For the past three years, I’ve been deep underground, excavating. Writing Surfing the Interstates was never really about producing a book. It was about understanding a life — mine — by forcing it through language, scene by scene, until patterns I couldn’t see while living inside them became visible on the page. That work is done. The book is published, available here on Substack for subscribers and on Amazon for those who prefer a copy in hand. I’m proud of it. More importantly, I’m changed by it.

I absorbed what the writing taught me. About my father. About perpetual motion as addiction. About the spaces between who we think we’ll become and who we actually are. Three years of that kind of interior work leaves a mark. A good one, I think. But it also leaves you ready for something else.

Something has been calling me for the past six months. Back to the studio.

I have three acoustic guitars and two electrics, one fitted with a hex pickup that lets me dial in bass, saxophone, or just about any other instrument through a synthesizer. I have a vocal processor, a drum pad, and a dream pedalboard that can shape any sound with any effect in stereo. It’s all down there. It’s been down there, largely untouched, for a couple of years.

What happened was photography. After a health scare that nearly cost me both eyes, I pivoted hard into the visual — walked every trail, shot every season, documented the landscape and the dogs in every light Vermont could throw at me. That was its own kind of meditation, and I don’t regret a frame. But eventually you take every picture there is to take of the places you walk and the creatures who walk with you. You get done.

And then you hear the guitars calling.

I should be clear about what I am and what I’m not. I’m a noodler, not a virtuoso. I don’t loop live. I’m more of a house framer — I lay the foundation first, get it plumb and square, then hang the drywall, then put on the siding and the roof. Multi-track recording suits my temperament the same way the carpenter’s blueprint approach suited the memoir. One layer at a time. Get each one right before moving to the next.

So this is a pivot, not a goodbye. I’ll still post here when something moves me to write. There may be occasional essays, maybe a piece of music, maybe a photograph that earns its place. But the daily focus is shifting. The studio needs to be dialed back in — cables reconnected, software updated, levels set. The preparation before the preparation, which, if you’ve read the memoir, you know is a pattern I’m well acquainted with.

The difference now is I know it’s a pattern. And I’m doing it anyway, with my eyes open, because the alternative is silence. At 74, with limited energy and a body that has made its position on overexertion abundantly clear, I’d rather spend what I have making sound than making excuses.

Spring begins. So do I.

Surfing the Interstates is available on this Substack, or as a paperback or Kindle on Amazon

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If you’ve been reading along, thank you. If you’re just arriving — welcome, pull up a chair, and don’t mind the guitar cables.

The cold snap broke sometime in the night. I didn’t hear it go — I just woke up and the house felt different. Softer. After weeks of that relentless, bone-deep cold that makes the walls tick and the pipes groan, the air had finally let go.

I walked outside this afternoon and stood in the driveway and listened. Nothing. Not a single sound. No birds yet — they’re still weeks away. No snowmobiles. No cars on the road. No rumble from the sandpit. No airplanes. No drones. No wind. Not even the distant hum of traffic that you don’t realize you’re hearing until it stops. Just silence so complete it has texture.

The snow is sliding off the roof in great slow slabs, the mountain of it piled halfway up the side of the house. The sun is different now — not just bright but warm, with that particular February quality that says I mean it this time. The air is clean and sharp and sweet. You can feel the turn coming. Not spring, not yet, but the promise of it. The first honest light after a long lie.

We’ve been in this little yellow house since October of 1998. We’ve had a line of golden retrievers — Buio first, then Izzy, now Blaze — and Blue, our black lab, who’s still with us. Twenty-six years of winters like this one, each of them hard in its own way, each of them breaking open into exactly this moment: the afternoon when the light shifts and the silence arrives and you stand in your driveway and think, yes, this is why we stay.

Absolute perfection in an image.

You were alive in the cold morning. You breathed the same air I breathed. You drank from water I have never found. You knew trails older than any road I ever traveled.

I did not take you lightly. I take you into my body now the way the forest takes its own fallen — not with grief, not without it, but with the understanding that everything feeds everything and nothing is wasted if it is received with thanks.

You ran the ridgelines. You survived winters I cannot imagine. You carried your antlers like a crown earned by patience and season and bone.

Now you carry me.

I am grateful.

I will try to be worth it.

