Dear Moss People,

If you’ll indulge me—after last week’s back-to-back retrospective newsletters—I’d like to look backward in time once more. Briefly. Before we take a look at the road ahead.

Back in the summer of 2021, when I decided to start this newsletter and kick things off with a story about the rare, west coast-style switchback pathway that allows hikers to reach the bottom of Vermont’s Ball Mountain Dam, all of this felt like an experiment. I wanted to see how many people would be interested in reading stories that were too weird or niche to sell to mainstream magazines and websites in the outdoors sector. I was surprised by how many of you demonstrated interest by subscribing to Mind The Moss in those early months—and in several cases, even paying for subscriptions! Any writer will confess to suffering from imposter syndrome at times, and at first, I felt this too; intensely skeptical that running a weekly publication was within my wheelhouse.

Then, as months became years and I realized that I was running my own publication, I sometimes found myself wrestling with a different question. How long can this last?

I would imagine that quite a few of you subscribe or have subscribed to a handful of newsletters from writers you’ve enjoyed following. That’s because Mind The Moss was launched in the middle of a newsletter boom that shook the foundations of modern media. Basically, traditional media companies were losing revenue, cutting jobs, and scaling back coverage. Tech companies like Substack took advantage of this sectoral instability, by offering platforms that journalists and writers who were employed or contracted by media companies could use to start their own show; with the option of selling paid subscriptions. In fact, Substack lured some pretty big writers away from these companies with fat advances. One of the early adopters was neoliberal pundit and Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias. Another—whose work I appreciate far more—was former Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr, whose newsletter (Ty Burr’s Watch List) began here before moving over to Ghost; another big player in the newsletter space.

As it happened, this newsletter bonanza was discussed in seismic terms that struck me as a tad hyperbolic, even at the optimistic heights of the boom. The idea was that paid newsletters woud facilitate better storytelling, create real competition for traditional media, and forge stronger connections between writers and readers. And I do believe in the third part of this! Because one of the great joys of writing and publishing Mind The Moss each week has been hearing back from many of you—whether you found a story nourishing, took issue with any points I raised, or simply wanted to put a couple of typos on my radar. Prior to setting up the newsletter, I found that anything I wrote that was published online yielded crickets (not even hate mail!) while stories of mine that appeared in print seemed to spur much more reader engagement and feedback.

I have a theory about this. Most of us are suffering from some level of digital fatigue, with more and more of our waking hours consumed by texting, apps, scrolling, and resetting passwords. So it means a LOT to me when I open my computer each week and find a couple of comments left on the most recent Mind The Moss story; a sign that several of you pushed through any such digital fatigue and read a story that is, technically speaking, a long and dense email that I sent you. That is…pretty special!

And again, it’s also quite remarkable that a lot of you decided that Mind The Moss has been worthy of monthly or annual investment—especially given the explosion of indie newsletters since 2021. Most literature on the newsletter business suggests that when you launch a newsletter, you can expect roughly 10% of your total subscribers to level up to paid subscriptions. Over the last three years, that percentage for Mind The Moss has been closer to 12%, and to be completely transparent, this has translated to about $11,600 of annual writer income (after Substack and Stripe have each taken their cuts.)

So when I say THANK YOU, it’s coming straight from the heart.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that this revenue has been career changing. A portion of that Moss income has been funneled into stories that would be difficult to sell to a household name publication—like my reporting on urban trails in San Francisco and around Chicago. And the rest has made it easier for me to sweat a little less about the brutal cost of living in America; a burden that so many of us have been struggling with.

That’s why I’ve always been a bit bearish about the notion that indie newsletters will be a long term game-changer for the media biz. As enlightening, entertaining, and intriguing as a newsletter might be, it’s a fundamentally different thing than a paper or magazine that offers direct access to lots of writers covering lots of topics. Getting the same experience from the newsletter landscape—which would mean subscribing to at least 20 different newsletters—would get really expensive, really fast. This would be a lot to ask of audiences in the most optimistic economic climates. But in a climate like this, with throat-tightening prices for housing, healthcare, utilities, transportation, and groceries, a lot of us are taking longer, harder looks at our budgets and trying to make every dollar go further. That’s why I decided to make all December stories for Mind The Moss paywall-free. In acknowledgment of what we’re suffering right now.

That decision is the start of the road into 2026, and where Mind The Moss is going.

Truth be told, I had been thinking about removing the paywalls for new “MTM” stories since last spring. I had a hunch that we were reaching the downslope of the newsletter boom bell curve—a moment when the sexy novelty of email newsletters would fade, and the ceiling of what newsletters can do would feel more palpable. Paired with the grim state of the economic landscape (from a consumer perspective), the worsening austerity we’ve experienced under the Trump administration, and the belt tightening that millions of us are preoccupied with, I wondered if it was time for a foundational change to how Mind The Moss works. The December experiment allowed for a taste of what that change might look like. It felt really good to have all of these new stories launching in a barrier free-way. It actually changed the manner in which I approached writing the most recent stories. And this also speaks to the future of Mind the Moss.

Those of you who arrived at the party on the earlier side alreadt know that Mind The Moss has undergone a bit of an evolution over time. The newsletter began as a more service-y publication focused on “unusual hiking in New England.” Each story would conclude with directions and maps for the featured trail or hiking experience. Back in 2024, the newsletter’s scope expanded to “the power of walking,” and the offerings changed too. Plenty of newsletters still finish with actionable adventure ideas, and others ended with more contemplative things to chew on. But since the beginning, we’ve looked at the intersections between the outdoors and the politics and cultural developments of our time. I do believe this is one of the things that makes Mind The Moss unique, given how often the outdoors is idealized as something pure, crystaline, and sequestered—a place where we can escape the cacophony and conflict. Having more freedom to write about all those intersections has yielded some of my favorite Mind The Moss stories to date and, judging by the data, some of your favorites too!

SO…..with the stage fully set now (thanks for bearing with me), here is what will be happening with Mind The Moss in 2026 and quite possibly for the longer haul too.

1. All new Mind The Moss stories will be published without paywalls—making the future of the newsletter free to the public! It will still be possible to purchase a paid subscription to Mind The Moss if you would like to support my work, and each paid subscription will still come with the perk of getting access to the hundreds of stories in the MTM archive. But having a paid subscription will no longer be a prerequisite for being able to read the latest newsletter each week. I’ve thought about this and it’s the direction that I feel best about, for continuing the long, strange trip of Mind The Moss.

2. As Mind The Moss approaches its fifth anniversary, expect more coverage of where outdoor recreation collides with politics and culture. If you enjoyed the recent story about the history of wassailing, my requiem to the art of walking home, or my early autumn PSA about why more of us should “touch grass,” good news. I’m planning to write a lot more stories like this in 2026 and beyond. 2025 was my first year of leaning harder in this direction, after 3.5 years of mostly covering “unusual hiking in New England,” and I’m looking forward to doubling down next year. That said, because I live in New England, many of the upcoming stories will be rooted here.

3. To simplify the format of Mind The Moss and honor its intersectional nature, I’m removing all “Sections” of the newsletter in 2026. This is the most technical change that’s coming. Back when Mind The Moss was primarily designed as a way of sharing hiking ideas, it made sense to have the newsletter organized into Sections. It began with six of them—one for each New England state. Then, during the evolution of 2025, I segued to a more thematic tri-sectional model. Today, stories are placed in one of three topical categories: A Walk In The Woods (backcountry stories), A Walk In The City (urban stories), and Walks Of Life (ideas-centric stories.) But the more I think of Mind The Moss and its intersectional nature, the less I feel that that these Sections make much sense anymore. So for the road ahead, I’m publishing and grouping all of the new and older stories under the simplest banner: The newsletter name and logo.

