis program, fitfully funded and politically buffeted, has not yet returned Americans to the lunar surface, though it may yet do so if it can survive conservative budget cuts to fund wars of choice and corporate tax shelters. But wonder does not require a rocket. It necessitates only the willingness to notice what is still possible.

For now, we must believe it is still doable to change our government at the ballot box, and to organize, litigate, publish, march, run for office, and refuse to violate the tenets of our founding documents. It is still possible, barely, contingently, with effort, for us to hold the line. My contemporaries who came of age in 1968 did not know that the worst year of their lives would be followed, twelve months later, by one of the most transcendent moments in human history. They could not have known. They only knew to keep going. I think that’s what Americans have always done, and still do.

I believe that’s what the record of 1968 and 1969, bracketed between assassinations and Moon dust, actually teaches. Not that history and the moral universe bends automatically toward justice, King himself knew better than that, but that the bending requires hands. Human hands, tired and uncertain, reaching forward in the dark toward something they cannot yet see. We have been here before. We have also been somewhere better. And the distance between here and there is not fixed.

It is measured by how far we are willing to go.

I suppose I am being indelicate by writing about this subject on Easter Sunday but allow me to blame Pete Hegseth, the Pentagon’s God of War. As science propels us around the far side of the moon, a man in control of the planet’s largest military is dropping explosive terror on another country in the name of God, or, in his case, Jesus and Christianity. Maybe just fight your war, Petey, and leave religion out of it because, if there is a God, she’s washed her hands of human affairs. We claim God is on our side in battle and forget to ask where she was when our troops were killed.

Maybe, as was suggested by R.L. Dione more that a half century ago, “God Drives a Flying Saucer,” and the pilot of that craft turns around every time human behavior comes into view. I confess that I have been reading about this notion since I was barely a teenager, haunting the school library in search of books that serious adults had shelved in the section they reserved for things they hoped nobody would take seriously. I have followed the science, tracked the congressional hearings, read the declassified documents, and watched with a mixture of fascination and grinding frustration as credible witnesses like military pilots, radar operators, astronauts, and admirals were systematically laughed off the public stage for reporting what they saw with their own eyes. I have watched governments, especially ours, deny, redact, and obfuscate for decades while ordinary people who reported genuine experiences were subjected to professional ruin and public ridicule.

I arrived, after all these years, at a conclusion that is perhaps more disturbing than the existence of aliens themselves.

We don’t deserve the truth. Not yet. Possibly not ever.

There is a pretty simple case to make against humanity, and it’s damning even without embellishment. While you reading this, somewhere on earth a war is being prosecuted in the name of God. (See also: Pete Hegseth.) Not metaphorically. Literally. Human beings are killing other human beings because they read a different book, face a different direction when they pray, or use a different name for the same divine force they both claim to worship. In Ukraine, Russian Orthodox priests have blessed the weapons pointed at Ukrainian Orthodox Christians. In Gaza, ancient scripture is invoked to justify the killing of children. In Myanmar, Buddhist nationalism, yeah Buddhist, has been used to justify ethnic cleansing.

Avi Loeb, the Harvard theoretical physicist who directs the Galileo Project’s search for extraterrestrial technological artifacts, looked at this from a cosmic perspective and didn’t mince words. “If I were looking at Earth from a distance, I would be pretty disappointed. Most of our investing is dealing with conflicts to prevent other people from killing us or us killing others. Look at the Ukraine war over a little bit of territory. That is not a sign of intelligence.”

That’s a Harvard physicist describing our civilization the way a disappointed parent sees a child who has once again set the kitchen on fire. And, in my view, he is being generous. Because the wars we are currently fighting are not even purely about territory or resources, which are at least comprehensible motivations of biology and survival. Instead, our present conflicts are substantially about whose invisible friend is the real one. We are, in measurable, documentable, undeniable ways, murdering each other over metaphysics.

Which is probably why beings capable of interstellar travel might not be ready to introduce themselves to us.

