The Long Road Between Ghosts and Grace

A travel essay, from the roads of New Mexico.

I left Roswell on a quiet desert morning that seemed to crack open like a ripe melon—pinkish light stretching long over the empty parking lots and angular rooftops of motels and UFO-themed gift shops. The air tasted of dust and possibility, of childhood dreams that had been buried under decades of responsible living, steady paychecks, and the comfortable numbness that comes from knowing exactly what each day will bring.

I'd spent the previous evening wandering downtown, marveling at the earnest oddity of the place—alien murals painted with the kind of hope that makes you believe in something bigger than yourself, papier-mâché saucers suspended like frozen prayers, and a postal employee named Dolores who swore she'd seen something in the sky that changed her life. She told me this while selling me stamps, her eyes bright with the kind of conviction that comes from having your world tilted on its axis and finding the courage to speak it aloud. "People think we're crazy here," she said, pressing the stamps into my palm with gentle firmness. "But crazy is just another word for open, don't you think?"

I felt a pulse in the town, something tender and hopeful, transcending punchlines and tourist traps. It was the pulse of people who had decided that mystery was more important than mockery, that wonder was worth defending even when—especially when—the world rolled its eyes. Walking those streets, I remembered what it felt like to believe in impossible things, to let my imagination run wild without the constant editorial voice that had learned to say "be practical" and "grow up" and "that's not how the world works."

When I left, I was buoyant. I felt light, invigorated, as if I'd tapped into some sliver of my childhood self—the one who used to stay up late watching black-and-white alien flicks on our old Zenith television, the volume turned low so I wouldn't wake my dad or my sister. Mom was up, was a night nurse then, coming home with her feet swollen and her uniform smelling of disinfectant. Sometimes she'd find me there in the dark, bathed in the flickering light of "The Day the Earth Stood Still" or "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," and instead of sending me to bed, she'd sit beside me on the couch, still in her uniform, and watch with me.

"You know what I love about these movies?" she said once, during a commercial break. "The aliens always come to teach us something about ourselves. They're like mirrors from outer space." I was eight, maybe nine, and I didn't fully understand what she meant then. But sitting there in the Roswell morning light, I finally did. We're all looking for something that will show us who we really are, something that will crack us open and let the light in.

That same kid had been the one who signed up for the MUFON monthly newsletter with birthday money, who waited for Morgus the Magnificent to come on Channel 6 and send my imagination spinning into galaxies I'd never see but somehow knew by heart. I had lost so many of those memories, and feelings, until the emotional nuggets surfaced like a relic in my mind while gassing up at the Last Stop convenience store on Main. The attendant was a kid about my daughter G-'s age, maybe twenty-two, with the kind of earnest enthusiasm that reminded me of everything I used to feel when the world was still made of endless possibilities.

"First time in Roswell?" he asked, wiping his hands on a rag that had seen better days.

"Yeah," I said, and then, for reasons I couldn't explain, I added, "I used to believe in all this stuff when I was a kid."

He grinned. "Why stop?" Then he jokingly went into, “Don’t Stop Believing.” We shared smart-ass grins.

Something within my heart had been rekindled, I felt a tickle of adventure stirred in my gut—that old familiar hunger for the unknown that I'd been feeding with work deadlines and grocery lists and all the small deaths that come from living a life that fits neatly into boxes. But here, in this strange little town that had built itself around a question mark, I remembered what it felt like to live in the spaces between certainty and wonder.

I blazed west on Highway 380 riding the crisp bright air, windows down, letting the desert wind run its fingers through my graying hair. A dry brightness of morning, that unmistakable high desert smell of dust, heat-stung creosote, and sun-warmed pavement chased my knobby tires. The Bronco—my partner's Bronco, technically, the one they'd ordered years ago that finally came in. It hummed with the kind of confidence that comes from being built to last. They'd wanted to take trips like this, we had talked about it, but it would never work out.

We talked about life after retirement, running my hands over the steering wheel, "we're going to see this country the way it was meant to be seen. Not from thirty thousand feet, but from right here, where you can smell it and taste it and feel it in your bones." We talked about RV life...

But retirement never came; one job led into a another, relationships changed and evolved. The trips never happened. The Bronco sat in the driveway gathering Louisiana pollen and guilt in equal measure, until my partner finally said, "if you want to do it. Do it. If it’s important to you. Go."

They was right, of course. They usually are, which is part of why our relationship has evolved. The truth sits easier with some people than others, and I'd always struggled with the way they could see straight through to the heart of things, past all the careful defenses I'd built around my disappointments and regrets. The support though, that was always a treasure.

As my Bronco climbed through long stretches of nothing, the landscape was punctuated by the surreal presence of Atlas missile silos. They rose out of the earth like forgotten bones, cold and watchful, monuments to a past that still buzzed quietly in the circuitry of American fear. I passed official Scenic Historic Markers with titles like "Missile Testing Range Overlook" and "Lincoln County War Battleground," and for every one of those, I felt an unease that settled deep in my chest.

This land held ghosts—not the Hollywood kind, but the real ones made of consequence and miscalculation and the weight of choices that echo across generations. The ghosts of men who died for causes they might not have understood, of politicians who made decisions in rooms far from here that turned this beautiful emptiness into a proving ground for the end of the world. The ghosts of my earlier generations, who grew up practicing duck-and-cover drills and learning to be afraid of the sky.