And finally, last but definitely not least…

4. Next summer, I will be releasing the first Mind The Moss book! As in, a real deal, physical book that you can leaf through, throw in your backpack, and/or loan to your friends—with a beautiful cover and a curated lineup of Mind The Moss stories; a few of which will be book exclusives! Why? A couple reasons: I’ve been thinking about ways to celebrate the upcoming half-decade anniversary of Mind The Moss, and after seeing the wonderful anthology book created by my friends at Mountain Gazette, the idea for a similar Mind The Moss book took hold of me. The timing of this also struck me as fitting, given the onslaught of digital fatigue that I touched on earlier. Finally, there’s the question that’s something of an elephant in the room, when it comes to the Internet and our chronically online lives. What if all of this suddenly disappeared?

That may sound overdramatic and I know it’s unlikely, but given how our economy is now built on top of an AI industry that could prove to be a bubble, I’m a little warier of putting infinite faith in our tech overlords and infrastructure than I was in 2021. Books aren’t impervious to calamities either, but they’re somewhat harder to…erase?

In any event, watch this space in May for more deets on the book and its launch date!

With regard to the first and biggest change for 2026 (nixing the paywall for all future stories), my ultimate hope is that this will make it easier for more readers to continue enjoying Mind The Moss amidst the turbulence and suffering of the present. At the same time, I can understand how this change might re-shape the value proposition of a paid subscription for Mind The Moss, and that’s why I’m applying the paywall-free approach to new stories, and not to the full archive. Hundreds of you made it possible for me to spend nearly 5 years writing and sharing hundreds of stories; creating that whopper of an archive and taking the newsletter from its gonzo infancy to the current crossroads. However you decide to continue down the road ahead, please know that being able to write Mind The Moss each week has been an incredible gift—and the ultimate ride. Kind of like those legendary waves of the “50 Year Storm” that Patrick Swayze surfs at the end of Point Break. The crucial difference, of course, is that Swayze surfs one wave—the biggest—and even as the newsletter boom that started Mind The Moss crests and spills, the water beyond it is already starting to froth and take shape.

That’s where I’ll see you in 2026. In the meantime, enjoy the last few days of the year with people you care about, food you appreciate, and the places that make your heart sing—natural or built. And also, please reach out if you have any questions. It’s a lot to digest, announced during a week when lots of us are already doing some digesting.

Thank you, and Vaya con Dios,
Miles Howard

(PS: If you’ve never seen Point Break, go watch the whole film before viewing this clip.)

#3: How to walk across a National Park

Getting to enjoy a National Park by strolling from place to place and peeling off of the trails for grub, grog, and rest is one of those fantasies that’s near-impossible to realize in most places—because, like America itself, most NPS sites are designed for cars first and foremost. But Acadia, the only National Park in New England, is an exception. The park’s labyrinthine trail network connects landmarks such as Jordan Pond and Cadillac Mountain to the neighboring towns! This, combined with the free shuttles that run in Acadia in summer and early fall, makes it possible to not just explore the park without a car, but to literally walk from one end of the park to the other. And while I originally reported and wrote about this for The Boston Globe, that feature story (included in the special Wild Issue from the Ideas team) was a partial re-telling of my cross-park hike. So…I laid it out in more detail for you all, and I added some How To seasoning.

#2: Long walk home

For those of you seeing the above image for the first time, that’s me during the spring of 2013—working as a seasonal caretaker at Zealand Falls Hut in the White Mountains and setting off for the long 8-mile walk from the hut to Route 302. Twice a week, I had to hike down to the valley and then hike back to the hut with fresh food supplies. This felt like a sole-crushing ordeal at first, but with time, it turned into one of my favorite rituals. It brought me back to the 1990s, when walking to school or around your town or city was fairly commonplace for a lot of kids. And it made me think about what we stand to lose, if we’re too burdened by work and plagued by car-centric planning to experience the cathartic power of a long walk home. Evidently, a lot of you have felt that power at some point. Because since this particular Mind The Moss story was first published in April, and it’s hovered near the top of the most widely-read stories in the newsletter’s history. This was the greatest surprise for me. It was a more personal and contemplative story, with no obvious outlet for hiking or traveling. I guess it worked!

But there was another story—published rather recently—that snagged the top spot…

#1: Did Mark Zuckerberg just buy a mountain in Maine?

In a way, I find it fitting that this story—in which the purchase of a beloved mountain near Moosehead Lake is linked to Mark Zuckerberg—caught more eyeballs than any other in 2025. We are living through a scourge of insatiable greed from the wealthiest people in the world, and the vast majority of us are paying for it, through the loss of public resources and safety net programs, and in cases like this, the seizure of lands that we’ve enjoyed recreationally. Whether the person behind the LLC that purchased Burnt Jacket Mountain and fenced off its hiking trails was actually Mark Zuckerberg is kind of beside the point. This kind of thing happens often enough these days that it’s wholly believable that Zuck yanked the mountain away from locals. But it could have just as easily been Larry Ellison—who’s hard at work acquiring more media companies and reshaping them in his own reactionary image. Or Elon Musk, whose net worth is about to surpass $1 trillion. As I mentioned the other day, public access to the great outdoors is intrinsically political, and we overlook this to our own detriment. Because once a place like Burnt Jacket Mountain is suddenly lost , it’s often lost for a long time.

That said, if there’s one thing that I’ve learned about Mainers, it was perfectly stated by Steve Yocom, a photographer interviewed by the New York Times for this story.

“The people at Moosehead will hardly trust somebody if they come to town doing good,” Yocom said. “But if you come to town and take something from them right off the bat? Good luck.”

Thank you all SO much for another full year of reporting and writing Mind The Moss! I can’t believe the path has brought us this far, beyond the Summer 2021 launch of the newsletter, when many of us were still getting our first COVID-19 vaccines. What a ride.

Sincerely,
Miles

One of my favorite things about end-of-the-year retrospectives is how they can shine light on things that we inexplicably walked past—multiple times—between January and late December. Last night, I led about 30 Boston residents and visitors on a hike through the shaggier west woods of Franklin Park, and as we approached our final destination (the great Drawdown Brewing), one of the hikers pointed to a gorgeous mural at the intersection of Granada Park and School Street that I had never seen before. It was a beautiful piece called BRILLA, from the artist Silvia López Chavez, and despite turning from School onto Granada too many times to count, I had missed the mural. Why? Probably because when I made the turn, I was anticipating the similarly gorgeous flowers at Chilcott and Granada Community Garden, just a few steps ahead.

I would like to think that revisiting a newsletter with the heft and frequency of Mind The Moss might offer similar belated “discoveries” for some of you. Especially if you’ve been receiving the newsletter on a weekly basis for a year or even longer. Inevitably, we miss things in the landscape, and that’s why I love re-reading books that stirred something inside me, or movies that I couldn’t stop thinking about after the initial screening. (If you saw and enjoyed One Battle After Another, watch it again and pay close attention to Avanti, the bounty hunter.) So to celebrate the fifth winter of Mind The Moss, I’ve combed through the archives and identified the 10 most widely-read stories of 2025. There were some surprises here, which left me feeling vindicated for taking the newsletter in some weird or risky directions at times. Thank you for that!

Now—without further ado—here are the Top 10 Mind The Moss stories of 2025:

#10: Meet me at Lantern Hill

Sometimes, I start writing a newsletter and I wonder, “How many people are actually going to follow me down this path?” I wasn’t sure how a story about the little-known woodland trails around Foxwoods—and the idea of trails as an escape hatch from our gambling addictions—would register. But apparently several of you were just as intrigued by the so-called Pequot Trails as I was when I went down there back in April to climb Lantern Hill itself. The view of Foxwoods’ blue-and-white citadel, which is owned and operated by the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, is worth the rock scrambling once the snow melts next year. And hey, if you do end up following some of the trails to the casino itself, remember: A bit of analog gambling once in awhile is part of American life. Just try to remember the rustling world outside of the building.