I have spent decades watching what happens to people who try to have this conversation honestly, and it is not pretty. Military pilots with spotless records and decades of service report structured craft performing physics-defying maneuvers, no wings, no propulsion signature, moving at speeds that would kill any biological organism inside them, and they are quietly shuffled away from their careers. Radar operators who track unidentified objects for extended periods, objects confirmed on multiple independent systems, are told to file the report and never speak of it again. I met some of those witnesses. Ordinary civilians, medical professionals, engineers, teachers, farmers, who witness something genuinely inexplicable in the sky are met, if they’re brave enough to report it, with the specific social cruelty we reserve for people who threaten the consensus reality.

Debbie Dmytro, a fifty-six-year-old medical professional from Michigan, described seeing four yellowish-gold lights recently flying in perfect formation, roughly a hundred feet off the ground, in complete silence. “I’ve never seen anything so low without any noise and flying in complete uniformity,” she said. Her reward for this honesty was the implicit suggestion that she had either imagined it or misidentified something mundane.

This is what we do, the system we have built. Not to find the truth, but to protect the people who are most threatened by it.

The scientific establishment, which I respect enormously, has for decades treated the serious investigation of UAP as a form of professional leprosy. The researcher who pursues it with rigor risks grant funding, peer regard, and institutional standing. Even Bill Diamond, president and CEO of the SETI Institute, must speak carefully about the search for extraterrestrial life in the abstract, on distant planets, through radio signals, at safe astronomical remove, because that is scientifically sanctioned. The moment the conversation shifts to craft in our own airspace, right now, the shutters come down.

Retired Rear Admiral Timothy Gallaudet, a man who spent thirty-two years in the United States Navy, served as acting administrator of NOAA, and has viewed classified UAP video, has stated publicly and without qualification, “The nonhuman intelligence that operates them or controls them are absolutely real. We’ve recovered crashed craft.”

We’ve recovered crashed craft.

A retired flag officer of the United States Navy said that and the silence that followed was, in its own way, more revealing than the statement itself. This also might be where this gets truly dangerous, and why I think the people guarding these secrets, whatever they actually contain, may not be entirely wrong to guard them. Because approximately 85 percent of the world’s population identifies with a religious tradition. Most of those traditions share a common structural feature and that is a creation narrative in which human beings occupy a special, divinely intended position in the universe. We were made in God’s image. We were given dominion. We are the point of the whole exercise.

What happens to that story the morning after confirmed, documented, undeniable contact?

Probably, I suspect, a kind of chaos. Not the careful, Vatican-managed, gradual-disclosure version where theologians have eighteen months to prepare nuanced pastoral letters. The real version will be the one where it’s on every screen simultaneously and there is no controlling the narrative.

Priscilla Wald, who teaches at Duke University, has observed that our cultural depictions of aliens almost always reflect our own worst impulses back at us. “It seems to me it’s a reflection on who we are, that we’re projecting onto aliens the way we treat each other,” she said. “So the aliens are coming down, they want to conquer us, they’re violent. Who does that sound like? It sounds like us.”

Question asked. Question answered.

We have already demonstrated, at enormous historical cost, what happens when one group of human beings with a strong creation narrative encounters another group of human beings with a different one. The result, almost without exception, has been the attempt by one group to eliminate the other. The Crusades. The Inquisition. The conquest of the Americas. The partition of India. The sectarian violence threading through human history like a river of blood that never quite dries, all driven by mysteries that songwriter Tom Russell said, are “cured in centuries of blood and candle smoke.”

Now, try this exercise, and remove “different human group” from that equation and replace it with “confirmed nonhuman intelligence that has apparently been here longer than we have and may have had something to do with our creation.” Run that historical pattern forward and take a close look at whatever scenario unfolds.

The people who believe or have evidence of non-human intelligence in our world often turn to books that can be as credulous as religious tracts like the Bible. Zecharia Sitchin, for example, was not a credentialed academic. When I first read his book about the translations of Sumerian cuneiform, I thought it was bad sci-fi. His research, often vigorously disputed by professional Assyriologists, at the least posed important questions, like where did civilization come from and how did it arise?

