Week 22: The Long Walk

(or, the time I tried to walk to the horizon)

I’ll never forget you, Bright Green Tree

THE AIRPLANE GRAVEYARD

So back in this lovely little camping spot shown above, strikingly dominated by my Best Friend The Tree, one of the cool things was that I was sort of up on a hill, and could see for literally miles. If you squint at the picture, you might see some little dots of white on the horizon- well, those are airplane hangars, and jumbo jets. A regional airport! Pretty cool, right? Only, after a week of sitting in my camp chair and looking at that airport, I realized all of a sudden that I hadn’t once seen any planes actually taking off- or landing- at this airport. None of those jumbo jets sitting there had moved even a smidge.

And if you think THAT sort of thing wasn’t gonna set my little ol’ imagination on fire, you ain’t been paying attention.

So, obviously, I decided one day that I was going to walk there.

I like walking in the desert! It’s nothing like taking a walk out east. Out east, you’re either tramping through forest undergrowth, getting torn by prickers, and avoiding all the signs the park rangers put up expressedly telling you not to be walking where you’re walking, OR you’re walking along a carefully manicured path, trod by thousands and millions before you, and you might as well be on a ride at Disneyland.

(Now, that ain’t fair, really, and I love taking a walk on a good path as much as anybody. The paths tend to lead to all the Cool Stuff, after all!)

However, I’ve certainly fallen in love with the hiking out here- you just pick a direction and walk. It’s more or less impossible to get lost; you’re taller than almost all of the vegetation and the handful of things that are tall make for excellent landmarks. You get the sense of being the first person stupid enough to try to walk this way; there’s no signs, no guideposts, and sometimes you can pretend that you’re discovering shit. The tradeoff is that there’s very little Cool Shit to see, and you gotta delight in the little things.

I’d been taking walks in all of my desert camping spots; in fact I can tell it’s time to be moving on when I run out of directions to go and hills to climb up. But they’re usually little hour-long jobbies; once in a while I really stretch my legs and go for a couple. I didn’t know how long it would take to get to them airplanes, but I was guessing it would be more than a couple. But I was ready for a goddamn adventure, goddamn it!

(This was also right smack dab in the middle of my Meagrims from the last post, and whenever I’m feeling particularly sore of spirit and want to do some thinking, I go on walks. Always have, probably always will until the knees give out. I just walk until I reach some kind of epiphany, and then I turn around and walk back. Hey, it’s cheaper than therapy!)

So, I filled up my water bottle, put on some Long Pants (those don’t see a lot of action out in the desert) and dig out my HANDS DOWN favorite purchase I’ve made on this trip.

My cheap-ass, ugly-as-sin, twenty-dollar WalMart brand hiking shoes.

eat your heart out, Paul Atreides

RIVERS OF SAND ARE REAL COOL

So I remember right after I got the Big Bad News about my job, after I’d decided on the ‘Survive In The Desert’ plan. I knew there was some stuff I needed, if I was going to make it work, and one of those was some hiking shoes. I went on exactly one hike in my flip-flops, and then remembered I’m a Midwest City Boy and I should probably consult the Internet about how advisable that was. The Internet had strong opinions! I don’t scare easy, but it scared me into wearing long pants and leather shoes when I’m going on my hikes (and my can of Bear/Big Cat spray too, even though I’ve never seen any animal bigger than a jackrabbit out here).

ANYWAYS, I remember standing in the shoe aisle at Walmart, in a wildly anxious spiral about whether to spend a little more of my precious Survival Money on some decent hiking shoes, or just get the cheapest possible ones. I’m a big ‘research before purchase’ kind of guy. I spend two months researching wireless keyboards before buying my super awesome high-end steel-finish keyboard. I’ll watch hours of Youtube reviews of a guitar before I buy one. I’ll agonize over which coffee grinder is the very best.

However, one of the myriad of little lessons this trip has shown me is that stuff is just stuff. Not that it’s bad to have nice stuff, or care about it, but when it comes right down to it, it’s not that important. Do I miss my precious, wonderful, amazing OLED tv (that got ruined by rain in the first two weeks of the trip)? No, not really. My cheap little TV works great and I literally never think about it. I said fuck it and grabbed the cheap, ugly shoes.

You guys, I love them so much. They’re so ugly! They’re so cheap! But they’re pretty comfortable, and I don’t have to worry about stepping on scorpions, and every time I look at them I feel like it’s a miniature lesson in ‘learning to love what you have’. This whole damn trip has been a lesson in ‘learning to love what you have’, because ‘all your stuff is broken trash’. But we’ll get to that in a few!