#9: Weekend hike at Bernie’s

I can’t say I was surprised that a story about going on a community hike with Bernie Sanders in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom proved popular. But I do have to wonder if any elected officials or political staffers read this particular story. Because there’s kind of a brilliant idea at the heart of it; especially for politicians with star power. You put out the word that you’re leading a local hike, in lieu of a town hall. You use your star power to get people through the door. Then, once the hike has begun and the masses are moving, you pull an Irish Goodbye and slip into a vehicle staged along the route. That’s what Bernie did on that toasty Saturday morning in June. He tricked us into spending time walking and talking with each other. And we were all better off for it.

#8: Collecting snails

On the special occasions when Mind The Moss ventures overseas, I’m mindful of the risk involved. It’s very easy to write something that feels more like a vacation diary to audiences. But I had a feeling that the genius of the Slow Ways project—a grassroots effort to map walking routes between every town and city in the U.K.—would resonate with many of you. I mean, how do you hear a pitch like that and not get all tingly and starry-eyed? In the last two years, I’ve found two ways to get over there and explore a few of the 10,000+ routes that Slow Ways adventurers have created. (I recently wrote a big story about one of these rambles for the fifth issue of ORI magazine.) And here’s the thing to remember: more Slow Ways are being proposed! And they’ll need testing.

#7: Written on the mountains

As several of you will remember, Mind The Moss went through an evolution last year; expanding from a more nuts-and-bolts “Unusual New England Hiking” newsletter and wading deeper into the intersectionality between politics, culture, and the oudoors. In February, National Park Service employees suspended an upside-down American flag from Yosemite’s El Capitan—in protest of the Trump administration slashing the NPS budget and firing a ton of NPS workers—and the outdoor recreation community took notice. This was a moment that starkly demonstrated how access to the outdoors is inherently political. (A reality that a lot of people deny or overlook.) And now, with no end in sight to the austerity and Trump’s more recent dick move of revoking free entry to National Parks on Juneteenth and MLK Day, the ground is seeded for more protests.

#6: Punked by a pond

Now here’s one of those stories that you could probably never get published in one of the mainstream outdoor adventure magazines—a love letter to ponds that can kick your ass. Using Rhode Island’s Long Pond as the backdrop, I wanted to illustrate how suffering to reach a natural landmark that we associate with tranquility and peace can actually make the “reward” even more humbling and serene. I wonder if a few of you have been punked by a pond too. If so, I’d love to learn about some of the ponds that destroyed you. I need ideas for where to take cocky hiker friends visiting from Boulder.

#5: Marginalized

I used to bristle at the old Robert Frost chestnut which tells us that “good fences make good neighbors.” And then I took a walk on the Marginal Way of Ogunquit Maine—a seaside path with continuous fencing on one side, to keep walkers from traipsing onto the lawn of a resort or a mansion. Paired with fences on the other side of the path (to prevent people from tumbling down cliffsides toward the rocks and the water) the Marginal Way can feel like a corridor built for livestock. But here’s the thing: Maine is one of the few states where you can own the full extent of a beach, all the way down to the low tide line. And the Marginal Way, for all its limitations and scenic wonders, is a rare, successful example of what a public path through privatized land can look like.

#4: When you break a mountain

Climbing up to the old white marble quarry in Dorset, Vermont—where raw material for the Gettysburg National Cemetery tombstones was harvested—had been a bee in my bonnet for a few years. I expected to be wowed by the place in a visual sense, but what surprised me about the quarry was how palpable the shadows of history felt up there; in the same way that visiting the legendary Carrara marble quarries of northern Italy might conjure visions of the old anarchist laborers waging strikes after suffering too many workplace deaths. Or luring fascist soldiers into the quarries during World War II and dropping marble blocks onto them. This story was inspired by the news of Trump’s ballroom and all of the gold that will be needed for the interior. Where does that come from? And what impression does it leave on the landscape? Time will tell.

Due to Substack’s email size limitations, the Top 3 Mind The Moss stories of 2025 will be revealed tomorrow in a followup newsletter! Until then, enjoy this old banger by Cerrone.

Look close enough at any beloved artwork or tradition, and sometimes you’ll find a piece missing; deliberately lost, for political reasons. One of the best examples is the so-called forbidden verses of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” which made the song’s implicit critique of private land ownership pretty explicit. Sing ‘em with me!

”There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
The sign was painted, said ‘Private Property.’
But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing.
This land was made for you and me.”

*CHORUS* (we all know this part, hopefully)

“One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple,
by the relief office I saw my people.
As they stood hungry,
I stood there wondering if God blessed America for me.”

There’s a lot happening here, between Guthrie’s condemnation of land hoarding and his observation that the American dream of bootstrapping prosperity is missing a few pieces itself. I’m sure you can understand why these verses were scrubbed from the cultural lexicon via the 1951 recording that millions of us are familiar with. Back then, using the platform of a major record label to explore the darker depths of American capitalism—while not easily done today either—was enough to get you frog-marched before Joseph McCarthy, at the height of his anti-communist crusades. Decades later, the song remains the same. But occasionally, you’ll hear a version with the forbidden verses; exhumed and dusted off for a new generation that relates to Guthrie’s words.

There are holiday traditions with redacted and sanitized origin stories too. This week, my Boston neighborhood is one of hundreds across New England holding a “Holiday Stoll,” in which people put on coats and walk a commercial district well after dark. The streets are illuminated with twinkly lights. The shops and restaurants stay open later than usual. And there might even be caroling or opportunities to meet Santa. It’s the civic equivalent of a creamy peppermint hot chocolate. Nourishing if timed right, and broadly appealing. But you also have to wonder: What if—just as there are sweet and festive drinks made for adults only—there was a holiday stroll that went much harder?

Well….if you happened to live in England during the Middle Ages, you were in luck.

Each Christmas, groups of peasants would liquor up, bundle up, and engage in an activity that you might have heard about in old school holiday jingles—Wassailing. You ventured out into the night with your mates, walked to the nearest feudal lord’s house, and knocked on the door. What happened next is where the history tends to get murky, depending on where you’re getting the story from. Carols such as “Here We Come A-Wassailing” offer a treacly, two-dimensional view of what went down:

”Here we come a-wassailing
Among the leaves so green,
Here we come a-wandering,
So fair to be seen.

Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail, too,
And God bless you, and send you
A happy new year,
And God send you a happy new year.

We are not daily beggars
That beg from door to door,
But we are neighbors’ children
Whom you have seen before.”

Now if you skimmed that second verse and thought, “Huh, that’s interesting. I wonder why the wassailers felt like they needed to acknowledge their feudal lord’s disdain for beggars,” you are getting closer. Most carols that invoke wassailing offer listeners the impression that the commoners were out on the town to spread good cheer and offer their best wishes to their employers. And while that’s technically true, it’s not all that the peasants were looking for. Consider the midpoint of the timeless, “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.” A brigade of wassailers has arrived, the door of the manor has just been opened, and the Yuletide cheers have been offered. Now, pay attention to these next two song verses, *especially* the line which is repeated thrice in the second verse:

”For we all want some figgy pudding,
For we all want some figgy pudding,
For we all want some figgy pudding, and a cup of good cheer!

And we won’t go until we get some,
and we won’t go until we get some,
and we won’t go until we get some, so bring it right here!”

What often goes unsaid whenever we talk about wassailing in 2025 is that the roving bands of peasants—tipsy, merrily rowdy, and sometimes costumed as animals or in cross-dress—wanted some holiday loot from the ruling class. Maybe it was a heaping bowl of figgy pudding, or a more potent holiday cocktail like Lamb’s Wool; a special ale jacked up with cream, sugar, and nutmeg. Savvier lords would have these offerings ready for the wassailers. Because wassailers didn’t take kindly to stingier noblemen. If their entreaties for presents were shot down, the wassailers would hurl insults. And in some cases, they would vandalize the lord’s manor before moving on to the next one!

