One of the upsides of living in the Internet age is the sheer number of windows into unfamiliar lifestyles and recreational hobbies that we’re offered. I never realized how many young people are using peptides and counting “macros” until the Instagram algorithm started doubling down on fitness content. On a healthier note, a lot of us have discovered the joy of outdoor activities such as hiking, birding, fishing, and even ultra-running through exposure to seasoned pros who’ve been using social media to share their joy and expertise with the wider public. This makes the prospect of trying out a new recreational activity feel more tangible. And sometimes, when the gears click into place after the first few exposures, our lives can change unexpectedly fast.

Earlier this spring, after breaking my pinky toe from stubbing it too hard on the leg of a love seat (is there anything more emasculating than cracking a bone on furniture?), I got back into biking after a years-long hiatus. It came back to me like…well…riding a bicycle. Within a month of pedalling around Boston’s protected paths and bike lanes, joining the BlueBikes program, and procuring a used bike for trips beyond the city, an opportunity to escalate my free-wheeling presented itself. I accepted an assignment for a story about mountain biking—a story that would benefit from the perspective of someone totally new to “MTB” culture. I gamely accepted, and grabbed my helmet.

The first few rounds on beginner level trails went nicely. My nerves jangled a little too much to allow for rolling over roots and rocks at full speed, and at one point I thought that I was going to grind the brakes of the loaner bike into nubbin. But once the trails emerged from the woods into sun-splashed hillsides and meadows, with groomed dirt trails that meandered across the landscape, I found my flow and genuinely enjoyed it. By the time I found myself in the hills of southeastern Vermont, on a trail network with more rigorous obstacles, I decided to try a trail that was right on the edge of easy and moderate; at a cautious speed, with the self-agreement that if I ran into anything that made me feel extra nervous, I would dismount, walk my bike, and then pedal onward.

What I failed to account for, however, is a common mishap that mountain bikers refer to as “pedal strike;” the moment when your pedal makes contact with an object along the thin trail, like an extruding stone or stump. Less than five minutes into my fourth ever mountain bike ride, my left pedal struck something and what happened next was so fast and jolting that I’m still not quite sure what went down. Other than my body. I hit the ground hard, breaking the fall with both hands, absording most of the impact in my right arm and shoulder. I scraped my left elbow on something, drawing blood. By the next morning, I had a bruise on my lower stomach that required a trip to the ER.

The reason why I went to a hospital to get the bruise checked out is because bruising in the vicinity of your internal organs can be a symptom of internal bleeding. Getting hit in the gut with a handlebar can cause this. As a hospital tech injected contrast dye into an IV in my left arm, telling me that I would soon feel a warming sensation in my midsection as they slid me into the CAT Scan machine, I tried to prepare my brain for the possibility that I might need surgery—if the scan results revealed a critical injury. Surprisingly, I wasn’t freaking out internally. Being in a place where I could get such care, if needed, helped me stay cool and collected. But there was also some level of disbelief at play too. I had spent less than 5 hours on a mountain bike in my entire life, all within the last few months. Now the doctors were making sure that I hadn’t banged up one of my guts too hard when I ate shit on that “easy” trail in Vermont.

When I got the results of the scan—all clear, with the bruising attributed to a light abdominal sprain—I decided that it was time for me to retire from mountain biking.

It was a quick, firm decision, but not without its disappointments. My brief foray with the sport had introduced me to people within the mountain biking scene who were gregarious and generous to an extent that you don’t often see in outdoor sports. My buddy Dan, a very experienced mountain biker, had gone above and beyond to ease my passage into the sport and demystify it for me. Pedalling around grassy trails for the first time was enjoyable enough that I actually wondered how far that path might lead. It took me deep into the bowels of Tufts Medical Center, for a scan of my literal bowels. When I emerged back into daylight in Boston, banged up but not seriously so, I felt that sense of mourning washed away by gratitude; for being able to walk away.

Maybe this has happened to you as well. Not a mountain bike crash and ER visit, but a new recreational hobby through which you flew a little too close to the sun. While the inherent dangers of mountain biking are steeper than average—broken bones, muscle strains, and even concussions are possibilities that come with the territory—challenges that come with experimental pursuits take on many forms. An old college friend in LA once told me that she gave up yoga after three months, because she found the other patrons at her studio to be insufferably judgmental and unpleasant to be around. A former co-worker I met through the Appalachian Mountain Club had a brief flirtation with marathoning, only to quit after two races where they logged remarkable times. It wasn’t the physical rigor of the sport that prompted them to retire, but the realization that training for future marathons would torpedo the balance of their lifestyle. They chose that balance over a sport they were already excelling at, and I found that cool.

Friends, family, and peers tend to be supportive when they see us enjoying something new. If you go out with a birding buddy and spot an ultra-rare Bewick’s wren on your first walk, you may find yourself fielding encouragement to spring for top-of-the-line binoculars or a plane ticket to a bird-watching festival on the Gulf Coast. Even when we run into early challenges while trying out a new recreational hobby, it can be very instinctual for onlookers and our inner voice to promote perseverence. It comes from a place of good intention, and in general, pushing through adversity tends to create better outcomes in life. As a New Englander—afflicted by Puritanism in ways that I’ll never fully understand—I am keenly aware that suffering can augment gratification.

The question that’s important to ask, however, is whether there’s room for that early suffering in the day-to-day landscape of your life. With recreational activities, there’s almost always going to be some trade-off of risks and rewards. Regarding mountain biking, I respect that many MTB fans find the thrills and shared joy of the sport to be more than worth the hazards that it presents, and I would never try to convince them otherwise. The same goes for folks who enjoy playing football, even with the recent studies on concussions linking the injury to the sport in deeply troubling ways. It’s an activity that is very much for someone, and for all I know, they’ve made a calculation that allows them to accept the physical exposure of the sport and play on in earnest.

If you find yourself at a crossroads after trying out a new recreational path, struggling with short term pains and feeling torn between soldiering onward or reatreating, ask yourself this: Am I up for more pain? The most important word in that question is “I.” Don’t think about how friends might respond with surprise or disappointment upon learning that you decided to bail on your new activity. Only you can know whether your life has enough buffering for the inevitable challenges and setbacks of sticking with it, and whether the catharsis of gaining experience and confidence is worth it.

I quit mountain biking after four short and mostly enjoyable rides because I don’t have room in my life for going to the hospital more often. The fact that my crash didn’t leave me with mobility-altering injuries now feels like a godsend, and if I had found myself in a cast or an ankle brace, I would have been deeply unhappy; cursing my decision to take a walk, or a glide, on the wild side. Maybe that’s the best case for retiring from a recreational activity that feels unsustainable or too risky for comfort.

Why ruin a good thing by clinging to it, when your mind and body say, “Let it go?”

Most of us have wanted to be a rock star at some point in our lives. For you, maybe that dream involved splintering a bat and sending a baseball soaring out of Dodger Stadium. For me, at the peak of my teen years, the fantasy was writing and directing a star-studded adaptation of Heart Of Darkness set in the 19th Century American West. (An extra grizzled Sean Penn would have played Kurtz.) But around this time last summer, in an extremely toasty part of the American South, I was reminded that in some places, simply going outside for a walk can transform you into a local legend.

The setting was San Antonio. I was there for a few days to do some field research for a book project. The outside temperature was creeping into the triple digits, with 100% humidity, as is common in Texas each July. Dawn and dusk were the prime hours for being outdoors semi-comfortably. The parks and commercial streets were bustling in the softer light of early morning. But by 8:30 AM, most of the joggers, dog walkers, and cyclists had retreated inside, where they would remain until sunset. In the interest of staving off heat exhaustion, I had planned most of my roaming for the beginning and end of the day. But I needed to take some daylit photographs of the San Antonio River Walk; a gorgeous network of canalside walking paths that converge downtown, with sexy placemaking touches like cypress trees, cascades, and public artwork. This meant venturing outside during the worst heat of the day, for no more than an hour.

But the misery of shuffling along pavement under the midsummer Texas sun—coated in SPF 50 lotion and sweating like an extra in a Gatorade commercial—is not the most salient part of this story. Midway through my River Walk foray, when I staggered into a donut store to get an iced coffee, I noticed that the cashier was sizing me up with an odd look. It was the kind of expression that I would make if a Sasquatch boarded the subway that I take to downtown Boston a few times each week, and helped itself to a seat across from me. I took my drink and spent another wretched half hour outdoors taking photos of the River Walk and noting how the waterside paths, which had been alive with pedestrians the prior evening, were near-empty. On some stretches, I was the sole walker in sight. When I finally returned to the air-conditioned sanctum of my hotel, the guy at the front desk offered a debonair nod as I headed for the elevators. But when I got to my room on the ninth floor, I realized that I had forgotten to see if there were still any free cookies in the lobby. (When free amenities are offered, I turn into a hoarder.) I took the elevator back down to the ground floor, and as soon as I stepped out, the front desk receptionist saw me and said, “Fortune favors the bold!”

”Come again?” I asked.

”You’re going back out on another walk, aren’t you?”

”Oh no, I was just—”

I stopped, starting to grasp what was happening here. I was still wearing my sun hat, I had a backpack slung over one shoulder, and I was being pegged as an adventurer.

”Do you…get a lot of midday walkers at the hotel?” I queried.

”On days like this? Rarely. I’d assume that a lot of the guests are sleeping right now.”

”Or clinging to life at the bar, or in the pool.”

”If you don’t mind me asking,” the receptionist said. “You do this kind of thing often?”

”What, walking?”

”Yeah!”

”Sure, I guess. Just seemed like the simplest way of getting around. And the cheapest.”

The receptionist guffawed and slapped his thigh, as if I had just recited a joke worthy of George Carlin. “I love it,” he exclaimed. “Here, take some provisions for the road.” He handed me a fistful of individually wrapped chocolate chip cookies and offered a little salute. Mind you, I had no intention of going back outside for another broiling walk in San Antonio. But now I had this mythic stature to live up to as a mysterious walking man, hitting the sidewalks amidst 100 degree heat. So I stepped out of the hotel, took a right turn, and as soon as I had escaped the view of the lobby, I started searching the back of the building for an entrance to sneak back into; hoping that the receptionist didn’t have access to the security camera monitors behind the front desk.

I made it back up to my room undetected, where I uploaded photos, and read a book for the better part of the afternoon. Around 5:00 PM, with the sun sinking toward the horizon, I suited up for my second night in San Antonio, excited to see the River Walk flush with amblers again. My friend from the front desk had clearly clocked off, and it looked like his night shift replacement was busy checking in a big family with lots of roller bags. But as I passed the desk, she turned to me and went, “Have a nice walk!”

I have to assume that a lot of us have unwittingly found ourselves in this position at least once—promoted to rock star status, by virtue of taking a walk in a place where nobody else is walking. Granted, when I say “rock star,” I’m not talking about stadium filling heavyweights like Springsteen or Shakira. The celebrity of walking where people don’t walk is more like the kind of fame enjoyed by Tilda Swinton or Jim Morrison. The onlookers behold you as they might a visiting creature from another nebula. If you are walking through a particularly car-centric environment that doesn’t see many walkers, like a lonely stretch of sidewalk connecting suburban malls, or the drive-thru ATM at your bank, you might even be perceived like Iggy Pop, rolling around in peanut butter and broken glass before whipping out his dick on stage. On some level, to become a mysterious walking person is to embrace your inner freak. Many folks appreciate this. But the trick to cultivating this, in my experience, is to be passive in your freakishness.

What do I mean by that? Consider the subtle difference between my interactions with the donut shop cashier and the front desk guy at the hotel. Midway through my San Antonio sauntering, I actively walked into that donut store, I headed straight toward the cashier, and I asked for a coffee. I may as well have been a Kodiak bear trudging into somebody’s camp and nodding toward the pot of noodles on their camp stove. But at the hotel—where my mysterious walking ways were received with delight—I was simply strolling through the lobby, like a moose wading through a bog in plain sight of several excited hikers. In other words, getting knighted as a walk star is not something that you can intentionally seek out. It just happens to you, and your odds of becoming a walk star will be higher if you strike that balance between being visible and keeping your distance from the audience. One of the golden rules of fandom is that you never want to get too close to your favorite stars; not just because they will let you down, but because maintaining some distance allows you to stare in wonder.

There’s an air of mystery to stars, and I imagine that a lot of us would like to keep it that way. If I were in a bar and Al Pacino started walking toward me, I would look for the nearest exit. To me, he must always be Vincent Hanna in Heat, and if I have to run to preserve that relationship, I will. If you have become a walk star, after taking a walk someplace where most people see the world through a windshield, chances are you mean something to a handful of those folks; in ways that you will never fully know or understand. I think that’s pretty cool. Maybe it’s even cooler than achieving celebrity status through years or decades of grinding away for it. You never know exactly what you’ll stumble across, when you venture outside for a walk. But it’s also impossible to guess how far the ripples of your walking can travel, or what people might see them.

Who knows? Maybe that front desk receptionist in San Antonio decided to try going for a midday stroll later that week, after our interaction. Perhaps I was a footnote in a story that he told his family at dinner that night, to illustrate how people are losing it these days. Either way, I look forward to hopefully seeing him again. On my next tour.

Among other things, my late grandparents and I were movie-going buddies. When I was in high school, mainlining films from fucked up European directors, the three of us started attending the Telluride By The Sea festival in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. This was where we caught high-octane cinema like House Of Flying Daggers, Kontrol, and La Mala Educación. The last film that my grandmother and I saw there, in 2013, was 12 Years A Slave. If you’ve seen this movie, you know that it's an immersive and devastating experience. The entire theater was silent as the last scene faded to black. But once the credits started rolling, an audible murmur swept through the crowd as the first credit—”Directed by Steve McQueen”—appeared in the center of the screen.

”He’s still alive?!” I heard one person whisper, alluding to the action icon who starred in 60s blockbusters like Bullitt and The Great Escape. I chuckled, realizing that a good deal of the audience was unaware that there are two Steve McQueens in cinema. The one who adapted Solomon Northrop’s memoir on the horrors of slavery comes from London’s contemporary art world, where he won a Turner Prize before breaking into narrative film with Hunger and then Shame. Both of those films, respectively exploring life in captivity for IRA prisoners and sex addiction, made waves with critics but barely broke out of containment from the indie scene. 12 Years A Slave, produced by major studios and distributed widely, showed the public that it’s possible to make a name your own; even when you share the name with a legend who almost everyone knows.

The same thing applies to places where you might find yourself walking this summer. In U.S. cities and towns, there are several “Crosstown” Trails that can take you across an eclectic range of scenery. The Crosstown Trails that most people know are the ones that spiderweb around San Francisco’s eucalyptus forests, canyons, and beaches. But in the tony Boston suburb of Wellesley, Massachusetts, there’s a much shorter, flatter Crosstown Trail that offers mixed hardwoods and glimpses of rich homeowners’ yards. Across New England, there are quite a few high points called “Mount Misery,” which is perfectly fitting with our Puritan heritage but topographically varied—from molehills to actual mountains. And recently, while driving through northern Vermont for work, I happened upon a more jarring example of a name shared by two very different trails.

July can be a dangerous time to be in Montpelier, the state capital, and that’s because the local waterways sometimes flood after heavy rainstorms that materialize when the region is swamped with humidity. Millions of us watched this happen via YouTube and TV reports during the summer of 2023, when the waters of the Winooski River flowed through downtown Montpelier. The natural, forested floodplains around the city were not enough to stave off disaster, but in many other cases, they’ve played a crucial role during stints of rain; giving all those floodwaters a chance to spread out and disperse, before they crash into homes or businesses. The floodplains around the North Branch River, which approaches Montpelier from the north, are a lovely place for a saunter in summer and fall. A small, brushy network of footpaths at North Branch Park (plus the adjacent North Branch Nature Center) make it possible to appreciate floodplains at a grassroots level, and that’s what I was doing on a toasty afternoon when I discovered that one of these paths is called “Grouse Grind.” It’s a short, grassy trail that ascends one of the wooded hills flanking the North Branch floodplain. It couldn’t have taken me more than 10 minutes to reach the high point of the path, which runs uphill past paper birches at a gentle, almost meditative grade. When I reached the end, I had to laugh. Because the “Grouse Grind” that most people know is anything but meditative.

That trail, tucked in the forest on Vancouver’s Grouse Mountain, is the sort of natural landmark that reduces uber-outdoor athletes to blubbering wrecks—especially in the west, where the ubiquity of groomed switchback trails can make a hiker overconfident and annoying; a person who gushes about crushing a 4,000 footer before breakfast. I think the simplest way of describing the British Columbia Grouse Grind is this: Picture the longest set of wooden stairs that you’ve encountered along a hiking trail. Imagine if those stairs were the backbone of the entire trail. Now, try to think about how many stairs you would need to climb to gain 2,624 vertical feet in just 1.5 miles. Also, think about how steep those stairs would have to be. Finally, consider that once you reach a certain point along that stair climb, throwing in the towel and turning back becomes impossible, given the twisty, narrow dimensions of the stairs and the column of hikers wheezing and hauling ass behind you. In fact, turning around is not allowed by Metro Vancouver’s trails department! Grouse Grind is a one-way ascent through hell. As The Seattle Times’ Tan Vinh put it, “Lemme tell you….the Grouse Grind is not misnamed.”

Climbing these legendary stairs, stopping countless times along the way as the fitter hikers squeeze by, collapsing at the top—a heap of quivering quads, dying gasps, and sweat—and then riding the Grouse Mountain gondola back down to the foot of the mountain, has been a dream of mine for several years. I might finally get a chance to take a crack at it in September, when I visit my friends George and Zarya in Seattle. It would be fitting, since George is the person who put Grouse Grind on my radar. But life is hard to predict, especially during stressful times like these, and if slogging up the stairs on Vancouver’s most evil trail just isn’t in the cards for 2026, that’s alright.
Because, technically speaking, I can still tell people that I have climbed Grouse Grind. And when I start vocally reminiscing about the beauty of the surrounding floodplains with their beeches and sugar maples—if someone pipes in and says, “Wait, there’s a Grouse Grind in Vermont?”—I get to emerge from the conversation with hipster cred.