So one of the crazy things about hiking in the desert is that it LOOKS flat, but rarely is. As soon as you start hiking down into it, you find all these little rivers of sand, where water flows through once in a blue moon, and you see how the whole desert is oriented around them; all the biggest bushes and cactus grow near them; what little life there is huddles around them. And if you follow one long enough, it leads to a bigger one, and a bigger. A thin line of green, low to the horizon, will turn out to be a deeply set river of sand, bordered and shaded by trees and grass and rabbits and bugs, and you’ll feel like you stepped through a goddamn wardrobe into NARNIA.

It’s amazing. I crossed a few of those, on my way to the airplane graveyard. I walked through the desert for what seemed like forever, and when I’d get up high enough to see the planes, they… didn’t seem to be getting bigger. I saw some elongated pink shapes in between me and them, now, and wondered how I hadn’t seen them before.

I hadn’t hit no epiphany, though, so I kept walking.

I came across a bombed out, burned car sitting in the middle of nowhere, a burned up tree that was- shit you not- ringed with bleached-white bones of some big animals. Eventually crawled through a bunch of scrub and found out what the pink things were, because I reached the edge of the desert, and was looking out over a cotton farm.

The big pink things were enormous bales of cotton! I’m a city boy; this was cool. There was this huge patch of tilled bare dirt, and a bunch of new high-capacity electric poles that they hadn’t run lines on yet- also very cool. I could still see the planes, and I wanted to see some cotton up close, so I started walking across what felt like two miles of tilled dirt.

Eventually I got to an irrigation ditch, and on the other side of that was what looked like two more miles of cotton, and then a thick stretch of trees past that, and past THAT were the airplanes, and I swear to god they didn’t look any closer than they had back at the van, and I had been walking for like four hours or so, and anyway I’d had my epiphany (which I told you about exhaustively in the last post) , so I figured that was a good place to call it.

And it was right about then that I realized I didn’t have my sunglasses on.

cool shit

DON’T WORRY, THERE’S STILL BEEN DISASTERS GOING ON

So none of them have been a particularly big deal, and even I get tired of whining sometimes, but this adventure has been pure hell on material possessions.

That super deluxe, steel-body wireless keyboard with whisper-quiet keys I bought myself a year ago because I spend most of my time typing? I was storing it in a little cubby and it must have been getting banged around too much, because I opened it one day and half the keys had broken off. Cest la Vie, I suppose. My laptop fell and, while it still works, it has a bunch of cracks across the screen. My one pair of decent shoes got singed black when I was kicking a fire out. My cool Warby Parker glasses picked the first month of this adventure to suddenly become so scratched and foggy I couldn’t see through them. And my precious guitar, my Martin, the one I fell in love with at a music store when I was driving around Michigan- the trip that inspired this trip… Well, it kind of isn’t a guitar anymore?

I picked it up to play a little ditty to the Green Tree Friend, and saw that most of the back of the thing had decided not to be part of the rest of it anymore. Why? I dunno. Possible that it didn’t like going from 28 degrees to 104 in the space of twelve hours, over and over; possible it had fallen off my bed while I was driving and I hadn’t noticed, or got knocked on something, or whatever. Long story short, it don’t sound much like a guitar anymore.

Cest la vie, indeed. I did an inventory, and I’m pretty sure that other than some USB cables and maybe my phone (which I hate), every single thing I brought along on this trip- all of my beloved gadgets, TV’s, keyboards, guitars, ect.- have all been broken or ruined in some way or the other. All left behind on the road, in various dumpsters and trash bins.

Everything I have in the van is stuff I picked up on the way, pretty much- and it’s all pretty much the cheapest possible version that I could find at Walmart while I was refilling my water jugs. Need a keyboard? That one’s twenty bucks. Need new glasses? Let’s get these ugly ones at America’s Best. Fuck it, right? Need new shoes? Grab those cheap ones.

Honestly, it’s been very freeing. Nice things are nice, but the stuff I got is working just fine. And I’m able to keep the Van Thing going. I don’t love those shoes because I love the shoes, I love ‘em because they were twenty bucks and they work, and they kind of represent something to me, you know? Learn to love what you got.

Which brings us, unerringly, to the sunglasses. I’ve never had prescription sunglasses before, and I almost never wear contacts, so I’ve had a long life of squinting into the sun. But before I left Cleveland the second time, when I realized my Warby Parkers were ruined, I went and got the cheapest glasses that I could bear to wear in public- and saw they had one of those deals where if you buy the glasses, you can get a pair of sunglasses cheap.