Now, I want you to perform a thought exercise. Let’s imagine that wassailing had not faded into obscurity after initially being imported to Boston in the 1700s. Assume that this boisterous tradition had continued for centuries, right up to the present day. So here’s your Saturday night agenda for this weekend. You’re meeting up with 15 to 20 friends and neighbors around 6pm, in costume, and pre-gaming with spiced beers or mistletoe margaritas. Then, you’re walking through the flurries together, singing carols on your way to the gates of Robert Kraft’s mansion. The Patriots owner and chairman of The Kraft Group walks to the gate, you offer your songs and dances, and…Kraft has no sweets or elixirs. Well. This is why you all brought spray paint and toilet paper rolls.

Fantasy aside, what intrigues me about wassailing and its lost prominence in English society is how strategic it could be; for the benefit of the ruling classes. If nothing else, wassailing was a short, planned window for the peasants to expel some of their pent-up populist energy before going back to underpaid work for the next 11 months. You might even say that wassailling was an exercise in controlled opposition—a mitigation meant to lower the temperature enough to prevent a full-scale pitchforks and torches revolt from breaking out. That gambit didn’t always pay off for the landowners. The English countryside saw plenty of localized uprisings between the Middle Ages and the 19th Century, when agricultural and economic restructurings brought about the decline of wassailing. But still, a historian could probably argue that wassailing played a role in preserving the social hierarchies that continue shaping U.K. society to this day.

So the question of whether we should revive wassailing—for the lopsided economic dystopia of the 21st Century—may sound like an immediate, “NOPE.” But here’s where I get stuck. Relentless exposure to hardship and cruelty isn’t really pushing the needle. Cathartic as it’s been for millions of us to see or take part in the huge, record breaking-protests against the Trump admininstraiton and the modern oligarchy, we *still* don’t have a formidible opposition party with a tangible and compelling counter-pitch for society. But there is one element of the No Kings protests that I believe offers some navigational guidance. Which element? The creative, frequently funny protest signs.

As my friend and fellow author Jay Heinrichs wrote back in mid-October, the peaceful Velvet Revolution that freed the Czechs from Soviet rule began irreverently, “with kids dressing up like American cowboys and Indians and hoboes.” A lot of the organizing for protests and other direct actions that fueled the revolution took place in venues for merriment like pubs; places where Emma Goldman would have found the kind of singing and dancing that make a revolution worth joining. And I can’t shake the hunch that this is what we’re still missing in the growing American resistance. There are some promising glimmers, like the frog costumes that protesters began wearing in Portland. But there’s a broader unmet need for more laughter, more songs, more costumes, and more mischief. I know that might sound oxymoronic or flippant, given the pervasive danger and demoralizing cruelty of our rulers. But finding ways to blow off steam—merrily, and in festive company—is a challenge that humans have figured out many times before, while suffering hideous repression. And I think we can do this again.

And even in their learned servitude, perhaps the old wassailers were on to something.

Friends: I’ve been back on my home turf in Boston for three weeks since wrapping up field research for the fall foliage guidebook that I spent most of the fall conducting. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this grateful to be resettled—alternating between being cozy at home and active in the community. On a recent Wednesday evening, a bunch of us put on headlamps, met up at a subway station in Dorchester, and hiked to the sands of Malibu Beach and the summit of Savin Hill itself. (Our next night hike—which you can sign up for—will take us into the forested Boston burbs!) Last weekend, I caught three Oscar bait movies in 72 hours thanks to the miracle of AMC A-List, which allows you to catch up to four weekly movies for only $25 per month. This afternoon, I need to drop off a few window insulation wrap kits for an anonymous mom of three from my neighborhood Facebook group, who’s been struggling to pay their heating bills.

For all of the terrible things about social media, it can offer a window into the lives of those around you; people whose sufferings were once invisible. And something that has become as seasonally routine for me as winter walks and movies is reading social media posts from neighbors being brave enough to ask for help with food, utilities, and other winter essentials that have become increasingly expensive since the onset of the pandemic. Even in “blue states” like Massachusetts, social safety net programs often come with burdensome means-testing hurdles that make it hard for people to get help. Because I guess the thought of one unqualified person receiving a penny is more odious to our lawmakers than hundreds or thousands getting their heat shut off when temperatures drop to freezing. Now, under Trump, the number may be millions.

I would imagine that a great deal of you are taking a hard look at your budget for the next several months. I certainly have been. Because when you’ve got executive leaders driven by insatiable greed, any government program that softens the blows of zombie capitalism is potential kindling for the woodstove at Larry Ellison’s ski chalet. So, in the interest of offering up something nice amid these dark times and briefly cleansing the palate of commerce, I have decided that for the remaining weeks of 2025, I am going to make every upcoming Mind The Moss newsletter free. Knowing that the newsletter has actually gotten lots of you out and about, in the sticks and streets, has made it clear to me that stories or ideas can be gateways to walking. And while walking isn’t a solution for what’s tormenting us, it could be a means of getting closer to finding one.

I am referring, of course, to the historic precedent of marches and demonstrations as change agents. Getting together to occupy and move through a space doesn’t offer a framework for a new normal, but it does break us out of isolation—thereby raising the odds that a real blueprint for something better future does materialize at some point.

You can witness a quieter version of this connective power at mass movement events that aren’t hitched to any cause beyond, “Hey, let’s get back together.” Consider the Turkey Trot, which some of you might have participated in on Thursday. A 5K road race staged just a few hours before the feasting of Thanksgiving is a proven way to deepen your appetite and jumpstart your metabolism before pushing Parker House rolls into your face later that afternoon. That’s why I initially started participating in these fun runs. But over time, I came to enjoy the presence and camraderie of all the runners most of all. It’s not that I was lacking for the warmth of family and friends on T-Day (something for which I’m deeply grateful.) Rather, the Turkey Trot allowed for everyone to experience some version of that warmth, no matter the windchill or the amount of ice on the sidewalk. I don’t know if this would be enough to stave off the pain of a Thanksgiving spent alone or in a household full of lingering resentments, as many of us experienced at some point in our lives. But it was still a fleeting comfort.

It’s enough to make me wonder if mass movement events could become a fixture of more seasons. Here in New England, the historybooks are packed with old ideas and lost traditions that could be reignited at any point. And earlier this summer, while on my way to a work conference in upstate New York, I made a stopover in the southern Berkshires town of Stockbridge to track one of those lost traditions in the local forest.

You see, in the mid-19th Century, it was a summer custom for Stockbridge residents to walk into those woods carrying torches. Just for the hell of it. The winding, glowing procession would make its way to the Ice Glen—a mossy ravine where a base layer of ice survives underneath the rocks, filling the ravine with cooling vapors. Those who didn’t participate in the torch parade often gathered to watch the torchbearers, and two witnesses of note were Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne. After seeing the torch parade re-emerge from the forest and cross the bridge over the Housatonic River, Sophia would subseqeuently write about this ethereal viewing experience, noting how, “It looked as if a host of stars had fallen out of the sky and broken into pieces.”

There are contemporary versions of light parades that offer a similar enchanting sight. In Boston, I have somehow managed to miss the Jamaica Plain Lantern Parade around Jamaica Pond each year. This event, organized by Spontaneous Celebrations, involves creating lanterns out of craft supplies, lighting them up, and circling the pond with the lanterns in hand. Multiple times, I have been driving back into the city after spending that Saturday or Sunday elsewhere, only to see a winding column of lights circling the dark pond, at which point I exclaim, “Shit! It was this weekend?!?” But as I followed the fern-flanked trail to the Stockbridge Ice Glen, listening to the soft patter of rain on the leaves overhead, I imagined the more visceral glow of torches illuminating the woods at night. And I wondered why we’ve allowed this tradition to either die or be hijacked.

The first outcome I sort of understand. Carrying a flaming stick through the forest is a very optimistic act, and I would assume that historic records only account for a small fraction of the times when 19th Century torchbearers were barbecued after tripping over a thick tree root. Handing out flaming torches to families with small kids seems like a pretty dodgy way to build community spirit and solidarity; unless putting out a giant brush fire togther, Days Of Heaven-style, is the real bonding experience there.

