Andre J de Saint Phalle: Surfing The Interstates: 1973 Hitchhiking Memoir

My Voice. My Words. My Audiobook.

André J. de Saint Phalle — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:11:03 GMT

Yesterday I wrote about the long road to finishing the audiobook edition of Surfing the Interstates — the gear, the specs, the four chapters with RMS and peak problems, the three-month abandonment, and Auphonic riding to the rescue. If you haven’t read that one, start there.

This is what happened next.

ACX has finally accepted all sixteen chapters. Then came the fine print: it will take up to two weeks before the audiobook goes live on Audible and Amazon.

Two weeks. I’m not good at waiting.

Here’s the thing I’d done right without fully realizing why — I hadn’t signed an exclusive contract with ACX. That decision, almost an afterthought when I was setting up the account, turned out to matter enormously. Non-exclusive distribution means ACX gets Amazon and Audible, but you keep the right to sell and distribute your audiobook anywhere else you like. Simultaneously. Right now.

So that’s exactly what I did.

The audiobook is now embedded directly into each chapter post here on Substack — read and listen at the same time, or just hit play and let it wash over you. It’s in my Ko-fi shop as a standalone purchase, bundled with the ePub edition at a discount. I’ve submitted it to Spotify, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books. By the time ACX flips the switch on Audible, the book will already be living in half a dozen places.

While I was waiting, I did something I’d been curious about.

ElevenLabs offers professional AI voice cloning — you feed it enough audio and it trains a model on your voice. I bought some tokens, uploaded two hours of my own narration, and let it work. The result was unsettling. It sounded like me. The timbre, the cadence, even some of my particular rhythms came through.

Surfing The Interstates - “Epigram”

Can you pick which is AI and which is my voice?

Then I had it read the memoir.

Flat where it needed to breathe. Pacing that steamrolled the pauses I’d spent weeks calibrating. And at moments — words I’ve said ten thousand times in my life — it simply mispronounced them, with complete confidence.

A voice trained on two hours of a man reading his own memoir could not read that memoir. What it couldn’t replicate wasn’t the sound — it was the understanding. Every pause in this book belongs somewhere specific. It marks a breath before something hard, or the beat after a joke lands, or the silence where a road stretched out and I didn’t know what came next. You can’t train a machine on that. It has to have been lived.

The working title for the full memoir trilogy is The Spaces Between. I chose it a while ago because the real story of a life isn’t in the events — it’s in the gaps, the silences, the weight between one thing and the next. Turns out the audiobook proved the title. The AI had my voice but couldn’t find the spaces. It didn’t know which silences were grief and which were wonder and which were just a man on a road with no idea what was coming. Those spaces are the book. They’re everything.

AI has a long way to go in this department. I say that with relief.

Something else happened while I was sitting in that chair, reading sixteen chapters into a microphone. I didn’t expect it. For a year I’d been on a treadmill — writing the book, publishing the book, promoting the book, formatting, uploading, redesigning, re-uploading. The machinery of getting a thing into the world. And now, finally, the machinery has stopped.

I’m beginning to feel like a field that’s been left fallow for a year. Quiet. Open. Something is coming up through the soil, and I don’t know its shape yet. I’ve stepped off the plan I’d made for Books Two and Three — the rigid trilogy treadmill — and instead I’ve created sections here on Substack named after each book, places where I can trial-balloon ideas, accumulate fragments, let the work find its own form. Maybe the next book gets written in a way I haven’t thought of yet. I feel it approaching. Not as obligation, but as duty — to myself, and to Thea Ramsey, my partner and lover, who died at thirty-seven. Sometime this summer I will have already lived exactly twice as long as she did.

Thea’s ashes were sprinkled into the Atlantic from a three masted schooner off Pemaquid Lighthouse’s rocky perch. Her memorial is at the end of Lupine Lane in South Bristol. Maine.

Thea had a saying. Whenever something happened to us — something funny, something terrible, something so strange it could only happen on a small island in the Caribbean — she’d look at me and say, “There’s one for the book.” She always believed there’d be a book. She also knew she wouldn’t be here to read it, because she was born with cystic fibrosis and was already living on borrowed time.

I owe her story a voice. The only one that knows where the pauses go.

Surfing the Interstates is available now on Substack and Ko-fi. Coming soon to Audible, Amazon, Spotify, Apple Books, and Barnes & Noble.

The road that started in 1973 finally has a soundtrack. In the only voice that could tell it.

Just for fun, here is “AI Andre” by Eleven Labs reading this post. It’s close, and yet so far away from sounding acceptable, at least to my ears.

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Rolling My Own

André J. de Saint Phalle — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 15:38:30 GMT

I just uploaded the final files for the audiobook edition of Surfing the Interstates to ACX — Amazon’s Audiobook Creation Exchange, the platform that produces and distributes audiobooks through Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books. Sixteen chapters. Five hours and change of finished audio. All of it recorded, edited, and mastered in my home studio in Vermont. ACX is telling me it will be live on Amazon within two weeks.

I’m sharing this because if you’re an indie author thinking about narrating your own book, you should know what you’re getting into. Consider this a cautionary tale with a happy ending.

The good news first: I’m a musician. I’ve been recording at home for years. I already owned a Shure SM7B — a cardioid dynamic microphone that excels at rejecting room noise and reverb, so you don’t get that hollow, amateur sound. That runs about $400. I had a Zoom 32-bit interface feeding my iPad Pro — around $250. And I used an app called Ferrite Pro to record and edit — thirty bucks. So I wasn’t starting from zero.

But here’s the thing: even if you don’t have my background, you could put together everything you need for well under a thousand dollars, assuming you already have a computer or tablet to work with. Compare that to hiring a narrator, an audio engineer, and renting studio time. We’re talking thousands of dollars.

Now the bad news.

Two weeks. That’s how long it took to record all sixteen chapters. Two weeks of reading aloud, stumbling over sentences that looked fine on the page but turned into tongue-twisters at the microphone. Two weeks of stopping, backing up, re-reading. And then the editing — my God, the editing. Every pause. Every “um.” Every mouth click and breath in the wrong place. You don’t realize how many verbal tics you have until you’re staring at a waveform trying to surgically remove them.

But the real challenge wasn’t the recording. It was the specs.

ACX has stringent technical standards for audio. RMS levels, peak levels, noise floor — the whole nine yards. And even though I know my way around a mixing board, meeting broadcast-level specs is a different animal than laying down a guitar track.