The ancient Sumerians, among the first human beings to develop writing, mathematics, astronomy, and codified law, described their gods with specificity that reads less like mythology and more like reporting. These were beings who arrived, who communicated, who intervened in human affairs, and who eventually departed and promised to return. Nearly identical narratives appear independently in the pre-Columbian Americas, in ancient India’s Vedic texts, in the oral traditions of Aboriginal Australians, in the mythology of West Africa. Sitchin, somewhat fantastically, places the Sumerian Gods aboard a 12th planet that moves through an orbit near the Earth, which prompted its inhabitants to come down and give us a jump start.

The standard academic explanation, though, is that these aliens and gods are psychological archetypes, products of the human mind’s universal tendency toward narrative. That may be true. But it is also the explanation you would construct if you needed one badly enough, because the alternative, that disparate human civilizations separated by oceans and millennia were all describing encounters with the same nonhuman visitors, has implications that the academic establishment has never been institutionally equipped to absorb.

Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the DNA double helix and therefore not a man casually dismissed, spent years developing the theory of Directed Panspermia, the proposal that life on Earth was deliberately seeded here by an extraterrestrial civilization. Not accidentally nor via random cosmic distribution. Deliberately. He looked at the machinery of DNA, understood it more intimately than almost any human being alive, and concluded that its complexity could not be adequately explained by undirected processes alone. The God botherers might step in there to offer their answer, but it is no more scientifically acceptable than Sumerian explanations.

The most theologically explosive version of this question about alien life is the one nobody wants to ask directly, which is if an advanced civilization engineered or seeded or accelerated human life, why didn’t they simply make us good? Why give us four billion years of single-celled organisms, mass extinctions and evolutionary dead ends and the whole brutal, magnificent, wasteful apparatus of natural selection? Why not just build the endpoint? Put Darwin out of business.

My guess is because the endpoint isn’t what they’re after. What they’re watching for, again, if they’re watching at all, cannot be manufactured. Genuine moral agency, authentic conscience, real courage in the face of real consequence are not engineering problems. They are emergence problems. They only arise through the long, uncontrolled process of a creature becoming aware of itself and then deciding, in a million individual moments nobody is scripting, what kind of creature it intends to be.

And, my, oh my, is our decision-making route of travel littered with mistakes.

But that’s free will. That is also, if you follow the logic, what a sufficiently advanced civilization would understand immediately. You cannot shortcut consciousness into wisdom. You can only watch, with what I imagine would be a mixture of hope and despair not entirely unlike parenthood, and wait.

The problem is that we are not making it easy to wait. We have presidents now saying, or at least suggesting, that UFOs/UAPs are real. The Pentagon released hundreds of UAP reports in 2024. Donald Trump has directed the release of government files. Admiral Gallaudet is on the record about recovered craft. Professor Edwin Bergin at the University of Michigan, who teaches courses on the search for extraterrestrial life, notes that the statistical probability of life elsewhere in a universe of billions of galaxies containing billions of stars each is, conservatively, high.

“When has ignorance ever been a good national strategy?” Gallaudet asks.

Never, but historically, our democratic republic has been good at legislating it into existence. The answer to ignorance is not simply information. The correct curative for ignorance is readiness. And we are not ready. A species that is currently killing its own members over whose interpretation of God is correct is not ready to be told that the God question may need to be reopened from the very beginning. A civilization that ridicules its own most credible witnesses is not ready to process what those witnesses are describing. A culture that has spent seventy-five years treating this subject as the province of paranoids and Hollywood screenwriters has not built the institutional, theological, or psychological infrastructure to absorb a truth this large without catastrophic fracture.

I have been frustrated by this for fifty years, and, in particular by the absence of serious public science, the contempt directed at experiencers, and the gap between what credible people are reporting and what our institutions are willing to acknowledge. That frustration has not diminished. If anything, watching Congress hold serious hearings while cable news covers them with a smirk, watching decorated military officers stake their reputations on claims that are then treated as entertainment, well, it has only gotten worse.

The truth, though, has been leaking out for decades in classified briefings and deathbed confessions and documents with the critical paragraphs blacked out. The question was never whether it exists. The question has always been, and remains, whether we will still be shooting at each other over scripture when it finally arrives.

Based on current evidence, I would not bet heavily on our species.