This morning a barred owl appeared on the wooden stake I’d put by the driveway to guide the snowplow driver. He sat there for the better part of an hour, calm as stone, eyes half-closed, unbothered by anything — the house, the cold, the fact that his perch was a piece of lumber meant for a man in a truck. He just sat. We watched from the window. Veronica and I were careful not to disturb him. Eventually the dogs went out into the yard and never even noticed him. When we looked again later, he was gone.

He’s been around our property for years. Veronica photographed him back in 2022 — perched on a wire, tucked into a pine — always with that same stillness, that same unbothered presence. He comes and goes on his own schedule. We don’t own him. We share the woods with him, and when he shows up, we pay attention.

There’s a reason every culture that ever lived close to the land assigned meaning to the owl. Wisdom. Clarity. Transition. The owl sees in the dark. The owl sits still while the world moves. The owl doesn’t chase — it waits, and when the moment comes, it acts without hesitation. If you live in the woods long enough, you stop thinking of these encounters as coincidence and start understanding them as conversation. The land talks to you if you’re quiet enough to hear it.

I needed the owl this morning.

Yesterday I made a decision I’d been circling for weeks. I took what was going to be the opening chapter of my second book — a chapter called “Caught in the Light” — and made it the final chapter of my first and only book, Surfing the Interstates. The trilogy I’d planned is done. One book. This is the book.

That meant going back through all seventeen chapters and editing carefully — tightening, cutting, making the whole thing flow as a single work rather than the first installment of something larger. It meant reading every sentence with fresh eyes, asking whether it earned its place. Some didn’t. They went.

And then came the harder cut. I’d spent two weeks recording the audiobook — five and a half hours of final recordings, chapter by chapter, the whole thing done. And it no longer matched the book. The edits I’d made to the text meant the recordings were out of date. So I deleted them. All of them. Five and a half hours, gone.

And that’s OK.

The owl doesn’t hold onto the branch it left. It doesn’t grieve the perch. It finds the next one, sits, and waits. That’s what making something real requires — the willingness to let go of finished work when the work itself has moved past it. The recordings were good. They served their purpose, which was to teach me how my voice sounds reading my own words. I’ll record again when the book is truly done. The next version will be better because this version existed first.

This is what living in the woods teaches you, if you let it. The animals don’t agonize. The barred owl doesn’t sit on that stake wondering whether the pine tree was a better perch. He’s here. He’s present. He sees what he sees. And when it’s time to go, he goes without looking back.

I’m trying to learn that. I’m seventy-four and I’m still trying to learn that. But this morning the owl came and sat outside my window for an hour while I worked, and I took it as a sign that I was on the right track. Not because I’m superstitious. Because I live here. Because attention is a form of respect, and respect is a form of love, and love is the only thing that makes any of this — the writing, the cutting, the letting go, the starting again — worth doing.

The owl is gone now. The book is almost ready. The woods are quiet. Back to work.

In 1956, MGM released a science fiction film that most audiences took as a clever updating of Shakespeare’s *The Tempest*—a story about a brilliant castaway, his innocent daughter, and the sailors who disturb their isolation. The film was *Forbidden Planet*, and it starred Walter Pidgeon as Dr. Morbius, a philologist who had unlocked the secrets of an extinct alien civilization. It featured Robby the Robot, who became an icon. It had a flying saucer and ray guns and a beautiful girl in short skirts.

What it also had—buried beneath the 1950s Technicolor spectacle—was the most accurate prediction of where we’d find ourselves in 2025.

The Krell were a species that had evolved far beyond us. A million years ahead, Morbius explains to the visiting Earth crew. They had conquered disease, eliminated want, and turned their entire planet into a single machine. This machine consumed the interior of their world—7,800 thermonuclear reactors powering a system designed to do one thing: project thought into reality. Whatever a Krell imagined would materialize instantly, anywhere on the planet. They would become as gods, freed from all physical instrumentality.

The night the system came online, the Krell vanished. All of them. Overnight.

I saw this film as a teenager in the early 1960s, and what stayed with me wasn’t the monster or the romance or Robby’s comic relief. It was that image: a civilization so advanced it built a machine to give itself unlimited power, and that machine erased them from existence before they could understand what they’d done.

Sixty years later, I follow world events on X and see the same story unfolding in real time.