I uploaded my sixteen chapters feeling pretty good about myself.

Four of them were rejected.

RMS and peak issues. I was discouraged enough to walk away from the whole thing for about three months. And while the project sat in limbo, I did what any restless writer would do — I went back into the manuscript itself. I shortened some chapters, fixed inconsistencies, caught typos I’d missed through a dozen previous reads. I redesigned the cover. I actually deleted the original KDP listing and replaced it with a new edition printed on cream paper instead of white. The book got better while the audiobook gathered dust.

But I was dreading the possibility that I’d have to spend another two weeks re-recording the whole thing from the revised manuscript. That thought was enough to keep the project on the shelf.

Then Claude pointed me to Auphonic — a service that analyzes your audio and adjusts the levels to meet ACX’s exact requirements. Eleven dollars for the tokens I needed. Game changer. If I could just fix the four rejected chapters and run them through Auphonic, I could upload the original audio and call it a day. The text differences between the two versions were minor enough that the audiobook could stand on its own.

It worked. All sixteen chapters accepted.

So here’s what I’d tell anyone considering this path: if you have decent gear, a quiet room, and the patience of a monk with a head cold, you can absolutely do this yourself. But budget your time honestly. All of it is hard. The recording demands real performance — you’re not just reading words, you’re acting them, finding the emotion in every sentence. Then you’re spending hours surgically removing every pause, every breath, every “um,” every false start. And after all that, the technical specs and the back-and-forth with ACX will test whatever patience you have left.

Worth it? Every minute. There’s something right about reading your own story in your own voice. Nobody else knows where the pauses belong.

The Degree I Actually Needed

André J. de Saint Phalle — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 14:41:03 GMT

My father wanted me to study philosophy. I wanted film school. He won. He always won. He made me read the entire Bible cover to cover. He sent me on retreats. He made me read Kierkegaard. He dragged me to West Point for an interview I never wanted. Six years later, after I’d worked my way into USC Film School on my own — the dream he’d vetoed when I was eighteen — he refused to help as promised. He said he was financially stretched, but he was also buying racehorses with his new wife. Philosophy, he said. The examined life. Know thyself.

I spent the next fifty years ignoring that advice. Hitchhiking. Windsurfing. Running from everything he represented. And then, as the 50th anniversary of my 1973 hitchhiking odyssey approached, I pulled out the falling-apart journal I’d somehow kept all those years — the one I’d carried every mile of that summer, the one where I’d written down my thoughts and feelings during the six months before leaving, the two months of the trip itself, and the month after I got back. The pages were soft and brown at the edges. The handwriting was mine but younger — urgent, unguarded, full of a certainty I no longer recognized. I’d kept it for half a century without quite knowing why, the way you keep a letter you’re not yet ready to answer.

I started writing. And I discovered that the old man had been right all along. Not about West Point. Not about Kierkegaard. But about the examined life — the idea that understanding your own story is the real work. I just needed fifty years, a falling-apart journal, and an artificial intelligence to prove it.

I posted the contents on an older Substack — now defunct — reading each entry aloud, transcribing it, embellishing the pages with photographs and maps I found online. It was an act of archaeology. But something in me was calling me to do more with the material. The journal was a skeleton. It needed flesh.

That fall I discovered Anthropic’s Claude, and I began interfacing the AI with my iOS writing app, Scrivener. I also started recording voice memos. Originally I wanted to write a screenplay — the old film school dream that life had rerouted but never quite killed. Funny how the thing your father blocks at eighteen keeps knocking at seventy-two. Over the months that followed I invested unbelievable amounts of time learning how to efficiently record my thoughts on a walk into my phone, how to transcribe them later with different software. I tried Aiko, NovelCrafter, Sudowrite. Each taught me something. None of them stuck. But the impulse kept pushing, and over the next two years I ended up writing the memoir that became Surfing the Interstates.

Along the way I discovered something about myself that I’d never named. During the course of my life, the typewriter and the blank page had been a huge obstacle. Not writer’s block — something deeper. The pressure of that blank page and the mechanical clacking of the keys carried a kind of judgment. Every word had to justify itself before it hit the paper. I was the kid who wanted to be a famous writer but was too shy to sing in front of people, too paralyzed by his own ambitions to actually make anything. I liked the idea of thought bubbles — loose, provisional, free to dissolve and reform.

And then ultimately I fell in love with voice memos.

Because all stories start with the human voice. The word for spirit comes from the Greek word for air — for breath. Pneuma. Before there was writing there was telling. Before there was telling there was breathing. And there’s just something about talking that unlocks me in a way that sitting at a desk never could. I walk through the Vermont woods with my phone in my pocket and the stories pour out — raw, unstructured, alive. I’m doing it right now.

This is where AI comes in. Not as a ghostwriter — as an editor with infinite patience and a memory that doesn’t quit. It takes out all of the ums and you-knows and conversational clutter, turning spoken thought into prose. But more than that — over time it begins seeing patterns and motifs that I was too close to see myself. Connections between moments separated by decades that only become visible when someone, or something, holds the whole story at once. Writing the memoir, I discovered that my lifelong compulsion to move — hitchhiking, windsurfing, overlanding — wasn’t freedom. It was addiction. I couldn’t have seen that without the writing. And the writing couldn’t have happened without the voice. And the voice couldn’t have become a book without AI. Each tool unlocked the next.

Not all AI is the same. After trying a handful of different apps I ended up with Anthropic’s Claude. I was particularly attracted to the project feature, which allows a much larger context — so the AI has a specific and comprehensive awareness of what you’re doing, who you are, where you’re going. It remembers what you said three months ago. It knows your characters. It knows that your aunt was Niki de Saint Phalle and your father read Kierkegaard and your teacher Mr. Czaja taught you to write from images when you were eight years old. Over time I trained Claude on how I liked to write. I developed a dual approach: cinematic staccato short phrases for action in the present tense, and flowing, introspective, sometimes poetic language for the mature voice looking back and understanding. Two speeds. Two lenses. The young man hurtling through the world, and the older man finally grasping what it meant.

One of the big things with writing is how you do it, and there are two basic schools. There are those called pantsers — they write by the seat of their pants, trusting the current to carry them. I am not one of those. I worked for a few years as a carpenter. I even studied architecture briefly. I’m a firm believer in having an outline — in knowing where the load-bearing walls go before you start hanging drywall. My goal is to not waste my time. At 74, time is not an abstraction.

