The Coming of Spring
At 74, a man who spent 3 years excavating the past, steps into the present
March 20th is the vernal equinox. It’s also my 74th birthday. I’ve always liked the symmetry of that — being born on the day the world tilts back toward light.
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 basement. 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 from the basement.
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.