Maybe you’ve been through this before. Perhaps you’ve finished the “John Muir Trail” that winds through the forests and golf courses of Van Cortlandt Park in The Bronx. Of course, it’s not the same thing as the 211-mile John Muir Trail that climbs through the Sierra Nevadas. But it’s a legit hike in its own right. Knowing that it’s overshadowed by a namesake juggernaut shouldn’t stop you from going, “Yeah, I’ve hiked the John Muir Trail,” if you find yourself in the company of chest-thumping hikers. You might have to defend your valor from some reductive blowhard who insists that there can only be one John Muir Trail. But I’d wager that most folks will be intrigued to learn that there are multiple trails in the U.S. that are beautiful enough to be named after John Muir.

You may even consider going out of your way to experience lesser-known namesakes of iconic trails and places. For years, I’ve wanted to visit Versailles, Kentucky, which is pronounced “VUR-SAILS.” Part of my agenda while there would be mis-pronouncing the town name in conversation with residents—instinctually leaning toward its French sister city—and then getting corrected. On a more rugged note, there are more than a dozen mountains in the United States called “Mount Washington.” While the one in New Hampshire’s White Mountains is fittingly majestic for such a hallowed historic figure, I’m intrigued by the Mount Washington in Arizona, right on the U.S./Mexico border; particularly because there do not appear to be any trails to its summit. Why name a lonely, inaccessible peak like this after George Washington? As it turns out, the mountain got its moniker from an old 19th Century mining settlement, which was known as the Washington Camp. Perhaps, when you’re living and toiling away near a parched peak, you need to import a sense of majesty to your desolate surroundings.

I haven’t been able to get as much insight as to why that gentle hillside path on the North Branch floodplain of Montpelier shares its name with one of the most brutally masochistic trails in North America. Given how many hikers from around the world tend to cross-pollinate in the Green Mountain State, I’m thinking that there could be some cheeky intention here. But then again, what makes a “grind” can be relative. The person who planned Vermont’s Grouse Grind probably had to bushwhack their way up that little hillside at some point, long before the trail was cut. A sudden fluttering of grouse from the understory might have caused them to dart away into a patch of poison ivy, twisting an ankle in the process. It might not make for the best story, in the way that hundreds of steep mountainside stairs would, but I would still call it a grind.

CLICK HERE for a map of Montpelier’s North Branch trails

CLICK HERE for a map of Vancouver’s Grouse Grind

I’m going out on a limb and guessing that at least a couple of you have approached recent Independence Days feeling conflicted. You know, given the wealth inequality, wars of aggression, and social antagonism that America has been engaged in lately.

Of course, there are plenty of Americans who see this stuff as worthy of celebration, and those folks get to enjoy July 4th, 2026 in the fullest sense. But tonight, for the first time in years, I’m intentionally seeking out a fireworks show and attempting to toggle my brain into another mode of thinking about America’s birthday. Rather than trying to tune out the political nightmares of the present, I’m approaching this July 4th as a celebration of the myth undergirding America. Not the idea that we’re exceptional, or the Horatio Alger fantasy that we can each bootstrap our way into prosperity, but the myth of America as a place where freedoms of all people can be honored and upheld.

It’s a lovely idea; definitely something that would inspire a bunch of us to crush a few beers, wolf down a few burgers, and blow off a few fingers with a Roman Candle. It also couldn’t be further from the ground truth of how the United States of America was founded against a backdrop of genocide and slavery; the echoes of which still haunt us to this day, reanimated in gruesome detail with the Trump administration. But it would be short-sighted to overlook the moments in U.S. history when we have gotten closer to touching the flame of our own mythology; the extensions of voting rights to all peoples, defeating the tide of global fascism in World War II, and around the same time, a New Deal that bolstered Americans’ economic backbones, allowing them to take more control of their own lives. That many of the New Deal programs excluded agricultural and domestic laborers—a decision that hit Black Americans disproportionately hard—is a reminder of how far we still have left to go, in living up to the myth that catalyzed this country. Understandably, given our slow progress and numerous setbacks, our founding mythology has come under a lot of scrutiny lately.

But as strange and discrepant as July 4th can feel these days, I would not brush off the power of a good myth. In fact, now might be a time for embracing our own mythology.

Looking beyond the landscape of American politics—to the greener, pitiless beauty of nature (which you must describe in a Werner Herzog accent)—some myths have had positive impacts for the flora and fauna in many parts of the world. Consider the old Slavic legend of the Leshy, a shapeshifting forest spirit that can appear as a Sasquatch-esque giant, a tiny insect, or an old peasant with a long green beard. The Leshy was best known for fucking around with hunters and lumberjacks who took more game and wood than they needed. It would cover their trails in brush, sabotage their tools when they weren’t looking, and occasionally lead them into festering swamps. Myths can sometimes reflect our cultural priorities, and the myth of the Leshy was a glimmer of how people living in Europe’s Slavic region in the Middle Ages were starting to see forests as living ecosystems. Today, the region contains some of the largest protected woods on the continent, like the 350,000-acre Białowieża Forest that connects Poland and Belarus. This enormous old-growth forest is home to hundreds of European bison!

The River Boyne, which runs across eastern Ireland for 70 miles, also has an inspiring backstory involving deities and humility in the face of nature. As the story goes, Dagda—essentially the Irish Zeus—maintained a well that offered wisdom to all who walked around it clockwise, following the path of the sun, and drank from its waters. Anyone who caught and ate one of the well’s resident salmon was endowed with even more smarts. At one point, Dagda had a fling with a goddess named Boann, who apparently grew tired of her lover’s grandstanding. So one day, she decided to knock Dagda down a peg by walking counter-clockwise around his old well. The waters surged and exploded, imbuing Ireland with a beautiful, winding river that’s now known as the River Boyne. And until the last few decades, Irish citizens and governments honored the myth of the River Boyne’s creation by keeping it well-protected from pollution.

The erosion of those protections over recent years, which has led to more wastewater and industrial runoff finding their way into the river, feels reflective of where we are these days. Too many of us have lost touch with the awesome, spellbinding power of the natural world, which once inspired the naturalist John Muir to call the mountains “God’s first temples.” These days, life can feel increasingly dictated by the power of spreadsheets and algorithms. A year ago, while watching a John Wick movie on the packed opening night, I overheard a guy behind me breathlessly telling his girlfriend how the sequel would present so much potential for intellectual property crossovers with other action franchises. That was what he was fixated on; not the amazing fight choreography or the charisma of Keanu Reeves, but the corporate enrichment that an IP merger might yield. It was one of the most depressing things I had ever listened to.

When our imagination and sense of possiblity become so corroded that we treat the desires of CEOs like our own, things start to fall apart. There’s no single answer as to how America got to this current rut in history, but I have long felt that as a country, we’re long overdue for a humbling from something bigger than ourselves. Another movie that’s currently in theaters, Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, offers a hopeful look at how this could go if we were confronted with proof that aliens exist. While it’s not as awe-inspiring as Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Spielberg’s latest is one of the most unabashedly optimistic blockbusters I’ve seen in recent memory, and it left me wondering how our own, terrestrial realm could knock our socks off again, in the not-too-distant future. Suppose we learned how to communicate with plants one day. It’s already been established that underground mycorrhizal fungal networks act like marketplaces, trading elements with the trees and plants, and thereby sustaining each other. Earlier this year, I wrote a story for the Phillips Exeter alumni magazine on Dr. Toby Kiers, one of the trailblazing mycologists studying this invisible market. It left me wondering what might happen if mycologists determine how these fungi “talk” to the flora. This, in theory, could allow humans to break into one of their conversations.

A development of such earth-shaking nature would invite millions of questions, and it’s often moments like this, when a door opens up and minds are blown, that inspire mythology. Historically, we have leaned on myths to try and make sense of the world around us. One could argue that the spread of conspiracy theories in recent years is a symptom of how urgently we crave logic and meaning, at a stressful moment when it feels like the world is on fire, as inequality widens and people are pitted against each other. Perhaps this is wishful thinking, but I wonder if a sudden, staggering revelation of a more positive nature—maybe rooted in nature—could push us toward another kind of myth; the galvanizing genre of mythology, by which America was conceived.

Would a renewed sense of wonder, for the world around us, bring us closer than ever to realizing our myth to its fullest extent? Could it spark a movement…for a version of America in which the bedrock freedoms and dignities of all are peoples are honored?

Whether it comes from the cosmos or from the ground beneath our feet, a humbling like this—a moment of mass astonishment—could be a turning point for this country. It would be an acknowledgment of forces at play that are bigger than us and all of the things we’ve built up and accumulated. Maybe I’m giving us way too much credit, in imagining a positive response to a revelation like this. But clearly, there’s a hunger out there for something. The other day, I learned that Christopher Nolan’s newest film, The Odyssey, is going to be allowed to drop into theaters on July 17th with an R-rating (for “violence and some language.”) That never happens with blockbusters that cost over $200 million to make. But someone at Universal Pictures decided that a hard-edged version of Homer’s centuries-old myth, with its gods and monsters, would get enough adults to the cinemas to yield a profit. I hope they’re right, and I’ll do my part to help.

For anybody wondering, “Wow, why am I getting two new Mind The Moss newsletters in less than 72 hours?!?” the short answer is that I’m giving myself a mini-vacation this coming week. But this particular newsletter has been on my mind for ages, and before I log off for the week ahead and touch some grass, I wanted to share this one with you. I hope today and the rest of your weekend allows plenty of room for wandering and brooding about this country’s history, and where our next chapter might take us.

When was the last time that you stepped outside, joined up with throngs of people, and walked downtown together to experience something big? If you live in a town that hosts a fair, maybe you and your neighbors sauntered there together, lured by the luster of fried dough and tilt-a-whirl lights. If you’re based in a city, the recent protests against the Trump administration—many of which took place in downtown areas—could have sparked a similar surge of walking.

But throughout much of the world, there’s another kind of event that reliably gets thousands of people walking together: soccer games. Sometimes called a “fanwalk,” these intentional marches usually begin from a centralized meeting place, from which the casual fans and the psycho fans set off for the stadium. I experienced this once in Prague, where I spent a college semester abroad, and the thrill of walking to the game with people decked out in red and blue facepaint was like nothing I had experienced in the U.S. It felt like we were marching to a battlefield for the Slavic equivalent of Braveheart, but instead of getting dismembered by swords and axes, we were going to get pumped up and then, extremely wasted.

So in 2018, when the real life Bond villains of FIFA announced that the United States would be hosting the majority of the 2026 World Cup games, I couldn’t quite picture how this would work. In America, most sports fans get to stadiums by driving there; especially since our stadiums are often located on the edge of town or beyond it, with limited public transportation service. From downtown Boston, it’s a 40-minute drive (without traffic) to reach Gillette Stadium, where the New England Patriots play. The MBTA does offer a special train from Boston to Gillette, but its capacity is limited and prices are often jacked up for major events. Earlier this year, when it was announced that roundtrip World Cup train tickets to Gillette Stadium would cost $80, the public backlash was swift. But the price-gouging could have been worse. In New Jersey, the initial price for a World Cup train ticket to MetLife Stadium was going to be $150! It sparked such outrage that NJ Transit eventually lowered the price to $98.

Between paying through the nose for public transportation or suffering through traffic and then paying even more money for parking, the America-based World Cup games were beginning to look like a landmark event that most Americans would only get to experience through secondhand accounts. It was a paradox; spending so much public money to host something that we would only get to lay eyes on through broadcasts or stories. This, I imagine, is why so much of the pre-game discourse in the U.S. focused on the headaches of hosting the World Cup. But a few weeks before the first Boston match between Haiti and Scotland, I started picking up a more optimistic transmission from Twitter and Reddit. Visiting soccer fans bound for New York City were trying to figure out whether they could walk to MetLife Stadium.

Never mind that the land between NYC and MetLife leans heavy on industrial territory and marshes, or that there was a literal ban on accessing the stadium grounds by foot. World Cup-goers coming from parts of the world where walking to a big game is the norm were determined to solve this puzzle. And as I imagined French and Moroccan fans flopping over chainlink fences, rock-hopping across streams, and dodging traffic on the shoulders of busy roads, it occurred to me that no such pedestrian ban was being enforced at Boston’s World Cup stadium.

Thanks to Google Maps and its streetview feature, it took me all of 20 minutes to discover that it’s entirely possible to walk from Boston to Gillette Stadium on consistent sidewalk. From Forest Hills Station, a major transit hub on the south side of the city (close to where I live), it would be a foot journey of 17 miles, with a respectable elevation gain of nearly 900 feet. A lot of cities have streets that continue through the neighboring suburbs in various permutations, and the one that connects Boston to the northern edge of the Gillette Stadium grounds is Washington Street. It made me smile, knowing that a viable path to the stadium was hidden in plain sight.

Still, actually walking to the World Cup did not initially strike me as a venture worth taking. For one, I didn’t have a game ticket. And even if I did, we were entering the muggiest months of summer and no amount of sunblock and Gatorade would be enough to make walking 17 miles in those conditions pleasant. But then, two days before the kickoff game—while doing some work from a coffee shop in Jamaica Plain—I started to pick up on something through the window. A lot of people were walking past the shop.

At least half of them were wearing kilts.

Much has been said of Scotland’s so-called Tartan Army and the gregarious cheer they bring to cities hosting soccer matches that include Scotland; drinking bars dry, putting traffic cones on statues (a tradition that began in Glasgow on the Duke of Wellington statue), and even cleaning up their own refuse. That, in itself, is a story I might have to dig into in the future. But all those Scots were coursing past my neighborhood coffee shop because it’s located next door to The Haven—the only Scottish pub in Boston. The owner, Jason Waddleton, had known what was coming to Boston and had thrown out all the stops in planning a multi-day World Cup watch party with big screens, big tents, and enough kegs of Tennent’s Lager to keep the good vibes cranked to 11. The presence of all these Scots in their kilts and dark blue jerseys, spreading cheer and crushing beers, made the World Cup games feel real to me. And suddenly, I felt the urge to lay eyes on the epicenter of this historic event. Like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, climbing Devil’s Tower just so he can take a look at the alien spaceships on the other side, I needed to see Gillette Stadium on a game day.

The forecast for the day of the Haiti versus Scotland game called for temperatures in the upper 80s. So I left my apartment with a Mark Zuckerberg amount of sunscreen plastered to my face, an umbrella for additional UV protection, and a backpack full of water, crunchy snacks, and electrolyte packets. My plan was to reach Gillette Stadium around 6 PM, on the hunch that most of the fans would be rolling in around then on trains and chartered buses. I suspected there also might be a couple of illegal tailgate parties happening in some of the wooded parking lots on Route 1, near the stadium. Maybe one of the revelers would have an extra can of Narragansett.

The long walk began with a climb up Boston’s southernmost portion of Washington Street toward the summit of Bellevue Hill in West Roxbury; the highest natural point in the City of Boston. As I approached the top, I had to remind myself to look over my shoulder for a stunning view of the city skyline. On a regular walk, this vista would be a climactic reward for the accrued mileage. But on this particular broiling Saturday morning, the view was only a measure of how far I had left to walk: about 15 miles.

I had a feeling that somewhere along the walk to Gillette, the joy of the World Cup would pop up in unexpected places. But the first 5 miles from Forest Hills, up and over Bellevue Hill and then down to Dedham, tested my optimism. I had started the walk early in the day, but within an hour of setting off, I still looked like I had been trekking through a rainforest. The sweat poured down my face as I crossed above I-95—which was less congested than I had expected for a game day—and by the time I made it to the town of Norwood, I was struck by how quiet the walk had been so far. Everybody else seemed to be inside, hiding from the heat. So I joined them, ducking into a pizza joint for a pepperoni-mushroom slice, a rest, and a re-evaluation of my life choices.

When I emerged to resume the pilgrimage, a flash of blue and red down the street grabbed my attention. Ten people garbed in Haiti team jerseys were gathered around a table set up on the sidewalk, laden with a multicourse feast procured from a nearby Caribbean restaurant. Two of the guys wore Haiti flags like capes. The enthusiasm of their game day celebration powered me through the next few miles of the walk. Still, even with regular breaks, I was getting tired, and mostly, I was weary of walking by myself. But then, up ahead through some maple trees, I spotted a lone man in a kilt.

As I got closer, I saw that the Scotsman was walking with another soccer fan sporting Haiti swag. These two strangers were sauntering toward the stadium; the Scottish guy was coming from a nearby Airbnb, and the other guy who was rallying for Haiti lived in the area. They were sipping beverages and shooting the breeze. It was around this point in Walpole Heights, 3 miles from Gillette, when the traffic along the road (pedestrians and cars) finally started stacking up. I caught up with more Tartan Army members, dressed in navy and heading to the game on foot. The thick brogues and cracking of beer cans became as ubiquitous as the sound of all those engines and squeaky brakes. When we reached the terminus of Washington Street, where the cars veered left for Route 1 and the stadium, those of us on foot kept to the right and made our way to a wooded path at the end of a tranquil, dead-end street called Shufelt Road. This allowed for a more direct and emission-free passage to a parking lot on the edge of the stadium grounds.

In the woods, I had passed a couple of rag-tag tailgate gatherings and hadn’t worked up the social courage to crash any of them. But as I reached the sidewalk across from Gillette, the other walkers and I were given a hero’s welcome from legions of cheering Scots crammed into yellow school buses that were inching their way through traffic toward the stadium entrance. Big Scottish flags were unfurled. A young lad handed me a Narragansett tallboy through one of the bus windows as it crept by. It was the most satisfying gulp of lukewarm beer that I’ve ever enjoyed; even more so than the Rolling Rocks some friends and I once shared at sunrise on the top of Mount Pierce, after a nocturnal traverse of New Hampshire’s Presidential range. It didn’t matter that I wouldn’t get to continue into the stadium with the fans. By walking there, I had gotten to be part of something bigger and more inspiring than any of the games.

