I pull onto the shoulder where I always park, where the gravel meets the frozen mud, and kill the engine. The silence is immediate. No wind. Just the tick of the cooling motor and, somewhere far off, a crow.

The fog is thick this morning, the kind that erases the tree line fifty yards out and turns everything beyond it into milk. A hard frost has locked the fallen leaves to the ground like pressed flowers under glass. The maples along the road are bare, their branches black against the white sky, and when I open the door the cold finds my lungs before my feet find the ground.

Blaze and Blue are already pressing against the tailgate, and when I pop it they pour out in that way retrievers do—not jumping, exactly, but flowing, like water finding its level. Blue shakes once, tags jingling, and looks up at me with that expression I’ve never been able to read. Not a question. More like confirmation. Blaze is already nose-down in the frost, following something only he can smell.

We start up the road.

The first stretch is what it always is. Frozen ruts, boot-prints from other walkers locked in ice, the crunch of frost under my feet and the softer padding of theirs. My breath makes clouds. The dogs range ahead, circle back, range ahead again. I know this walk the way I know the hallway to my kitchen—every curve, every root, every place where the trail narrows and the hemlocks lean in close.

But today something is different.

I notice it first in the ground. A hundred yards up, the frost thins. The leaves under my boots are no longer brittle—they’re damp, soft, the way they get in early spring when the melt is just beginning. The air shifts. Not warmer exactly, but less sharp. Like the season can’t quite hold its grip.

I stop. Blue stops with me, looks back. Blaze keeps going.

Ahead, through the thinning fog, I can see green. Not the dark green of hemlocks—a lighter green, the impossible electric green of new growth. Buds on the maples. Buds that weren’t there a minute ago, buds that have no business being here in November, but there they are, tight and shining and unmistakable.

I keep walking.

The buds unfurl as I climb. That’s the only way to describe it. Each step higher on the trail brings the season forward, as if altitude and time are the same thing. The branches overhead fill in—first the pale translucent leaves of early May, then the full dark canopy of June. The air thickens with moisture and warmth. I unzip my jacket. Somewhere a thrush is singing, that spiraling flute song that means summer in Vermont, and the light filtering through the leaves is the dappled gold-green of a world completely alive.

That’s when I see the first one.

A flash of mahogany, moving through the ferns at the trail's edge. Long-legged, elegant, ears like silk curtains. An Irish setter. She steps onto the trail ahead of us and looks at me, and I know her the way you know a face in a dream—not by logic but by something deeper than logic. Tara. My mother's dog. Stolen sixty years ago.

She doesn’t run to me. She falls in with Blaze and Blue as if she’d been walking with us all along, and Blaze noses her once, gently, and that’s that.

A quarter mile later, Cashel appears. The Irish wolfhound, massive and gray, my mother's pride and joy, loping out of a stand of birches with that hitch in her stride she carried ever since the neighbor's beagle ripped her chest open — dozens of stitches, and the vet said she was lucky to survive. Then Rusty, the Irish setter, a copper flash in the green light, moving with that effortless ranging stride I remember from the woods behind Ledge Acres — my first dog, my deepest dog love, who ran free across square miles of forest and once dragged a deer leg home like a trophy. And Brer—my first golden retriever, the one who couldn’t come with me to Antigua and ended up living with my mother for four years.

Each one appears without announcement. Each one joins the pack as if this were the most natural thing in the world. Blaze accepts them all. Blue plays with each new arrival, his tail a metronome of joy. I’m walking now with six dogs, then seven, and the trail is wide with summer and I am not afraid.

I should be afraid. Some part of me knows this. But the part of me that knows it is very far away, like a voice from a room I left a long time ago.

The leaves begin to turn.

It happens the way it does in Vermont—first the swamp maples go scarlet, then the sugar maples catch fire, orange and gold and a red so deep it looks like it’s lit from inside. The light changes too, taking on that September slant, that golden clarity that makes everything look like a painting of itself. The air sharpens. The trail steepens.

And now it’s not just dogs.

She’s standing at a bend in the trail where the birches cluster, leaning against one with her arms crossed the way she always stood—weight on one hip, chin slightly raised, that half-smile that meant she knew something you didn’t. Her hair is loose. She’s wearing the white tank top from the beach. She looks exactly as she did in Antigua, exactly as she did before the dust came, and she doesn’t speak but she watches me pass and I feel something break open in my chest that I didn’t know was still sealed.