The race is on. The United States, China, and Russia are locked in a competition that makes the Cold War arms race look quaint. The prize isn’t territory or resources in any traditional sense. The prize is the machine—the system that will monitor, predict, and control human behavior at a scale never before possible.

They don’t call it that, of course. They call it artificial general intelligence. They call it innovation. They call it inevitable.

What they’re really building is a control grid.

Consider what’s required to run these systems. The data centers proliferating across the American landscape consume more electricity than many countries. A single AI query uses ten times the energy of a Google search. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are racing to secure power sources—any power sources—to feed the machine’s appetite.

And here’s where the hypocrisy becomes impossible to ignore.

For thirty years, we’ve been lectured about carbon footprints. We’ve been told to drive smaller cars, eat less meat, turn down our thermostats. School children have been terrorized with visions of flooded cities and extinction. Entire industries have been strangled with regulations designed, we were told, to save the planet from the catastrophe of climate change.

Now watch what happens when the machine needs power.

Three Mile Island—the very name synonymous with nuclear disaster in the American imagination—is being restarted to feed a Microsoft data center. Decommissioned plants across the country are being evaluated for resurrection. New nuclear capacity is being fast-tracked with an urgency that would have been unthinkable five years ago. The same voices that shrieked about the existential threat of carbon emissions have gone suddenly, conspicuously silent.

Because the machine must be fed.

The climate emergency, it turns out, was never really about the climate. It was about control—about establishing the principle that human activity must be monitored, measured, and restricted by centralized authority. Now that a more effective control mechanism is within reach, the old narrative can be quietly retired. The carbon footprint of AI is irrelevant. The water consumed by cooling systems—millions of gallons daily—doesn’t matter. The environmental impact of mining rare earth minerals for chips and servers can be ignored.

The Krell didn’t worry about the environmental impact of hollowing out their planet either. They had bigger plans.

What are those plans, exactly?

Follow the infrastructure and you’ll see the shape of what’s coming. The data centers are one piece. The 5G networks blanketing urban areas are another. The push for Central Bank Digital Currencies—money that exists only as entries in a government database—is a third.

Put them together and you get a system of total surveillance and control that would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

Your money becomes a permission slip. Spend it on approved goods and services, and all is well. Deviate from acceptable behavior—buy too much gas, travel too far from home, express the wrong opinions—and your account can be frozen, limited, or deleted entirely. No judge, no jury, no appeal. Just an algorithm deciding you’ve become a risk.

The fifteen-minute city isn’t urban planning. It’s a cage dressed up in the language of convenience and sustainability. Everything you need within a short walk—and everything else increasingly inaccessible, requiring permissions and justifications and carbon budgets that will be tracked by the machine.

This is what the three great powers are racing to build. Not for their citizens. For their subjects.

The optimists will tell you that America is different. That our traditions of liberty and limited government will constrain how this technology is deployed. That we’re the good guys.

Watch what we do, not what we say.

The United States has spent the post-Cold War decades as the world’s bully, convinced of our own righteousness while we topple governments, impose sanctions that starve civilians, and wage endless wars against enemies that somehow multiply with every bomb we drop. We’ve constructed a global financial system designed to enforce our will on any nation that steps out of line. We’ve turned the dollar into a weapon.

Russia and China aren’t racing to build AI because they’re comic book villains. They’re racing because they’ve watched what America does to countries that can’t defend themselves. They saw what happened to Libya, to Iraq, to Syria. They see what we’re enabling in Gaza right now—the systematic destruction of a civilian population with American weapons and American diplomatic cover.

They’re not building the machine to oppress their people. They’re building it because we’ve made clear that any nation without comparable power will eventually find itself in our crosshairs.

The AI race is an arms race, and like all arms races, it accelerates because no one can afford to fall behind. The tragedy isn’t that one side is evil and the other good. The tragedy is that the logic of competition makes the outcome inevitable regardless of anyone’s intentions.

The Krell, Morbius explains in the film, had evolved beyond us in every way. They were peaceful. They had eliminated crime and war and want. They were, by every measure we’d recognize, good.

It didn’t save them.

Their great project—the machine that would free them from physical limitations—worked exactly as designed. The flaw wasn’t in the engineering. The flaw was in the assumption that consciousness could be trusted with unlimited power.