You can experience this too. The finale of the World Cup games is approaching! The last game at Gillette Stadium goes down on July 9th. The championship game will take place at MetLife Stadium on July 19th. And while that pedestrian ban is still in place, it didn’t stop Sean Gregory from taking a long walk from New York City to the edge of the Metlife grounds. Like me, Gregory didn’t have a game day ticket and he was also pleasantly surprised to find the route heavy on sidewalk and less exposed than one might assume. You can read an account of his journey in TIME. (I recently wrote about my own pilgrimage for The Boston Globe.) If I’ve manage to convince you that hiking from Boston to Gillette Stadium is a long, strange trip worth taking, I’ve included a link to a map at the end of the newsletter, which will show the route.

But here’s the note I actually want to end things on. Walking to the World Cup in an American metro region is sort of like getting into soccer as an American. In both of these instances, we’re catching up on something that most of the world has enjoyed for a long time. A part of me wonders what might happen if more of us tried walking to games in American metro regions long after the World Cup is over! How might city or town officials respond to an army of Patriots fans, trekking across the hills to Gillette when there’s snow flurrying in late October? What would the vibe among the fans be like?

I’m even less literate with football than I am with soccer. But I’m tempted to find out.

CLICK HERE for a map of my walking route from Boston to Gillette Stadium

Oh, and by the way, if you’re thinking of walking to Gillette but unsure of how you’d get back to Boston, you can catch the MBTA’s 34E bus from nearby Walpole Center.

I suppose you could also make your trip a lot easier by using the 34E bus to get part-way to the stadium as well. But who knows what—or whom—you might miss out on.

Late June in New England is playing out with uncharacteristic mercy. Usually, around this time in summer, the region is positively dripping with humidity, to such an extent that stepping out of an air-conditioned car can instantly fog your glasses. But for the week ahead here in Boston, we’re looking at high temperatures in the upper 70s and low-to-middling dew points. It’s a meteorological blessing, but like our old Puritan ancestors—afflicted by superstition—I just can’t shake the feeling that this temperate week will be paid for in the near future with a procession of stupefying heat waves.

SO, as we enjoy the calm before the storm of summer’s toastiest months, I want to tell you about the time that I got clinical heat exhaustion in Northern Maine—so that you can have a more visceral sense of what symptoms to look out for if you’re walking on a particularly sweltering day this summer. Those of you who know me personally may have heard the abbreviated edition of this cautionary tale before, but the version that I’m about to spin here leaves little to the imagination, when it comes to what it feels like to experience heat exhaustion in the middle of a hike. It is not for the squeamish.

The year was 2018. All 12 members of the Wild Boars youth soccer team had just been rescued from a submerged cave in Thailand, along with their coach. France was on its way to claiming a second World Cup title, in a furious match with Croatia. And I was on my way to the spruce wilds of Baxter State Park with my friend Woody. Our mission was to climb Mount Katahdin, the highest peak in Maine and the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, by scrambling up boulder fields and iron ladder rungs affixed to certain ledges. We had secured all the necessary reservations: a trailhead parking spot at the Katahdin Stream Campground lot and a cheap campsite just outside of Baxter, on the grounds of an establishment that was promisingly called The Big Moose Inn. A 5:00 PM arrival at the inn left us plenty of time to set up our tents, cook dinner on the campstove, and crawl into our respective vestibules to power up for a 5 AM departure.

That’s when we heard the guitar.

It was a summer weekend and the woods around the Big Moose Inn were packed with fellow campers—one of whom had apparently just learned how to strum a G chord. It was impossible to drown out the reverberations of the acoustic guitar with earplugs, and to be clear, this musical interlude wasn’t a gentle, serenade-you-to-sleep melody in the vein of Neil Young. It was the sound of a person in the most elementary stages of getting acquainted with a guitar. A bright, incessant DING-A-LING-A-LING-A-LING.
The sun had been down for at least an hour before the guitar player got cooking, and after another hour, I heard Woody unzipping his tent; presumably to go and find the the guitar player, so that he could thump him over the head with a log. The music suddenly stopped, I heard the mumbling of Woody exchanging words with someone. 10 minutes later, the two of us were asleep, and oblivious to the rumbling in the sky.

Somehow I managed to make it until 5 AM before stirring awake and feeling the inner ceiling of the tent dripping onto me, in the wake of a thunderstorm that had drenched the campground during the wee hours. Woody had been less fortunate, awoken in the middle of the night by water seeping into his tent. But even in a more sustained form of slumber, my dreams had been bad and I had tossed and turned amidst the muggy conditions. In the foggy woods, barely lit by dawn, the air was just as damp as all the spruce boughs overhead. The two of us were so haggard and deprived of proper rest that we could only communicate in grunts. When we finally got into Woody’s car and started forming words, we decided that we were not going to climb Mount Katahdin.

This was first juncture in a series of decisions that led me to the agony of clinical heat exhaustion. We had recognized that our compromised energy and the forecast for the day ahead—highs in the low 90s, with humidity near 100%—would turn Katahdin into a more dangerous venture than usual. Instead, we set out sights on a handful of trails at lower elevations. After all, we had driven nearly six hours from the Greater Boston area to Maine’s remote north woods. We weren’t going to spend the day putting our feet up next to a stream. But, in retrospect, that’s probably what I should have done. I was still driven by that traveler’s obligation to Do All The Things while out in the field.

And when the weather is nasty, that misguided compulsion can get you into trouble.

Woody and I ended up motoring around the east side of Mount Katahdin to Roaring Brook Campground, where we picked up the 1.9-mile trail to the top of South Turner Mountain, a comparably modest peak that looms 3,122 feet above sea level. This was where I made my second bad decision, donning a long-sleeved top in anticipation of gusty conditions and sun exposure once we broke through the treeline. But this top had a thin inner layer of fleece, subtle to enough to forget if you’re not thinking very carefully about your outfit. And after a shitty night’s sleep, I was not thinking carefully.

We spent the first hour in the steamy forest picking our way over boulders and across bog bridges on the edge of Sandy Stream Pond (which, by the way, is an outstanding venue for moose watching!) I was starting to feel less ragged, and as the trail climbed the slopes of South Turner Mountain on classic, New England-style stone stairs, I was feeling the restorative power of the sun flaring through the spruce trees. I started to get more excited about the view at the summit, which really allows to you to admire the titanic heft of Katahdin and its table-like ridgeline. But as we approached the end of the boreal forest, where the trail emerges from the trees and scrabbles up rocks to reach the peak, I noticed that I was having a rather difficult time catching my breath.

This was a new feeling for me. I’ve never had the lung capacity of an Olympic sprinter, especially when it comes to walking uphill, but until that hike, I had never struggled to catch my breath while stopping to take a rest. Worse yet, I was starting to experience dizziness as well. As Woody and I reached the treeline, I sat down on a rock to try and stabilize myself, which helped somewhat. Woody, noticing that I was struggling, asked me how I was feeling. This was where I started to suspect that the heat and humidity had sapped my strength. Humbled by the elements and not wanting to risk worsening symptoms for me—or emergent symptoms for Woody—we turned around and bailed.

No longer struggling to take in new air, I started to recover as we carefully made our way back down the trail. My breathing trended toward regular, and the dizziness had subsided. By the time we reached the car again, I felt more or less like myself, and the prospect of finding a place where we could wade into some running water and cool off lifted my spirits. Still, I was sweating so hard that my clothes would have produced liquid after multiple wringings, and I grimaced at the thought of losing so much water and electrolytes over the course of our short hike. So, without thinking much about it, I grabbed a bottle of Gatorade that I had left in the car, twisted it open, and chugged about half of it—forgetting that undiluted Gatorde is loaded with sugar and minerals.

20 minutes later, as Woody carefully drove us down the winding and rock-riddled park road, a wave of nausea slammed into me with such force that all I could think to do was unbuckle my seatbelt and grope for the handle of the passenger door. I couldn’t muster a vocal response when Woody asked me if something was wrong, and I don’t think the car had stopped moving when I flung myself out of the door, crawling on all fours to the grassy shoulder of the road. That’s where I started to vomit harder than I had ever vomited in my life. You know those moments when you’re overwhelmed with quiet amazement in what your body can do? Like spontaneously running six blocks in 90 seconds after you stumble across a skunk? Or pulling off a complex yoga stretch with a name like Concerned Bullfrog for the first time? That’s pretty much how I felt in that moment on the road; stunned by how much stuff had been inside my stomach.

Now, let’s break this down in a more itemized way. By the time Woody had driven us back to the Big Moose Inn—where we sprang for an upgrade to an air-conditoned room—I was barely able to talk. Lying in bed, oscillating between delirium and semi awareness of Woody bringing me a cup of water, feeling like I might spill my guts all over again, I had arrived at the logical outcome of the folllowing unwise decisions:

1. After a wretched night of sleep, feeling crappy on a day with a punishingly hot weather forecast, I had still clung to the agenda of summiting a mountain; instead of a gentler, low elevation hike, or even taking the day off from hiking.

2. When setting off on the hike, operating with compromised brain power, I chose an outfit that was unsuitable for hot and humid conditions of the day.

3. Upon experiencing shortness of breath, dizziness, and profuse sweating—all of which are hallmark symptoms of heat exhaustion—I didn’t immediately stop. I kept pushing through them until Woody and I arrived at the mountain treeline.

4. After descending South Turner Mountain and allowing my body a chance to start recovering, I introduced a new shock: that surge of undiluted Gatorade.

By midafternoon, I hadn’t shown any signs of improvement, and the limited Wi-Fi and cellular reception in the area made it hard to Google “when does heat exhaustion start to become heat stroke?” One of the telltale signs—which I was displaying—is slurred speech. Profound disorientation, like being unsure of where you are in the moment, is another worrying signal. If your internal temperature has reached or surpassed 104°F, that’s another sign that what began as heat exhaustion is turning into something far worse. But perhaps the starkest symptom of heat stroke is the absence of sweat. It’s such a severe failure of your body’s cooling mechanism that the skin becomes drier, and hotter to touch. The presence of any of these symptoms is worthy of a trip to an urgent care clinic or emergency room. And that’s where Woody and I went at 4 PM.

Instead of ending the day with an ice cold IPA at one of Millinocket’s bars, I ended up with a chilled bag of saline hooked up to my arm at the Millinocket Regional Hospital. The physician’s assistant who took care of me us exceedingly kind, and after two or three hours of hydration, I had regained enough strength to walk into his office with Woody and check out some satellite maps of canoeing routes in the Allagash that he suggested we try exploring on a future trip to Northern Maine. The PA also mentioned that I was the fourth person that the hospital had treated for heat exhaustion that day. And while Woody and I did eventually make it to a local pub, where I nursed a bowl of chicken noodle soup, I wondered if midsummer heat exhaustion that requires clinical interventions is one of those seasonal things that we tune out…until it happens to us.

The list of normalized season hazards here on the east coast is long and painful, from slipping on ice and shattering a bone, to picking up Lyme disease from a deer tick, as I wrote about last week. But heat exhaustion and its deadly doppelganger, heat stroke, transcend regions. High temperatures and high humidity—which renders your sweat far less effective as a cooling device—can yield one of the most sickly days of your life. So, I hope that sharing my disastrous day in Baxter State Park can shed a little light on what to avoid doing when it’s hot and muggy outside, and what you should do if the warning signs of heat exhaustion start materializing when you’re out in the field. The author Jack Gantos once wrote that “a writer’s job is to turn his worst experiences into money.” For me, knowing that you avoided heat exhaustion would feel like a windfall.

Oh, and in case you’re up in Baxter State Park on a less grueling summer day…

South Turner Mountain via the Sandy Stream Pond Trail
Hike distance: 3.8 miles out-and-back
Elevation gain: 1,597 feet
CLICK HERE for a trail map
CLICK HERE for the Baxter State Park website

Around this time last year, I was on the southwest coast of the United Kingdom, on a story assignment that had me walking through thigh-deep grass in rolling farmlands and disappearing into roadside hedges, Homer Simpson style. When I got back to my Airbnb at the end of the day’s end and peeled off my sweaty clothes, I found a tiny, black-legged Sheep Tick (the equivalent of a Deer Tick in North America) hitching a ride on my left calf. But as I rifled through my bag for a pair of tweezers, I wasn’t hastened by the sense of red-hot urgency that often comes with discovering an embedded Deer Tick when you’re in America.

That’s because over in the U.K., the tick-borne illness known as Lyme disease is still relatively uncommon. According to the U.K. Health Security Agency, 2025 saw 1,168 confirmed cases of Lyme within the country, which is home to 69.9 million people. In the United States, however, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 476,000 Americans are diagnosed with Lyme yearly. Proportionally, that’s 0.0014% of our population, compared to the U.K.’s 0.000019%

All of which is an elaborate way of saying that Lyme disease—which can cause a vast range of symptoms, from flu-like fevers, headaches and chills, to more serious joint swelling and neurological disruptions, is a serious problem for Americans who enjoy spending time outside. Even the West Coast, once relatively spared from Lyme, is now experiencing the bacterial illness at higher transmission rates. If you live on the East Coast or in the Midwest, odds are you know someone who had a miserable round of Lyme in the wake of a tick bite.

In New England, where I live, deer ticks are so eponymous to the region that a lot of us now conclude any outdoor activity—a hike, picnicking in a park, even going for a bike ride on a trail trail—with a thorough tick check. Because the one silver lining with Lyme disease is that it takes its sweet time making the passage from an infected tick to the skin and blood vessels of the tick’s host. If you remove a tick embedded and engorged within 24 hours of first contact, you should still save the tick in a Ziploc bag (seriously) and be ready to go to a clinic, in the event that the classic red “bullseye” rash appears around the bitemark. Or if you start to feel lousy, right after being bitten. But you’ve probably dodged Lyme disease.

But the reason why I am dedicating this week’s Mind The Moss to ticks and the nasty things they carry is because an alarming number of folks on the Eastern Seaboard are now dealing with another type of tick-borne nightmare: an allergic condition called Alpha-gal syndrome that’s delivered via the bite of the hyper-aggressive Lone Star Tick, which is found in the Eastern United States and Mexico. (The female ticks sport a telltale white dot on their reddish-brown bodies, and both female and male Lone Star Ticks are larger than Deer Ticks.) Alpha-gal is a sugar molecule found in red meats, dairy goods, and other products made from mammalian matter; such as gummy candies or pills that contain gelatin. But it’s also found in the saliva of some Lone Star Ticks, and when the Alpha-gal molecule is introduced to the skin and bloodstream—as opposed to the digestive system—it can essentially reprogram your body to mount an allergic reaction to Alpha-gal in its edible forms. This could be hives or nausea…or anaphylactic shock.

We’re still learning about the permanence of Alpha-gal syndrome. Some patients have actually experienced a decline in their symptoms over time, and not every person who develops Alpha-gal syndrome will experience the same allergic symptoms. But the thing that’s inspiring me to crank up my tick prevention practices for 2026 is that Alpha-gal syndrome does not come with a Lyme-esque 24 hour window for detecting and removing an infected tick, before the Alpha-gal molecule is transmitted. In fact, it can take weeks after a tick bite for an allergic response to Alpha-gal to develop. And once the rewiring is done, allergic symptoms can appear hours after consuming mammalian products, since Alpha-Gal molecules are attached to fats and proteins that take longer for the body to process.

My point being, Alpha-gal syndrome is serious shit.

Still, the last thing I want to do is leave you with the impression that the outdoors is to be avoided for the indefinite future. Ticks and their illnesses are, unfortunately, part of the ground reality that spending time outside is always going to carry some level of elemental risk that can’t be fully eliminated. And the current spread of Alpha-gal in locales like Martha’s Vineyard is a natural moment for millions of us to reassess what we’re doing to mitigate the risks associated with being outside in veritable Tick Zones.

So this week, as we head into the hazier months of summer, I want to break down the steps some of us are taking to lower the chances of being bitten by the wrong tick. And I share all of this with the caveat that even the best defenses can be overcome by one determined insect. In the same way that Pacific Northwest residents live with the reality that their region is overdue for a terrifyingly massive earthquake (and tsunami), we will continue finding ways to share these lands with the ticks.

A lot of this work will be more of a mental exercise—finding a balance between understanding what’s out there, and actually going “out there” ourselves and enjoying it.But the more practical steps that one can take to ward off the ticks this summer and fall are things that you can try this weekend. Some of them will require a bit of spending, and others might feel burdensome at first, when adopted on your next walks or outdoor experiences. But for now, the following Tick Watch practices are the best that I have to offer. On top of standard defenses like wearing high socks and/or long pants in tick-y areas.

#1: Turn your clothes into shields. When venturing into environments that ticks love (tall grass, bushes, and areas with lots of forest detritus), I sometimes spray my shoes, socks, and legs with insect repellent made to ward off ticks. The active ingredient for tick deterrence varies. Some sprays contain DEET, which can sometimes cause skin or eye irritation, and others utilize less polarizing alternatives like Picaridin, a synthetic inspired by black pepper plant compounds. Spritzing yourself and your clothes will keep ticks at bay. But this year, you can also up the ante with another bug repellent product that can transform your hiking clothes into shields that kill ticks on contact.

This product is Permethrin, a CDC-approved insecticide that can obliterate ticks by making their nervous systems go haywire. You can buy Permethrin by the bottle and spray it onto your shorts, socks, etc. (Don't spray it on your underwear or hat, as you don’t want this stuff close to your genitals or eyes.) Once you’ve air-dried all your treated clothing, the application process is complete and the tick protection can last for five to six laundry cycles before re-application is needed. There’s also a company called InsectShield that allows you to mail in your clothing for Permetherin treatment that lasts much longer. This option can be particularly advisable for anyone with a cat, since Permethrin is highly toxic to cats in liquid form. Once the Permethrin has dried, this is no longer an issue, but you should still keep Permethrin treated clothing away from cats; you might even consider washing it separately from your usual machine.

Lastly, never apply Permethrin directly to your skin. It’s strictly meant for garments.