Maybe it was the uncanny vastness and the unraveling quiet—I figured out later it was the history of the place. Weighty consequences, a world away, nibbled at my spirit and teased a darkness into my journey. I shifted my ass in the seat, adjusting the A/C vents pointlessly, wiping sweat from my palms despite the cool air. This is what happens when you slow down enough to really see a place: you realize it's not just landscape, it's layer upon layer of human choice and human cost, and sometimes the weight of all that history can press down on you like a physical thing.

As I crossed the rolling desert and stone I found solace in Charlie Crockett and his New Orleans blues influenced country. My foot lightened as the miles slid by like the frets on Charlie's guitar. Music has always been the thing that saves me from my own thoughts, the thing that turns the static in my head into something bearable, even beautiful. Charlie's voice, with its whiskey-rough edges and unexpected tenderness, seemed to understand the particular loneliness of being middle-aged and driving through empty country, looking for something you can't name but will recognize when you find it.

S- had suggested playlists for this trip, spending hours curating songs they thought would fit my mood and the landscape. "This one's for when you're lost in your feels," they'd said, pointing to a Laufey track. "And this one's for when you remember why you left in the first place." They knew me better than I knew myself sometimes, my youngest kiddo with an artist's intuition and a way of seeing straight through to the tender places I tried to keep hidden.

I turned south onto NM-70, passing through San Patricio—a ghost of a town with a church, a post office, and not much else—and then Glencoe, where the road narrowed, and the pines started to thicken. There was something about these forgotten places that spoke to me, these towns that had been left behind by progress and modernity but somehow managed to maintain their dignity in the abandonment. They reminded me of my partner’s family stories about the small Louisiana farming communities where they spent their summers, where people knew each other's troubles and triumphs and made space for both.

There was a soft fork in the road where the name Hondo appeared, and something in me caught, like a hitch in the breath. As I rolled into the sleepy town, I pulled over without thinking, near the Hondo Trading Post, a squat adobe building with chipped turquoise trim and a sun-faded Zia symbol painted above the entrance. The parking lot was empty except for a few tumbleweeds and a rusted pickup truck that looked like it hadn't moved in months. That's when the tears started.

I hadn't meant to cry. I hadn't meant to feel anything beyond the landscape and the motion and the simple pleasure of being alone with my thoughts on an empty road. But it hit me—this was that Hondo. The same one Louis L'Amour named in his novel, the one M- said was his favorite. M-, the man that helped bring me into being, though I didn't know him, not that I ever did, until I was 18. Conversations that I needed, finally happened, and they turned my understanding of family upside down and inside out.

The same man who'd referenced that paperback during a rare phone call from prison, his voice hollow and careful through the static of a collect call. "Start with this one," he'd said. "Then keep going. L'Amour, he understood what it means to be a man in a country that doesn't give you many chances to prove it."

I did. I read about a hundred more of those paperback books. Through those stories, I met men who wrestled with solitude, grit, integrity, with the land and with themselves. Men who looked a little like he did—tall, lean, weathered by circumstances and choices—and maybe even more like me. Men who understood that sometimes the only way to find yourself is to get lost first, to walk into country that doesn't know you and doesn't care what you used to be.

M- had suggested those books like a father gives a son a road map, except he couldn't explain the territory because he'd never learned to navigate it himself. He'd been in and out of prison most of his life, a man caught between the person he might have been and the person his choices had made him. But in those few phone calls, when he'd talk about L'Amour's characters as if they were old friends, I could hear the man he wished he'd been—steady, honorable, capable of love that didn't come with conditions or complications.

I hadn't picked up a L'Amour book since the year he died. That weight caught me full in the chest in that little town, and I sat there, hands gripping the wheel, watching sun glare blur the small crack in the windshield as grief moved through me, slow and insistent. It wasn't just grief for M-, who'd died alone in a Shreveport prison hospital while I was teaching. It was grief for all the conversations we never had, all the ways I'd tried to become the opposite of him and ended up becoming something else entirely.

The tears came harder then, surprising me with their intensity. I thought about my own kids... G- and S- and how they'd grown up with a father who was present but somehow always slightly absent, always holding something back, always afraid that if I loved them too openly, too completely, I'd somehow damage them the way damaged folks had damaged me. I thought about all the times I'd bitten back words of affection, all the hugs I'd cut short, all the ways I'd taught them to expect less from the world because I'd learned to expect less myself. Over the years, I gave too much of myself away as a teacher and regretted what we could have had.

But here's what I realized, sitting in that empty parking lot with Louis L'Amour's ghost town spreading around me like a meditation on impermanence: you can't protect people from pain by withholding love. You can only teach them that love is unconditional, that it doesn’t has to be earned, although it can be lost, that it's safety is often an illusion, a lie that we tell ourselves to preserve our comforts.

I said a prayer—nothing formal, not a church prayer, but something that tasted earthy and personal, something that came up from the same place that had recognized this town before my conscious mind could make the connection. I said goodbye again, a final time. To the man I barely knew but who had influenced me in ways I was still discovering. To the young man who read paperbacks hoping to understand him, thinking that if I could decode the stories he loved, I could decode him.

But sitting there in Hondo, I realized that I never would understand him completely, and that was okay. I had everything I needed. Those shoes had been filled well. My dad is a kind and generous man, I appreciate him every day. I'd learned to be present for my children. I'd learned to stay, to show up, to do the daily work of loving people even when it's boring or difficult or inconvenient. Those weren't small things. They were everything.