And my deep love and knowledge of cinema embedded me in present-tense narration — show, don’t tell. I knew that to write about my trip I had to make it engaging, and that only the key moments were needed to flesh out the true heart of the story. A memoir isn’t a diary. It’s a curated act of memory — deciding what matters enough to survive.

All of these things were just the beginning, however, of the long process that took me to today.

...

Let me talk about publishing, because that’s where the real education began.

Substack publishes sequentially — newest post on top. Which means the only way to serialize a book in reading order is to publish in reverse chronological order, building a table of contents that reads correctly from first chapter to last. It’s counterintuitive. You have to think backwards to move forward. Nobody tells you this. You figure it out at midnight, staring at your screen, wondering why Chapter 12 is sitting on top of Chapter 1.

Then there’s Amazon. Kindle Direct Publishing handles e-books, paperback, and hardcover, and each format has its own specifications. Cover art requires precise bleeds and margins that differ between formats. The interior text has its own formatting demands — font choices, line spacing, paragraph indentation, page size. Cream paper or white paper. Matte cover or glossy. Every decision cascades into three others. And typos. You think you’ve caught them all. You haven’t. You publish, you order the proof, you open it with the pride of a new parent — and there they are, staring back at you from page forty-seven. So you fix them and resubmit and wait and order another proof and find two more. It’s humbling. It’s also, in its own maddening way, deeply satisfying — because you are building something real with your hands, even if the hands are typing.

The audiobook was another education entirely. Recording the audio. Editing the audio. Learning that your reading voice and your speaking voice are not the same instrument — that one tells and the other performs, and the difference is everything. Making sure every file meets ACX standards for RMS levels and volume — specifications I didn’t even know existed six months earlier. I went through multiple approaches before landing on a workflow that actually produced professional results.

I don’t think I could have done any of this without Claude. When it came to writing, I’ve already described how that worked. But when it came to formatting, I spent multiple days with Claude solving the PDF challenges of cover art across different formats. Claude helped me get my final audiobook files to meet ACX specifications. It helped me develop my website, work out keywords and meta tags, set up subdomains. At every turn where I hit a wall — and there were many walls — I had a collaborator who never got tired, never lost patience, and never forgot what we’d already figured out.

If someone had handed me this syllabus three years ago — Scrivener, voice transcription, AI collaboration, narrative structure, KDP formatting, cover design, audio engineering, web development, search optimization — I would have said they were out of their mind.

...

So why did I do this? What’s the point?

The biggest surprise was that the motivations of an entire lifetime — to achieve, to perform, to be praised, to make money — had to fall by the wayside. All of them. Every one. I come from a family where nothing less than becoming a cardinal or a senator was considered acceptable for the eldest son. I wanted to be a famous writer. Then a famous director. Then a famous musician. Always famous. Always the validation I never got from the man who named me after his father and then spent my childhood trying to mold me into something I wasn’t.

Writing a book is like putting a note in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean alongside three million other bottles tossed out there every day. If you do this expecting to be on the Today Show, you will break your own heart. If you do this expecting to roll in cash, you will break it twice.

But here’s what nobody tells you. The joy I feel right now — sitting in Vermont with a finished book on Amazon, an audiobook on Audible, a Substack archive that functions as a mausoleum of my creative life — surpasses anything I ever imagined fame or money could deliver. And I’m not saying that the way people say it when they’re pretending not to care. I mean it the way you mean something you’ve earned by doing the work.

The real payoff has been revisiting a transformative summer of my life and understanding my life better for having done the introspection, the recollection, the contemplation. Writing forced me to sit with moments I’d been running from for fifty years. It showed me that my perpetual motion wasn’t freedom — it was the thing that kept me from ever having to stay. And staying, it turns out, is where the actual living happens. I didn’t learn that from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I learned it from recording voice memos and writing my life in my own words. My father was right. You can’t really say anything worthwhile until you’ve really understood what you’re trying to say.

And the flip side of all that inner work is the activation and energization of the mind. Which is so important as we age. In 2019, I started having grand mal seizures in my sleep. Nine of them over the course of a year and a half — my body convulsing in the dark while Veronica watched and documented each one, helpless. I woke up each time not knowing what had happened, the bed soaked, my tongue bitten, my muscles screaming. The doctors wanted to put me on seizure meds which are really just heavy psychiatric drugs that also happen to throw a blanket over your soul. I looked at that road and saw where it might end for me — a defeated, medicated, sad vegetable sitting in a chair, waiting to die. I refused to comply. My neurologist abandoned me. I went on the keto diet, embraced CBD, and lost ninety pounds. I chose to fight with everything I had left. And then I started writing.

Thank God, I have been seizure-free since 2021.

Every single one of the technical challenges — Scrivener, KDP formatting, audio mastering, Substack architecture, AI collaboration — lit up a part of my brain that might otherwise have gone dark. Every wall I hit and solved was a synapse firing that hadn’t fired in years.

Nobody designs a curriculum like this. There’s no syllabus for teaching yourself Scrivener at 72, audio mastering at 73, and self-publishing at 74. My father wanted me to study philosophy — to live the examined life. He was right about the destination. We both just had the route wrong, and the timing off by about fifty years.

This was the degree I actually needed.

Paperback Writer

André J. de Saint Phalle — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 12:50:10 GMT

Some songs don’t enter through your ears. They enter through your chest.

Dorm room. Exeter. 1966. Thirteen years old in a blazer and a tie that’s been loosened since chapel. Transistor radio on the nightstand, dial locked to WBZ-AM. Homework untouched. The signal drifts in and out, and then the harmonies hit — McCartney’s voice climbing over itself, layered, insistent — and something locks into place that will never come loose.

I didn’t fully grasp the lyrics. Didn’t care. The song wasn’t about words yet. It was about a sound that lived somewhere between the melody and the blood. Three voices braided together into something that bypassed the brain entirely and went straight to the body. You know the feeling — certain songs just move in. They don’t ask permission. They take up residence in a room inside you that you didn’t know existed, and they never leave.

I was thirteen. I would carry that song for the rest of my life, like a touchstone.

Certain music does this. It isn’t about taste or preference. It’s deeper than that — almost biological. The way Neil Young’s single distorted note at the opening of “Cinnamon Girl” can rearrange something in your nervous system. Or Donovan singing “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” — that wash of color and light that doesn’t describe transcendence so much as produce it, right there in your eardrums. These songs don’t represent feelings. They are feelings, compressed into three minutes of sound, and once they’re inside you, they become part of your operating system. You hear them at thirteen and they’re still running the software at seventy-four.