#2: Embrace the mid-activity tick check. Most people tend to perform their tick inspections once they’re done recreating outside. And while it’s always a smart idea to take a good, thorough look at standard tick hangout areas like the backs of your knees, your armpits, or behind your ears, you don’t need to treat the tick check like a one-off coda. Periodically checking yourself for ticks while you’re actually engaged in an outdoor activity can be simple yet effective means of catching the little buggers before they have an opportunity to dig in. I do this all the time when I’m out hiking.

It’s less of a headache than it sounds like. Every 10-15 minutes, while walking outside with exposed legs, I’ll take a quick peek at my ankles, calves, knees, and lower quads, scanning the skin and the fabric of my socks and shorts for ticks. If I spot one and if it hasn’t latched on yet, I flick it away. If the tick has already gotten a bite…not great, but I can still use a pair of tweezers—which I do recommend carrying—to carefully remove the tick without detaching the head. (The CDC has a helpful guide for how to do this.) You can apply a similar practice to any exposed body parts while outside. And if you just finished walking through a field where the grass was waist-high, you might as well take a quick look down your shirt and other garments as well. It takes all of 5 seconds.

#3: Consider quarantining used outdoor clothes. Long pants and socks are a time tested defense strategy for ticks, but the bugs can also find plenty of places to hide on and within such garments. And when you get home after an outdoor adventure and you fling your clothes into a hamper, there’s not much stopping a stowaway tick from finding its way from your laundry repository to your bed or armchair. I know a couple of people who will toss their fragrant outdoor clothing right in the washing machine when they return from tick-heavy environments, activating a hot wash cycle and then drying the clothes on high heat for the first 10 minutes to kill unwanted hitchers. Since I live in a building with a shared washing machine that’s often in use, I take a different approach—if I’ve been hiking in a tick country, I put my clothes in a large plastic bag and I seal it shut. This is where they remain until I can wash them.

This might seem excessive and perhaps it is. But on more than one occasion, I have upended a hamper full of laundry into a washer, only to find a persistent tick in the hamper, stuck to the inner wall and holding out for its next meal. And one of the subtler benefits of quarantining your clothing after spending time in a tick-infested locale is that you can temporarily forget about your clothes—and the ticks—once the bag is sealed shut. And that’s the thing about living with these ticks. We have to afford ourselves as many opportunities to forget about them as we reasonably can, even in the face of ongoing tick-borne hazards like Lyme disease and Alpha-gal syndrome.

That's what pretty much every method of tick deterrence is doing; buying you just a little more time that you can devote to being outdoors and loving it. So be careful out there in the weeks ahead, my friends. And if you discover any new ways of warding off ticks that you feel like sharing with the Moss readership, sound off in the comments!

In solidarity,
Miles

When desire reaches a certain height, it can distort the things we see around us. In the days leading up to my first colonoscopy (I had to start getting them a few years earlier than most people do), the bland preparatory diet had me hallucinating richer foods in all kinds of places. A basket of laundry in the basement reminded me of a big bowl of Tonkotsu ramen, with every topping on the menu. The full moon brought to mind the creamy innards of a king-sized Whoopie Pie. Maybe you’ve had an experience like this too; manifesting nourishment from your local environment. It can take on all manner of forms, depending on what you’re lusting after and what exactly you’re looking at.

This past weekend, for instance, I had to make a 48-hour trip down to New York City for work. The soaring air temperatures and hotel prices were a reminder that we’re entering the peak summer travel season; a fleeting window that millions devote to chasing the most superlative natural landmarks like Old Faithful or El Capitan. I have neither of patience nor the travel budget to compete with these golden hordes, which means that I’m often stuck seeking grandiose beauty in more understated places. And on my first night in NYC, I decided to slip into my toe socks and lean into this coping tendency. How? By taking an evening saunter to the Grand Canyon of New York City.

If you’ve spent any time north of Central Park, then you know how the topography of Upper Manhattan and the South Bronx can be startlingly angular. Contrary to the idea that Manhattan Island only has two surrounding rivers, there is a third, much smaller waterway—the Harlem River—that pinches off the northernmost tip of Manhattan from the mainland. And where the Harlem River flows around the northern waterfront of Manhattan, the land on both sides is steep and sometimes densely wooded. A few of you might have crossed over the Harlem River on the Washington Bridge, which is one of multiple arched bridges that span the width of this enormous cleft in the cityscape. I started thinking of that cleft as the Grand Canyon of New York City after crossing a different bridge located there, which is solely used by walkers and cyclists. And once you’ve taken in the Harlem River and its surrounding slopes from that bridge (we’ll get to it shortly), it’s tough to un-see this hidden natural landmark.

My hotel was just a few subway stops away from the 167th Street MTA station in The Bronx, which is a great place to begin a trek to the Grand Canyon. Because the station itself is just a couple blocks from the creaking trees and cacophonous ballfields of Rev. T. Wendell Foster Park and the so-called Joker Stairs. If you watched the film Joker and you lay eyes on this steep set of stairs—from the park’s corner up to Anderson Avenue—you’re probably going to imagine Joaquin Phoenix doing his deranged dance on the stairs, with that Gary Glitter song blaring in the background. Movies and TV shows that were filmed in real locations are a more literal means of visualizing something interesting in a more mundane environment. And it when we visit a place that we’ve seen depicted in a memorable film scene, it can be hard to wipe that memory as we take in the space in its natural state. Halfway up the stairs, I quietly cackled to myself.

From the top, the walk to the Grand Canyon of New York City take about half an hour at a nice, leisurely pace. And up here, the roly-poly nature of the South Bronx is made much clearer by the visible slant of the streets. But on the evening of my urban hike, I encountered something else that made the borough feel wilder and more reminiscent of traditional hiking territory. As is often the case on scorching days in NYC, several of the fire hydrants I passed had been uncapped. Torrents of water sprayed and gushed into the streets, forming countless rivulets that rippled downhill, along the sidewalks. There are thousands of backcountry trails across the U.S. that involve walking beside similar streams, often with frequent crossings. And in a couple of spots, I found myself hopping over these hydrant-fed streams, to avoid soaking the only pair of shoes that I had brought on my trip. It was the same intention that’s often had me testing out the stability of exposed rocks on brooks in the mountains, before gingerly crossing them.

When I finally arrived at Merriam Avenue, the literal high point of my urban ramble to the Grand Canyon of NYC, I could feel a breath of wind coming through the trees of Merriam Playground—not unlike the gusts that can cool you down when emerge onto an exposed ridgeline after spending two hours slogging uphill through deciduous and boreal woods. From here, the grade of the hike is less punishing. A quick descent from the playground down some crumbly stone stairs and a right turn on University Avenue leads to the canyon’s gateway, Highbridge Park. This slopeside oasis on the Bronx side of the Harlem River is named for the car-free bridge that offers stunning views of the Grand Canyon in both directions. The High Bridge, which towers 140 feet above the river, is supported by a huge steel arch that was first welded-together in the mid-19th Century. The bridge was once part of the Croton Aqueduct, which carried water from the Croton River to the city (a 41-mile journey) until its closure in 1955. The woods on the Manhattan side of the High Bridge contain rustly trails that follow the old route of the Croton Aqueduct. But savoring the Harlem River and the “canyon walls” of Upper Manhattan and The Bronx from the bridge is about as ecstatic as walking here gets.

Surprisingly, only a small handful of people were enjoying the High Bridge when I got there, just in time for sunset. A cyclist here, a scooter rider there, and an older couple who appeared to be walking home from a grocery store trip. I wondered if they were so adjusted to the beauty of the Harlem River or the canyon that it no longer inspired a mid-bridge stop to gaze down at the water and at the nearby spires of Midtown. But when I reached the stairs on the Manhattan side of the bridge, I saw a lone gentleman to my left who appeared more humbled by the natural environment. He stood beside the fencing, looking out toward the skyscrapers. I was tempted to approach him and make a comment about the glow of the magic hour, in hope that this might spark a conversation between us about the bridge, the canyon and his familiarity with them.

But I decided to leave him alone—for the same reason why many of us acknowledge fellow backcountry hikers with little more than a quick, friendly nod. When someone is clearly having A Moment with a wondrous landscape, why disrupt that? In a densely populated, pavement-heavy city like NYC, finding those moments can be challenging.

And yet, they’re out there. If you know where to look for them.

CLICK HERE for a map of my hike to the High Bridge

Dear friends,

Have you ever tried walking around the city or town where you live, in the most literal sense? Back in 2024, I did this on assignment for The Boston Globe, spending a week hiking a close approximation of Boston’s strange, squiggly border. And what became very clear within the first leg of this city perambulation was how arbitrary and random the border felt. I would walk into a buzzing marshland, hemlock forest, or residential labyrinth with the understanding that I was still in Boston, only to find that I had just stepped into a neighboring municipality within a few yards; within the same landscape.

So naturally, I wondered: What if there was a different way to walk around a major city like Boston? An orbital journey that played faster and looser with lines that demarcate “cities” and “towns,” emphasizing the interconnected nature of green spaces and built environments around Greater Boston? This was pretty much the same idea that led to Boston’s Walking City Trail from Mattapan to Bunker Hill taking shape—using curious, walkable spaces to link communities that are often misperceived as distant from each other. But the prospect of applying this idea to Boston and neighboring municipalities started to grow more intriguing since my earlier walk around the city. And back in late November of 2025, a group of us Walking City Trails volunteers started discussing this.

Half a year and many, many miles later, that idea has evolved into a very big new trail.

Today, on National Trails Day, I’d like to introduce you to the Boston Boundless Trail.

The latest addition to the Walking City Trails network—our first loop trail, and by far our longest trail—is an epic re-imagining of Boston’s borders. The Boston Boundless Trail, or the “BBT” as I like to call it, passes through every city and town that touches Boston. It’s divided into 12 segments and like all the Walking City Trails, it prioritizes green space and other scenically interesting spaces over directness. Public transit is available along each section of the BBT; even the section that roller coasters through the Blue Hills Reservation over the rockiest and most backcountry territory visited by any Walking City Trail thus far! And the final step to closing the loop, on the BBT’s last stretch through East Boston, is a suggested $2.40 ride on the ferry from Eastie to the North End. That makes the Boston Boundless Trail our first “multi-modal” trail as well.

None of this would have happened without the enthusiasm, creativity, and generosity of the Walking City Trails community. The name of the trail, a real struggle until just a few months ago, was suggested by Wyoma, who came to the first very group hike on the Walking City Trail in 2022 during a blistering heat wave. Joining me on most of the scouting and photography walks that took place between March and June was Patrick Maguire, whose prolific ambling has included walking the length of a marathon in lots of Boston neighborhoods. And two of the leafiest segments of the Boston Boundless Trail actually double as a sneak peek of another landmark trail in Greater Boston that’s going to be coming to the surface in the not too distant future—the Boston Greenbelt Trail, envisioned by David Loutzenheiser, who has been on several of our Boston Night Hikes. Sections 4 and 5 of the BBT will follow the same route as David’s upcoming trail.

All of which is a way of saying that Boston’s culture of exploring and sharing what we find out there seems to compound each year. I hope that the BBT will inspire many of you to wander beyond the edge of what’s familiar—with sunblock, salty snacks, and a watchful eye for ticks—and be open to the social cross pollination that can happen on trails of any type. And just to whet your appetite further, here are several nuggets of information about the Boston Boundless Trail and the ground that it covers…

- From start to finish, the BBT is 90.9 miles long. (We didn’t plan this. It just happened!)

- The BBT runs through over 100 different green spaces in Boston and its surrounding cities and towns, from pocket parks to craggy hills and ridgelines with amazing views.

- The spectrum of environments covered by the BBT ranges from backcountry-esque forests to industrial territory where hidden flecks of greenery still manage to survive.

- Of all the BBT sections, the shortest of the lot is Section 11, which runs 4.7 miles through the town of Winthrop and a bevy of maritime environments found there.

- Conversely, the longest section of the BBT is Section 4 (11.1 milles) which features a literal lost highway in the woods near Canton and multiple forests there and in Boston.

- The most physically challenging part of the BBT is without a doubt Section 3, which enters the Blue Hills Reservation via other parks and follows the roly-poly Skyline Trail.

- The flattest part of the BBT is Section 7 from Oak Square in Brighton to Davis Square in Somerville, and this section is also one of the most thoroughly bike-able on the BBT.

- While the BBT was planned for walking first and foremost, it includes more bike-able stretches than any of the prior Walking City Trails, and you can see these segments by using our Google Map of the BBT and selecting the optional overlay of bike-able areas.

Ready for an adventure? Click here to visit the page for the Boston Boundless Trail for maps, directions, and more information about stuff like transit connections or packing.

You’ll be hearing a lot more about the BBT in regional media over the coming weeks. Will Katcher of MassLive just published a nice story about the trail launch, and in a few weeks, I’m going to be bringing a radio host that a lot of you know out to that lost highway in the woods that I mentioned earlier. In general, one of the best ways to introduce a trail is to invite people out to explore it. And to that end, I’m thrilled to announce a series of introductory group hikes along select segments of the Boston Boundless Trail, all of which will be taking place between mid-June and July Fourth!

You can register for the first hike by clicking here. It’s going down on Sunday June 14th at 5:00 PM. (Ward off the Sunday scaries with a ramble along the intersection of the Mystic and Malden Rivers, on Section 9 of the BBT!) There is no cost to RSVP for these hikes, but if you feel like supporting the Walking City Trails project by grabbing a WCT membership—which includes a sweet patch!—you can do so by clicking here.
And you can get updates on the next hikes by signing up for the Walking City Trails newsletter, which is the best way to stay abreast of trail news and events in general.

Whether your gateway to the Boston Boundless Trail is one of these group hikes or a more solitary jaunt, I can’t emphasize it enough: These trails would not have come to fruition without the curiosity and support that so many of you have expressed, in lots of ways. Thank you for believing in this venture, and most crucially, have fun out there!

Cheers,
Miles

Whenever the phrase “follow your own path” is written or uttered, the context tends to be self-improvement—say, starting a small business or pursuing a degree in post-war film criticism in the U.S.S.R. But sometimes, following your own path can be a lot more impusive and unhinged. Ages back, when I was four years old and meandering around the house on a plastic Fisher-Price tricycle, I decided to “follow my own” path down the stairs from the second floor to the first floor. (Kudos to my parents for not removing the carpeting on those stairs.) And during the 1950s, a man in the Mount Washington Valley of New Hampshire decided to follow his own path up the road to New England’s highest mountaintop, but with a twist. He walked the road backwards.

By all accounts, Alton Weagle was a regular guy—inconspicuously blending into the North Country for most of the year. But during the Truman-Eisenhower era, something inside Weagle began kicking and stirring to life. His backwards ascent of the Mount Washington Auto Road was the first of several experimental walks that defied both convention and reason. He also climbed the auto road blindfolded, and then, he did the climb while pushing a wheelbarrow full of sugar to the summit. And to this day, nobody really knows why Weagle undertook these peculiar walks. The journalist Dan Szczesny came closer than others with his 2018 book The White Mountain, in which Weagle appears as a figure of Mount Washington lore and culture. But still, being able to grasp the “why” behind ventures like Weagle’s may be impossible from a distance.

Instead, the key could be following in his irreverent footsteps, with a walk of your own.

Last week, while reporting a story for Mountain Gazette in Northern Vermont with my friend Dan Brown—a great photographer with a penchant for finding story threads to investigate—we learned about an event on the Mount Washington Auto Road that just took place; an event that we’ve already marked on our calendars for next spring. Alton Weagle Day, which will occur on Saturday May 22 in 2027, is an invitation to invent your own “first ascent” on the Mount Washington Auto Road. In other words, you come up with a method of climbing the auto road that would have left Weagle smiling, you show up at the bottom of the auto road with all the other first ascenders, and then, you make history. A 2013 NHPR feature by Sean Hurley shed light on a few of the first ascents that took place on that Alton Weagle Day. One man did the climb on construction stilts outfitted with 15-foot flag poles, while also wearing a top hat. A group of middle school students climbed the road while dressed up as chocolate chip cookies. They also kicked a soccer ball around during their shared first ascent. But my favorite is Otok Ben-Hvar, who squeezed into five inner tubes and rolled up the road!

The list of Weagle-esque first ascents on the auto road grows more eclectic each year, from climbers dressed as Star Wars stormtroopers to others who used pogo sticks or camels to make it to the top. (I am desperately searching for photos or footage of the latter.) And despite knowing nothing about Alton Weagle Day until 48 hours ago, I’m already in love with this Granite State soiree. Not just because of the batshit creativity it encourages, or the camraderie it must inspire between first ascenders, but because embracing and celebrating the intentional ambiguity of walks like Weagle’s is starting to feel transgressive; at a time when more people seem increasingly uncomfortable with pleasure for the sake of the pleasure, and with life’s many unknowable mysteries.

Maybe, like me, you’ve seen this reflected in the rise of practical articles and features in venues that used to be more devoted to life’s wonders. In the National Geographic “Health” vertical, it’s no longer enough to marvel at the intricacies and unanswered questions about the human body. Now, we’re encouraged to try out biohacks from longevity scientists so that we can stave off death a little longer. Or to organize our homes or offices for improved mood and reduced anxiety. Useful information? Sure, but seeing more and more of this life-optimizing content in NatGeo feels kind of like stepping into an ice cream shop and being offered cookies-and-cream with activated charcoal for gut health. And I’m not making that up. It’s the flavor of the month at the neighborhood ice cream counter where I live. I don’t know what this says about the era we’re living right now—that junk food is being re-branded as an opportunity for wellness and bodily augmentation—but it highlights the beauty of Alton Weagle Day and goofy first ascents. These walks serve no practical purpose, and that’s the point.