America seems to have come into a peculiar kind of madness. Our soldiers are being told, in the sterile fluorescence of a combat readiness briefing, that the president has been “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran.” This is the kind of idiocy that the Founders, those hardheaded men who had watched Europe bleed itself white over centuries of religious warfare, specifically designed a Constitution to prevent. But they didn’t have tattoos on their chests like the American Lord of War, Pete Hegseth.

Since U.S. and Israeli forces began coordinated strikes against Iran in early March, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has received hundreds of complaints from service members at more than fifty installations worldwide, alleging that military commanders are yoking the war to Christian eschatology, the theology of Last Things. Being frightened of combat and death has now been emotionally supplemented with the end of the world for American troops. Reports indicate at least one commander cited the Book of Revelation in a combat briefing, declaring that Armageddon was at hand and that the return of Jesus Christ was imminent. Another, according to an email shared by MRFF founder Mikey Weinstein, told troops not to worry, because “there’s a whole plan here” and Jesus is using Trump.

Weinstein is not an angry, anti-military curmudgeon. An Air Force Academy graduate and former JAG attorney, he is careful to note that the vast majority of his clients are themselves Christians, believers who feel, and this is his word, “brutalized” for failing to be sufficiently rapturous about the end of the world. When even the faithful find the theology alarming, it might be worth asking what exactly is going on.

The answer to that question, of course, is Christian Nationalism. The frightening religious movement has risen from the fever swamps of fringe internet theology into the Pentagon’s press briefings with surprising speed. Defense Secretary Hegseth, a man whose primary qualification for his position appears to be body art and facile tough talk, told his personally curated audience of reporters that “the providence of our almighty God” is protecting U.S. troops in Iran. At a dignified transfer ceremony for fallen soldiers, (until Trump showed up in a MAGA hat), Hegseth quoted Psalm 144 by declaring Jesus is “who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.”

The Pentagon and Hegseth, when asked to comment on the MRFF complaints, responded by linking reporters to a private X account called “Shadow of Ezra,” a QAnon conspiracy poster with zero credibility. The account shares a mix of pro-Trump political commentary, conspiracy theories, and sensationalized claims, including posts about figures like George Soros, Jay-Z, and others, often framed in conspiratorial terms. The Pentagon directing reporters to this anonymous account was widely seen as remarkable and controversial, given that Shadow of Ezra is an anonymous, unofficial account with roots in QAnon circles rather than any credible news or government source. Thirty Democratic members of Congress have written to the Pentagon’s inspector general demanding an investigation. No Republicans joined them.

To understand where this theology comes from, it helps to understand the concept of “the Rapture.” This is a mainstream Christian notion that true believers will be bodily whisked to heaven before a period of tribulation and Christ’s return. The delightful narrative of The End of Days was invented by a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish preacher named John Nelson Darby. Before Darby, this was not mainstream Christian doctrine, and it remains, in the scope of Christian history, a theological novelty. As the late Christopher Hitchens observed with characteristic precision: “The Rapture is a belief held by millions of Americans, many of them armed, that they will be physically carried to heaven before an apocalyptic war cleanses the earth of the ungodly. The only difficulty is that this is demonstrably not what the relevant texts say, and demonstrably not what most Christians throughout history have believed.”

And now the Lord of War Hegseth has turned this fringe view into operational U.S. military doctrine.

The Book of Revelation, from which U.S. commanders drew their briefings, is one of the most contested documents in the biblical canon. Many early church fathers opposed its inclusion in scripture. You don’t have to dig far to discover even Martin Luther called it “neither apostolic nor prophetic.” Scholars have argued for centuries that it was almost certainly written during or just after the reign of the Roman Emperor Domitian, around 95 CE, as an elaborate coded protest against Roman imperial persecution of Christians. The “Beast” of Revelation, scholars like Elaine Pagels have suggested, almost certainly referred to Nero Caesar, whose very name excites the QAnon crowd because in Hebrew numerology it yields the infamous 666. The “Whore of Babylon” was Rome. The apocalyptic imagery was the language of resistance literature, the kind of coded dissent any occupied people uses when speaking plainly would get you killed.