I dragged my hand across my face and moved on, but the stones in my gut had shifted. The grief was still there, but it felt lighter somehow, less like a burden and more like a companion—something I could carry without being crushed by it.

As I continued along the Billy the Kid Scenic Byway, the world around me began to twist and throb with surreal energy. It was like entering a fever dream, or maybe like finally waking up from one. The landscape seemed to shimmer with possibility, with the kind of strangeness that makes you question whether you're seeing things as they really are or as they were always meant to be.

I passed roadside attractions that looked half-finished, half-abandoned—statues of cowboys with chipped faces that stared out at the highway with expressions of permanent bewilderment, a hand-painted sign for something called Fox Cave that looked like it had been lettered by someone who'd learned to write in a nightmare. I had no idea what it was, but the idea of a cool dark cave sounded glorious. I imagined spelunking, descending into the earth's cool darkness, finding chambers carved by water and time into cathedrals of stone.

Our family gone caving when the kids were younger, down in Townsend during a family vacation that was more about escaping work than getting together. We'd descended into caverns with a guide who told us about geology and the outlaws who'd hidden in these chambers, and I'd been transfixed by the idea of disappearing into the earth, of finding safety in darkness and silence. It brought Taliesin and his crystal cave to mind, I even peered around each bend looking for Golum.

"Don't get separated from the group," the guide had warned, his flashlight carving sharp shadows on the limestone walls. "These caves go deeper than we know, and it's easy to get lost down here."

But I'd wanted to get lost. I'd wanted to slip away from the group and explore the unmapped passages, to find chambers no one had ever seen, to discover something that was mine alone. That desire—to push beyond the safe boundaries, to explore the unmapped territories of experience—had never really left me.

Fox Cave turned out to be something else entirely. It was a full-blown weed dispensary hidden behind the facade of roadside kitsch, a wonderland of absurdity that seemed designed by someone who understood that the best way to hide in plain sight is to be so obviously strange that people assume you must be a joke.

There were fiberglass dinosaurs out front, their bright primary colors faded by sun and wind into pastels that seemed almost dignified in their weariness. Mannequin pilgrims stood in eternal tableau, their painted faces serene and slightly accusatory, as if they were judging everyone who passed by and finding them wanting. And giant sculptures of bloody hands reaching up from the gravel as though trying to claw their way back into life, fingers spread in gestures of desperate supplication or ecstatic surrender—it was impossible to tell which.

It was grotesque, hilarious, and a little unnerving. A wave of disappointment washed over me—I had my heart set on caves and everything that I loved about them. The coolness, the silence, the sense of being held by the earth itself in chambers carved by patience and persistence. Instead, I'd found this fever dream of commerce and strangeness, this monument to the American gift for turning anything—even transcendence—into a business opportunity.

But instead of driving on, instead of letting disappointment sour into cynicism the way it usually did, I slowed down and made a choice. I was committed to the adventure, committed to staying open to whatever the road offered, even if it wasn't what I'd expected or hoped for. So I went in.

Inside, it was part tourist trap, part head shop, part anthropological exhibition of American weirdness. Painted skulls grinned from shelves like patron saints of bad decisions. Knives gleamed under fluorescent lights, their edges sharp with possibilities I didn't want to contemplate. Scorpion paperweights suspended in resin caught the light and held it, turning the creatures' final moments into decorative objects that somehow made death seem both more and less significant.

T-shirts that glowed under blacklight proclaimed allegiances to conspiracy theories and chemical enhancements with equal enthusiasm. Alien bobble-heads nodded their oversized craniums in permanent agreement with everything and nothing. And everywhere, the sweet, pungent smell of cannabis—not just the plant itself, but the entire economy that had grown up around it, the gummies and tinctures and pre-rolls and accessories that had turned getting high into an art form as complex and varied as wine tasting.

I got H- a novelty baseball with a cannabis leaf embroidered where a team logo should be. He collected baseballs and is an avid athlete. I hoped it conveyed the proof that I was thinking of him when I was somewhere else.

Found Weed World key chains for G- and S-, gaudy plastic things that would make them laugh and then disappear into the chaos of their college rooms, but would serve their purpose as tokens of affection, small proofs that even in the strangest places, I was thinking of them too.

There was weed, sure—everywhere, in every conceivable form, with names like "Desert Thunder" and "Alien Cookies" that seemed designed to appeal to exactly the kind of middle-aged romantic who would drive across three states looking for meaning in roadside attractions. But there was also an eerie, loving care to the madness. Someone had made this space with a kind of chaotic affection, a determination to create something that honored both the absurd and the sacred aspects of American road culture.

The woman behind the counter—forties, golden hair in braids, wearing a t-shirt that said "Age Before Beauty Before Pearls Before Swine"—watched me browse with the kind of amused patience that comes from having seen everything and being surprised by nothing.

"First time?" she asked, and something in her voice reminded me of a friend, who'd had the same gift for making strangers feel like welcome guests.

"Is it that obvious?"

"Honey, I've been working weird retail for thirty years. I can spot a rookie from a mile away. But don't worry—we all start somewhere, and this is a pretty good place to start getting weird."

It was strange. It was perfect. The folks that worked there were super friendly and chill, treating their bizarre merchandise with the kind of casual professionalism that made everything seem normal and surreal at the same time. Go figure.