What’s more troubling is how torch parades have become something that many of us now associate with menace and cruelty. Remember all of those polo shirted neo-Nazis who invaded Charlottesville, Virginia with tiki torches back in 2017? That spectacle was borrowed from the Ku Klux Klan and Germany’s Third Reich, both of which routinely used torches in marches and gatherings that would usually lead to violence. Because a torch can be an instrument of possibility and destruction. You can use a torch to find your way through the world, by making it visible. Or you can use it to burn the world.

Torch events like the old Stockbridge Ice Glen parade present an intriguing queston. What if those of us don’t want to burn everything down could reclaim this tradition? It’s a question that the Town of Stockbridge is actively mulling over right now. According to a recent Berkshire Eagle story from Sally Bergmans, the local Selectman and Fire Chief have gotten behind a long-brewing plan to revive the torch parade sometime in the next few years. The ice glen would be lit up by “strategically placed flares,” the torches for participants would be designed by the local psychiatric health center with safety in mind, and the whole event would conclude with a bonfire and hot dog roast.

This wouldn’t have happened without enduring curiosity and support for an Ice Glen parade revival at the grassroots level. We’ll have to wait and see if the plan is greenlit by Stockbridge’s chief of police and its Parks and Recreation Commission. If approved, the reincarnation of the parade is something I’ll be putting on my calendar. But even if the idea is shot down out of safety concerns, there’s something to be said for trying to revive or take back what’s been lost. Imagine if we did this more often—even when what’s been lost is a tradition or activity that carries some risk. The people that have exacerbated the poverty and immiseration that millions are suffering right now are many things, but they are not afraid of being assertive. Re-taking the torch parade, for good, would at least demonstrate some willingness to fight back. You know, the thing that more and more Americans are saying they want to see from their elected leaders.

We should continue pushing our Senators and Representatives (even the ones we like) to be much bolder. But we can also start bringing the fight—and the light—ourselves.

The Stockbridge Ice Glen
Hike distance: 1.4 miles out-and-back
Elevation gain: 216 feet
CLICK HERE for a trail map

Because I enjoy shamelessly using Mind The Moss as a vehicle for amateur film critic musings, here are those three Oscar bait films that I mentioned watching earlier:

Wicked: For Good. *** out of ****. As someone unversed in musicals and the original Wicked book and Broadway show, I feel the least qualified to opine on Jon M. Chu’s two part movie adaptation. What I will say is that I went into the theater with friends who did know both of these worlds intimately, and I was pretty much swept off my feet by the music and the sense of place. When watched back-to-back with the first Wicked installment from 2024, I think the two films make for an even stronger piece.

Sentimental Value. **½ out of ****. I had really high hopes for this one, as a Nordic curious person in general and a huge fan of Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person In The World—one of my favorite films of the decade thus far! The idea of a filmmaker who was a lousy, absentee father (Stellan Skarsgard) reuninting with his daughters (Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) and driven by the hope of casting one in his final movie had promise. But despite terrific performances and a few scenes that I’ll likely remember for a long time, I think Trier trips into the same gulch as a lot of directors do when they make films about directors. There’s a little too much sympathy for the filmmaker, and the notion of art as a vehicle for understanding or reconciliation just didn’t feel honest here. That said, I’m clearly in the minority with my middling take!

Rental Family. *** out of ****. Now this was a nice surprise, on a couple of levels. It’s been great to see Brendan Fraser landing interesting film roles since re-emerging to headline The Whale in 2022, and I had no idea that he was working on this one—the story of an American actor living in Japan who ends up working with an agency that hires performers to impersonate friends or loved ones for clients. It’s directed and co-written by Hikari, who helmed the outstanding pilot episode of Beef (the highlight of the whole first season, in my opinion) and while I could have done with a little more background on Fraser’s character and how he ended up living a solitary life in Tokyo, the relationships that he develops with a number of clients are affecting enough that I just went along for the ride, with several laughs and some misting eyes along the way.

And with that, here is Underworld to close us out. On-the-nose, but what a lush track.

For someone who grew up in one of the most storied regions for chasing fall foliage, I don’t think I’ve ever understood the scale of allure that draws millions to New England from mid-September to late October. I can appreciate the way that fall colors light up the hills and valleys of the northeast, and how that irreplicable crunch of fallen leaves underfoot seems to make your nerve endings sigh. But spending upwards of $300 on a dated motel room—or driving many more hundreds of miles—just to stare at trees?

I still can’t fully wrap my head around it; particularly because fall foliage is a lot more more pervasive than seasonal travel trends might have you believing. While it’s tough to beat the northeast for sheer concentration of foliage, there are rustling corridors of auburn and gold throughout the U.S. and Canada. One of the reasons why I signed on to research and write a guidebook about fall foliage this fall—which is what I’ve been on the road doing for the last 1.5 months—was the opportunity to explore several of these corridors. But I also wondered if 7 solid weeks of leaf peeping, for occupational purposes, might finally help me see fall through the eyes of the meandering masses.

At the moment, I’m almost on my way back to Boston. I’ve just pulled off of I-495 and I’m posted up at a McDonalds right outside of Washington D.C., pilfering the free WiFi and caffeinating for the final push to Delaware; the last stop of my field research tour. The trees down here are still offering a toasty showcase of fall colors, and given what a strange and sporadic season we’ve had for fall colors, each yellowy bend in the road feels like a gift. (Southern Vermont, by contrast, had become a great mass of sticks as early as the first weekend of October!) And in a way, my current rest stop—one of the United States’ most ubiquitous and dreary fast food chains, as opposed to a charming country cafe with cider donuts—speaks to something that all of this foliage travel has really impressed upon me; something that might be a hard sell for reading audiences.

Consider how the word “hiking” almost always triggers images of very specific, usually grandiose natural landmarks. Yosemite’s Half Dome. Those red cliffs on Prince Edward Island. The Appalachian Trail and its legions of grizzled thru-hikers. When people are getting acquainted with hiking, these landmarks are often among their first adventure destinations—in the same way that fall foliage road trips typically involve setting the controls for the White Mountains or the Catskills. And it makes sense. When you are flirting with a new kind of experience, the most cranked up, Instagrammable version of that experience is often going to be the most inviting place to start. The experience might be a one-off, and if that’s the case, coming back home with something that you can revisit in your dreams and show off to your friends is an ideal outcome. If you live in a place where there are no deciduous trees, and you have one chance to see the fall transition in a region that does get colorful, I would urge you to head for the bustling and superlative leaf peeping venues. Drive the Kancamagus Highway! Wander those sepia woods in Lenox! And have a late lunch picnic in the hills of Arnold Arboretum!

But more broadly, I would encourage something less orthodox. When you’re plotting a fall foliage road trip and trying to figure out where exactly you should drive or walk, don’t spend too much time thinking about which byways or trails will be the prettiest. Because the fall foliage showcase is impossible to predict, regionally speaking. It can sneak up and surprise you with its vivid colors; often in some very unexpected places.

A few days ago, I was driving through the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania—the hills where Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house is nestled. A lot of Fallingwater photos depict the house against a backdrop of orange leaves, festooned with the plume-like cascades. But both of these features were muted during my visit. Most of the leaves had come down, and modest rainfall had reduced the falls to a trickle. It was still a privilege and a little thrill to be there, at this mythic architectural wonder that I had only seen depicted on film and with Lego bricks. But it kind of felt like showing up to a party that The Prodigy had been playing, moments after they had finished their set.

My destination for the evening was Pittsburgh—one of my favorite U.S. cities, where hundreds of staircases hidden in the hills offer a unique foliage chasing experience of their own. But to get there from Fallingwater, I had to drive one of the most loathed roads in the state. Pennsylvania Route 51 is a nightmarish throughway of tight lanes, aggressive gridlock, ugly commercial scenery on both sides, and traffic lights every 200 feet or so. Navigating the byway was making me sweat through the back of my shirt, purely from anxiety and frustration, as I watched my ETA on Google Maps get later and later. But as I reached the top of a hill where the road was flanked by gas stations and dealerships, I saw something unexpected—an explosion of rustling red trees. The tree canopy here was popping off, in too many shades to count! It was an improbably bucolic backdrop for the consumerist hellscape of Route 51 and the effect that it had on me was immediate and comforting. It felt like I had just run into an old buddy while sitting in a packed emergency room and waiting a nurse to call my name.