Thea.

Further up, my mother is kneeling beside the trail, examining something in the moss. She doesn’t look up. She doesn’t need to. I can see the way her hands move—careful, precise, the way they moved in the garden at Ledge Acres years before the lung cancer crushed her before she could even get Medicare. I want to stop. I want to kneel beside her and ask what she’s found. But the dogs keep moving and I keep moving with them, and she stays where she is, content in her looking.

At a clearing where the trail switchbacks, a young man sits on a fallen birch, one leg crossed over the other, watching the valley below. Dark eyes, dark hair, that quiet intensity he brought to everything. Fred. My classmate at Exeter, the one who directed my senior film, who saw the world through a lens the way I did. He'd tried to end his life after they kicked him out, and survived. A year later, a horse threw him and finished what he'd started. He doesn't look up as I pass, but I see his hands — still, relaxed, at rest in a way they never were when he was alive.

Others appear along the trail as the leaves fall and the light fades. I don’t name them all. Some I recognize from behind—a posture, a way of walking, a coat I haven’t seen in decades. Some turn to me and smile. Some don’t. They’re all exactly as they were when I loved them most, which is to say they’re all younger than me, which is to say they’re all as I remember them, which is to say they’re mine.

The trail narrows. The trees thin. I can feel the altitude in my legs now, that familiar burn in the calves that tells me the bridge is close. The dogs are all around me—I count eight, nine, too many to count—and they move through the falling leaves like a river, golden and black and russet and gray, and I am at the center of them, carried upward.

The first flakes come sideways.

Snow, hard and small, the kind that stings your face. Not the fat lazy flakes of a Christmas card—the real thing, driven by wind, turning the air white. In fifty steps the trail disappears. In a hundred, the trees disappear. The world is contracting around me, pulling itself closed like a drawstring, and all I can see are the shapes of the dogs moving through the white and, ahead, the dark line of the gate.

The gate is open.

I’ve never seen it open. In all the years I’ve walked this road, in all the times I’ve stood at this gate and decided whether to go on or turn back, I have never once found it open. But today it swings wide on its hinges, snow collecting on the crossbar, and beyond it the bridge is barely visible—a gray shape in the white, the railing posts like fence pickets in a blizzard.

The dogs don’t hesitate. Tara goes first, then Cashel, then Brer and Rusty. One by one they cross the bridge and dissolve into the white on the other side, their shapes softening, fading, becoming part of the snow until they’re gone. Blue follows, the black lab, his drummer tail beating one last rhythm against the white, and then he's gone too.

Blaze stays.

He stands at the foot of the bridge and looks back at me, snow settling on his broad head, his amber eyes steady. He doesn’t bark. He doesn’t whine. He just waits, the way he’s waited at every door, every trailhead, every threshold of every walk we’ve ever taken together. Waiting for me to go first, or to tell him it’s okay.

I put my hand on his head. The fur is warm under the snow.

“Okay, boy,” I say.

We step onto the bridge together.

The bedroom is quiet. Snow ticks against the window. The lamp on the nightstand throws a circle of amber light that reaches the edge of the quilt and no further. Outside, the bare maples of Collins Hill stand black against a white sky, and the fog that has been sitting in the valley all day has not lifted.

The man in the bed is still. The dog beside him is still. Somewhere in the house, Veronica is already awake, beginning her day. He had almost lost her once, over something small that felt enormous at the time. He never made that mistake again. The memoir on the nightstand is bookmarked to a page he will never finish. The glass of water catches the lamplight and holds it.

Somewhere on Reservoir Road, the gate swings shut in the wind. The snow covers the trail. By morning there will be no footprints, no paw prints, no sign that anyone walked this way at all.

Just the white. Just the quiet. Just the bridge, waiting at the top of the hill, the way it always has.

Izzy died on August 21, 2020, around four in the morning. During the week or two before, he changed his behavior several times and did some unexpected things that were particularly striking and meaningful to me.

Over the last two years of his life, he had been on a CBD tincture that dramatically improved things. Prior to that, arthritis had nearly disabled his rear right leg, and he had restless, painful nights, groaning audibly as he shifted himself trying to get comfortable. The CBD changed all of that.