Souvenirs in hand, I bounded past cowboy dinosaurs to the car and waved to the photo-op Billy The Kid life-sized cutout that stood guard over the parking lot like a patron saint of outlaws and tourists. The whole experience had been so perfectly, absurdly American that I found myself laughing as I pulled back onto the highway—not at Fox Cave, but with it, grateful for its refusal to be anything other than exactly what it was.

I drove on chased by a cloud of dust, passing River Ranch RV Park, where nothing called to me. Just gravel RV lots and silence, the kind of inauthentic emptiness that makes you feel lonelier rather than more alone. I pressed forward toward Ruidoso, my long-haunted dream town.

For twenty years I'd imagined it—the place I'd settle when the dust finally cleared, when the kids were grown and the mortgage was paid and I'd finally earned the right to live for myself instead of for everyone else's expectations. Mountain air, crunchy artists, small-town calm. Back when I was teaching, drowning in lesson plans, IEPs, and parent conferences and the relentless demands of shaping young minds while my own stayed trapped in routines that felt more like sleepwalking than living, I'd trace Ruidoso with my finger on the classroom map during lunch breaks, imagining a life, thousands of feet above sea level, writing with coffee under tall trees and a wood stove in winter.

I'd picture myself there, finally free to write the novel I'd been carrying around in my head for decades, finally able to wake up when my body wanted to wake up instead of when the alarm demanded it. I'd have a small cabin, maybe a container home, with a porch where I could sit in the evenings and watch the light change on the mountains, where I could finally have the kinds of conversations with myself that I'd been too busy for during all those years of raising children and paying bills and being responsible.

But fantasies have a way of being both more and less than reality, and Ruidoso was less rustic than I thought. Busier, too. Downtown was cute—murals that celebrated local history and natural beauty, coffee shops with names like "The Krafty Kup" that suggested the kind of gentle humor that comes with small-town comfort, the ghost of a Blockbuster that stood like a monument to obsolete technologies and simpler times.

I walked into Dollar General, bought a can opener and a small container of sunflower seeds, chatted with a teenage clerk who seemed happy to be alive in a way that reminded me of my own children at their best—unguarded, enthusiastic, generous with her attention and his smile. That alone made my day, that reminder that joy is still possible, still present, still available to anyone willing to notice it.

But something sat uneasy in my gut as I wandered through the town, something I couldn't quite name until I sat on a bench outside the coffee shop and tried to imagine myself living here, tried to picture my morning routine and my evening walks and all the small rituals that would fill the days of my hypothetical new life.

It was... nice. But it wasn't enough. Not for me. Not anymore. Something was missing.

I realized I wanted more. More art that challenged instead of just decorating. More strangeness that opened doors instead of just being quirky. More culture that asked hard questions instead of just providing easy answers. Something less settled. Less "almost." Not Eureka Springs, with its careful balance of hippie aesthetic and tourist convenience. Not Bisbee, with its artistic conflations and underlying propriety. But something with teeth, something that still had room for becoming instead of just being.

The revelation surprised me. For years, I'd thought I wanted safety, predictability, the kind of comfortable routine that would let me slide into middle age without having to keep growing or changing or challenging myself. But sitting there on that bench, watching families walk by with their strollers and their shopping bags and their settled lives, I realized that what I actually wanted was the opposite: more questions, more uncertainty, more of the discomfort that comes from not knowing what comes next.

Past Ruidoso Downs, I stopped at a Visitor Center near the Lincoln County line. A kind woman with salt and pepper hair and turquoise nails showed me a floor map built into the ground—a 3D model of the whole region that let you see the landscape from the bird’s perspective, all the relationships between mountains and valleys and rivers that you miss when you're moving through it at ground level.

She pointed out Lincoln National Forest, tracing the boundaries with her finger like she was introducing me to an old friend. We chatted about the Inn of the Mountain Gods, a Mescalero Apache resort that she described with the kind of enthusiasm that comes from genuine local pride. I politely passed on it—I was chasing silence, not slots, seeking the kind of solitude that can only be found in places where human voices are outnumbered by wind and birdsong and the subtle sounds that empty country makes when it thinks no one is listening.

In the restroom there was a giant bear statue that I posed with in front of the mirror, making faces at myself like I was eight years old again, and I left with a handful of pamphlets and the strange lightness that comes from rediscovering your capacity for silliness. The parking lot was sprinkled with massive horse statues like the kind Greek Gods would ride—painted creatures frozen in eternal gallop and leap, their manes streaming behind them like prayers to the gods of motion and freedom.

Instead of following the tourist trail, I took NM-48 to 532, ascending sharply into the forest on roads that seemed designed to test both your vehicle and your nerve. Thousand foot drops, unguarded, dropped pebbles as I climbed. The gravel sang like Johnny Cash under my tires—a low, rhythmic percussion that provided the perfect soundtrack for soaring into country that felt more like myth than geography. The switchbacks grew steep, each turn revealing new vistas that seemed painted by someone with a supernatural understanding of light and shadow and the way mountains hold the sky.

My Bronco took it in stride, climbing with the kind of steady confidence that reminded me why my partner had chosen this particular machine for their dreams of adventure. At one overlook, a sign said simply: "Wild Horses."

I laughed. Sure. Of course there would be wild horses. This whole trip had taken on the quality of delirium, a surreal journey through landscape that seemed designed by someone who understood that the best stories are the ones that sound too strange to be true.