The Krell forgot about the subconscious. The buried drives, the repressed fears, the ancient hungers that evolution had wired into them long before they became civilized. When the machine came online, it didn’t just project their conscious intentions. It gave form to everything beneath—the monsters from the id, as the film famously calls them.

They were destroyed by their own shadows.

I’m not predicting that AI will become sentient and turn on us. That’s the Terminator narrative, and it misses the point entirely. The danger isn’t that the machine will develop its own will. The danger is that it will serve our will—all of it, including the parts we don’t acknowledge.

What happens when a system designed to predict and control human behavior is deployed by governments that view their own citizens as potential threats? What happens when the tools built to fight terrorism are turned on domestic dissent? What happens when the algorithm decides that your opinions constitute a risk factor?

We don’t have to imagine. We can watch it happening.

The censorship regimes that emerged during COVID were a beta test. The social credit systems being refined in China are a beta test. The financial deplatforming of individuals and organizations who hold unfashionable views is a beta test.

The full system isn’t online yet. But it’s coming. And the three great powers are racing to complete it because whoever controls the machine controls the future.

There’s a scene near the end of *Forbidden Planet* where Morbius finally confronts what he’s done. His unconscious mind—amplified by the Krell technology—has been murdering the people who threaten his isolation. He didn’t know. He didn’t intend it. But the machine gave his hidden fears the power to kill.

“My evil self is at that door,” he says, “and I have no power to stop it.”

That’s where we are. The machine is being built. The infrastructure is going in. The legal and financial frameworks are being established. And the people building it tell themselves they’re doing it for good reasons—for security, for efficiency, for progress.

They don’t see the monster they’re creating because it’s made of their own shadows.

The film ends with Morbius triggering the self-destruct sequence that will obliterate the Krell machinery and the entire planet. As the survivors flee toward Earth, Commander Adams reflects that perhaps in a million years, humanity will reach the heights the Krell attained—but hopefully with wiser understanding of their own natures.

That was the optimistic Hollywood ending, required by the studio system of 1956.

I don’t think we get a million years. I don’t think we get a century.

The Krell vanished overnight. Their technology was so powerful that once it turned against them, there was no time to understand what was happening, no opportunity to shut it down, no possibility of survival.

We’re building the same machine. We’re hollowing out our civilization to power it—not the physical interior of a planet, but something more fundamental. We’re hollowing out privacy, autonomy, the very possibility of a life outside the system’s view. We’re building a control grid that will monitor every transaction, every movement, every communication. And we’re handing it to governments that have demonstrated, repeatedly, that they cannot be trusted with such power.

The Krell were a million years more advanced than us. They were wiser, more peaceful, more evolved.

It didn’t matter.

The machine doesn’t care about your intentions. It only amplifies what you are. And if the last century has taught us anything about human nature—about what governments do when they have power and what people do when they’re afraid—then we already know how this ends.

We just don’t want to look at it.

The Krell couldn’t look at it either. They built their great project, they congratulated themselves on their achievement, and sometime in the night, while they slept, the thing they had created erased them from existence.

I saw that movie when I was a teenager. I’m seventy-three now, and I’ve watched the warning play out in slow motion across my entire adult life. The machine gets bigger. The controls get tighter. The justifications get more elaborate.

And somewhere, in a data center humming with the electricity of a resurrected nuclear plant, the great project inches closer to completion.

The Krell knew something we don’t.

Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the lesson of *Forbidden Planet* isn’t that advanced civilizations destroy themselves through hubris. Maybe it’s simpler and darker than that.

Maybe some machines, once built, cannot be unbuilt.

Maybe some doors, once opened, cannot be closed.

Maybe we’re not racing toward a future we can control, but toward an ending that was written the moment we decided to build the machine in the first place.

The Krell found out overnight.

We’ll find out soon enough.

That quote found me this morning, floating above an image of faceless figures with television sets for heads, each screen showing the same hypnotic spiral. The masses, the market, the algorithm. The crowd you’re supposed to court if you want to make it.

I stared at it for a long time. Then I laughed.

It took me nearly seventy-four years to accept something I should have understood decades ago: whatever gold I can pan from all these years on the planet is mine to enjoy. Not to market. Not to monetize. Not to package for strangers who might scroll past it anyway.