He always looked forward to his forty-five-minute morning walks with us and was up for everything and anything, often scrambling over rocks into streams, up and down banks, fully in his element.

We got a ramp to help him in and out of the truck, but he didn’t trust it at first, and only grudgingly later. Towards the end, he would place his front legs inside the truck and I would hoist his hindquarters up and into the vehicle. He gradually came to expect that. Sometimes, though, he would surprise us and get in and out on his own, especially getting out. He had his pride.

Over the course of that spring and early summer of 2020, he began sleeping a lot on the couch after these expeditions, often through the night. Sometimes he would make it to his bed next to me, but mostly he stayed on the couch.

Around two weeks before his death, he started sleeping in a number of different spots on the floor: behind my recliner, near the fireplace, on the front stoop, in front of one of our recliners. I didn’t understand it then. Now I think he was taking inventory, revisiting the places that had mattered to him, saying quiet goodbyes to each one.

Eventually he started to decline in his ability to do much of a morning walk. While on the trail, he would pause and stare blankly into space for minutes at a time. His last week, we skipped the walk a few days in a row. But he acted like he wanted to go anyway. I stayed home with him while Veronica took Blue and Blaze, and walked him out our front door. He would make it to the garage and then turn around and go right back—a total of twenty yards each way.

The day before his death, he insisted on going on the walk, and we loaded up the three dogs and drove to the Long Trail. Veronica headed out with Blue and Blaze while I lingered near the truck with Izzy. He surprised me and made it farther than he had in weeks, about four hundred yards each way up a moderate incline. He paused often and gazed into space. At first it appeared that he was suffering from dementia, but I came to realize that maybe he was just taking it all in—the sunshine, the breeze, the smells, the totality of being in the moment—and I tried to do the same. These are special memories for me, both of us just standing there, gazing at the trees, feeling the breeze, trying to just be.

At the start of his last week, he stopped eating. We were unable to give him his twice-daily thyroid pill and CBD because he wouldn’t eat the bread roll we hid them inside. He became very restless, waking up and wandering aimlessly, going from his water dish, which he did not avail himself of, to the front door, but once outside, he would just come back having done nothing.

We started holding his mouth open and dropping his CBD down the back of his throat, which he did not appreciate, but it definitely calmed him down. Still, the nocturnal restlessness persisted. One night, after letting him out several times, we let him stay out. It was definitely on the cool side for a summer night, but we didn’t know what else to do. We figured it’s where he wants to be and he can always scratch the door to come in if it gets too cold. In the morning, he was nowhere to be found. He gave us quite a scare. We searched high and low. Veronica finally located him, curled up and trembling, hidden amongst the tiger lilies on the side of the house. It was as if he’d gone looking for a place to die.

During his last two days, he spent hours laying in a few different spots in the backyard. I felt like he knew he was dying and was seeking out mother earth, auditioning different sites beneath the big sugar maple out back. I sensed that maybe he wanted me to bury him in one of those spots.

On his last full day, after lunch, after he had been laying next to the garden gate for several hours, we heard a hoarse, hollow, raspy shadow of a bark. The sun had found him and I figured maybe he was too hot. I carried him in my arms—down from sixty-five pounds to a mere forty-three—all the way around the house, in the front door, and over to his favorite spot on the couch. He did not try to right himself as I lowered him down the way he usually would, limply falling into the cushions.

Something happened at that moment. It was like his dimmer switch had started automatically dialing him down. He never got up again.

That evening, when it came time for us to go to sleep, Veronica and then I, individually, spent time with Izzy, saying goodbye and kissing him, fearful that he might pass in the night.

I woke up twice and checked on him, around midnight and two a.m., and he was resting comfortably, still breathing his shallow breaths.

I woke a third time, a little after four, and he was gone. He was still warm, but already starting to stiffen.

In my heart of hearts this was exactly what I had hoped for Izzy, especially after what we had gone through with Buio seven years earlier: a frantic trip to the vet, euthanasia in the parking lot, part of which Veronica missed because she was being asked for her credit card, and then cremation. I wanted to spare Izzy and us the drama and the stress. I wanted him to die peacefully in his sleep and to be buried on our property. It just seemed like the natural and truly ideal way to go, if at all possible.