But two bends later, they were there. A small band, maybe eight or ten animals, grazing in a meadow that opened up like a secret between tall the trees. Unbothered by my presence, magnificent in their indifference to human schedules and human needs. A mare looked up at me, her dark eyes holding the kind of ancient knowledge that comes from never having been broken, never having been made to serve purposes other than her own.

I stopped. Watched. They shimmered in the late light like something from another century, like spirits made flesh just long enough to remind me that wildness still exists, that there are still creatures in this world who answer to no one but themselves and the seasons and the deep rhythms that connect all living things.

I texted my kids: "Saw REAL wild horses." I sent a few blurry shots, though the phone camera couldn't capture what I was really seeing—the way they moved like dancers who'd never learned choreography, the way their presence transformed the entire landscape into something sacred and timeless.

G- texted back immediately: "NO WAY. Are you serious?"

S- sent a string of horse emojis followed by: "Dad's having a midlife crisis and it's AWESOME."

"How do you feel?" I asked myself.

How did I feel? Watching those horses, breathing that thin mountain air, feeling the weight of all the miles and all the years that had brought me to this moment, I felt... present. Completely, utterly present in a way I hadn't been in years. Not thinking about tomorrow's responsibilities or yesterday's mistakes, not rehearsing conversations or planning next steps, just standing there in the fullness of now, grateful to be alive and conscious and capable of wonder.

Tangled hair and unbrushed, they were beautiful like all wild things are beautiful—not because they conform to human standards of beauty, but because they embody something essential and irreducible, something that can't be improved upon or optimized or made more efficient.

Minutes passed, measured in the swish of a tail, the casual repositioning of a hoof, the slow rhythm of grass being cropped and chewed and swallowed. On a steep switchback, alone, in serenity that felt earned rather than given, I understood something about my own wildness, my own need to answer to rhythms deeper than career advancement and social expectations and all the careful compromises that had shaped my adult life.

Upward I went, cresting at 9,635 feet on Forest Road 117. I pulled over and let the stillness swallow me, let it fill the spaces in my chest that had been tight with anxiety and ambition for so long that I'd forgotten what it felt like to breathe deeply.

Horse droppings patterned the dirt like runes, like messages from the wild world written in a language older than words. It felt like a million miles away from anything—from traffic and deadlines and the constant electronic chatter that had become the soundtrack of modern life. It was a scene from a film, but not the kind of film they make anymore—something slower, more contemplative, more interested in how landscape shapes the soul than in how quickly the plot can advance. Kurisawa-like long held shots.

Hiking and a little mountain biking came next. I cut the thin air with a light step and my dad's Trek, the bike he'd bought to exercise on our Rails to Trails in St. Tammany. Riding it felt like a conversation with him, like a way of completing journeys he'd started in his imagination but never got to finish. We communed through the bike.

A pit toilet sat half-sunk into the slope broke the ridge line, and I was grateful for its clean simplicity, for the way it served its function without pretense or apology. Sometimes the most profound moments happen in the most ordinary places, and sitting there near that mountain outhouse, looking out at vista that stretched to the horizon, I thought about dignity and necessity and the way wilderness strips away everything that isn't essential.

I made dinner from a can—stew that tasted like ambrosia in the thin air—watched the sky stain itself with sunset, and felt an echoing stillness inside me, a quiet that matched the quiet of the mountains and made me feel part of something larger and older and more permanent than my own small concerns. After dinner I hiked paths through boulders on the lookout for mountain lions. Every turn filled me with joy and there was no pacing my enthusiasm until I returned to camp.

Then came the altitude sickness. Nausea that hit like a wave, cramping that doubled me over, dizziness that made the world tilt and spin like a carnival ride designed by someone with a cruel sense of humor. It was my own fault. I'd gone from 35 feet above sea level to 9,000 feet in under two days, asking my body to adapt to atmospheric changes that would challenge an athlete in peak condition.

Pain rolled over me in weird waves, each one teaching me something new about the relationship between ambition and limitation, between the places we want to go and the bodies we have to carry us there. But I didn't care. This was worth it. Every wave of nausea, every moment of dizziness, every reminder that I was mortal and middle-aged and not as tough as I'd been at twenty—all of it was worth it for the privilege of being here, of breathing this air, of seeing the world from this impossible height.

I felt alive. Aching and alive, present in my body in a way that reminded me that consciousness is a gift, that the ability to experience beauty and discomfort with equal intensity is not something to take for granted.

I settled onto the thick stones of the fire watch and felt the coarse knuckles of rock under my palms, their mineral roughness grounding me in the physical world even as my spirit soared with the eagles and the wind. This was what I'd come for, I realized—not comfort, not convenience, not the carefully managed experiences that modern life offers as substitutes for actual adventure, but this: the raw encounter with landscape and weather and my own limitations, the chance to test myself against something bigger and older and more powerful than my own will.

A few travelers joined me before nightfall. A retired cop and his teenage son, road-tripping to celebrate graduation. They climbed up from their campsite below like pilgrims ascending to a shrine, breathing hard in the thin air, grinning with the kind of exhausted triumph that comes from pushing your body beyond what it thought it could do.

"Hell of a view," the man said, and something in his voice—the wonder mixed with relief, the gratitude for having made it this far—reminded me of every important moment I'd shared with my own children, all the times we'd pushed ourselves to reach something beautiful and difficult and worth the effort.

I snapped their photo—father and son standing on a boulder, wind in their jackets, the sun melting behind them like honey over the distant peaks. The father welled up looking at the photo, a tear ran down his weathered cheeks as he saw himself and his son transformed by light and landscape into something archetypal, something that would outlast both of them.