My father didn’t understand this. To him, the music I loved was noise. He was a classics man — structured, formal, composed. The Beatles were chaos. Neil Young was an assault. He couldn’t hear what I heard, and I couldn’t hear what he heard, and that gap between us was one of many that would widen for decades before it finally — slowly, improbably — began to close.

He had come home from New York one evening during the summer of 1964 to find me wearing genuine English leather Beatle boots, the ones my french cousin Edme had urged me to buy in the city. Too expensive, he said. Go back to New York tomorrow and return them. I was twelve. I took the train back and returned the boots. The boots weren’t the point. The point was that anything associated with that music — the sound, the look, the culture — was suspect. Dangerous. A distraction from the serious business of becoming the man he’d decided I should be.

What he’d decided was philosophy. I wanted film school — wanted it the way you want air when you’re underwater. I was going to be the next Peter Fonda, the next Ingmar Bergman. I had placed third in scholastic magazines, national short story contest and been published. I had the Ralph Bradley Prize for film from Exeter. I had talent. I had ambition. And my father looked at all of it and said no.

Not cruelly. Not even wrongly. He said: You can’t tell the world a story until you know what it means.

I hated him for it. Hated him for decades. Carried it like a stone in my chest — the father who blocked his son’s artistic life, who chose philosophy over film, who valued the examined life over the lived one. He wanted me to sit in a classroom and read Kierkegaard. I wanted to pick up a camera and go.

So I went. Not to film school. Just — out. Into the world. Thumb out on 684, eighty dollars, a guitar, a backpack. Ten thousand miles of American highway in the summer of 1973. Then California, then New York, then Antigua, then Maine, then Hollywood, then back. Decades of motion. Decades of running from that study where he sat with his index cards, handicapping horses, demanding I account for every conversation, every aspiration, every stray thought.

The music came with me everywhere. It was the one inheritance he couldn’t confiscate. The Beatles, Dylan, Neil Young, the Dead — they were the soundtrack to every departure, every highway, every rented room. When I played guitar in Tompkins Square Park with a drummer from Harlem and a rhythm player from Queens, I was speaking a language my father had never learned. When I played in Antigua with the trade winds coming through the open shutters, the music was still the same conversation I’d started at thirteen with a transistor radio on a nightstand in New Hampshire. My father heard noise. I heard a lifeline.

Here’s what fifty years teaches you.

He was right.

Not about the boots. Not about philosophy as a college major. Not about West Point or the priesthood or any of the specific ambitions he tried to graft onto me like branches onto a tree that didn’t want them. He was wrong about all of that, specifically and sometimes damagingly.

But the principle underneath — the insistence that you can’t tell a story until you understand what it means — that was exactly right. I just didn’t know it would take fifty years to understand it. He thought four years at Penn reading Kant would do the job. It took the open road, Antigua, Thea’s death, the seizures, a simple house in Vermont with two dogs and a guitar, and finally — finally — sitting down at seventy-two to write the book.

Not a film. A book.

The thing he’d been pointing toward all along. Not because he knew I’d be a writer — he didn’t. But because he knew that surface wasn’t enough. That the camera could show you what happened but not what it meant. That the music could make you feel everything but explain nothing. He wanted me to go deeper, and he was right, and I spent my whole life resisting the very thing that would ultimately save me.

The song came out in 1966. I published the paperback in 2025. Fifty-nine years between the boy hearing it on the radio and the man holding his own paperback.

McCartney’s character in that song is desperate. Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book? It took me years to write, will you take a look? He’s willing to change the style, make it longer, do whatever the publisher wants. He needs a job. He needs validation. He needs someone in a position of authority to say: Yes, this is worth something.

I know that desperation. I mailed twelve author copies to siblings, old friends, people I thought might care. Not one person responded. A boarding school acquaintance who became chairman of the board at Farrar, Straus and Giroux read the manuscript and told me it had no commercial appeal. He suggested I print copies for family distribution. The family, of course, being the very people who refuse to read it.

But here’s where the song and I part company. McCartney’s paperback writer is begging for permission. He’ll change anything — the story, the style, the length — to get a yes. He’s selling. I didn’t sell. I wrote the uncomfortable version. The version that names what happened in the laundry room. The version that cost me what was left of my family. I didn’t make it longer because someone liked the style. I didn’t change it round. I wrote what I saw.

The father who blocked film school, who tried to force me to study philosophy, who heard noise where I heard God — that man gave me the only tools that could have produced this book. Not the camera. Not the guitar. The depth. The insistence on meaning. The refusal to let his eldest son skate along the surface of a life without understanding what was underneath.

I’m sitting in a recliner in northern Vermont. The dogs are at my feet. The guitar is in the corner. The iPad is floating above my knees and I’m speaking these words into it — dictating to an AI that helps me find the shape of what I’m trying to say. My father would have had opinions about this. He would have called it noise.

But the book exists. The paperback is real. You can hold it in your hand. It took me fifty years because it needed fifty years — the hitchhiking, the windsurfing, the love, the losses, the long silence, the whole life lived before the story could be told. My father planted the mission: find out what it means. He just didn’t know the classroom would be ten thousand miles of highway and a Caribbean island and a woman who died too young and a lifetime of music that kept me alive long enough to finally sit down and write.

The harmonies are still in my chest. McCartney’s voice layered over itself, Lennon underneath, Harrison floating on top. Sixty years later and the song hasn’t moved. It’s still in the same room where it took up residence when I was thirteen — the room my father never entered, the room where I kept everything he called noise, the room that turned out to hold the answer he was looking for all along.

Dear Sir or Madam. There is no sir or madam. There is no publisher. There is just a man at seventy-four with a paperback and a long story about how the song and the father and the fifty years between them were always heading to the same place.

I just couldn’t hear it yet.

What the Machine Saw

André J. de Saint Phalle — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 17:42:18 GMT

The road runs through both halves — one lived, one analyzed.