The treadmill of trying to become famous, accepted, appreciated, celebrated, treasured—it was a giant illusion. A con I ran on myself for half a century.

Here’s what actually happened when I let that go: peace. Deep and wide and worth far more than any physical gold.

Over the last years I have lost the once automatic urge to photograph something beautiful. I just stand there and soak it in. The light through winter trees. The way snow sits on a fence post. My retriever’s face when he’s dreaming. These moments used to trigger an immediate response—capture it, share it, show someone. Now I just let them wash over me, then wash away. They’re mine. They were always supposed to be mine.

The networking stopped. The tooting of my own horn. The endless, exhausting effort to get people to notice, to read, to care. I’d rather just do more work.

And lately that work is shifting. My friend KT suggested this some months ago. After all the work focused on writing the first book of my memoir trilogy, I find myself being pulled back to music. My home recording studio sits waiting—I’ve been rearranging it, reconfiguring the gear, running cables, testing sounds. The prospect of spending this year in there playing and experimenting with sounds and words fills me with something I’d almost forgotten: creativity without expectation.

That’s the key phrase: without expectation.

When I was young, every creative act carried a silent rider—and then maybe someone will see it and recognize me and my life will finally begin. The work was always a ticket to somewhere else. A means to an end that kept receding.

Now the work is just the work. The song is just the song. The words are just the words. If no one ever hears them, they still existed. They still mattered. They were still made.

Those TV-headed figures in the image? They’re waiting to be programmed. Waiting to be told what to want, what to like, what to consume. The spiral on their screens is the algorithm, pulling attention toward whatever serves the machine.

I don’t want to appeal to that. I never did. I just thought I was supposed to.

There’s an irony here I’m not blind to—publishing a piece about not needing an audience on a platform designed to build one. But sharing and needing are different things. I can put this out there because it’s true, not because I’m hoping for something back. If it resonates with someone, fine. If it doesn’t, also fine. The writing did its work the moment I finished it. Hitting publish is just opening a window, not begging someone to look inside.

So here I am. Seventy-three. A home studio. A patient wife. Two dogs. Vermont winter pressing against the windows. And for the first time in my life, the complete freedom to make things for no reason at all except that making them feels right.

That’s the harvest. That’s the real, solid gold.

It was here all along.

Why I Write Memoir at 73

People have told me my memoir writing is too personal. They’re shocked by what I’m willing to reveal—the suicides, the alleged abuse, the psychiatric hospitalizations, my father’s cruelty, the family dysfunction laid bare. They expect the soft-focus lens, the sanitized family history.

But I’m not writing for comfort. I’m writing because at 73, I’ve discovered one of the sweetest privileges of a reflective old age: the chance to preserve what would otherwise dissolve like snowflakes.

There’s a saying about dying three times. First, physically. Second, the last time someone speaks your name. Third, the last time someone thinks of you. After that third death, you’re truly gone—your essence absorbed and forgotten, almost as if you never existed. But of course you did exist. And memoir writing is my refusal of that third death.

The Complicated Truth of Love

What draws me back to these memories isn’t bitterness or revenge. It’s love. Even love for those who hemmed me in or abused me.

This is what makes memoir work so complicated, so uncomfortable for readers expecting simple narratives. My father administered ritualized punishments with a belt on bare skin, withheld the promised signet ring, eventually left nothing to his six children when he died. He was also the man who cut my essays apart with scissors and rearranged paragraphs on shirt cardboard, teaching me structure. Those were the same hands.

My grandmother Nana brought pranks and irreverence, hiding us kids in the toy closet, teaching us silly songs. She also retreated to her room with bottles and wielded the silent treatment as a weapon. Both things were true. Both were her.

My grandfather Grandpop was connected to Dr. Feelgood’s amphetamine injections and the family’s evangelical fervor. He also took his eleven-year-old grandson to Washington to witness President Kennedy’s funeral procession—shared that profound moment of history and grief.

The love I felt wasn’t despite the damage. It was woven through it, inseparable from it. Most memoirs avoid this truth because it’s too messy. It’s easier to write hagiography or condemnation. I’m doing neither.

Moments That Shine

Beyond the complicated family love, what glows in my memory are those moments of pure connection—with other human beings, with nature, with life itself.