We all did. We all welled up, understanding without words that we were witnessing something sacred—not just the sunset, but the moment when a father and son became legend to each other, when an ordinary trip became the story they'd tell for the rest of their lives.

Later, four college kids in a wheezing all-wheel-drive hatchback barely made the climb, their little car gasping and lurching up the steep switchbacks like a mechanical animal pushed beyond its design limits. They stayed ten minutes, took selfies with the studied casualness that their generation had perfected, and vanished back down the mountain road in a cloud of dust and youth and the kind of restless energy that can't sit still long enough to let beauty really penetrate.

I stayed. Slept in the Bronco, passenger side fully occupied with my height, my sleeping bag, and my thoughts in the vast silence of the mountains. Wind howled all night, shaking the car, making the roof creak like an old barn settling into its bones, like the mountain itself was breathing in great, slow rhythms that had been going on since before humans learned to make fire.

My phone buzzed with a high wind advisory: Seek shelter. But I was in shelter. Even thought I was relieved I had chosen the car over the tent and hammock. This was it—not the kind of shelter that protects you from experience, but the kind that holds you while you experience everything, that keeps you safe enough to be vulnerable, grounded enough to fly.

This is why I was out here, I realized as I lay there listening to the wind compose symphonies in the trees and stones. Not to escape from life, but to remember what life actually is when you strip away all the noise and hurry and artificial urgency that modern civilization mistakes for vitality. My smile lit the darkness, and I felt a gratitude so profound it was almost painful—gratitude for this moment, this place, this body that had carried me here despite its protests, this heart that was still capable of being cracked open by beauty.

At 2:00 A.M., I was wide-eyed and awake, thinking about the arc of this trip, about grief, and wonder, and how the world holds so many strange gifts in places no one writes about. I thought about M- and the books he'd introduced me to, about my father and the dreams he'd shared with me, about my children sleeping safely in their beds thousands of miles away, dreaming their own dreams of adventure and possibility.

I thought about my partner, probably asleep in the house we'd shared for twenty three years, the house where we'd raised our children and fought our battles and slowly, gradually learned that love isn't always enough to bridge the spaces between two people who want different things from life. I think they'd wanted stability, predictability, the kind of life that could be planned and budgeted and executed according to schedule. I'd wanted that too, or thought I had, until I realized that what I'd taken for contentment was actually a slow suffocation of everything wild and unpredictable in my nature.

"You're always somewhere else," they’d said during one of our final fights, their voice sharp with the kind of hurt that comes from feeling abandoned by someone who's sitting right next to you. "Even when you're here, you're somewhere else, dreaming about other places. Never satisfied."

They'd been right, of course. But lying there in the Bronco at 9,635 feet, wind howling through the boulders and the branches like the voice of everything I'd been afraid to want, I realized that maybe being somewhere else in your dreams isn't a failure of presence—maybe it's a sign that your soul is still alive, still hungry, still capable of imagining better versions of yourself and the life you're living.

The wind carried sounds I couldn't identify—branches creaking, something larger moving through the undergrowth, the distant cry of what might have been an owl or might have been something wilder, something that reminded me that humans are still visitors in most of the world, still subject to forces larger and older than our plans and ambitions.

I pulled out my phone and started to text my people, then stopped. What could I say? How could I explain to any of them that I was sleeping in a truck on a mountain in New Mexico, crying about wild horses and dead men and the terrible beauty of finally, finally being exactly where he was supposed to be? Instead, I just looked at their profile pictures on my phone—graduation days, arms around G- and S-, both of them laughing at something off camera that I’d forgotten—and felt the weight of how much I loved them, how much I wanted them to know that it's possible to be middle-aged and still surprised by the world, still capable of wonder and foolishness and the kind of joy that makes you want to wake up strangers and tell them about wild horses.

When I left Monjeau Lookout, the sky was thick black and my headlights sliced like bright knives across the mountain road, carving reality out of darkness one curve at a time. The wind had died down just enough to make my descent possible, though it still whispered through the uneven terrain like it was trying to tell me something ancient—secrets about endurance and solitude and what it means to stand your ground when everything around you is in motion.

I didn't rush. There was no reason to, and rushing would have been a betrayal of everything the mountain had taught me about patience and presence and the virtue of moving through the world at a speed that allows you to actually see it. I rolled down slow, coasting in and out of switchbacks, letting the Bronco hug the curves of the mountain like a beast bred for this terrain, like it had been waiting its entire mechanical life for this moment of perfect marriage between machine and landscape.

My eyes were wide for horses in the night, but they were all asleep somewhere off the beaten path, dreaming whatever dreams wild horses dream—of endless grasslands, maybe, or of the time before fences, when the whole continent was open country and a horse could run from sunrise to sunset without ever encountering a boundary.

My bones were tired, but I felt oddly awake—charged, almost, like the solitude of that high-altitude night had recalibrated something fundamental in my nervous system. The forest faded behind me in layers, until all that was left was open country again—wide and dry and quietly humming with the kind of heat that builds up in the earth during the day and radiates back toward the stars all night long.

Somewhere along Highway 54, I passed a giant pistachio. I wasn't expecting it—you never expect the giant pistachio, which is part of its power and its charm. There it was, off the shoulder like a dream artifact or the leftover prop from a surreal roadside attraction, standing in the flat, scrubby landscape like it had always been there, like it was as natural and inevitable as the mountains behind it.