Unfortunately, I had pulled my groin muscle and had a bad knee and shoulder, so hand-digging a grave was out of the question. That summer we’d had a great experience with a young man named Cole Palmer who had just graduated high school but also had his own excavation business. He’d helped us fill our new raised beds and did some tree work and grading as well. I knew it wouldn’t be practical to use the mini-excavator out back again, as we had already reseeded the grass after the first job.

Then it dawned on me: we could bury Izzy over at the log landing on the western edge of our property, which also happens to be the neighborhood “view spot”—an unobstructed, sweeping panorama of the Green Mountains.

I texted Cole around six-thirty in the morning. He was here by seven forty-five.

By eight-thirty, Izzy was reunited with mother earth. We wrapped him in the blanket that Veronica had made for him years ago, white fleece on one side and a patterned fabric covered in dogs on the other.

Cole refused to charge us, so we gave him a two-hundred-dollar tip and suggested he spend it caring for his one-year-old female golden retriever, Bailey. It was a whirlwind of serendipities. I could not have dreamed up a better scenario myself.

Later that day, Veronica and I went back and did more work at the burial site. Standing there, looking out at the mountains with the fresh earth at our feet, something shifted in me. I’d been telling Veronica for a while that I wanted to be buried on our land, and I’d recently found out that it’s entirely legal in Vermont—you just have to file a form with the Town Clerk. While we stood there, Veronica came up with a great idea: maybe we could subdivide our land, peeling off a tiny parcel that would include the log landing—say fifty feet by fifty feet—and have it declared a private cemetery.

It is a wonderful spot with a view beyond time itself. Izzy found it for me.

Vermont, 2002-2023: Where the Road Finally Leads Home

The Green Mountain State becomes the final landing place for a man who never learned to stay. Here, where mountains promise freedom but deliver boundaries, the same restless soul who once caught rides with his thumb out builds a different kind of life. Webmaster for Stratton, then Stowe. Designer laying out ten years of Eastern Edge Snowboarding magazine. A golden retriever named Buio who introduces him to Veronica—not the woman prophesied in the canyon, but the one who stands by him, loving him, until he finally learns how to stop running. They marry on a catamaran in Antigua, returning to the waters where paradise was lost, surrounded by many of Andre’s old friends from back in the day.

Back home in Vermont they build a wedding photography business that actually succeeds. He founds a public access TV station. Creates. Contributes. Stays. Yet still spends more than he has on the ultimate escape vehicle—an overlanding rig equipped for anywhere but here.

Dogs in the back seat. Every sunrise a potential departure. Yet he never makes it past the county

Why Vermont Became Home: Exploding the Geographical Cure Myth

Through thirteen years of failed recreations—Hood River's adrenaline, Maui's magic, Antigua's ghosts—we witness a man discovering that you can't outrun what travels in your bones. Then come nine nocturnal seizures in 2019, electrical storms at 4 AM that mirror a lifetime of running. The body rebels.

The Choice That Changes Everything

Pharmaceutical Lamictal or cannabis CBD. He chooses the plants. They work. After a year that saw him lose 90 pounds on healthy keto, the seizures finally stop. Not through medical compliance but through accepting what the body has been trying to say all along: Stop. Stay. Be here.

What Happens After the Adventure Ends

When the thumb comes down. When the wind dies. When the only journey left is inward. It's about discovering that paradise isn't a place you find—it's what remains after everything you thought would save you fails—and everything you built while running turns out to be home.

From a recording studio that records music no one ever hears comes the perfect metaphor for a life spent preparing to live. From believing escape equals freedom to understanding that freedom means choosing your cage. Where Veronica teaches what Thea couldn't: that love isn't a comet blazing through your life, but Tuesday after Tuesday after Tuesday of choosing to remain.

Raw, Unflinching, and Unexpectedly Tender

"Green Mountain Flash" completes the road trip that began with a young man fleeing his father's golden ring promises and ends with an aging man learning that some wounds don't heal—they teach you how to experience life differently.

The Flash You Wait for at Every Sunset May or May Not Exist. That's the Point. You Wait Anyway. Because after fifty years of searching for home, the most radical act is realizing you're already there.

Where "Surfing the Interstates" was about leaving and "Sahara Dust" was about losing, "Green Mountain Flash" is about the terrible, beautiful necessity of staying.

The wandering was the point. Until it wasn't.