There’s a great hunger for this, and it runs deeper than we might realize. Several years ago, when climbing Mount Katahdin for the first time, I encountered a group of young hikers from Nova Scotia with perfect tans, sculpted bodies, and the kind of energy we expect from varsity athletes. But the reason why these friends were climbing Katahdin that day was weirder and more random than I could have guessed. One of them had an ironing board strapped to his backpack and upon reaching the “tableland” of the Kathdin summit, the Canadians had set up the board and whipped out a clothes iron. The ringleader of the pack, a dead ringer for Pamela Anderson in her Baywatch days, started to pantomime ironing laundry. They began with several garments they had packed up with them, and THEN, the hot, young Canadians offered passing hikers the chance to have their sweaty clothes pretend-ironed too! Who was I to pass this up?

I peeled off my fragrant tank-top and handed it over. And that was when I found out that setting up an ironing board on Katahdin was a summer tradition that the friends had been practicing for half a decade. “How’d you come up with this idea?” I asked.

The Canadians looked at each other, chewing on this for a beat or two, and then the blonde woman turned back to me and said, “You know, I really can’t remember.”

My hunch is that you’d get a similar answer from Alton Weagle if he were alive today; if some reporter from the New York Times cornered him in a pub and asked him why he decided to walk backwards up the Mount Washington Auto Road. Or perhaps his response would be a version of what Philippe Petit told the press just after getting arrested for walking on a wire between the World Trade Center towers: “There is no why: When I see a beautiful place to put my wire, I cannot resist.” Maybe that’s how Weagle felt about the windy, winding road to New England’s highest place, or how those Nova Scotia hikers looked at Maine’s great mountain. I’d imagine millions of us have a special place where we can’t help but realize our most bug nuts dreams. Next spring, I plan to find out if the Mount Washington Auto Road belongs on my shortlist.

Perhaps I’ll see you there too?

Now, to close us out, here’s a lovely song about Alton Weagle Day from Dan & Faith!

In case you haven’t heard yet, something BIG has been cooking in Boston lately. The Walking City Trails network of cross-town urban hiking trails, which I founded in 2022, is just a few weeks away from welcoming a new addition: a trail around Boston’s leafy and salty perimeter that will be somewhere between 80 to 100 miles long! Cambridge Day published the scoop the other week, and at the moment, a small of crew of us are in the process of scouting, mapping, and photographing the final sections of the trail, which will officially launch on June 6th (AKA, National Trails Day) at BostonTrails.org.

Naturally, the question of how many people will actually hike 80 to 100 miles around the City of Boston border has come up. But I have an ace up my sleeve; an incentive that could be the difference between “sounds neat, in theory” and “let’s fucking go!”

I am going to offer a free, commemorative patch to anyone who completes the trail.

Now this might sound absurd—the idea that people would spend days or even weeks out in the sticks, putting distance on their soles and micro-tears in their calves, just so they can claim a 3-inch woven patch with the name and logo of the trail they’ve hiked. But for some reason, which I don’t pretend to understand, the allure of a prize, grand or pithy, can inspire some truly unhinged ventures in the outdoors. If you traverse the 365-mile Erie Canalway trail across upstate New York and record your miles using a special logbook from the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, you can receive a finisher’s kit that includes a pennant, a car magnet, and….drum roll, please.…a sticker!

Or consider the Bay Circuit Trail; a C-shaped trail through the woods and wetlands of Greater Boston that stretches for 230 miles from Newburyport to Duxbury. In 2017, the Appalachian Mountain Club’s director of operations for the Bay Circuit Trail, Kristen Sykes, created a program in which anyone who completes the trail can claim a nifty AMC pin. I think it’s safe to say that these programs would not continue running if people were not finishing the trails and claiming the prizes with some regularity. And I can attest to that because shortly after the launch of Boston’s Walking City Trail (the namesake 27-mile trail that started the network), I launched a similar program through which you can receive a free “WCT” trail patch after completing the trail. The number of people who have claimed the patch is modest enough that I’m not worried about cheating—most of these programs run on the honor system—but the claims hit my inbox frequently enough in spring, summer, and fall that I’m pretty much covinced that the power of patchwork can help activate any trail or outdoors-based challenge.

It’s a fascinating psychological paradox—doing so much for so little—and I wonder if some of this is rooted in nostalgia for a bygone era when opportunities to claim free shit were ubiquitous in American life. You could find them on a box of cereal. I fondly remember rifling through boxes of Berry Berry Kix when they carried X-Men trading cards, in search of the elusive Professor X. I can also recall how the arrival of a box of Red Rose Tea in our house meant adding a new porcelain figurine to our collection. Each box included one of these little creatures, which were crafted by the legendary English pottery manufacturer Wade Ceramics. You could even save up the tiny comic strips from rolls of Bazooka Joe chewing gum, mail them to the Bazooka Joe HQ, and claim a prize comensurate with the number of comics you amassed; like X-ray glasses or a whoopee cushion. Rising manufacturing costs, and the widening realization that marketing molar-rotting foods to kids with prizes might be unethical, killed the party.
But those of us who lived that era know: It was a hell of a party, and worth the fillings.

You might say that the growth of prizes for walking, hiking, and outoor adventuring is an evolution of this lost tradition—prizes in the service of activities that are great for our health and happiness. Nonetheless, I still find myself surprised by just how far a number of people are willing to go, in pursuit of their prize. Some years ago, a family of New Hampshire hikers named Trish, Alex, and Sage put together a list of seriously exposed, vertigo-inducing hikes in the Granite State that they called The Terrifying 25. It didn’t take long for New England hiking communities to find this list and treat it like a quest. And for the finishers, a special Terrifying 25 patch was created. list. But having done a handful of the hikes on the Terrifying 25 list—most traumatically, the Six Husbands Trail up Mount Jefferson, which includes a dismount from the top of a tall wooden ladder to a slick, sloped cliff that left me shuddering—I’m not sure if the luster of the patch would have gotten me through all 25 of these hikes. Even Adam Hoyt, an outdoor influencer with a greater tolerance for terror, found the Six Husbands Trail freaky.

Nonetheless, there’s always someone out there waiting to empowered or enabled by a “free” prize, no matter the cost that’s actually paid in labor or exposure. Several years ago, a white-hot bagel vendor here in Boston upgraded from a farmer’s market stand to their first brick-and-mortar store. To ensure a crowd, they offered one free bagel to every customer who visited that day, until they were cleaned out. It was a windy, rainy morning in late April, still bitter enough to numb your fingers, and my friend/current housemate Katie and I decided to jog over there and leave a trail sesame seeds in our wake. We figured the bad weather would be a deterrent…and we could not have been more wrong. The line of people waiting to get into the tiny bagel shop didn’t just spill out the door. It ran the length of the block and then it wrapped around the block and disappeared from sight. There were several families with small kids and babies in line, hypnotized by the promise of a free bagel and unbothered by the likelihood of being stuck at home with runny noses the next day. Hungry as we were, Katie and I couldn’t get into the zone like that. So we went home. And we still talk about this sometimes.

Maybe you were one of those people, enduring the drenching rain so you could sink your teeth into a pillowy ring of dough that would have cost $2.50 on any other day. Perhaps you’ve done something even more reckless and inspired outside, driven by the promise of acquiring something that you can wear on your jacket or slap on the bumper of your car. If so, I’d love to hear about it. Sound off in the comments below, by all means! And even if you haven’t earned a prize for doing something challenging outdoors, I’d love to hear what you would be willing to do, and for what prize. Would an engraved butter knife be enough to get you training for the Cactus to Clouds Trail up California’s Mount San Jacinto, in which you gain more than 10,000 vertical feet in 19 miles? Could you imagine cold plunging into each of the Great Lakes in December and uploading a selfie of each plunge if it earned you a special beanie with the shape of the lakes embroidered into the hat? (I think I already know my dad’s answer.) And above all, why do you think that patches, pins, and other prizes have this effect on us?

We may never know, but we can certainly keep chasing answers, along with the prizes.

Spend enough time outdoors in any region and you’ll get to know a few high profile locals without ever crossing their paths. A few years back, when my friend and current housemate Katie was living in Western Massachusetts, I would visit her often and we would search for local venues with gnarled trees and bristling tallgrasses for taking a walk-and-talk. One day, near the town of Hadley, we found ourselves walking along a boardwalk through a viney wetland known as the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge. I assumed the place was named after some guy who had nursed a blue heron back to health in his barn, or donated a giant parcel of land to the state. And then, once Katie and I headed back to her house, I forgot about Silvio O. Conte.

Until nine months later in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, where I bumped into him again. My friend Adam and I were up there for a spritzing weekend in mid-May and we were searching for a place to go for a muddy ramble. Having bought a house up there, Adam was tapped into the local landscape and suggested a boreal woodland near Island Pond, where we could follow the North Branch of the Nulhegan River. A quick look at the map brought on a sense of Deja Vu. Because this enormous green splotch was also labeled “Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge.” Again, I presumed a massive, cross-regional land transfer from someone with seriously deep pockets. But just a couple weeks later, while driving through the White Mountains in New Hampshire, I decided to take a quick walk into the Pondicherry Wildlife Refuge to visit Cherry Pond; a gorgeous, watery mirror for the Northern Presidential Range. And when I got to the parking lot, I noticed something on a sign that had eluded me on prior visits. While informally known as the Pondicherry Wildlife Refuge, this parcel is the Pondicherry “division” of the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge.

What on earth is going on here? I wondered. And who the fuck is Silvio O. Conte?

The short version is that he was a Massachusetts Republican who served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 16 terms between 1958 and 1991—when he died from prostate cancer and was buried in his hometown of Pittsfield, Mass. But Conte was also an avid fisherman who spent a lot of time in the wetlands and shallows that make up the Conneticut River Watershed. This 7.2 million-acre zone covers the full length of the river from its humble origin on the New Hampshire-Canada border to its terminus at Long Island Sound. It’s a vast stopover point for migratory birds and fish (including salmon!), and its habitats cover everything from northern forests to salt marshes. But during Conte’s years in Congress, the Connecticut River was suffering from decades of damming and industrial pollution. This inspired Conte to introduce federal legislation that would establish a series of protected refuges throughout the gigantic watershed.

Like many bills, it stalled and languished for years. But not long after Conte’s death, as public awareness of environmental desecration expanded, Congressional leaders saw a dualfold opportunity. By dusting off Conte’s wildlife refuge bill, they could do some good for the regional environment and offer a belated tribute to their old colleague; kind of like the way that Academy voters will literally wait for decades to give Oscars to cinematic trailblazers such as Martin Scorsese. (Getting passed over for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull is still unbelievable to me.) And so, in 1997, Congress and the Clinton administration formally minted the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge. The refuge includes 17 pieces of land in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire, and several of them offer gentle, groomed footpaths for visitors.

Of all the possible ways to leverage a seat in the House or the Senate, protecting your favorite fishing and birding territory is a worthier cause than others; especially if the mechanism of protection yields trails and infrastructure, thereby making it easier for the public to enjoy the territory. When Adam and I squelched through the woods of the Nulhegan Basin division of the Silvio O. Conte refuge, chasing the North Branch of the Nulhegan River and watching its mists shroud the pine trees, I was reminded of another federal wildlife sanctuary in a very different part of America. A couple years back, while visiting Philadelphia, I spent a hazy afternoon perambulating the marshes at the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tilicum, which is located next to the airport yet somehow acoustically protected from the planes taking off and landing. I did a little post-hike digging into the story of John Heinz, an heir to the Heinz fortune who left the family business to serve in both the House and Senate during the 1970s and 80s. Like Conte, he was a moderate Republican who didn’t fully buy into Ronald Reagan’s vision for a government small enough to drown in a bathtub. Heinz was an outdoor enthusiast and a conservationist who saw federal land protections as a vital intervention, in a country ruled by industry and wealth. The Philly refuge, established in 1972 to protect the city’s last tidal marsh, was a project long-championed by Heinz.

And in 1991—the same year of Conte’s passing—the marsh was re-named after Heinz.

I suppose this is how most of us become a conservation advocate. We fall in love with a green space in our orbit, we come to see how that green space is vulnerable, and we act on the human instinct to protect it. But when I look back on the advocacy of Silvio O. Conte and John Heinz today, from the scorched earth vantage point of America in 2026, I find myself someplace between respect and sadness. Both men recognized the inevitable consequences if industry had been allowed to run rampant across America’s landscape. Their conservation projects were a reflection of that prescience. But rather than question whether the power of industry itself—and the wealth behind it—should be reined in, Conte and Heinz decided to protect their own corners of the landscape from extraction and desecration. Don’t get me wrong; I’m grateful that both of them took these proactive steps to establish some of the most beautiful wild oases in the northeast. I just wonder where we might have found ourseles today, in an alternative universe, if more moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats looked at wealth and industry not as godlike forces, but as powers that a government can regulate too.

In any event, connecting those dots seems to be the generational task bequeathed to those of us who are alive today, as the Trump administration and the Republican Party strip environmental protections away from places like Minnesota’s Boundary Waters. If this week’s newsletter inspires some of you to explore the woods and waters of Silvio O. Conte’s rustling divisions, or the boardwalks and birding towers at the John Heinz refuge, or any green space named for a politician who devoted themselves to keeping it green, think about why these environmental protections are so urgently needed. Or what the United States might look like if protecting the great outdoors from industry and wealth wasn’t such a steep, uphill battle. I hope we live long enough to find out.

CLICK HERE for a map of the Silvio O. Conte refuge in Hadley (MA)

CLICK HERE for a map of the Silvio O. Conte refuge on the Nulhegan River (VT)

CLICK HERE for a map of the Silvio O. Conte refuge at Cherry Pond (NH)

CLICK HERE for a map of the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tilicum (PA)

Those of you who’ve read Mind The Moss for a while will know that I’m something of a skeptic, if not a militant, when it comes to the role of generative AI in our lives. It’s not that I’m unwilling to recognize scenarios or applictions in which Large Language Models (LLMs) could eliminate some of the unneccessary friction from daily life. The work of organizing gathered information into something like a spreadsheet is fairly tedious work that an AI program could do in five seconds (though I would strongly prefer to outsource this work to a form of technology that doesn’t require obscene levels of electricity and water, as AI data centers consume.) What concerns me most about generative AI is the way it can remove human deliberation from activities that require inquiry and debate; sanding down the types of friction that are good for us.

Consider the last great hiking trip that you planned for yourself or a group of friends. Maybe you spent some time leafing through guidebooks or trawling online forums or Reddit communities to get ideas for where you should hike, where you should eat, or where to park your carcass at the end of the day. At some point in the process, it was necessary to have a dialogue, internally or with your fellow travelers, about the things that should be avoided. If I had been part of that group, I would have suggested that we eliminate trails with freestyle cliff climbing from the list of possibilities. (But if the cliff had ladder rungs or climbing chains, no problem!) Someone else might pipe up and request a hike with limited rock stairs, due to an old knee injury they suffered in high school while playing varsity soccer. These deliberations can feel like work, but they can also be fun. As the specifics of your voyage come into focus, the anticipation grows. And even if it all goes to hell, you can rest assured that hey, you did your best.

So, you can understand why I’m not exactly thrilled about the just-announced news that AllTrails—one of the most user-friendly resources for hiking ideas, online and in app form—has now joined with Claude and become “the first major trail app to live inside Anthropic’s AI assistant.” (Is it just me, or does the thought of “living inside” an LLM bring to mind the gaping maw of a gargantuan sea monster covered in lice?) It was an announcment that I’ve spent the last two years dreading, after watching the integration of generative AI into search engines, email platforms, social media, and pretty much every other venue where information can be summarized into bulleted points. It was only a matter of time before the labor of planning a hike became new terrain for cognitive offloading. And while I could go on at length about the roots of my strong disdain for this trend, no one has time for that. Instead, I’m going to try explaining, as succinctly as I can, why you should not use AI to plan your next hike.

First, AI will never know your comfort zone—or your friends’—as intimately as you can. As an experiment, I decided to try following AllTrails’ suggestions for how to use Claude to generate hiking ideas. This involved literally copying a pre-prepared question from AllTrails, pasting it into Claude, and making a couple of choice tweaks.

Here’s what Claude—culling from AllTrails—spat back out me, after just a few seconds.

These aren’t bad hikes! But already, I could see potential problems. The trail to North and Middle Sugarloaf, which I wrote about a few years ago, includes a rather tall and steep wooden ladder that could give a lot of experienced hikers pause. This level of elemental specificity about the North and Middle Sugarloaf hike is unlikely to come up in a conversation with Claude if you’re using AI to bypass the labor of talking with your hiking party about comfort levels and things that some folks may wish to avoid on trails. Or opening a guidebook. Or even visiting AllTrails yourself, reading the user reviews of the trail, and looking at crowd-sourced photos, which reveal the tall ladder.

Similarly, the Boulder Loop Trail offers hikers two choices; a steep climb and a gentle descent, or vice-versa. Once again, this is the kind of thing that’s not going to show up in an AI summary of hike ideas unless an LLM knows that you’re curious about it. Why would you be curious? Maybe you’re skittish on steep descents, or perhaps a member of your hiking party struggles with ascending tall rock steps. As is the case with AI chatbots, the results tend to be better when you have something of a back and forth with an LLM, giving it more information and sharpening the answers. But this begs a question; Why not just have that dialogue with your real hiking buddies?

I guess one reason why somebody—not you—might choose to dodge such dialogue by using Claude or ChatGPT to plan a hike is because negotiating a trip plan among friends can be awkward. Expressing the limits of your comfort zone requires being vulnerable, and choosing how to respond to such expressed boundaries is a delicate step to take. Conceiving of something together is inherently going to involve some amount of friction. But there’s a tremendous satisfaction to be enjoyed from dealing with that friction together, and coming out with something that you’re excited about. Several years back, when I huddled with my friends Natalie and Adam to plan a 4,000 footer hike, I was only a year or so past an awful back injury that had severely limited my ability to hike uphill. When they suggested the iconic Franconia Ridge Loop in the White Mountains, I had to explain that I wasn’t up for this level of elevation gain just yet. They took it well, absorbing my limitation, and we ended up setting the controls for Mount Moosilauke instead; a less relentless climb, but still a big old rock monster that left us scenically dazzled and sated, when we finished the hike around sundown.