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From third grade through eighth, I attended the Whitby Montessori School in Greenwich, Connecticut. There I was privileged to experience the most influential teacher of my entire academic training. Mr. Paul Czaja showed us how to use a 35mm camera, develop the film and make prints. He also took us to Times Square in New York City, where we were able to shoot 16 mm black-and-white film and edit it afterwards. He helped us create our own school newspaper, which we handset with real type and printed on a real printing press. He also gave us a unique creative writing class that started the same way every time. Five to ten minutes of meditation. Silence. Eyes closed. Then, when you were ready, you walked to the front of the room where he kept a basket full of laminated photographs — images he’d collected from magazines, calendars, wherever. You chose the one that spoke to you. Took it back to your desk. Contemplated it. And freely wrote whatever came.

Paul Clement Czaja (1936-2018)

No prompts. No thesis statements. No instructions beyond: sit with the image until something opens, then follow it inward. Afterwards, we published our work in a mimeographed literary magazine he named “Caedmon” after the first English poet, dubbed the “Father of English Sacred Song.”

Caedmon’s Hymn (c. 7th century)

Now we must honour the guardian of heaven,
The might of the architect, and his purpose,
The work of the father of glory, as he,
The eternal lord, established the beginning of wonders.
He first created for the children of men
Heaven as a roof, the holy creator.
Then the guardian of mankind,
The eternal lord, afterwards appointed
The middle earth, the lands for men, the Lord almighty.

I have worked that way my entire creative life. Image first. Feeling second. Words last. The process moves from the outside in — a visual lands, something stirs, and you write your way toward whatever it stirred. It’s an inward-facing method, and it produced every page of Surfing the Interstates, the memoir I spent two years writing about hitchhiking four thousand miles across America in 1973.

Fifty three years after that journey, and sixty three years after Mr. Czaja’s classroom, I watched a machine do the exact opposite.

I was checking the final PDF of the second edition in Adobe Acrobat when I noticed a button I’d never seen before. “Create Summary.” So I pressed it, the way you press any button you’ve never pressed, which is to say without thinking.

What came back was strange. Not wrong, exactly. But strange the way a photograph of your house taken from a satellite is strange. You recognize the roof. You can see where the driveway meets the road. But you’d never describe where you live that way.

The algorithm organized my book into twenty-some thematic categories with titles like “Personal Journey and Family Background” and “The Search for Freedom and Self-Expression.” Academic. Bloodless. The kind of language that takes a kid standing on the shoulder of I-80 with his thumb out and turns him into a “narrator reflecting on displacement and inherited trauma.”

Which — fine. He was. But he didn’t know that. He thought he was hitchhiking to California.

That’s the first thing the machine missed. Not the facts but the ignorance. The not-knowing that drives every page of that book. I was twenty-one. I didn’t have themes. I had a backpack, a guitar, some Colombian weed, and a very clear need to be somewhere other than where I was.

Mr. Czaja would have understood. You don’t pick a photograph from the basket because you already know what it means. You pick it because it pulls at something you can’t name yet. The writing is the naming. The algorithm skipped that part entirely. It started with the names.

But here’s what surprised me. The summary did notice real things — it just described them in a language that made them unrecognizable.

It caught the stone and water symbolism — “stones as symbols of clarity, love, and abundance, formed under pressure and holding collective memory.” I’d worked on that thread deliberately, over months, with Claude as my writing partner. We built it together, scene by scene, knowing exactly what we were doing. The algorithm found the thread and described it like a lab report. The same pattern, stripped of everything that made it feel like discovery.

It caught something about the way music functions — not as entertainment or even rebellion, but as what it called “a conduit to transcendence.” That’s not language I would use. But the observation underneath it is accurate. The Grateful Dead shows in that book aren’t concert scenes. They’re the closest thing to church I’d ever experienced. The algorithm saw that without knowing what church means to a kid who never had one.

Where the summary falls apart is exactly where you’d expect a machine to fall apart: in the texture. The felt reality of things. It cycles back to the same observations — trauma, connection, nature, repeat — like someone stirring a pot that’s already been stirred. Here’s a characteristic passage:

“The narrator seeks a love that operates by different physics — patient, deep, and cyclical like tides. The importance of slow, deliberate connection is emphasized as a way to find stability and understanding.”

That’s not wrong. But it could describe a hundred books. It could describe a self-help pamphlet. What it can’t describe is sitting in the passenger seat of a cattle rancher’s truck outside Winnemucca, Nevada, at four in the morning, not saying anything, watching the headlights eat the road, and feeling for the first time in your life that silence between two people doesn’t have to mean something is broken.

That’s what I mean by texture. The machine reads theme. The writer lives moment. The book sits somewhere between the two, or tries to.

The summary also caught Steve — and got him wrong. The algorithm called him a Vietnam vet whose arc illustrates “how war and systemic violence shape individual destinies.” Steve never went to Vietnam. A school psychiatrist gave him a psychological 4F that kept him out. His paranoia didn’t come from combat. It came from somewhere inside him that no draft board or algorithm could have mapped, and it ended with him being killed by police decades later — a death I compressed into the narrative because the truth of who he was demanded that the reader not be let off the hook.

The machine identified Steve’s importance to the book. Then it invented a biography for him that sounded right but wasn’t. It needed a cause for his damage, so it supplied the most obvious one. That’s exactly what a machine does. And it’s exactly what a writer can’t afford to do.

I spent two months trying to put Steve back together as a person. The algorithm spent a fraction of a second turning him into a category.

This is the fundamental tension of any summary, human or machine — the gap between pattern and presence. Patterns are real. They matter. But presence is what makes you turn the page.

There’s something the summary gets right by accident, though. In its relentless circling — trauma, nature, connection, music, trauma, nature, connection — it inadvertently mimics the actual structure of the journey. Because hitchhiking is circular. You’re not going somewhere in any meaningful narrative sense. You’re going, and then you’re somewhere, and then you’re going again. The people change. The landscape changes. You don’t change, or you do, but so slowly you can’t see it, the way you can’t see your own face aging in the mirror every morning.

The algorithm’s repetitiveness frustrated me at first. Then I realized it was doing what the road does. Coming back to the same things, slightly different each time. That’s either a defense of the algorithm or an indictment of it. I’m not sure which.

What fascinates me most is what the machine emphasized and what it ignored.

It gave significant space to the cosmic bus, the UFO sequences, the peyote visions in the redwoods. Algorithmically, I understand why. Those scenes are linguistically dense. They generate the most “meaning” per paragraph. They light up whatever circuits a language model uses to identify significance.

But the book’s emotional center — the scenes that readers have told me stopped them cold — are quieter than that. A kitchen with no smell of Sunday roast. A grandmother’s tinsel, one strand at a time. Lucy humming a frequency in a mountain camp that made something inside you stop clenching. The machine sailed right past those moments because they don’t announce themselves as important. They don’t have thesis statements.