These moments are sprinkled throughout my memoir work. Some are strictly personal and universal: family dinners, my mother’s poolside drinks with the neighbor, Nana’s pranks. Others are sublime: carving down a mountain while skiing, the wind filling my windsurfer’s sail, the exact quality of light on water.

And then there are the unlikely intersections that a wandering life brings: meeting Jerry Garcia one-on-one. Teaching Vanessa Redgrave to windsurf in rough conditions she had no business attempting—watching her top come off in the surf and her spirit shine because she refused to be deterred. Shaking hands with BB King.

I took both my inheritances—the Saint Phalle proximity to power and culture, the Furlong resilience and irreverence—and I used them to stay open. To keep moving, keep connecting, keep experiencing. I lived like a surfer, swimming out past the break, waiting for the best wave.

The Work of Preservation

At 21, I stood on the side of an interstate with my backpack and guitar—literally leaving town, shuffling the deck, unable to find a place to land. I was one of those who kept moving, who cut ties rather than end up in fights, who couldn’t settle.

Now, at 73, I’m doing the opposite of leaving. I’m going back. Not to find the places (Ledge Acres is sold, the river bends have changed, the farmhouse belongs to someone else), but to find the moments. To capture not just what happened, but the feeling of those moments before they dissolve completely.

This is urgent work, but it also takes time to gestate. My first book took two years, with most progress coming at the end. I’ve already done the legwork for book two—the Antigua years with Thea, my soulmate, the peak years of adventure and fun. We always joked: “There’s one for the book.” We were already living with memoir consciousness, collecting those moments even as they happened.

And book three waits beyond that: over 25 years with my wife Veronica, a deeper, longer, more challenging and ultimately more rewarding and life-defining experience.

Right now, I’m in a transitional phase. I’ve just finished recording myself reading book one aloud—its own kind of reckoning with the material. I’m shifting from one form of memory-capture to another. I’m preparing for the onslaught of winter, clearing the deck, letting book two ripen.

Why the Personal Matters

So is my memoir writing too personal? Perhaps. But the question isn’t whether it makes readers comfortable. The question is whether it’s true and purposeful.

Every detail I include—the belt on bare skin, the withheld signet ring, Nana hiding us in the closet, my mother’s afternoon drinks, Vanessa’s laughter in the surf—serves a larger understanding. I’m examining how two family lineages, each with their own survival strategies and damage, converged to shape me. I’m preserving the texture of being alive and connected, even within constraint.

I’m saying to those people and those moments: “You existed. I was there. It mattered.”

This is the work of memoir at 73. Not nostalgia in the hokey, kitschy sense, but nostalgia as a tear in the eye and an overwhelmed feeling in the heart. The privilege of remembering, of keeping people alive by thinking of them, of refusing to let the snowflake melt without witness.

The people who are shocked by my honesty might be more accustomed to sanitized family stories, or they might have known my family and feel uncomfortable seeing the private made public. But my job as a memoirist isn’t to make people comfortable. It’s to tell my truth as clearly as I can, to preserve what would otherwise be lost, to honor both the damage and the love.

Because once I stop thinking about these moments—once no one remembers the texture of that particular afternoon, that specific connection, that quality of light—they’re gone. And I’m not ready to let them go.

Not yet.

Apart from having a complicated last name, I also have a very famous aunt. As a result, it’s hard to find me on Google. I’ve been working on search engine optimization and I thought maybe these pictures might give Google a leg up. For those of you who are confused, there was another Andre de Saint Phalle— he was my grandfather. And there was yet another Andre at the beginning of the family line in 1240 A.D. My father John, was the older brother of the artist Niki. This makes me the nephew of world-famous artist Niki de Saint Phalle. It’ll be interesting to see if any of these pictures pop up on Google search results anytime soon.

On another note, Google seems to be unaware of the fact that my wife and I closed our wedding and portrait photography business in 2012.

Pausing on a big grade, I look into the forest. The canopy is fully deployed, ferns spread like a soft feathery cushion. I see paths, creeks, and glimpse into that land of the heart and soul—full of ghosts and memories and smells and animal scat.

It seems uninhabited, but everywhere life is going on. Salamanders crawl across fallen logs. Deer flies ready themselves for their murderous rage, coming any time the heat returns. Soon this place will become unwalkable. Mosquitoes lurk, waiting. Snakes hide in the underbrush. Elk roam these woods, along with deer and bear—I've seen all of these up here, though not often. The bear was just a cub, halfway up a big tree, staring at me terrified. I thought about his mother possibly being nearby and backed away quickly.