That’s the other thing that makes me wince at the thought of people using AI to plan their next hikes. Finding ideas for hikes can be a rewarding social experience, and using LLMs can deprive you of making connections to hiking communities. Take the growth of groups like Outdoor Afro, the Venture Out Project, and Unlikely Hikers; all of which are built on the goal of making it easier for people who’ve been excluded from mainstream outdoor culture to get onto trails, with the guidance of folks from their communities. Even if you’re not planning on attending an upcoming joint hike with a local group, connecting with that group in-person or online can still open the door to hikes that you might want to pursue in the future, solo or with accomplices.

Even forum-based websites like Reddit can be a fruitful place for getting great intel for where to go hiking, and connecting with other users over a shared affinity for a trail, or fierce disdain for it. One of my favorite hobbies, as a member of the WMNF (White Mountain National Forest) subreddit, is to steer people away from skin your shins mountain hikes toward trails that sound more fitting for their group. Often, I’ll see posts like, “My 7-year old son and I are going to take our first White Mountain hike this summer. He’s a bit nervous with heights and I’m wondering which trail on the Tuckerman Ravine headwall offers the least exposure on the way up and down.” This is when I slide in and suggest the more serene pleasures of Zealand Falls and its adjacent beaver bogs, or—if a climb of any sort is necessary—a jaunt up to Mount Willard for a banger view of Crawford Notch that punches way above the relatively short and gentle trail to the summit. If I’ve offered some solid ideas, other Reddit users will chime in and affirm the suggestions. Often, they’ll add other good ones. And I’ve been on the opposite side of this: venturing into some hiking forum with a rough grasp of what I’m looking for, and re-emerging enlightened and empowered.

Hiking is often misunderstood as a sport of individualism. So it makes perfect sense, in a really depressing way, that tech companies with products that can super-charge social isolation are now getting on the action of the hiking renaissance. And as more people start turning to these products for tasks and decisions that are better hashed out with real people or the resources they’ve created—books, blogs, forum posts, or even GoPro videos posted on YouTube—the consequences will come in the form of more hikers getting into trouble outdoors, more search-and-rescue calls, and more missed opportunities to connect with other people who are interested in hiking. The good news is that resisting this cognitive offloading is extremely simple. If you don’t like the sound of using AI to plan your next hike, don’t use AI to plan your next hike.

I promise, you will be happier for it. And I don’t often make big promises in public. But that’s small potatoes next to what Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have been hawking.

As a habit, people tend to bristle at changes that don’t pay out immediate dividends. In Boston, where I’m based, and a number of other American cities, the installation of bike lanes and dedicated bus lanes on streets—to reduce the number of vehicles and traffic accidents on the roads and to improve the local air quality—has been met with fierce backlash from residents and commuters who only see the inconveniences of the transition. When new housing is proposed, in cities and towns where there’s a critical shortage of housing, a lot of the opposition (though certainly not all of it) is fueled by the prospect of having to deal with the sound of construction, the presence of trucks, and the influx of new residents who will also need to use local resources. The horror!

This aversion to accepting short term “pain” for lasting rewards is chronically human, and these days, it seems to be holding us back from making changes that would yield a lot more health and happiness. This week, as I was driving up to Montreal for work and thinking about this rut that we seem stuck in, my thoughts wandered in the other direction. I tried to think of long game investments that cities, states, and nations are more open to embracing. The answer hit me like that first blast of springtime aromas—fresh mud, flowers, and grass—that lots of us experience sometime in April. Parks!

In a way, public parks are one of humankind’s greatest deceptions. While a handful of them are naturally occurring green spaces, preserved in their scraggly glory, most city and town parks are works of architecture. The woods, waters, rocks, and floral displays are installed and allowed years to grow and weather. The promise of their maturation and the escalating beauty of the parkland is usually enough to get residents on board with the breaking and seeding of the ground. As I chewed on this, waiting in a line of cars at a Vermont-Canada border crossing, I remember something in Montreal that I had read about years ago. Something BIG, in the literal sense. And I realized that I was on my way to a perfect city for seeing how patient we can be, when parks take shape.

Maybe you’ve had the curious experience of visiting a park that looks like a mound of bright green gumdrops, where the grass is abundant but the little trees have barely made it beyond their sapling stage. Then, you learn that this sun-soaked park used to be a town landfill. Transforming a trash disposal site into something more ecologically responsible isn’t a new idea. For Mind The Moss, I’ve sometimes visited parks like this, such as Berlin’s Volkspark Hasenheide, where people threw illegal raves in the woods during the early years of the pandemic. But in north central Montreal, in a residential neighborhood called Saint-Michel, a landfill greenification on a massive scale is now underway. And while the space has years to go, on its long journey from a dump site to a rustly green space, you can walk there today and see how far the land has come.

Frédéric-Back Park, named for the late Québécois animator behind an Oscar-winning short called The Man Who Planted Trees, was once a 474-acre limestone quarry. It was so thoroughly scraped out during the early 20th Century that by the time it shut down in 1963, the sprawling pit was over 230 feet deep and the city had to decide what to do with this gigantic hole in Montreal’s cityscape. By 1988, the quarry was being used as a landfill for garbage, construction debris, and even some of the snow plowed from streets during the winter. In less than a decade, 40 million tons of waste had already accumulated in the old quarry, and the city was trying to leverage some benefits from the odorous mass—like setting up an onsite power plant that could capture some of the biogases wafting out of the landfill and convert them into electricity. Somewhere up or down the chain of city planning, another idea was hatched. Why not convert the landfill into a public park, on the same epic scale as Parc Mont Royal or Jean-Drapeau?

From inception, this was no light undertaking. Mont Royal, Montreal’s woodsy crown jewel, weighs in at nearly 700 acres. It connects city neighborhoods and it has its own namesake mountain, which Frederick Law Olmsted identified as the natural heart of the park when he started designing it back in 1874. It’s worth noting the Olmstedian origins of Mont Royal, because it took a century for the park to become the thriving green space that many of us know today. Frédéric-Back Park—the old quarry turned landfill turned public park—has an even longer and steeper road ahead of it. Filling the space with soil, woodchips, compost, and sand was only the beginning. Over the last several years, 525 trees and 17,800 bushes, perennials, and herbaceous species have been planted here. But beneath it all, there’s still over 40 million tons of waste decomposing at a near-glacial pace and producing all kinds of troublesome gases.

The latter explained one of the most peculiar things that I noticed just after I entered Frédéric-Back Park from Rue Paul-Botet. Across the rolling plains of the park, more brown than green in early spring, I gazed at hundreds of white pods planted in the ground. Each was the size of a smartcar, and the number of pods scattered across the park gave the space an otherworldly energy. I felt as though I had stumbled across a piece of land being surreptitiously used by the alien colonists in The X-Files. Through a glass window on the nearest pod, I saw a valved pipe, which immediately suggested that these strange objects had an important utility, given how many there were. The pipes, I would soon learn, are connected to gas capturing wells that collect Methane and other fumes that continune to emerge from all the garbage! As to why each of the well casings is spherical, there may have been some intention to giving Frédéric-Back Park a distinictly extraterrestrial vibe. A barely-adolescent park with nearly 500 acres of space is going to look somewhat lunar to begin with. It’s a unique landscape that can feel both fertile and barren. The vivid color of the grass and flowers hints at greater things to come, but the lack of shade trees—especially in a northeastern city like Montreal—is a departure from the parks or conservation lands that many know.

And yet, the inherent weirdness of a young park and its limited natural amenities don’t seem to dampen public enthusiasm for these projects. Somehow, in this context, more of us are able to connect the dots between making substantial near term investments for our health and happiness, getting some strange early results, and one day, ending up in a much better place. Perhaps the indignity of living near an enormous landfill is bad enough that any proposed environment change is seen as an improvement, warts and all. Or maybe being able to walk in the rehabilitated space, even as the trees and plants remain in their infancy, is enough of a reward to stave off misgivings about the price tag of the project or the development timeline. By nature, millions of us crave more spaces where we can amble freely, without worrying about getting clipped by a car or being told that we have to buy something. New parks, including those derived from landfills and other sites of ecological desecration, are one way of addressing this need. Maybe this makes us predisposed to support something like Frédéric-Back Park.

Still, you have to wonder what life might be like if we applied this open-minded, long game thinking to other facets of daily living. Once again, Montreal offers a glimpse of what this can look like. The bike lanes there, for which is the city is globally renowned, are as much a foundational part of the city as the streets. They’re used throughout the year by cyclists, and the city even plows them. It would be easy to assume that when the lanes were proposed during the 1970s and 80s, Montrealers were somehow more open to the project due to the European influence throughout Quebec. But in fact, the bike lanes ran into much of the same opposition that rages in American cities today! The thought of having to share more of the roads with bikes was anathema to drivers. This is what happens in pretty much every city and town that tries to install bike lanes.

The difference in Montreal, however, was how generations of city leaders responded to the backlash. They refused to abandon the project, recognizing its long term perks for mobility and health. There were setbacks, delays, and other hurdles. But in the end, Montreal got its labyrinthine, protected bike lanes, and the city is better off for them; just as the development of green spaces like Frédéric-Back Park can be an upgrade for our surroundings. And as other place-making projects run into reactionary skepticism, I have to wonder if more mayors and governors in the U.S. might choose to take that second page from Montreal’s book; keeping their eyes on the prize, not retreating in the face of harsh pushback, and accepting that this may cost them another term but will benefit their constituents in the long haul. One can dream. But it would be nice.

CLICK HERE for a map of Frédéric-Back Park

I don’t know about the rest of you, but last week, I was really starting to get worried about spring in the northeast. The trees were still skeletal and barren, and the ground brought to mind the contents of an ashtray, except for some one-off flowers here and there. Maybe it’s a reflection of the times we live in, when a global economic collapse or World War III seems more feasible each week. After all, spring happens on different regional timelines each year. But as I drove to Southern Maine last Thursday for work, I couldn’t help but wonder, What if spring never arrived this year? What would that even be like? Living in a primarily brown and gray world that grew hotter each week?

Thankfully, in the 24 hours between my arrival in the Pine Tree State and my return to Massachusetts, the big event that many of us have been waiting for finally came. The greening. You know it by sight. The emergence of electric green grass on the ground lights up the landscape. It’s complimented by the sudden explosion of buds on all the tree branches, as if the understory and overstory have coordinated their schedules. In the grand scheme of the landscape, the sudden materialization of the green elements is a “small” event, but the psychological effect can be downright luminous. As I drove south on I-95, heading back to Boston, I could feel the nearby glow of the new grass from the freeway, and that’s not something one will be able to say in May—when the novelty of the grass has burned off—or in August, after the higher temperatures have turned much of that grass into yellowy straw. In the same way that being on the street in New Orleans and unexpectedly witnessing a jazz funeral might inspire you to chuck your plans and spend the rest of your day clubbing, I decided to make the most of the 2026 greening by making a side-trip to an environment where I could really admire it.

Mass Audubon’s Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary, a 1,955-acre expanse of marshes, meadows, and drumlins, is one of those places that looms enormous and aquamarine on maps, while occupying a much smaller and more specific place in my memory. As a kid, I logged some miles here with my parents and my sister, and we were particularly bowled over by a unique feature of the reservation called The Rockery. It’s a jumble of boulders and stones, assembled in the early 19th Century like a primordial LEGO set. It features multiple caves that you can walk through and winding stone stairs that lead to little decks and lookouts atop the rockery. It’s the sort of feature that feels tailored to parents who are trying to instill some appreciation of nature in their children, and I remembered its dank recesses and ingenious construction so vividly that I wanted to see what revisiting The Rockery felt like during the greening (and less than six months from my 38th birthday.) But this time, instead of hiking to The Rockery from the main visitor parking lot, which is located very close to the rocks, I opted for a longer and far more scenic alternative route, from a sleepy residential street in the town of Topsfield.

It was late afternoon on a Friday, which made it possible to park in the lot at Steward Elementary School, nestled in the pine woods on the north edge of the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary. A few paces from here, up Perkins Row, a gate on the right marks the beginnings of a gentle trail through the trees, which I spent a good 15 minutes following. The abundant chirping overhead hinted at what was ahead, in the heart of the marshlands. But I was so taken by the green resonance of the ground and how it imbued the forest with energy that the birds barely registered. Transitioning into the refuge this way felt like a recalibration of my consciousness; making my eyes and ears more perceptive to signs of life that were popping up around me. And as I crossed a series of wooden bog bridges and boardwalks onto Averill’s Island—a wooded piece of land completely surrounded by floatsam and jetsam—I managed to glimpse a pair of tiny turtles sunning themselves on a rock beside the bridge. The texture and color of their shells, and their stoic posture, felt in concert with everything surrounding us.

Still, as much as I enjoy briefly letting go of everything by being outside, and thereby getting outside of my head, it’s only so long before a forgotten ember of information starts glowing again. As I gazed lovingly at the turtles and thought about their place in this localized natural world, I remembered another context with which a great deal of Americans got to know the word “greening;” a context that’s also worth revisiting.

Maybe this is borrowed nostalgia speaking, but the 1970s were a unique time when you could smoke on a plane, walk into a sex club in Times Square, or write an essay for The New Yorker and quickly land a publisher’s deal to turn that essay into a book. (This still happens for writers occasionally, but way less often than it used to.) And at the start of the decade, a Yale Law School professor named Charles A. Reich wrote a piece called “The Greening of America,” which read more like a manifesto. Harnessing the countercultural movements of the 1960s, the ongoing horrors of the Vietnam War, and the discontents of the Nixon presidency, Reich envisioned a sweeping change in the American consciousness; a “greening” of the barren individualism and corporate logic of America, from which a more collective, human-centered society would grow.

“There is a revolution under way,” Reich’s New Yorker essay began. “It is not like revolutions of the past. It has originated with the individual and with culture, and if it succeeds it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structures are changing in consequence. Its ultimate creation could be a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. This is the revolution of the new generation.”

Having spent a great deal of time with students at Yale, who were among those on the frontlines of the counterculture movement—and being a gay man himself, a few years away from coming out—Reich was better equipped than most to see the roots of this possible revolution of American thinking and culture. When he turned the essay into the 1970 book, The Greening of America, he expanded on his thesis by identifying the three layers of consciousness that would soon change. The first two levels concern the lopsided economic system in the U.S., and how the average American sees themselves being part of that system…or outside of it. Today, that certainly feels prescient, given the number of Americans who have found themselves downsized and marginalized by corporations over the last several decades (and the great many who could soon join them, as the same companies turn to generative AI to automate more of their labor.)

The third layer—Consciousness III, as Reich calls it—is somewhat murkier, and also the most elemental. It’s the crossroads where an individual establishes a spiritual harmony with their natural environment. This, according to Reich, is where a release from the scarcity-minded thinking of consumerism may finally happen. “Once a person reaches Consciousness III, there is no returning to a lower consciousness,” Reich wrote. The implication here is a numbers game. As more Americans go, so goes their culture. In the early 1970s, after The Greening of America was published, the question of whether millions of peaceful and individual revolutions could change the course of things was the subject of debate in magazines and on talk shows. There were optimists, and also plenty of critics; some of whom dismissed the third chapter of Reich’s vision as naive.

I find myself somewhat on the fence. Or rather, on top of a floating log, which I had to gingerly creep across shortly after reaching the end of Averill’s Island and getting back onto a waterlogged piece of the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary mainland. The vision that Reich laid out helped seed the ground for the environmentalist movements that emerged from the 1970s. Millions of Americans underwent a change of consiousness, so far as their relationship to the natural world was concerned. But all these atomized revolutions failed to generate something bigger and more sweeping. After all, the 70s were followed by Ronald Reagan’s presidency—a broadly supported steroid injection for American individualism, corporate greed, and structural poverty. In a way, we are living in the wreckage of Reich’ vision today. At least, that’s what a pessimist might say.

But as I made the final push to The Rockery, over a floating boardwalk where each of my footsteps sent panicky birds shooting out of the nearby tall grasses, I felt my own thoughts about the greening of America wandering down a more hopeful road. The Rockery itself seemed to encourage them. Here was this beautiful oddity that people came together to build; schlepping heavy stones, fitting them into place, and seeing how The Rockery would compliment the natural elements of the Ipswich River basin, especially as age left The Rockery mossier and muskier. And some level of underlying curiosity and affection must have preceded this landscape project. Similar to how the Occupy Wall Street protests caused millions of Americans to become more mindful of widening wealth inequality—despite the lack of tangible outcomes produced by the movement—I think it’s possible that continued exposure to the magic of the wetlands and woods on the river set the stage for a shared idea like The Rockery to be realized.

I suppose that’s where we are today, as a country; long-primed and overdue for the “greening” that Charles A. Reich foresaw during another challenging chapter of our recent history. The question of when this happens and what it looks like remains as unknowable as the arrival of spring’s grasses and flowers. And of course, there’s no inevitability that undergirds this greening or its outcome. Nonetheless, I do believe that something is coming. And unlike this spring, it may arrive sooner than we think.

CLICK HERE for a map of my Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary walk

PS: Speaking of watery spaces outdoors and spring rituals, those of you who live in or near Massachusetts might enjoy this recent piece that I wrote for The Boston Globe’s Travel section on spectating venues for spring herring runs! Grab some coffee and an extra chunky donut, plunk down on a bench, and cheer the fish on as they swim hard upstream to get it on (externally) in the lakes and ponds around the Commonwealth.

One of the essential struggles of being human is realizing that you might be doing something bad. Maybe it was a one time fuck-up, or maybe you’ve been unwittingly transgressing for years. Whatever the case, once that possibility sinks in, you have to decide what to do with it. Two weeks ago, I experienced this while doing something I love—going for a late day hike amidst the gloppy glory of Mud Season in Vermont.