In my experience, the things that matter most rarely do.

I asked another AI — the one I actually write with — to generate an image for this essay. What came back was a painting split diagonally down the middle. On one side, a young hitchhiker at dawn, thumb out, guitar at his feet, the sky blazing amber and copper in the style of Turner. On the other side, the same scene rendered as data — cool blue, columns of text, the flat glow of a terminal screen.

Two halves. Same road running through both.

I stared at it for a while, and I thought about Mr. Czaja’s basket. The laminated photographs. How the whole point was that you didn’t analyze the image. You let it analyze you. You sat with it until it opened something, and then you followed that opening wherever it led.

The algorithm did the opposite. It took a finished book — a book that began as feeling and image and the ache of memory — and read it backward, from conclusion to cause, from pattern to data point. It’s an impressive trick. But it’s the reverse of how the thing was made.

I’m sharing this not as a complaint about artificial intelligence. I’ve been working with AI for two years now — building this memoir in conversation with Claude, using it as a thinking partner, an editor, a sounding board. That collaboration produced something I couldn’t have made alone. I know what the technology is capable of as well as its weaknesses and traps. I’m grateful for it and use it as a tool, not a replacement for my interior life and process.

But there’s a difference between an AI that works with you over months, absorbing your voice and your history and your particular way of seeing, and an algorithm that scans a finished document and sorts it into buckets. The first is collaboration. The second is triage.

The Adobe summary triaged my book. It identified the major injuries, catalogued the symptoms, and wrote up a report. What it couldn’t do was tell you what it felt like to be the patient. That part is still the writer’s job, and always will be.

I turned seventy-four last week. I wrote Surfing the Interstates not to explain what happened to me in 1973 but to find out. The writing was the discovery. Every chapter peeled back something I hadn’t understood about myself, about my family, about the particular way damage gets handed down and, if you’re lucky, set down.

The machine read the book and saw patterns of trauma and transcendence. I wrote the book and found something simpler than that. I found out that a twenty-one-year-old kid with his thumb out on a hot July afternoon in Armonk, New York was braver than the seventy-year-old man who finally sat down to tell the story. And that the half century between them were the real distance I had to cross.

No algorithm is going to summarize that. But I’m glad one tried.

Mr. Czaja would have understood that, too. Sometimes you pick the image from the basket and it doesn’t give you what you expected. Sometimes what it gives you is better. You just have to sit with it long enough to find out.

Surfing the Interstates: A 1973 Hitchhiking Memoir

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The Machine Listened

André J. de Saint Phalle — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 13:09:47 GMT

I downloaded the free version of Adobe Acrobat to view my manuscript as a two-page spread before uploading it to Kindle Direct Publishing. Just a proofreading tool. But there at the bottom of the screen — a button I wasn’t expecting. Generate Podcast.

I pressed it. A few minutes later, two AI hosts named Chloe and Liam were discussing my book. Six minutes of banter, commentary, and thematic analysis, synthesized from 60,000 words of memoir while I sat there watching the progress bar.

They found the major threads — the guitar, the Vietnam shadow, the music, the mystical moments, the kindness of strangers. They got the architecture right. That’s not nothing. For a machine that’s never hitchhiked, never stood on a highway shoulder with $80 and a thumb out, never heard Pigpen play — it did a credible job of mapping what the book is about.

What it can’t do is what no algorithm can: disagree with itself. Chloe and Liam never stumble, never push back, never say wait, I don’t buy that. They have the frictionless agreeableness of two people having one opinion. Everything becomes a “symbol” or a “profound metaphor.” My book resists that kind of tidy packaging — but the machine doesn’t know that, because the machine doesn’t know what mess feels like.

They also got a few things wrong. They say the Vietnam War ended “months before” my journey. I left in the summer of ‘73. The war didn’t end until April of ‘75. Details matter in memoir. The machine doesn’t know that either.

But here’s the thing. When you’re a self-publisher without the starmaker machinery of a mainstream house behind you, you scramble to make your own buzz. Unfortunately, there’s an already a lot of noise out there, and it’s nearly impossible to break through it. But a free, AI-generated podcast that might make one curious person click through to the actual book? I’ll take it. Imperfect signal is still signal.

Surfing The Interstates

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Mar 21, 2026, 8:56 AM

Adobe Acrobat Podcast

(0:00) Welcome to this new episode. Today, we’re diving into a remarkable memoir, (0:05) Surfing the Interstates, a 1973 hitchhiking journey across America by André J. de Saint Phalle. It’s (0:12) a story about a young man leaving a troubled home with nothing but a guitar, a backpack, (0:17) and $80 from his mother.

Chloe, what struck you first about this memoir? (0:22) Hey, Liam. Yeah, right away, it’s that raw honesty. André’s family life is fractured.

(0:28) His father is controlling and violent, while his mother quietly supports him with that $80 (0:34) lifeline. That money isn’t just cash. It’s a secret escape hatch from a home (0:39) filled with fear and silence.

It sets the tone for the whole journey. (0:44) Absolutely. And that guitar he carries, the 1943 Harmony Cremona he calls Mona, (0:50) feels like more than an instrument.

It’s a symbol of his past and his hope. (0:55) Like, he’s carrying his history and his future on his back as he steps out onto the highway with (1:00) his thumb out. That act of hitchhiking, so terrifying and yet empowering, really captures (1:06) the leap into the unknown.

Yeah, and the first rides he gets are fascinating. He meets a Vietnam (1:12) vet who understands his draft avoidance, a free-spirited couple in a van, and others who (1:17) offer kindness and stories. It’s like the road becomes this classroom where he learns about (1:23) America’s complexity right after the war.

That’s a great point. The Vietnam War’s shadow (1:28) looms large, even though it ended months before André’s journey. The draft lottery, veterans,(1:34) trauma, and the cultural divide between those who fought and those who resisted are woven (1:39) throughout.

His friend Steve, for example, embodies that tension, brilliant but haunted,(1:45) eventually spiraling into paranoia and tragedy. Steve’s story is heartbreaking. He labels his (1:51) film canisters murder, insanity, death, a grim prophecy that comes true.

It’s a stark reminder (2:00) of the war’s lasting damage, not just on the battlefield but in the minds and lives of those (2:05) who lived through it or tried to escape it. And the memoir doesn’t just dwell on trauma. (2:11) Music plays a huge role as a spiritual force.