A metal sculpture, oversized and proud, painted in colors that seemed to glow even in the darkness. It made me laugh out loud—not at it, but with it, the way you laugh when you encounter something so perfectly, absurdly American that it restores your faith in the country's capacity for whimsy and strangeness and the kind of folk art that grows up in places where people have too much time and too much space and just enough madness to turn their obsessions into monuments.

Of course there would be a giant pistachio in the middle of nowhere. It felt like the kind of sign the road offers when you've been listening—absurd, slightly divine, and perfectly timed to remind you that the world is still full of surprises, still capable of stopping you in your tracks with gestures of inexplicable beauty.

I thought about calling my best friend, telling him about the pistachio, but it was three in the morning and he had work in five hours and a mortgage and kids and all the responsibilities that keep people tethered to predictable schedules. Instead, I took a picture, though I knew it wouldn't capture what I was really seeing—the way the pistachio seemed to glow with its own internal light, the way it transformed the entire landscape into something mythical and strange.

Before dawn, I pulled into a place called Raptor Lake, just outside White Sands. It was barren, windswept, and seemed mostly empty—just a wide basin that had seen better days and worse weather, one of those places that exists on maps but not quite in the real world, a thin spot where the ordinary rules of geography and expectation don't quite apply.

But it offered something I needed more than comfort or convenience: space. Flat places to park, peace that went all the way down to bedrock, and a quality of silence that reminded me that most of the noise in my life was optional, manufactured, designed to keep me distracted from the deeper rhythms that connect all living things.

I set up camp next to the Bronco again, laid out my kid's tent—a hand-me-down from G-'s adventurous youth, bright red and cheerful as a cherry—opened a protein bar that tasted half like victory and half like cardboard, and let the night wrap around me like a blanket woven from starlight and desert wind.

No fire, no noise, just me and the quiet hum of a place that had more ghosts than guests. I didn't mind the ghosts. By now, I understood that every landscape is haunted by everyone who'd ever stood there and felt small in the face of something larger than themselves, everyone who'd ever looked up at the same stars and wondered about their place in the vast machinery of existence.

My dreams were full of horses and lookout towers, of faces I recognized but couldn't name, of conversations in languages I didn't speak but somehow understood. I woke up feeling heavier and lighter all at once—heavier with the weight of everything I'd seen and felt and understood, lighter because I'd finally set down burdens I'd been carrying so long I'd forgotten they weren't part of my skeleton.

In the morning, I was greeted with a bright clear sunrise over murky water and friendly neighbors I hadn't noticed in the darkness. The shore was more crowded than I'd realized—vans and cars and RVs strewn all down the sight line like a impromptu community of wanderers and searchers and people who'd decided that the best way to find themselves was to get lost first.

A woman in her seventies was doing tai chi on the shore, moving through the ancient forms with the grace that comes stems from years of practice and the deep understanding that growing older doesn't have to mean growing smaller. A couple in their twenties sat in folding chairs, drinking coffee from a thermos and watching the sunrise like it was the first one they'd ever seen.

"Beautiful morning," the man called out as I emerged from my tent, stretching muscles that had been compressed by altitude and adventure and the particular aches that come from sleeping in places your body wasn't designed for.

"They all seem to be around here," I called back, and meant it. Every morning is beautiful when you're paying attention, when you're present enough to notice that the world recreates itself every single day, offering new light and new possibilities to anyone willing to receive them.

My electric tea kettle heated quickly in the crisp desert air. The instant coffee was mediocre, but the oatmeal was great—maple and brown sugar dissolving into something like contentment on my tongue—and I left feeling full in many ways. Not just physically satisfied, but emotionally nourished by the simple act of waking up in a new place, of sharing space with strangers who'd chosen the same adventure, of being part of the loose community of people who understand that sometimes you have to leave home to remember who you are.

I drove the short distance west and finally arrived at White Sands National Park, a destination that had been pulling me like a magnet since I'd first seen pictures of it years ago. But no amount of preparation could have readied me for the reality.

Nothing prepares you for it. You can read the travel guides and scroll through Instagram and watch the videos, but until you crest that final hill and the gypsum dunes reveal themselves—blinding and otherworldly—you don't really understand. It's like driving into snow, except warmer, brighter, and quieter. The sand is so white it looks fake at first, artificial, like you've stumbled into someone's fever dream of what a desert should look like if it were designed by angels with unlimited budgets and no concern for believability.

It's not sand, exactly- it's crystallized gypsum, softer than quartz sand, cooler to the touch, almost luminous in its whiteness. The dunes roll away in every direction like frozen waves in an ocean of light, their curves sensual and mathematical at the same time, shaped by wind patterns that follow laws older than human civilization.

A phantasmagoria that had me looking for Jack Sparrow. However, there were no small crabs scuttling across the surface, no giant ships rising from the dunes like mirages, no pirates or buried treasure—just beauty so pure and strange that it made everything I'd ever seen before seem slightly faded by comparison.

I parked and got out barefoot, letting my feet sink into sand that felt like cool silk, like powdered moonlight, like the physical manifestation of every dream I'd ever had about walking on clouds. The sensation was so unexpected, so unlike any other sand I'd ever touched, that for a moment I wondered if I was still dreaming, still curled up in the Bronco at 9,635 feet, imagining this impossible landscape.