”Mud Season” is how spring is often described in the highlands. Prodigious snowmelt from the mountains mixes with warm rain, transforming the earth into a musky stew worthy of an existentialist Herzog documentary. Over the last five years, I’ve written about the scenic and olfactory bliss of Mud Season several times. Getting to witness the landscape thawing after the lonesome darkness of winter is special and cathartic. Getting to squelch through that landscape in waterproof boots is even better. That’s what I had driven up to Vermont to do. I had managed to nab a fire sale priced hotel room in Stowe (pro tip: New England ski towns in spring are usually killer deals) and my plan was to spend the day splashing my way down muddy trails to big, thundering cascades like Bingham Falls and Moss Glen Falls. But in the haste of planning this last minute road trip, I forgot something about Mud Season in the Green Mountain State.

For all its mucky beauty, Mud Season is a vulnerable moment for backcountry trails made of packed dirt. The wet ground is softer than usual and too much foot traffic on any dirt trail has the potential to reshape it in a bad way. The intermittent warmth and cold of spring, plus the perpetual dampness, dissuades enough hikers from hitting the trails that Mud Season damage is usually limited. But that could always change. A viral Instagram reel about a world class waterfall could send an early surge of hikers to the cascade when the access trail is at peak moistness. Vermont, more so than the other New England states, seems to have taken this possibility quite seriously. And so, as a precaution, the state closes many of its hiking trails during April and May to allow for the ground to dry up and firm up for the heavier summer and fall crowds. This isn’t a problem for most visitors, but for those of us who experience primal, full-body desire to get out and slosh around during Mud Season, showing up in Vermont with boots and a daypack, only to find a TRAIL CLOSED sign—as I did—is a disarming experience.

There was the obvious sting of dejection. I was not going to spend a Saturday staring at rip-roaring plumes of whitewater, as I had planned. But on a much deeper level, I felt something that hadn’t registered on prior spring hikes. I had come to Vermont to do an activity that the Vermont government did not want people doing. And despite the fact that I had enjoyed the same activity in New Hampshire and Maine—hiking in Mud Season, on spongy trails that remained open to the public—part of me couldn’t help wondering if I had been engaging in something unethical, by clomping up and down all these spongy trails and then encouraging my friends to try the same thing.

That afternoon, over a consolation ale at The Alchemist, I decided to do some digging into the question of why Vermont closes so many trails for Mud Season, compared to its neighbors. One of the answers is reflected in the landscape itself. If you’ve crossed the border of Vermont and continued into New Hampshire, you’ve probably noticed how the terrain dramatically shifts from placid green hills to more angular peaks and ridgelines. New Hampshire, “The Granite State,” has a lot more underlying crystalline rock than Vermont does. And this provides something of a bedrock buffer for trails in New Hampshire during Mud Season. Trails built on top of firmer surfaces don’t have the tendency to get as waterlogged as trails on softer terrain. Understanding this, I breathed a sigh of relief and chased it with a glug of beer. My Mud Season exploits in the White Mountains and the Great North Woods weren’t as likely to have left scars.

But even if they had been, the odds of getting called out and chewed out by a Granite State authority or busybody would have been near zero. Because land use ethics are regional, and the question of what amount of trail damage is acceptable during Mud Season has a different answer in each place. The lopsided granite ratio between New Hampshire and Vermont partially explains why the neighboring states have their own approaches to trail access during spring. But there are other differences between New Hampshire and Vermont, beyond the elemental. One of these states keeps sending Bernie Sanders to Washington DC and came close to implementing its own universal health care system. The other was invaded by libertarians from the Free State Project and is now slated to suffer public education funding cuts. None of this is to dunk on New Hampshire. I love both of these states, they share a lot of qualities, and they’re more culturally eclectic than many realize. But politically, there is a stark difference in the ways of thinking that drive the respective state governments. In Vermont, a more communitarian mindset prevails, and I suspect that’s another reason why the state bars access to more of its trails in April and May—asking hikers to make a seasonal sacrifice. I can’t really imagine New Hampshire’s current elected leaders asking this.

Thankfully, there are enough rock-hard trails throughout Vermont to offer at least a few alternatives during the Mud Season closures, and the one in Stowe (pretty much the only game in town, as far as I could tell) is the paved, winding Stowe Recreation Path. Branching off from Stowe Village near VT-100, it follows the bends of the West Branch of the Little River for 5.3 miles, gradually heading up toward Mount Mansfield and Smugglers Notch. The path crosses the river in several places with the help of footbridges, and it often skirts past VT-108 before dipping back into the woods or cutting across a meadow. That proximity to the road may seem like a buzzkill at first, but it actually offers something kind of cool: the chance to experience Stowe on foot.

Think about it. The vast majority of towns around Vermont are experienced through the windshield of a car. Sure, you might get out of the car and bumble around the commercial center of a town, or on a trail. But getting from place to place is almost always an automotive task. The Stowe Recreation Path allows you to walk between many of the things that people come to Stowe looking to do. My hotel was steps away from the path, and shortly after I checked in, I followed the path downstream against the sunset and I ended up at Doc Ponds, which does a killer Big Mac-style burger. The next day, I set off in the opposite direction, taking the path toward the mountains. I stopped over at GiraKofi for a small black coffee (which I enjoyed on a wooden bench flanked by carved giraffes) and then I pressed onward to the more rustic northern reaches of Stowe. This quieter stretch of the trail, away from all the eateries and lodging options, offered the kind of creaking woodland immersion I craved from the forbidden muddy trails. It wasn’t the same thing, of course. There were places where the Stowe Recreation Path would emerge from the trees to pass municipal infrastructure or the grounds of another motel. But its existence and the number of people I saw walking it on an overcast morning in early April hinted at good times to come, when the Green Mountain State’s trails finally open up again.

If nothing else, my two brief jaunts on the Stowe Recreation Path left me feeling less conflicted about my Mud Season urges, and the question of whether they were ethical urges. There’s nothing wrong with the desire to squelch across the countryside as the snow melts; just like there’s nothing wrong with accepting an invitation to a friend’s family dinner and showing up at their house licking your lips, ready to chomp some chicken. But of course, you wouldn’t just rip off the fattest drumstick and gnaw away. (I assume.) You would take your cues from your friend and their family, watching how they share and pass the food, and seeing if there’s a grace or anything offered before the eating commences. Going on a Mud Season hike in any state is like being a guest in someone’s house. Observe their customs, follow their footsteps, and enjoy a nice day of squelching; bothered by nothing except the black flies that have just hatched.

CLICK HERE for a map of the Stowe Recreation Path

I found it impossible to focus on anything yesterday. Plugging numbers into a project spreadsheet, paying credit card bills, and taking out the recycling felt less like routine tasks of daily living and more like an absurd way of coping with the ground reality that our president was threatening to destroy an entire country. “A whole civilization will die tonight,” was the beginning of what Trump had posted on his TruthSocial page at 8:06 AM yesterday. “I don’t want that to happen,” he added. “But it probably will.” Whether this was an allusion to dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran or leveling enough power plants and bridges to send the Iranian people “Back to the Stone Age” (Pete Hegseth’s recent words), being alive and aware the other day was a cascade of awful feelings. I wandered from rage to shame to anxiety that the world might actually end, if no one in the White House had the courage to rein in Trump’s homicidal impulses. It was clear that most members of Congress—terminally obsessed with re-election, and unwilling to re-evaluate their paths to victory—were not going to do anything; which is almost as horrifying as Trump’s genocidal rhetoric and the damage it will inflict on any prospects for peace and on the world economy. I’m also rather horrified that the Democratic Party mainstream’s response to Trump changing his mind at the eleventh hour is essentially calling him a pussy. All of this is reckless, stupid, and unsustainable.

For me and my buddy Adam, also reeling from everything, our day ended at a quiet bar, where I couldn’t help but wonder how many of the other patrons were calming their nervous systems with alcohol because of the news cycle or irrspective of it. The healthier thing to do, which I’m trying to find the energy for this afternoon, would be taking a walk outside; something I’ve recommended time after time, whenever Very Bad Things happen. The boost of endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine may be short lived—I learned about Trump’s “civilization will die” post immediately after meeting another friend, Patrick Maguire, for an early morning walk around a pond in Boston. But at this point, we have to grab those boosts whenever and wherever we can; for the good of our health and our stamina. To say that we, as a nation, are in uncharted territory is describing the present situation lightly. I agree with Paul Krugman’s recent assessment that this is America’s “darkest hour;” that “the fate of the whole American idea is on the line.” I have a difficult time imagining this crisis ending in ways that are familiar and precedented. Nor can I picture America coming back from this without a big step in a new direction for America—culturally, economically, and governmental.

Reaching the edge of what’s familiar is a strange and sometimes scary exprerience. It means putting yourself in the way of chance, which can yield good things or go south. Stepping beyond that boundary doesn’t necessarily mean going into unknown space completely blind—usually, we have some idea what we’re getting into when we tread beyond our “normal” environments, whether it’s going on a birding walk with a bunch of strangers or trying a new sex position with a partner. But still, there’s often a pretty significant gulf between how we imagine these explorations playing out, and what they actually lead to. Once, when stopping in Worcester to search for a big rock in the woods that’s covered with fire and brimstone inscriptions, I ended up getting chased away by an angry dog from one of the houses near the edge of the forest. But more recently, a different and more local leap of faith opened my eyes to new possibilities that were hidden right under my nose for all the years that I’ve been living in Boston.

Since the price of gas is rapidly escalating across the world—making a weekday road trip and hike less practical for millions of us—I had been studying the commuter rail network map for Greater Boston. I was especially curious about the terminus of each route. I imagined taking one of the trains to the end of the line, setting off from the station platform with a backpack, and finding my way to someplace beautiful, weird, or unsettling. When the phrase “end of the line” is used in the context of train or bus travel, it often evokes this sense that a consequential transition is happening. When I hear or read the phrase, I think of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, in which a journey from the world of the living to the afterlife is taken on a train that crosses the watery expanse of a dead-calm ocean. Or, if I’m in a saltier mood, I remember the beginning of Jim Jarmusch’s anti-western, Dead Man. Johnny Depp is riding the rail from Ohio to a new job in a town called “Machine,” somewhere in the Rockies. It’s not a good sign when the greasy train conductor (Crispin Glover) tells him “That’s the end of the line.”

The lack of commuter rail options from the station closest to my apartment made the decision for me, and the ashen clouds and sleety rain that materialized that morning didn’t feel like a great sign either. I spent about 20 minutes riding the train southwest from Boston to the adjacent suburb of Needham, which is separated from the city by the Charles River. Given that some of the other trains run all the way to Rhode Island or the North Shore, I was a little bummed to be taking an “end of the line” adventure that barely breached the Boston perimeter. But a quick look at a map while I waited for the train at least gave me something to aim for in Needham—a splotchy green chunk labeled “Ridge Hill Reservation” and a smaller, neighboring green blob marked “Needham Town Forest.” At the very least, I could walk from the train platform at the Needham Heights station to a pair of forests, for some spruce and granite therapy.

The first few minutes of my hike began on West Street, which took me down a steep hill—the literal height of land behind “Needham Heights”—which was covered with single family homes. When I’m walking through residential territory to get to a more grandiose green space, I often try to make the connective walk more interesting by identifying possible places of interest on the map, like a pocket park or a sculpture that I could dart by. My map of Needham Heights suggested that it might be fun to pivot from West Street toward a little water body called Rosemary Lake. Not just to see the lake, but to explore a short path that appeared to serve as a car-free bridge between the two places. On Google Maps, paths like these are often represented as thin green lines, and they’re routinely unnamed. At the bottom of the hill, I kept my eyes open on the left, searching for the beginnings of a walking path and expecting something fleetingly charming, like a stitch of oaks between houses. But pretty soon, it became clear that I was approaching something that the map had really undersold.

On the final stretch of its journey to the lake, Rosemary Brook sloshes through a vast bogland with twisted trees covered in bright green moss. It’s a swampy oasis tucked between town streets and developed land, and a grassy path runs straight through the bog—from the edge of West Street to the beginning of Tillotson Road. It seemed likely that this cross-bog path may have been a lost or unpaved segment of Tillotson Road. It was wide enough to accommodate a horse and buggy, if not a Ford F-150, and the Town of Needham was founded centuries ago in 1711. Whatever the case, I found the scale and color of the bog thrilling to behold. It was so unexpected that I ended up walking the cross-bog path three times. First, I used it to reach the north banks of Rosemary Lake, and the next two times were just for the sheer pleasure of walking down an unlikely hall of grand trees, past pools where skunk cabbages will soon be thriving. I had to remind myself to press onward to Ridge Hill Reservation.

As I passed the lakeshore once again, heading westward toward the woods, I saw a lonely bike abandoned in the parking lot. I wondered if its owner was miles away, or down by the water’s edge smoking some weed. Perhaps this lake was a foundational place for them, but what might the periphery of their world—their normal—look like? Would it include the evergreen and deciduous expanse of a place like Ridge Hill? The 352-acre forest offered more seclusion from the burbs and the local highways, but it was a more predictable immersion, not unlike stepping into the trees of familiar green spaces like the Middlesex Fells or the Blue Hills Reservation. Stumbling upon the bog along Rosemary Brook had surprised me enough that I was now intent on detecting other surprises nestled in the landscape. Toward the end of my Ridge Hill traverse, I found a smaller one; a sodden stuffed animal that someone had positioned on a tree branch. There were no plush companions in sight, here or anywhere else on the trail.

The smaller Needham Town Forest, on the other hand, proved more bounteous. I entered the woods on the far west edge and I followed a squiggly trail through an especially lumpy section of the forest with mossy glacial boulders and pond-esque vernal pools. According to my map, the Needham Town Forest isn’t just municipal property. A chunk of these woods is owned by Scouting America (formerly the Boy Scouts of America) and the gnarly little trail I had just picked up was part of a camp frequented by Boy Scouts. The path struck me as an ideal place for introducing Boy Scouts or any young, beginner hikers to the rocky and rooty rigor of what to expect across New England’s open spaces. The placement of the trail, in such a chunky part of an otherwise demure town forest, felt intentional—like its creators wanted to use this tiny, hairier piece of the forest to offer a concentrated showcase of hiking with a capital H. I wondered if this could be replicated in other forests in cities and towns; a tiny trail that offers a generous taste of how grueling and messy a good hike can be.

The questions of how to make it easier for more people to get outside—and how we can break down real and perceived barriers—has rarely been more centralized in the outdoor recreation community. But answering those questions still requires treading past the end of our lines, seeing what’s out there, and considering the possibility that some of these things may be worth holding onto and exploring further. In doing this more often, we might change the course of things and “discover” opportunities and directions that were hidden in plain view. Even when life is good and most things are working out, a trip to the end of a line and beyond is an excursion worth taking. But when it feels like the world is ending and there are no obvious answers within reach, “beyond” is the only place left to go. We may be surprised by what we find out there.

If you go weak in the knees at the thought of watching a freshly thawed waterfall roaring back to life—yielding a torrent of snowmelt, tree branches, and other forest detritus—you might instinctively look toward towering cliffs and boreal forests. In New England, most of the April waterfall chasing happens in places like Maine and Vermont, where the sawtoothed topography makes for some big ass, aquatic gods. But in 2026, after previously covering waterfall spectating in the Green Mountain and Pine Tree States, I want to focus on a less intuitive destination for this event. It’s a state which might appear smaller in stature, but which actually packs a real wallop when it comes to rivers or creeks spilling down hills. So this year, we’re going to Connecticut.

The Nutmeg State often gets pigeonholed as a kind of transitional backwater between New England and New York City. And while there’s definitely some cultural truth to it, this characterization makes the mistake of reducing the entirety of southeastern New York to the NYC area. The westernmost border of Connecticut is a much gnarlier place where the Taconic Mountains spill over from the Empire State and form the backbone of localized ranges like the Litchfield Hills. (The modern process of snowmaking was invented there, at the Mohawk Mountain Ski Area, back in the 1950s!) The foothills of these mountains keep rolling eastward to form the Connecticut River Valley. And from there, heading toward the Rhode Island line, the landscape calms down considerably.

My point is that Connecticut boasts some seriously chunky terrain. That means plenty of rock faces, crags, and precipices for water to crash down—a seasonal event that’s happening as I type. And so, for those you who want to savor the messy glory of the spring thaw, I beseech you to find a car and brave The Connecticut Waterfall Crawl.

Unlike prior Mind The Moss waterfall crawls—which were cross-state Point A to Point B driving routes—the Nutmeg State version is a nifty loop that takes about 4 hours to complete by car (without traffic). The orbital journey begins and ends in Hartford, and you might as well consider plumping for a hotel in the state capital; to allow for a nice post-crawl dinner at which you and your fellow waterfall chasers can toast your victory at high volume. So that people at other tables will look toward you, with one of them traipsing by to ask what you’re all so excited about. At which point, you can gush over Connecticut’s cascades, and how you took in seven of them in a single mid-spring day!

Each of the falls on the Connecticut Waterfall Crawl is located pretty close to the road—some require a short hike of a half mile or less, while others are waiting mere steps away from the parking lot or the shoulder. In clockwise order, here is the full lineup:

#1: Wadsworth Falls. Initially, you’ll follow the Connecticut River south from Hartford through suburban territory; a misleading first step for a drive that willl involve quite a bit of elevation gain and loss. And as you approach the woods around Middlefield, the blue bends of the Coginchaug River will reveal themselves. And just a few paces down a set of stairs and leafy path from the edge of the road is Wadsworth Falls. While it’s “only” around 20 feet tall, the formation of this rip-roaring cascade is what makes it so special. The steep drop and the massive volume of water from the river makes this fall look like a baby cousin of Niagara. Even in the early winter of 2021, just when the Coginchaug was beginning to freeze, the immensity of Wadsworth Falls stunned me.

#2: Buttermilk Falls. A somewhat short-lived stretch of I-691 is all it takes to enter the rustly foothills of the Taconic Mountains, where Buttermilk Falls gurgles away in the woods of Terryville. Significantly taller than Wadsworth, at roughly 60 feet, this cascade is a quieter, more serene creature. And what really makes it stand out are the adjacent ledges from which you can sit and gaze down at the pathway of the falls. In spring, the half-formed canopy offers partial views of the surrounding forest as well. Park on Lane Hill Road and head south into the woods to intercept Buttermilk Falls.