Whether you’re experiencing fall foliage for the first and only time, or co-living with it each September and October, the unpredictability of its presence can enhance those special moments when you do connect with the leaves. I wouldn’t exactly liken the fall foliage to a close friend; because a lot of us tend to see close friends often, thanks to regular, planned hang-outs. Fall foliage is more like an old lover that you sometimes reconnect with, spontaneously and intensely. Whether it’s a coffee together or a night together, you both know that this surprise reunion is fleeting, and that’s okay. You let it happen, and when it’s time to part ways, you’re a little blue. But you’re also grateful.

That, in my opinion, is the emotional pinnacle of what foliage chasing can be. Simply plotting a list of high profile stops for a foliage trip and checking them off is a more consumptive experience—satisfying to a point, but more limited in what it may evoke. Take it from me. Making lists of places to pull over, walk around, and take photos has been the backbone of my working life since the latter half of September! My system is positively overloaded on foliage, to an extent where I’m probably going to need a few days in the most pavement-heavy neighborhoods of New York or LA to balance out. And to be sure, these fall foliage road trip itineraries with highlighted stops for food, drink, and ambience, will be the backbone of my guidebook. But each foliage itinerary will also include a lot of breathing room—a solid amount of driving through territory that might look like nowhere on a map or even at first glance, but where the calming warmth of autumnal leaves may materialize at any moment, taking your breath away.

Just the other day, this happened to me again in the middle of West Virginia. I was on my way to Parsons—one of the northernmost towns along the Seneca Skyway scenic road, which loops around the roly-poly Monongahela National Forest. The seemingly nondescript route that I followed southeast to Parsons ended up being more visually stunning than the scenic byway itself! West Virginia Route 72 hugs the curves of the Cheat River through wooded hollows and past desolate farms, with topography that had me shifting into lower gears frequently. By the time I reached the little town and sidled into Piccolo Paula’s Cafe for a killer steak salad, the look in my eyes probably registered to the server as something between “in love” and “just dismembered and buried a body behind the gas station.” When placing my order, I had a difficult time getting the words out properly and I had to start over. Perhaps it was because I had spent the last few days on various roads, with relatively limited human intereactions.

Or maybe this is just your brain on foliage.

Paul Greengrass, a former journalist who’s now the director of Captain Phillips, United 93, and Bloody Sunday, is one of my favorite filmmakers. He’s able to tell stories that are hyperlocal in their viscerality and at the same time, international in their reach. His depiction of the days-long standoff between freighter captain Richard Phillips and Somali pirate Abduwali Muse (played brilliantly by Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdi) is a story of two men from different walks of life finding themselves in the meat grinder of militarized globalization. It’s also an absolute nerve-shredder of a high seas thriller, in which each gunshot and every drop of sweat feels real. A post-film drink is necessary.

So last February, I found out that Greengrass was making a movie about the deadliest wildfire in California’s recorded history (thus far) I began sweating with anticipation.

Several months later, that movie is out on Apple TV+ streaming and in select theaters. It’s called The Lost Bus and it brings the 2018 Camp Fire to life through the true story of a school bus driver (Matthew McConaughey) and a teacher (America Ferrera) who find themselves in the path of the inferno while attempting to transport 22 kids to one of the evacuation zones near Paradise—the mountain town that was consumed by the horrific wildfire. Sparked by failing utility infrastructure that Pacific Gas & Electric had neglected to repair, the Camp Fire swept across the arid landscape and swelled into a gargantuan monster quicker than anybody expected. The town’s evacuation protocols proved fatally insufficient, as traffic immobilized the roads and firefighters with limited resources switched their priority from putting out the blaze to saving as many lives as possible. Many of the 85 people killed in the Camp Fire were burned inside their cars.

You don’t have to live on the west coast for the events of The Lost Bus to feel close to home. That’s because several regions of the U.S. are currently in a state of drought; including New England, where I live. A few weeks ago, I was in the far north of New Hampshire taking photos for my upcoming guidebook on fall foliage trips. I decided to swing by Beaver Brook Falls, a thunderous gusher of a cascade near the town of Colebrook, and what I saw shocked me. The waterfall—an 80-foot wall of whitewater—was gone. All that was left was a damp cliff. I texted a photo of the parched cascade to my friends Natalie and Adam, who own a house nearby. “WTF” Adam responded.

Less than one week after bearing witness to the vanishing of Beaver Brook Falls, I was on the other side of the U.S., driving east on the Chinook Scenic Byway to Mount Rainier. The Chinook road is one of two scenic byways that wrap around the gigantic cone of Rainier; making for a perfect 48-hour road trip, with a night in the high desert city of Yakima on the mountain’s east side. While evergreens are the dominant genre of tree around Rainier, there are plenty of larch conifers that take on brilliant hues of gold and yellow during fall. And that’s what I had flown out here to photograph. But as I walked through coniferous woods on the trail to a cascade called Skookum Falls, I noticed something odd when I came to a clearing and took pictures of the adjacent White River. The angle of the morning light was just right for capturing the river in its full color and texture. And yet, the images looked slightly foggy, as though invisible condensation had built up on my camera lens. The same thing happened when I tried taking photos of Skookum Falls itself. All of my pictures appeared mystifyingly hazy.

Gnawing concern that something was wrong with my camera equipment was how the anxiety of that day began. I kept driving eastward and began ascending the haunch of Mount Rainier. And just over halfway up to Chinook Pass—the titular high point of the scenic byway, from which the descent into Yakima begins—the snowcapped pinnacle of Rainier suddenly revealed itself through a gap in the pine trees. I frantically pulled over onto the shoulder, pleasantly surprised by the absence of other cars on the road. The nonexistent traffic behind me or ahead should have been a clue that something was amiss. But as soon as I got out of the car with my camera in hand, a much more obvious cue stopped me in my tracks. I could smell smoke. It was everywhere; a film of olfactory assault that partially obscured the vista of the woods below. Somewhere, in reach of Mount Rainier, trees were burning. And I suspected the wildfire was growing.

I was caught off guard. Earlier that morning, when I picked up my rental car at the Sea-Tac airport and set off for Enumclaw (the western start of the Chinook Scenic Byway) I hadn’t read or heard any mention of large wildfires burning in the Rainier vicinity. But then again, I hadn’t exactly searched for any fire reports; which I probably should have done, for a couple of reasons. The growing regularity of late summer and fall wildfires on the west coast is now a predictable natural hazard. And since I was a visitor to the region, and not a resident, I was not registered to receive wildfire alerts on my phone or computer. Now, on the upper reaches of Mount Rainier, with the aroma of smoke growing more intense by the minute, my cell phone was unusable due to the lack of service in the area. Should I go on? I wondered. Or do I hightail it back to Enumclaw?

The case for backtracking was the most straightforward. If there is a wildfire burning someplace nearby and you don’t know where it is or how large it is, retreating across territory where you weren’t encountering smoke or any other hints of a fire is a pretty safe wager. This was my initial impulse: get the hell out of the Rainier area, check the news upon re-gaining cellular service, and re-assess from there. Then, I wondered if I was overreacting. I had not encountered any signs on the Chinook Scenic Byway that warned drivers of a fire ahead. The fact that the road was still open seemed to bode well. And wildfire smoke can easily travel a great amount of distance in a short time. I might have been huffing the fumes of a blaze that was burning over 100 miles away.

