Over the past several months, I’ve been collaborating with AI to illustrate scenes from my life — translating memory into image, one moment at a time. The stone walls of Ledge Acres. The long light of a boarding school afternoon. A thumb raised on a highway shoulder in 1973. Trade winds over Antigua. The green mountains of Vermont where it all eventually landed.
Apple Photos gathered these illustrations into a short film, and something unexpected happened — set to music, dissolving one into the next, they became more than a gallery. They became the feel of a life remembered. Not the facts of it, but the texture. The way one chapter bleeds into the next when you stop trying to hold the edges apart.
This is a different way into the story. No words, for once. Just the pictures.
My published memoir, Surfing the Interstates, covers the 1973 hitchhiking journey that started it all. The rest of the story — Antigua, Vermont, and everything between — lives here on this Substack.