#3: Knife Shop Falls. As you approach the actual town of Litchfield—your best bet for a mid-crawl lunch, especially if you like the sound of oyster tacos or broccoli rabe and sausage rigatone—take a minute to pop by Northfield Pond. In the late 19th Century, one of America’s most innovative pocketknife makers (the Northfield Knife Company) ran a factory here, and that’s why the multi-layered falls that spill from the pond are known as Knife Shop Falls. Like Buttermilk Falls, the way to find these hidden beauties is to park on the edge of Knife Shop Road and crunch southward through the trees to reach the brook and its cascades. Be ready to schlep yourself over an occasional log.

#4: Kent Falls. A major escalation in every sense, Connecticut’s tallest waterfall is on the far west edge of the state, which means ascending through the mountains past the Mohawk Mountain Ski Area. But once you reach the doorstep of Kent Falls State Park, little is left to the imagination. The falls, which descend 250 feet down slopes of exposed stone, have their own pavillion at the base. But you can take in the total heft of Kent Falls thing by climbing the short trail alongside the drops, with its rock stairs and observation platforms. There’s a $10 fee for each car without Connecticut plates, and it’s bumped up to $15 over the weekends. But bear in mind, that’s about the same price as a single adult ticket to the inevitable Deadpool & Wolverine sequel.

#5: Dean’s Ravine Falls. Of all the cascades on the Connecticut Waterfall Crawl, the one that’s sequestered in a mossy ravine near Canaan requires the most hiking. It’s a half mile round trip from the junction of Music Mountain Road and Cream Hill Road (what great names!) to the hidden place where Reed Brook forms a gorgeous duet of horsetail falls that add up to 50 feet in height. If you’ve ever visited Crawford Notch in New Hampshire and laid eyes on Ripley Falls, the angle and shape of Dean’s Ravine Falls might give you a kick of Déjà vu. The path does get slippery, so tread gingerly.

#6: Campbell Falls. Now this one is a bit peculiar. A muscular cascade, with a 50-foot plunge and a frothing pool and rapids at the base, Campbell Falls is the crown jewel of Connecticut’s Campbell Falls State Park Reserve. The reason why I spell out the full moniker and its qualifier, however, is because Campbell Falls is technically located in Massachusetts! The waterfall occupies a tiny piece of forest that could be interpreted as Nutmeg or Bay State land, and it appears that Mass. just decided to let Connecticut have this one. The sloped half-mile trail to the falls starts at the state’s northwest tip and crosses into the town of New Marlborough, MA to reach the foot of the cascade. I’m still not sure how Campbell Falls became a Connecticut landmark. Maybe a former Massachusetts governor lost their dog around here or something. Either way, it rules.

#7: Enders Brook Falls. Descending from the Litchfield Hills back to the Connecticut River and the Hartford metro area might leave you feeling bittersweet…if the novelty of Connecticut casades hasn’t faded after taking in six of them! But you’re not out of the woods just yet, thankfully. West of Granby, the immersive Enders State Forest has its own sequence of falls—the most elegant yet varied of the day! Enders Brook Falls basically amounts to a buffet of waterfall genres. Horsetails, plunges, slides, you name it. The tallest of them is around 30 feet, and a boardwalk path that offers primo views of each fall. Think of Enders Brook Falls as the final number in a musical, in which the entire cast that you’ve spent two hours watching gets trotted out to belt out the song. You could also liken it to the finale of a fireworks show, when the pyrotechnicians take whatever is left in the arsenal and set it off at once, letting the whole place fucking rip.

Alternatively, if you decide to do the Connecticut Waterfall Crawl in counterclockwise order, then visiting Enders Brook Falls will be like those times when firework handlers accidentally ignite all the rockets and flares at the start; which is special in its own way.

CLICK HERE for a Google Map of the Connecticut Waterfall Crawl

As far as outdoor recreation is concerned, there are the four seasons that most of us live by, and then there are the micro-seasons; special, short-lived events that can turn a routine walk outside into a treasured memory that you’ll revisit for years. It might be exploring the Providence Riverwalk just in time to spot tens of thousands of herring in the water, swimming upstream and down to fuck. Or you might be visiting Southern California and hiking an oceanside trail on some evening between June and October, when higher concentrations of bioluminiscent plankton can cause the waves to glow.

Either of these are reason enough to plan a trip. But this week, to my horror, I realized that I’ve been sleepwalking through one of the most unique micro-seasons in places that experience colder and soggier conditions during the winter. Regions in which the conditions that materialize between November and April are enough to make people look out their bedroom windows and say, “I would not want to be playing golf today.”

We’ve visited golf courses in Mind The Moss before—between the subversive joy of trespassing on a golf course, to the unsung landscape architecture that make some mini-golf courses better than others. And every time I’ve written about golf courses, with their sculpted beauty, recreational exclusivity, and dodgy ethics, a lot of you have responded with comments, rants, and policy ideas; all of which I appreciated. The golf course seems to be an object of shared fascination and frustration for many of us. So as we approach the last days of March, I want to encourage you to take advantage of your dwindling opportunity to go for a hike…across a municipally-owned golf course.

According to the National Golf Foundation, there are around 2,939 municipally-owned golf courses in America—which boils down to 18% of our total golf courses. Contrary to what one might assume in our age of inequality, privatization, and austerity, public golf courses are actually doing well, with strong visitation rates and sustained growth against a broader backdrop of golf course shrinkage! Think about that for a moment. As total golf course real estate declines, municipal golf course territory is expanding. That’s pretty special in this moment of American culture and history. The problem is that this expansion of land and opportunity for golfers comes at a cost, paid by folks who enjoy hiking, birding, forest bathing, and other activites that don’t pair well with flying balls that can crack skulls. For those of us huddling under that umbrella, there’s a seasonal window when municipal golf courses become accessible to us, and it’s now.

Consider Franklin Park, the southern crown jewel of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace park system, which connects several neighborhoods here in Boston. Nearly half of Franklin Park’s 527 rustling acres is occupied by the William J. Devine Golf Course. In the summer, it’s a forbidden zone for anyone who’s not wielding a club, but now—if you can look past all the Canada Goose shit—the hills of this golf course are downright romantic. On a sunny late winter/early spring day, you can even detect a hint of green in those hills. Their topography is not unlike the verdant humps of The Shire, as seen in The Fellowship of the Ring. To freely walk across such humps, in a city no less, is a special type of outdoor excursion. So that’s what I did on a bright Tuesday morning this week. I got up early, threw my laptop and work supplies in a backpack, and instead of jumping on the bus or train, I spent a lovely hour squelching my way across the William J. Devine Golf Course and enjoying the solitude of being there at the end of winter. My eventual destination was a bus stop near Egleston Square, on the north side of Franklin Park, but hiking there via the course allowed for the most naturally immersive morning walk I’ve had since Boston’s first snowstorm of 2026.

That’s just one example of what a municipal golf course hike can look like. A planned scenic detour on your morning commute, if you happen to live near a golf course. The municipal golf course takes many forms, and some of them are palatial enough to be worthy of regional travel. At the far eastern edge of Long Island, New York’s Montauk Point is packing a monster municipal golf course—buffered by woodlands, ponds, and of course, lots of sand traps. And since the Montauk Downs State Park Golf Course is ultimately a small piece of a vacation destination that draws hordes of visitors every summer, the golf course is within a short walking distance of other curiosities that can make for a full day of exploring; like the Arthur W.B. Wood Windmill House (the only house in Montauk with a windmill!) to the Fort Hill Cemetery (moody as hell!) Better yet, the Montauk MTA train station offers direct rail service to New York City and it’s less than an hour from the Montauk Downs golf course by foot. You can experience Montauk’s canopies, slopes, and seabreeze in a most unusual manner if you go ASAP.

Most golf courses in places with wintery climates tend to open back up for tee time in early-to-mid April. So I’m not exaggerating when I say that these next few weeks are your final chance to experience a golfscape that’s truly accessible to the greater public until this time in 2027. Probably, at least. I imagine that as summer droughts become more regular in more regions of the U.S., the question of whether maintaining golf courses is ethical will keep flaring up. (If a town or city is using limited resources to keep public land healthy and safe, it will be tougher to justify those expenditures if a large piece of land is only usable for a niche segment of the public.) As that question looms, it’s possible that some municipal golf courses could be converted into public lands of more uses. There’s already a precedent for cities buying private golf courses and turning them into parkland. Last year, Denver scooped up the 155-acre Park Hill Golf Course and voters there approved a $70 million public investment to transform the course into a rewilded park with trails, athletic facilities, and community gathering spaces. The architecture firm Sasaki is co-leading the project with Denver’s Parks and Recreation office, and the completed park will be one of the Mile High City’s biggest.

For now, most of us will have to imagine what a rewilded golf course could look like. But if you’re able to take a walk across your closest municipal course this weekend or next week, savoring all the soggy grass beneath your feet and the immense quietude that follows you from hole to hole—on the eve of golf season firing back up again—you might get a slightly sharper picture of how these polarizing green spaces could facilitate good health and happiness for a lot more of us, somewhere down the road.

I didn’t think I was going to be able to publish Mind The Moss this past week because, well, the last two weeks have been kind of insane. I’m not sure where to start. I had to deal with multiple health emergencies—including one of my own, that almost led to a broken toe—and this meant dealing with all the structural problems and indignities of our for-profit health care system. And while I’m relieved to report that the crisis phase seems to be over (pounding hard on wood), I can’t say the same for what’s happening beyond the localized scope of my daily life. Our president is dragging us into a war of choice that’s becoming deadlier each day. The cost of everything we need to survive is getting higher and forcing people to make terrible choices. And here in Boston, we’re still bracing for the possibility of an ICE surge, like the one inflicted upon Minneapolis.

All of which is a way of saying that millions of us are hacking our way through a world of shit right now. And this would be overwhelming and exhausting enough if all these things amounted to a recent detour into chaos—a sudden change in topography after you’ve been walking through a gentler, placid landscape. But what makes the stress of 2026 even more burdensome is that it’s just the latest escalation of a prolonged time period that’s been shaped by mass anxiety, instability, and trauma. Some people will cite the 2016 election and Donald Trump’s first presidential term as the beginning of this chronic nightmare, when the wheels of daily living started falling off. Personally, I would point to the COVID-19 pandemic. Horrendous as Trump’s first term was, there were still some “guardrails” to protect the world from his most sadistic impulses. And the pandemic marked the end of any breathing room that people found during those first four years. It was a global crisis characterized by mass death, illness, and isolation. And I feel fairly confident in saying that millions us have not recovered from that crisis.

I was talking about this with my friend and decades-long hiking buddy George a few weeks ago—not long after I followed him into some scrubby woods in Plano, Texas. It was the final 15 minutes of our hour-ish call, the topic had turned from the alarming state of the world to a possible path forward, and George proposed an idea that you don’t often hear in American life. What if, before moving forward, we took a minute?

Think about the crises we’ve weathered over the last decade. Again, we’ll go with the pandemic as the Godzilla of these crises. When was the last time you saw or heard a national political leader or public figure create a space in which the enormity of what was suffered and lost during the pandemic could be felt and honored? In which the millions who struggled in solitude during the pandemic could finally feel seen for a moment, beyond the bounds of their respective lives? If you’re having a tough time identifying a moment when we did this on a national scale, well….I’m not faring any better than you are. Because we never really had an intentional moment for national acknowledgment of the pandemic. Just as we never had a moment to recognize the things that occurred during Trump’s first term and how dangerous those years were.

Instead, as is often the case when control of the government changes hands from one party to another, the Biden/Harris administration primarily chose to “look forward, as opposed to looking backward.” Those were the same words that Barack Obama used in 2009 to explain why he wouldn’t pursue investigations of war crimes that occurred on George W. Bush’s watch during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While Biden and his team at least pursued prosecution of the insurrectionists who had stormed the U.S. Capitol and killed a police officer in January 2021, the first Trump administration and its architects mostly escaped any accountability for their actions. Just as the architects of the 2008 financial crisis, the Bush-Cheney wars, and other calamities were spared.

What this pattern yields is a dual-fold crisis of mental and civic health. When we fail to acknowledge a moment of profound, mass suffering—and the decisions that created this suffering or made it much worse—what we’re really doing is avoiding the work of healing. And that’s the thing which is often underappreciated in American life. Healing isn’t just something that happens with time. It takes a lot of intentional work, and this can be tough or even painful. It requires coming together to build something close to a consensus as to what happened, and what can happen next. In a personal context, it might mean talking with a health care provider and family members. But in a political context, this means more dialogue between elected leaders and communities, and an understanding that “looking backward” is often the first step of truly moving forward.

Last week, I took a short breather from the chaos and met up with my aunt Jorden for a walk on a trail that she had wanted to show me for months. The Clipper City Rail Trail is a recent addition to the North Shore realm of Newburyport, Massachusetts. It sets off from the commuter rail station outside the town center and it shoots through corridors of trees and power lines to the local Harborwalk. Right now, the Clipper City Rail Trail covers 3.9 miles, but it can be used as a means of connecting to additional rail trails and walking routes around Newburyport. Within a minute of hopping onto the trail from the Henry Graf Jr. Memorial Skating Rink (you can park here for free, if driving), we were encountering several forms of artwork and historic relics that have been staged along the trail. At one point, I posed for a photo in a replica of an early 20th Century steam engine. And a while later, as we segued to the waterside path of the Harborwalk, we found something else that inspired a literal moment of silence.

At first, all I saw was a wheel of dark granite, on which a school of white fish appeared to be swiming in circles. And then, I read the words. “For those who died and those who survived and all we lost during the COVID-19 pandemic. We shall remember.”

This pandemic memorial was installed on the Harborwalk back in 2023, after the worst of the crisis had passed. It was created by Michael Updike, a local sculptor and artist whose first intricate public project was the gravestone for his father, the author John Updike. It’s a beautiful sight in itself, but the surrounding landscape and the weather that afternoon amplified its power. The sky was the color of ashes and it was sleeting intermittently. Piles of rotten snow still dotted the grass nearby. But there was a faint warmth in the air—a tangible sign of spring. And just a handful of yards beyond the little white fish, swimming in their circles, Jorden and I watched the watery heft of the Merrimack River flowing forward, out and into the indefinite possibilities of the ocean.

Before our saunter, while toggling around various maps of the Clipper City Rail Trail, I had found a possible way to walk a much longer scenic loop around the Merrimack, on a patchwork of rail trails that run through Newburyport and nearby Salisbury. This loop walk would take the better part of a day, being around 13 miles in length, and it starts and finishes at the Newburyport train station—nixing a car from the equation! I had hoped to take the commuter rail back up there this coming weekend and spend some more quality time with Michael Updike’s pandemic monument and the nearby riverscape and wetlands, after a longer and more contemplative walk. Unfortunately, this past weekend, I slammed my pinky toe into the wooden leg of the couch at my apartment. And while I managed to avoid a bone fracture, I’m currently wearing a stiff soled surgical shoe and taping the little guy to his slightly larger neighboring toe. It’s an injury I’ve had before, and I should be back to walking and hiking in a week or so. But maybe you could get to Newburyport sooner; for a short walk, or the longer one.

It’s not often that a small piece of the landscape seems to offer a window to what a future could look like. But the Newburyport pandemic monument is in a league of its own. It is a depiction of our ability to remember and to continue living, with its white fish swimming around and around, and the flow of the Merrimack beckoning. Right after Trump’s re-election, I lamented the absence of a future that acknowledges the anxiety and immiseration that so many of us are still suffering…and how this deficit of vision made it easier for Trump to return to the White House, by promising the hellish inversion of such a future. As has always been the case, our job now—as a nation—is bringing that better, kinder, more humane and opportune future back into focus. The nightmare that we’re suffering at the moment won’t last forever. And when it ends, by election results or less conventional mechanisms, we’ll once again be presented with “looking backward” and “moving forward,” as if the two are binary, either/or choices.

The case for moving forward, without acknowledgment or accountability, has always been a way for politicians—and to some degree, the rest of us—to dodge the labor of doing both of these things. Making this mistake over and over again has brought us to this crux. For the good of our health, the next turning point should be different. It must include the space for recognizing what tens of millions have been forced to deal with since Trump re-entered the Oval Office. It must lead to prosecutions, for the laws that were broken. And it should bring us to a place of re-imagining what a real future can look like. Only then will we be ready to move forward, into something that can last.

CLICK HERE for a map of the 3.9-mile Clipper City Rail Trail walking route

CLICK HERE for a map of my 13.2-mile Newburyport riverscape walking route

I try to resist the temptation of using this newsletter to push my cinematic taste onto all of you too aggressively or frequently. But since the Oscars just went down, I want to use the footnote of this week’s dispatch to recommend one of the movies that was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film—not only because it’s my favorite movie from 2025, but because it involves walking through the landscape. That film is Sirāt, directed by Galician filmmaker Oliver Laxe, and the setup alone had me running for the nearest theater. A middle-aged father is searching for his daughter, who’s been missing for months, and he ends up at an electric music rave in the Moroccan desert (on the tip that she might be there.) He strikes out, but he also meets a small chosen family of nomadic ravers who are heading to another rave that’s even deeper in the desert. And that means another potential opportunity to find the missing daughter. But the desert is an incredibly harsh place, rife with elemental dangers. And to make things worse, a global war seems to be breaking out, just beyond the horizon line.

”Sirāt” is an Arabic word that describes a razor-thin bridge between paradise and hell. And that’s what the desert trip in Sirāt starts to resemble. Sometimes it mesmerizes, and other times it’s horrifying. But what sets Sirāt apart from other movies that have trafficked in merciless landscapes is its lack of nihilism. This movie is grounded in the idea that kindness is stubbornly persistent, even in the worst of times. Don’t get me wrong; Sirāt is an intense cinematic experience that had me periodically gasping. It stares at mortality without flinching. But when I staggered out into daylight, with the film’s techno beats still echoing in my head, I felt something that surprised me. Hope.