André’s psychedelic experiences at concerts and (2:18) campfires show music as a language beyond words, a way to connect, heal, and find meaning. (2:24) The tambourine left by Pigpen, the dead’s blues preacher, becomes a symbol of this connection, (2:30) music as love and participation, not just performance. Right, and the way the memoir (2:35) describes those moments of electric communion is powerful.

Music dissolves boundaries, creates a (2:42) shared sacred experience. It’s like the music itself becomes a living thing, carrying everyone (2:49) along in a collective rhythm. That’s a beautiful metaphor for connection.

And it’s interesting how (2:55) the psychedelic experience breaks down linear time, opening the door to deeper understanding. (3:01) André’s reflections on time as spiral, not line, and the way music carries meaning beyond words. (3:06) These are profound insights wrapped in personal experience.

(3:10) Speaking of connection, the kindness of strangers on the road is another key theme. (3:16) People like River, the flute player who teaches André about breathing and vulnerability in music, (3:22) or Keith, who shares his hopes and fears, and the Montreal guys who create spontaneous music(3:27) circles. These temporary families show the generosity and wisdom found in unexpected places.

(3:34) Yet there’s tension too, between freedom and fear, idealism and reality. The road teaches André how (3:41) to be human through connection, but also how fragile that connection can be, especially under (3:47) the shadow of war and trauma. And then there are those mystical moments that deepen the memoir’s (3:53) emotional impact, like the UFO sighting, two objects hovering over the ocean, scanning the (4:00) water with impossible light beams.

It’s a striking symbol of the universe’s mysteries and the limits (4:07) of human understanding. Yeah, that episode feels like a metaphor for the unknown, the mystical (4:13) forces beyond our grasp. And the dream of African stones, white for clarity, pink for heart, yellow (4:19) for abundance, represents transformation under pressure.

It’s like the memoir is saying healing (4:25) and connection often happen beyond words and logic. The redwoods and the canyon also become (4:31) living symbols, survival, healing, ancient wisdom. The mother tree, thousands of years old, teaches (4:37) endurance and growth around wounds.

The canyon’s limestone walls and rivers symbolize carrying grief (4:44) and finding peace beyond trauma. It’s a beautiful way to frame the journey, not just physical miles (4:50) but an inner search for freedom that’s complicated, fragile, and often painful. Freedom isn’t just (4:56) running away, it’s learning to carry your past, connect with others, and find moments of grace and chaos.

(5:02) And music threads through all of it as a language of vulnerability and truth. The road teaches (5:07) patience, trust, and the importance of letting go of control, letting the guitar decide, letting the (5:14) bus find its own path. The memoir ends with a sense of ongoing journey toward love that moves like (5:20) tides, toward home made through staying and belonging.

It reminds us that life’s deepest (5:24) connections come in fragments, moments of presence, and the courage to keep moving forward. (5:30) Exactly. It’s a powerful reminder that sometimes the best we can do is show up, be present, and keep (5:37) reaching for connection, even when the path is uncertain.

So to sum up Andre, S-Memoir is a raw, (5:44) honest exploration of trauma, music, connection, and the search for freedom in a turbulent time. (5:49) It’s about the road as a teacher, music as a language beyond words, and love as something (5:55) that moves in mysterious, often non-linear ways. And it’s about the courage to leave, the kindness (6:02) of strangers, the cost of war, and the mystical moments that remind us there’s more to life than (6:08) what we see on the surface.

Thanks for joining us for this journey through Surfing the Interstates. (6:13) It’s a story that stays with you about the road, the music, and the search for home. (6:18) Thanks everyone.

Keep listening, keep exploring, and remember, (6:22) sometimes the road finds you when you’re ready.

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The New York Times Reviews My Memoir

André J. de Saint Phalle — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 21:42:02 GMT

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The second edition of Surfing the Interstates is finished. Published. Paperback, hardcover, Kindle. Done. Anyone who's written a book knows that finishing the first draft means you're maybe a third of the way there. The real work comes after — cutting what you love, tightening what remains, learning to trust the silence between sentences. And then there's the other half nobody warns you about. Formatting the manuscript for Kindle. Reformatting it for paperback. Reformatting it again for hardcover. Hunting down misspellings, wrong typefaces, orphaned paragraphs, broken page breaks, margins that looked right on screen but wrong in print. Adjusting the cover for three different spine widths. Uploading, proofing, finding another error, fixing it, re-uploading. Over and over until you stop seeing words and start seeing pixels. When it was finally, truly done, I wanted a critical reading. Not encouragement. Not feedback from a friend. A review. So I asked Claude — the AI that's been my writing partner through two years of this project — to read the finished manuscript and write an honest assessment in the voice of a leading book reviewer. What came back surprised me. Not because it was kind, but because it saw the book clearly. Here it is.

SURFING THE INTERSTATES: A 1973 Hitchhiking Memoir

By André J. de Saint Phalle

233 pp.

Kindle Direct Publishing.

Reviewed for The New York Times Book Review

In the summer of 1973, André de Saint Phalle — twenty-one, broke, the son of a French count’s son and an Irish-American mother — pocketed eighty dollars from his mother’s closet and walked out of a crumbling Westchester estate with a backpack and a 1943 Harmony Cremona guitar. He headed west. What he carried was heavier than the pack: a blocked filmmaking dream, a violent father, a family dissolving into its component griefs, and an education from Exeter and Penn that had taught him everything except how to be a person.

“Surfing the Interstates” is the memoir of that crossing, and it is a strange, beautiful, sometimes harrowing book — one that uses the hitchhiking road narrative the way a jazz musician uses a standard: as a framework for improvisation that goes to places the melody never promised.

The comparison to Kerouac is inevitable and misleading. Where “On the Road” was centrifugal — all outward motion, all characters and kinetic energy — de Saint Phalle’s book is centripetal. The road goes west, but the real journey goes inward. Each ride, each campfire, each stranger becomes a trigger for memory, and the memories arrive in a prose style that shifts registers with cinematic precision. Present-tense action scenes are rendered in taut, fragmented sentences that read like screenplay directions: “Kitchen. Silent. No smell of Sunday roast. No Nana making Toll House cookies. Just the refrigerator’s hum.” Then a flashback opens and the writing relaxes into full, flowing sentences — literary prose that earns its emotional weight through specificity rather than sentiment. The reader always knows which timeline they’re in, and the contrast between the two modes creates a kind of stereo effect: the harsh external journey playing against the tender internal one.