To take this document as a literal roadmap for twenty-first century geopolitics is, plainly, nutso. Consider the absurdity of reading a first-century Jewish-Christian resistance pamphlet as a Pentagon planning document. Richard Dawkins, noted atheist, scholar, researcher, author and intellect, has pointed out that it is “a case study in motivated reasoning so pure that it would be fascinating if it weren’t so dangerous.” The Bible, Dawkins has argued, “was written by humans who didn’t know about germ theory, didn’t know that the earth went around the sun, and didn’t have access to the accumulated knowledge of two millennia of human inquiry. To take it literally is not faith, it is a failure of imagination.”

And yet, here is Texas, the state government is still mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. A number of districts have sued to block the rule and local courts have upheld their claims of constitutional violation but the governor insists that the school districts not involved in the lawsuits must continue to comply, or, you know, lose their funding. We have already banned hundreds of books our legislators found theologically or politically inconvenient.

Meanwhile, much of Christian culture in Texas is also embracing a growing movement of Christian Nationalists operating under the banner of “Seven Mountain Dominionism,” which is the noxious belief that Christians must “reclaim” seven spheres of social influence: family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business, and government. And no, that is not a metaphor. It is an explicit organizational strategy employed by influential figures close to the current administration that envisions a United States governed by biblical law.

Sam Harris, neuroscientist and author, has called this movement “Christian Sharia,” and the label is more than mere provocation, especially in a state where the governor expresses fears Texas is being overtaken by Islamists. “The desire to govern other people’s lives on the basis of ancient texts,” Harris has written, “is not limited to Islam. It is a feature of all religious conservatism, and the only thing preventing it from manifesting fully in the United States is the Constitution, which certain people are working very hard to erode.”

They are not working quietly, either. They are working through state legislatures, school boards, judicial appointments, and now, apparently, combat readiness briefings.

The Founders were not subtle about this. Thomas Jefferson called the doctrine of the Trinity “mere Abracadabra.” James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution, wrote that “the number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the state.” John Adams was blunter still, signing the Treaty of Tripoli, which declared explicitly that “the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

These were men who had watched the Thirty Years War kill a fifth of Central Europe’s population. They had read their history and knew what happened when the sacred and the secular fused. They built a wall between church and state not out of hostility to religion, but out of hard-won, blood-soaked wisdom about what religion does to governments and governments do to religion when the two are allowed to merge. That wall is now being dismantled brick by brick, in school classrooms and military briefing rooms and Cabinet press conferences, by people who believe, with disturbing sincerity and terrifying confidence that they are doing God’s work.

There is one more inconvenient fact lurking beneath all of this, which is that the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth as a divine figure is supported by essentially no contemporary evidence. The Roman historians Tacitus and Pliny the Younger mention Christians, not Christ. Josephus’s famous passage is widely regarded by scholars as a later interpolation. No Roman census record, no legal document, no contemporary account places a miraculous Jewish preacher at the center of first-century Judean life. This does not settle the question, obviously, because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it does suggest a certain epistemological humility might be appropriate before one arranges a nuclear military’s war strategy around that figure’s imminent personal return.

And let me throw in a for fukk’s sake here, just for emphasis.

Mikey Weinstein, who is Jewish, has spent decades fighting for the religious freedom of U.S. service members, including and especially Christians who don’t want their faith weaponized. He describes several commanders using a specific phrase to tell troops that “Jesus is using Trump to light the signal lamp.” The soldiers who complained to him, he says, fear retribution for speaking out. They are fighting a war while also, apparently, fighting a theology.

Citizens doing their civic duty are, as someone with considerably more sense than most of Washington recently put it, the immune system of our body politic. This strain of American life, the fusion of military power, apocalyptic theology, and authoritarian politics, which threatens the wider world, has already been rejected at ballot boxes across the country, including in the congressional district of its principal champion.

The question is whether the immune system will respond quickly enough. The Book of Revelation, whatever its original intent, is a document about the end of things. If it were real and viable, most of us would not be around to appreciate the exquisite historical irony when the people most obsessed with its prophecies were the ones to make them come true.