But if I’m being fully honest here, there was a more problematic reason why I talked myself down from retreating—a motivation which is often the beginning of really bad decisions. Convenience. The haze of the wildfire meant that I wouldn’t be able to take many good pictures that day, which was fine. (Guidebook photos are usually a mix of original images and others licensed from third parties.) But I was out in the northwest doing my field research on a packed schedule and limited budget. If I headed back to Enumclaw and found out that the wildfire was large and close enough to pose a risk to the byway or City of Yakima—where I had a motel reservation for the night—then I would be vindicated. But if the fire turned out to be a non-issue, I would have added a few more hours of driving to a schedule that already involved lots of time on the road.

It sounds so stupid now, spelling out my internal reasoning. Alas, most of us are all-too capable of brushing off our own exposure to natural hazards, if it suits our plans. (Just look at the seemingly irrepressible market for coastal homes in the U.S.) A few more hours in a Hyundai Elantra that was too small for me would have paled to the agony of inhaling denser smoke or getting licked by flames. Still, I wasn’t completely oblivious to the possibility that continuing along the byway could mean getting too close to a wildfire. So I brokered a self-compromise. I would keep going, cautiously, and if I got cell service, I would stop, check for updates, and re-evaluate my plan. If I wasn’t able to find cell service further up the mountain, I would keep my eye out for any additional signs of a fire burning nearby; warning signs posted on the road, and worsening visibility due to smoke. If I encountered either of these, I would turn back.

As I emerged from the trees and began the final switch-backing portions of road to Chinook Pass, I started seeing other cars descending the mountain in the opposite direction. This gave me some measure of confidence, even though the direction of those cars could indicate trouble up ahead. (None of them stopped to dissuade me from continuing onward.) And by the scenic overlook where you can gaze down at Tipsoo Lake, or hike down to its shoreline, there were other parked cars and visitors about, snapping selfies and acting normally. But when I finally got to the pass itself, I knew that my drive to Yakima was about to include a lengthy detour. The panoramic vista of the Naches Valley to the east was partially obscured by haze. The smell of the wildfire smoke up here was more overpowering. And an electronic sign staged along the byway warned travelers that further down the mountain—on the east side, where high desert reigns—sections of the Chinook Pass Byway were overwhelmed by smoke.

About an hour later, I rolled back into the smoke-free, service-rich town of Enumclaw and parked beside the Logging Legacy Memorial—a sculpture depicting two big oxen towing a felled tree. Five minutes of phone scrolling gave me a clearer picture of the situation. The inferno that I had been smelling was the Wildcat Fire; a 9,000 acre fire that had been burning in the nexus between Mount Rainier and Yakima for a couple of weeks. The day before my arrival, the fire had grown slightly and couple of adjacent towns had been placed on a higher level of alert; basically the “Get Ready To Possibly Evacuate” sage. I couldn’t find any mention of Yakima being in danger, so I called the motel to inquire about the conditions there. “No…there’s no smoke here,” the young desk clerk told me, as if I had asked him whether Wu Tang Clan was in town that night.

In the end, I made it to Yakima by taking a more meandering, smokeless approach on Interstate 90. I spent the magic hour sampling west coast-style IPAs in the garden at Single Hill Brewing, where families and young people were gathering for the weekly bingo night. There was no trace of smoke or haze in the evening air. As the host—a quippy entertainer who kind of reminded me of Bobcat Goldthwait—dropped off a bingo card and some gemstones at my table, the memory of detecting the wildfire and weighing my options seemed as far away as the east coast. But knowing that a forest and prairie were burning, less than two hours away from here, was difficult to shake. Before going to bed that night, I put all of my luggage in the trunk of the car.

In the years ahead, more of us will have experiences like this, out west, on the eastern seaboard, and in other places where people didn’t have to worry about wildfires until recently. It now seems inevitable that New England will experience a sizeable wildfire of its own, within my lifetime—given how little we’ve done to mitigate the effects of climate change. I have to hope that when or if that day comes, there will be plans for how we respond to that crisis and save lives. But as Paul Greengrass shows us in The Lost Bus, plans hinge on theory. Hotter summers, more expansive droughts, and the unpredictable recklessness of human behavior—whether it’s a utility giant allowing equipment to fail or a teenager throwing firecrackers into a gorge—cannot be fully planned for. Thousands, perhaps millions of us, will have to make snap judgments amidst circumstances that could range from slightly concerning to life threatening.

In the absence of a solution to this growing vulnerability, sharing our own stories of making risky decisions when we start smelling smoke seems like a good thing to do.

A head’s up: This week’s story involves a violent event that some may find upsetting. If you would prefer to avoid treading into that territory, I recommend skipping this one.

This week’s newsletter was supposed to be something very different.

On Tuesday, I turned 37 years old, and since I had already “partied” with family and friends over the weekend—when people were actually free to party—I decided to spend my actual date of birth taking a long walk around Boston and Cambridge to revisit all the apartments I’ve lived in for these last 12-ish years; with plenty of food and drink along the way, of course. I started writing an essay about what it’s like to take a spiritual walking audit of your environment and yourself, and I had planned to finish this essay around Wednesday evening. And then, somebody shot Charlie Kirk.

When I heard that something crazy had happened to Kirk—the far right activist who helped Trump boost his ratings with young people, and the founder of Talking Points USA—I instinctively headed over to Twitter, the same social media website where the earliest eyewitness reports of the Boston Marathon bombings were posted in 2013. I remember reading those reports and looking at one photo of what was quite clearly a bloodstained sidewalk near Copley Square: a sign that something real and really bad had just happened. This time, when I logged into Twitter, I was immediately greeted by something similar, and also much worse. It was the video that captured the precise moment when Kirk, in the middle of an outdoor speaking engagement at Utah Valley University, was killed by a shooter’s bullet. Nothing was left to the imagination. There was a lot of blood, a lot of screaming, and a surge of regret that I’ve only just shaken.

I’m old enough to remember an earlier chapter of the Internet, in which one had to go willingly into the darkest, grimiest corners of the web to watch videos of people being killed or tortured; if that sort of thing is their bag. But the final, gruesome moments of Charlie Kirk’s life were broadcast to millions of feeds via Twitter’s algorithm. People were exposed to an accidental snuff film without consent. It’s a shocking reflection of the content moderation collapse that Twitter has suffered since Elon Musk bought the company in 2022. And it’s a serious problem on big social media platforms; Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Threads, you name it. Increasingly, year by year, the digital content that we’re fed is the content that’s most likely to shock, enrage, and appall us. In 2016, that content may have been your old roommate’s photos from a vacation to Santorini, shown to you a moment when you were running a GoFundMe for medical expenses.

Now it’s a gore video of the latest assassination of a political figure; delivered to our feeds just a few months after Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman was shot and killed in her home. There’s been a lot of rightful discourse about how little time we spent dwelling on Hortman’s murder, compared with the mass eulogies that have been pouring in for Kirk and the calls for “vengeance” from MAGA influencers. And while that disparity is a reflection of the idea that violence is okay as long as it affects groups of people who are deemed less human—which is a bipartisan affliction these days, evidenced by the ongoing, U.S.-supported genocide in Gaza—I think the fact that Charlie Kirk’s assassination was a seismic social media moment is important to understand too. Especially as we prepare for the inevitable backlash to the killing.

The fear, among everyone I know whom I’ve spoken with about Kirk’s assassination, is that Trump will use this shooting as a pretext for further repressing free speech and going after anyone who opposes his agenda; the Democratic Party, liberal nonprofits, journalists, and no doubt, a handful of random social media users unlucky enough to get noticed and demonized by a MAGA influencer like Laura Loomer or Christopher Rufo. That last scenario could happen to a lot of us. Try to remember the last time when you tore into Trump with a Facebook post or comment, or the last post that you authored in solidarity with immigrants or trans people. Now imagine that post getting picked up by one of these rabid Trump-adjacent grifters and blasted out to their hundreds of thousands of followers—who then flood your inbox with death threats that prompt you to shut down your Internet presence and basically go into hiding.