But this is a quiet place, and the cool air makes my exertion tolerable. The lack of mosquitoes or deer flies buzzing around my face is a massive bonus.

In dog years, Blue is effectively eleven years older than me, and Blaze is going to be thirty-five, half my age more or less. So Blaze does what his name suggests: blazing his own trail. Blue steadily keeps pace with me, usually ten yards ahead, sometimes three, occasionally a little behind. Just like our aging golden retriever Izzy, who died five years ago this summer, old man Blue is starting to exhibit the same signs— pausing, staring off into space, sniffing the air, seemingly lost in reverie, perhaps triggered by scents on the breeze.

My wife used to say that Izzy was getting Alzheimer's, but I like to believe he was just pausing to remember, a memoirist in his own way. Like the last time we took him to the waterfall—he was too weak to scramble down the bank, so I carried him. He was down to nothing but skin and bones, half of what he used to be. I sat him down in the shallow water. It was so hot that day, July 18, 2020, a month before he died peacefully in the wee hours, resting comfortably his spot on our leather couch.

Izzy and I had a deep bond around water. I remember when we'd swim in the lake—I would plunge my cupped hands and make big booms. He would try to bite the water as it erupted. If I had a hose, he would try to bite the stream, going almost nuts for it. That last day, I gently splashed some water toward him, and he looked at me like, "I remember, but I can't do anything right now, Dad. But I remember."

As we age, memory is all we have left. There are no more wild blue yonder dreams, just that space you can find on a deserted class four dirt road in Johnson, Vermont, early on a cloudy morning.

Father's Day 2025

Sitting here at the top of an amazing waterfall, watching my dogs navigate at their different ability levels—Blaze getting into all kinds of trouble, Blue just taking it all in from the edges.

I remember my father. When he would telephone me, or when I called him, he always answered the same way: "André, my boy." There was definitely still affection there right to the end and I regret our estrangement.

He died three years ago this month at ninety-four. It had been just shy of fifty years since the sale of our 1865 farmhouse on 25 acres on a dirt road in Armonk, New York. During the first twenty-one years of my life, he was a dominating figure. Then he more or less disappeared.

I think we both held wounds we couldn't forgive. But I always felt his shadow through those fifty years of estrangement—that judging voice. It was the voice of a trainer disappointed that his yearling didn't turn out to be the champion he'd hoped for. He looked at me as someone who had broken a trust, maybe.

All our issues came to a head after I dropped out of the college he made me go to instead of the college I wanted. He told me, "André, if you ever go back to school for a year on your own and get a B average or higher, I'll pay for it."

Five years later, when I got into USC after attending San Francisco State for a year on my own—working full-time, earning a B-plus average—I contacted him to see if he'd help like he'd promised. He said he had no money.

Meanwhile, he was buying racehorses, had hired a trainer, was living in a really nice place in New York City. He shortly moved to one of the cushiest suburbs of Seattle, bought a huge place, tried to become racing commissioner. He had the money. He just wanted to punish me. We human beings can all be like that, petty and vindictive, with a long memory.

It's taken me three years after his death to see this and forgive him. But I was just a child when he did all that to me. Even though I wrote him a long letter in my forties detailing all my issues with him and “forgiving” him—because I was told it would be healing—he wrote back saying he'd been busy raising six kids, blah blah blah. Now, looking back, I realize that must have been awful ordeal for him too.

It was just a bet he'd made, raising six kids, and when it didn’t pan out, he simply walked away. Despite it all, I have a renewed sense of sympathy and love for my father—we're all human. We all have sensitive parts of our souls and hearts that, once bruised, don't seem to bounce back.

Giving each other forgiveness and space, trying to walk a mile in each other's shoes, goes a hell of a long way toward finding peace in our own hearts—not letting this stuff eat us alive, push us into addiction, or worse, self-harm and violence.

Nature has a deep heart, and I'm in the middle of it here with my dogs at the top of a beautiful waterfall. I thank the universe for this moment because it's rich and deep and priceless. You can't order it online, can't download it, can't really give it away. You can try to share it, but I have it. It's mine. It's my moment of peace.