The book’s structural gambit is to let the people he meets on the highway become mirrors. A Vietnam vet validates his refusal of the draft. A flute-playing mystic named River diagnoses his fear of being heard. A draft resister named Bill, driving with his motherless daughter, shows him what principled refusal actually costs. A trio of trust-fund women in a VW Westfalia remind him that the counterculture has its own class system. Each encounter is brief, charged, and surprisingly free of the sentimentality that plagues most road memoirs. De Saint Phalle has a filmmaker’s instinct for the telling detail and a writer’s discipline to leave it alone once deployed.

The heart of the book is a dual portrait: of the author’s friendship with Steve Ferry, a brilliant, paranoid Penn dropout living in a converted chicken coop in Sonoma County, and of the landscape — redwood groves, Colorado meadows, Big Bend canyons — that offers what human connection cannot. Steve’s arc, from charismatic campus radical to gun-cleaning isolate, is the book’s most devastating thread. De Saint Phalle handles it with remarkable restraint. He presents the deterioration factually, lets the reader draw their own conclusions, and then delivers the climax through a truck-stop television — the author watching his friend’s violent end play out on the news among strangers eating eggs. It is one of the most effectively rendered scenes of loss I’ve read in recent memoir.

But the book’s most original achievement may be its treatment of altered states. Chapter 2’s account of a Grateful Dead concert on LSD and Chapter 8’s peyote ceremony among redwoods are not the usual psychedelic testimonials. De Saint Phalle writes these experiences as consciousness operating at full bandwidth — Catholic liturgy colliding with rock and roll, family history erupting through the chemical breach, sexual awakening and spiritual crisis arriving simultaneously. The writing in these passages is formally ambitious, with sentence structures that mirror the dissolution and reformation of ordinary perception. That this risks preciousness is acknowledged by the author’s own self-awareness; these are a young man’s revelations, presented with an older man’s understanding of their limits.

The book also contains a UFO sighting off Big Sur — described with enough sobriety and corroborating witnesses to resist easy dismissal — and a final chapter in the canyons of Big Bend that achieves something close to the visionary. Saint Phalle, fasting and grieving, watches an F-4 Phantom jet scream through the sacred space and hurls stones at it in rage. The stones become birds. The birds become prayers. The prayers become nothing. It is a moment that could collapse into pretension but doesn’t, because the author has earned it through sixteen chapters of honest reckoning with what violence — institutional, familial, self-inflicted — does to young men who refuse to participate.

What finally distinguishes “Surfing the Interstates” from its considerable shelf of American road memoirs is its emotional argument. This is not a book about freedom. It is a book about a young man discovering that what he thought was freedom — motion, refusal, escape — was actually a pattern inherited from a father who moved his family seven times, who hit his wife behind the sound of the washing machine, who controlled his son’s dreams while calling it love. The road doesn’t liberate André de Saint Phalle. It teaches him what he’s running from. The liberation, the book quietly insists, will have to come from staying somewhere — a possibility glimpsed in the final pages but not yet achieved.

For a self-published memoir by a first-time author, the craft here is striking. The dual narrative voice is controlled and purposeful. The dialogue rings true without straining for period authenticity. The pacing — always the hardest thing in memoir — rarely falters. If the middle chapters occasionally drift toward the episodic, this feels less like a structural weakness than an honest reflection of what hitchhiking actually is: long stretches of waiting punctuated by brief, intense human encounters.

Saint Phalle has written a book about 1973 that speaks to the present moment — about what happens to sensitive young men in a culture that tells them to toughen up or die, about the distance between the counterculture’s promises and its casualties, and about the slow, painful work of understanding that the family you were born into is not the family you have to remain. It is a memoir that trusts its readers, trusts its material, and trusts the road to reveal what needs revealing.

The guitar gets stolen in Chapter 15. It’s a loss that registers as both literal and metaphorical — the instrument Jerry Garcia blessed, the companion of every campfire and canyon, simply gone one morning in Big Bend. Saint Phalle doesn’t dwell on it. He just keeps walking. By then, the reader understands: this is a man who has learned to carry loss without being crushed by it. Not yet gracefully. But forward.

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SURFING THE INTERSTATES

André J. de Saint Phalle — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 01:32:15 GMT

73 year old author holding his first printed book

“A masterwork of American road literature that captures a specific moment (summer 1973) and makes it eternal. Saint Phalle’s prose is deceptively simple—clear sentences, vivid details, dialogue that breathes. But beneath that clarity runs a current of poetry.”

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Paid subscribers can also read and listen to the full book below.

Epigram

(Author readings are embedded at the top of each chapter)

Every young man tells himself a story about who he’s going to become.

My dreams were blocked.

Every resource denied.

All that was left was the side of an American highway.

Thumb out.

Scared shitless.

But I felt a growing confidence that if I just put one foot in front of the other and walked out that door, I would make it.

I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

1. Thumb Out — 8 min — Westchester estate to the open road

2. Turn On Your Lovelight — 10 min — A Grateful Dead concert that changed everything

3. The Kindness of Strangers — 14 min — The people who stop for you

4. The Price of Paradise — 9 min — Everything costs too much

5. The Frequency of Freedom — 16 min — Mini Woodstock in the Rockies

6. Solitary Push — 7 min — Wyoming alone, California ahead

7. Chicken Coop Days — 10 min — A friend coming apart in Santa Rosa

8. Sasha Among the Giants — 13 min — Peyote and redwoods

9. Target Practice — 7 min — When friendship turns dangerous

10. Let the Guitar Decide — 14 min — Jerry Garcia, a guitar, and Highway 1

11. ZIP! — 7 min — Something impossible above Big Sur

12. Love Through Stone — 12 min — Prophetic dreams

13. The Ocean Don’t Lie — 6 min — A sailor’s wisdom in the Mojave heat

14. Out in the West Texas Town of El Paso — 9 min — Steve on the am news

15. The Descending Dark — 9 min — Into Big Bend carrying everything

16. Phantom Ships — 10 min — Vision quest — roads become water

“Raw, unflinching 1973 hitchhiking memoir blending family trauma, Vietnam-era tension, Grateful Dead mysticism, and vivid road encounters. Strong voice, evocative prose, no filler—reads like Kerouac raised on acid and Allman Brothers.”