Fuck it, right? I went for it. And man… when you’re driving around the country in a van, and especially when you’re taking a lot of long walks in the desert… prescription sunglasses are just about the best thing ever. I love them things.

Don’t ask me why I’d brought both pairs of glasses along- I’m not used to having sunglasses, and the idea of going somewhere without my real glasses was inconceivable. At some point I’d taken off my sunglasses, tucked them into my collar, and put my regular glasses back on and forgotten about it- I have a lifetime of squinting, right? Didn’t think much of it. But then, sitting with my back to the cotton, I realized that those sunglasses weren’t tucked into my collar.

I had zero idea when the last time I’d put them on was. I’d been wandering for four hours, following no trail or tracks, across mostly identical swaths of scrub-brush, cactus, and dry wash. There was no chance in hell I was gonna find those sunglasses.

Which was a real bummer. I felt that I’ve been dealing with some of the hard knocks relatively well; turned six months of no money into a Desert Adventure, had a laugh at the destruction of my beloved guitar, learned to love ramen noodles again. But man… I loved those sunglasses. I didn’t want to go back to squinting.

For a while, crouched in that drainage ditch, I indulged in a bit of spiraling. Woe is me. The straw that broke the camel’s back. Zero chance I can afford a new pair of sunglasses, not until the summer. Fuck.

And then I stood up, dusted my Long Pants off, gave my ugly-ass hiking shoes a good stern talking-to, and started retracing my steps. I mean, it was impossible, but I at least remembered my path across the bare tilled earth, right? I think I remembered which giant steel utility pole I took a picture by. Nothing there, but I remembered where I’d climbed over the barbed wire fence beyond that… I think. Nothing. I walked along the fence, looking for where I’d come up out of a dry wash. Took a guess… It was wrong. No glasses. But I saw a couple footprints in the sand that might have been mine, took another guess at where I might have walked down into the wash, and climbed out.

And then realized how hopeless this was; ahead was featureless, identical scrub-land, all the way back to the Van. I had wandered, man, gone in nothing like a straight line, following sand rivers and cool cactus all the hell over the place. But then I saw something I thought might be familiar, and headed towards it- the burned out tree and the animal bones. Then I found the car, but after that the trail was lost. Went through a couple more sand rivers, and had no memory of them.

And then… all of a sudden I did have a memory. I’d traced ‘WLBT’ in the sand in one of these things! For a picture, probably. I hunted all through the one I was in; nothing doing. Took an enormous risk, trusting my gut, and walked back towards the planes, and found the next dry wash. Hunted up it, then down… and found my scratching in the sand. INCREDIBLE! This desert is big, man, and I’d been hiking for something like six hours nonstop. I looked around, remembered I’d climbed up a grassy hill… there. And then- did I duck under those trees to the left, or had I pushed through the brush to the right? I picked the right…

And almost stepped on a pair of prescription black sunglasses that had gotten yanked off by the brush I pushed through.

I swear to god, I just stood there looking at those things for probably twenty minutes. I don’t believe in the kind of God that helps out with shit like this, but in that moment, my confidence wavered. I put them sunglasses on, and man, I felt lighter.

And now, a couple weeks later, I swear to that God I don’t believe in that finding those sunglasses was some kind of turning point. It was a couple days after that when I finally deleted those damned games (haven’t touched ‘em since) and since then I’ve kicked Instagram, Youtube, my News app, and Facebook off my phone. Things keep feeling lighter and lighter. My first book landed on a few pretty big ‘Best of 2025’ lists, and instead of fading into obscurity, new people keep finding it and liking it. I did my budget and all my scrimping and saving is fuckin’ working; barring disaster and assuming I can keep steady, I think I might just make it through the drought. Book 2 is starting to kick and I’m getting better and better at getting to work, and feeling better about the work, and the distracted fog that has filled my brain for most of the last ten years feels like it’s starting to clear.

And THAT, my friends, is the power of a good pair of sunglasses.

in all their glory

See ya next week! And obviously… THANKS. Especially to those who reached out publicly and privately and did not laugh at my last post too hard. I don’t know what this trip would be without y’all, but I know there would be a lot less growth and a lot more moping. I know, I know, it’s hard to believe there could be MORE moping, but just ask anybody I’ve dated and they will assure you that my capacity for moping is second to none.