I walked out into it like a child entering another dimension—each step a soft surprise, each breath a reminder that the world still held mysteries worth traveling hundreds of miles to witness. The dunes rolled around me in soft waves, unpunctuated by anything except the occasional desert bush that had somehow adapted to this alien environment, and the delicate traces of lizards and insects who'd crossed the sand before dawn, leaving calligraphy in a language written by small feet and desert wind.

It felt sacred. Empty in the way that's full—not empty like a vacant lot or an abandoned building, but empty like a cathedral between services, empty like a blank page waiting for the right words, empty like the space between heartbeats where all possibilities exist simultaneously.

There was no sound except the whisper of wind moving millions of tiny crystals, no distraction except the play of light and shadow across surfaces that seemed to glow from within. It was meditation made landscape, prayer turned into geography, the physical expression of what it might feel like to step outside of time and into the eternal present that mystics and poets spend their lives trying to describe.

Standing there, surrounded by more beauty than my nervous system seemed capable of processing, I suddenly understood what people mean when they talk about feeling small in a good way. Not diminished, not insignificant, but right-sized- part of something vast and ancient and ongoing, connected to the wind and the light and the patient processes that had been shaping this landscape grain by grain for thousands of years.

Time splayed out and passed me in ways that made clocks seem like quaint inventions, irrelevant artifacts from a world obsessed with measurement and control. Humming some Sierra Ferrell—her voice the perfect soundtrack for this kind of spacious solitude—I sat cross-legged on the edge of a dune and stared at nothing and everything, letting my mind wander through memories and possibilities with the same aimless grace that the wind used to reshape the dunes.

I thought about my family, the changes and growth we'd all been through, the way we'd learned to love each other not despite our differences but because of them. Thought about S- and their art, the way they saw the world through eyes that noticed beauty in places I'd learned to overlook. Thought about G- and her quiet wisdom, her gift for listening and understanding and offering exactly the right words when someone needed them most. Thought about my partner and their fierce independence, their refusal to let anyone else's expectations define their possibilities.

Thought about how our children had grown into amazing adults that I was incredibly proud of—not just proud of their accomplishments, but proud of their kindness, their curiosity, their willingness to keep growing and changing and becoming more themselves instead of less.

Thought about how lucky I was to be here, moving through these places with no schedule except the sun, no agenda except presence, no goal except the simple act of paying attention to what the world was offering moment by moment.

And then my eyes welled up—just a little at first, then more, until I was sitting in the white sand crying with gratitude and grief and the overwhelming recognition that my life had emptied itself enough to make space for something new. All the things I'd thought I wanted—security, success, the approval of people whose opinions didn't actually matter—had fallen away, leaving room for experiences like this, moments when the boundary between self and world dissolved completely and I could feel myself breathing with the same rhythm as the wind and the dunes and the vast sky overhead.

The tears weren't sad, exactly. They were more like relief, like the physical expression of finally, finally letting go of the story I'd been telling myself about who I was supposed to be and what my life was supposed to look like. I was fifty-two years old, sitting alone in a desert in New Mexico, crying about beauty and possibility and the terrible wonderful fact that it's never too late to surprise yourself.

I didn't know what was coming next. But I knew I wasn't done—not with this trip, not with the long process of becoming whoever I was meant to be when I stopped trying so hard to be who I thought everyone else wanted me to be.

The sun climbed higher, and the white sand began to warm under its attention. Other visitors started to arrive—families with children who ran across the dunes like puppies discovering snow, couples taking selfies against backgrounds that looked too perfect to be real, serious photographers with expensive equipment trying to capture something that could only truly be experienced, never quite reproduced.

But for those first few hours, it had been mine alone—this ocean of light, this meditation made landscape, this proof that the world still held places capable of stopping you in your tracks and reminding you that wonder is always available to anyone willing to slow down enough to receive it.

I walked back to the Bronco eventually, my feet white with gypsum dust, my heart full of something I couldn't name but didn't need to. Some experiences exist beyond language, beyond explanation, beyond the need to be shared or understood or validated by anyone else. They exist simply to be experienced, to be received with the whole body and the whole heart, to be carried forward as proof that beauty is real and accessible and endlessly renewable for anyone brave enough to leave home and go looking for it.

As I drove away from White Sands, I caught myself glancing in the rearview mirror, trying to hold onto the image of those impossible dunes, trying to burn it into memory so deeply that I'd be able to call it up whenever I needed to remember that the world is stranger and more beautiful than any life lived entirely within the boundaries of the familiar could ever reveal.

But I also knew that the real gift wasn't the memory—it was the knowledge that this was possible, that landscapes like this existed, that I was capable of traveling to them and receiving what they had to offer. The real gift was the understanding that this trip wasn't ending but beginning, that every mile I'd driven and every tear I'd shed and every moment of wonder I'd experienced had been preparation for whatever came next.

I didn't know what that would be. But I knew I was ready for it—emptied out and filled up, broken open and healed, finally old enough to understand that the point isn't to arrive somewhere but to keep moving, keep wondering, keep allowing the world to surprise you with its infinite capacity for beauty and strangeness and grace.

The road stretched ahead, and I followed it, humming Sierra Ferrell, thinking about wild horses and giant pistachios and the way love looks when you stop trying to control it and start learning to trust it instead. The Bronco hummed beneath me, carrying me toward whatever story was waiting to be written next, and I felt the deep satisfaction that comes from finally, finally being exactly where I belonged: between one place and another, between who I'd been and who I was becoming, between the certainty of the past and the possibility of everything that lay ahead.