This is not hyperbole. It has happened to people I know. Some of the worst cases have been documented by the New York Times. And while it’s a disturbing pattern of online behavior that’s particularly important to Trump’s MAGA movement, that is not what I want to use this week’s newsletter to talk about. Charlie Kirk’s integral role to MAGA and his poisonous rhetoric about Black women, Muslims, LGBTQ+ people, and many others—which must be remembered even as we condemn the assassination—is also not my primary focus. What concerns me most is the technical ecosystem in which this has happened; the websites and apps that are cooking our brains, in many ways.

And this, my dear friends, is where the mission of Mind The Moss—to get you outside, wherever you are, poking around, with renewed curiosity—will come into play as well.

For as long as most of us have been using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the other social media platforms (a little less than 20 years, by my count) we’ve known, vaguely, that these platforms are not good for our minds. We’ve skimmed an essay or two on how these websites are algorithmically designed to flood our brains with dopamine, by showing us words and images that stimulate us. Many of us associate dopamine with pleasure. The thrill of logging onto Instagram and seeing a picture of someone with a really hot body. Or a tower of fresh sashimi that has you salivating. And while you can still find that kind of release on the major social platforms, what’s become clear to big tech companies over this last decade is that anger—which also releases dopamine—can catalyze more prolonged engagement with social media. And if an algorithm deliver content that makes people mad, people may use a platform more.

Maybe it’s getting into a slap-fight with some jerk in the comments section of a news article, or scrolling through the profile of someone who posts “takes” that offend you. Part of you knows this is bad. That you should log off. But you can’t. Not yet, at least.

I am not writing about this from a pedestal—I’m alluding to experiences that I’ve had on social platforms over the last decade. When I was spending more hours on these websites, I was unaware of much of myself I was really spending on them. I was giving away energy, creativity, and time that I could have spent doing things that would have brought more light into my life and my community. I haven’t fully reckoned with how much of myself I gave to social media, because a full accounting would likely leave me feeling devastated. But what I can say, with certainty, is that my slow disenchantment with our scorched earth of social media—and my ongoing effort to extricate myself from these websites—began when Mind The Moss launched in the summer of 2021.

You see, writing a weekly newsletter about walking and the great outdoors in all of its dimensions requires spending a fair amount of time outside. Some of these stories are the result of stored knowledge, from older walks and adventures. But plenty of others were seeded by new field reporting. My recent dispatch about the Dorset, Vermont marble quarry that the Gettysburg tombstones came from? I drove up to Dorset and hiked into that quarry back in early August. On the same trip, I investigated a couple of other stories that you’ll be reading about in Mind The Moss this fall and winter. In two out of three cases, these investigations led to me crossing paths with other folks outdoors. The field research yielded connection; more fleeting than some of the ones we sustain in the digital world, but somehow more nourishing, humble, and honest.

When I think about the people that I’ve unexpectedly encountered in the landscape, while reporting and publishing the newsletter—and the friends who’ve sometimes joined me on these scouting trips—I can feel my pulse slowing down and a warmth glowing within me. I remember an elderly gentleman who I bumped into in the City of Fall River on a really cold evening in January. We were talking about the local ducks on the Quequechan River, in the least bucolic place imaginable. The stretch of pavement on which we stood, close to the river, was littered with broken glass. A billboard with a rotting WeightWatchers ad loomed above us. And nearby, the traffic on I-195 belched invisible pollutants into the air. But still, we were out there, sharing a root of intrigue.

A few months later—less than an hour west, via the interstate—my friend Laura and I were splashing through puddles in the woods of Blackstone Park; a Providence green space on the Rhode Island side of the Seekonk River. We had just eaten a tableful of tacos, taking shelter from the rain, and once it became clear that the storm would not be letting up, we surrendered ourselves to a sodden day hike through the verdant city forest, where the moisture seemed to crank up the olfactory side of Providence. It was the reason why we drove down to Little Rhody, after all. To take a hike across the city. And while it’s possible that we might have still spent the whole day together if a wet ramble hadn’t been in the cards, I can’t be sure about that. This wasn’t the first time that the allure of damp leaves, murky ponds, and chittering bushes got us together.

You’ve been there too, I’d imagine. So many of us experienced the connective power of the natural world—in cities, suburbs, and the backcountry—during those first years of the COVID-19 pandemic. If nothing else, a little moss therapy was a tonic for all the hours spent “doom scrolling” through endless feeds of horrific news that social media algorithms assembled for us. In fact, during that time, I started to notice some social media users adopting a sardonic two-word rebuke, directed toward anyone who was obviously spending too much time online—posting unhinged things or getting into pedantic comment wars with others. Touch grass. At the time, this made me chuckle.

But today, as I grimly accept what social media has become and re-evaluate the kind of relationship I want to have with it going forward, “touch grass” is starting to feel a lot less like a snarky quip and more like a form of self-intervention that millions of us would do well to stage. This weekend, I’m staying off the two platforms on which I still have an active account, and instead, I am going to touch grass. If you’ve been feeling really wretched this week, about the political violence in America and the number of people who seem to be cheering it on, I encourage you try touching some grass too.

Or trees. Or stones. Or pavement. Or metal rails. Anything! Get out there and touch it.

Obviously this does not address the larger and distressing question of how we might go about disentangling ourselves from tech platforms that have become so integral to business and information sharing. Some have suggested that we nationalize the social platforms and treat them like utilities. An interesting idea, to be sure. But as long as the platforms are owned by people like Musk and Mark Zuckerberg—unbothered by how their products are contributing to an intertwined mental health crisis and political crisis—we can go cold turkey and leave the platforms entirely. Or we can try, in our own ways, to limit our engagement with them. Most of us will take the second path.

For my part, I am going to try to remember something that another journalist once said to me. The purpose of any big league social media platform is to find the words or images that will make you the angriest, and send them to you. That’s it. Any laughs or enlightenments that you enjoy on these websites in the year 2025 and beyond are the bugs; not the feature. You had those nice experiences in spite of the platforms, not because of them. And while the ongoing presence of friends and family on big social media platforms might make it harder for us to leave them altogether, you can “slide into the DMs” (Direct Messages, for those lucky enough to not be online) and you can suggest taking a conversation or debate outside. In a nice way, and a literal one too.

One last thing, before I log off and touch some grass in my neck of the woods. It’s not lost on me that writing about the corrosive impact of social media websites in a digital newsletter has some irony to it. While the practical experience of reading a story that’s emailed to you each week is not the same thing as relentlessly combing a feed of user generated content that leaves you feeling shittier each time, these activities do exist in the same digital ecosphere. And these last few months, thinking about how to remove as much of myself from Instagram and Twitter as I can, I’ve had some related thoughts about Mind The Moss—thoughts about where the newsletter could live in the future.

All I can say for the moment is that I have an idea. It’s incrementally taking shape, like a tadpole embryo in one of those jelly-looking frog eggs. And I’ll be ready unveil it by the end of the year. Maybe even a little sooner. We all need things to look forward to.

Print Ain’t Dead is the name of the upcoming book—which will be released in January of 2026—and it’s also something of a motto for Mountain Gazette. The success of the magazine and other print publications like it, such as Ori and Adventure Journal, is an encouraging rebuke to the premise that the future of media is entirely digital; an idea that’s become increasingly repellent, with generative AI infesting every corner of the Internet. Mountain Gazette has enjoyed multiple life cycles, starting back in the 1960s, and that’s why I’m now sharing the spine of a book with Edward Abbey and Hunter S. Thompson; both of whom wrote for Mountain Gazette back in the day.

But the foremost reason why I’m sharing the news about Print Ain’t Dead with you all is because Rogge and the Mountain Gazette crew have done so much to support the kind of creative and unusual outdoor writing that I aimed to publish more of when I launched Mind The Moss back in the summer of 2021. They have gone out of their way to give writers without massive platforms a chance (and the resources!) to spin their yarns. In fact, the story of mine that’s featured in Print Ain’t Dead is a story that Rogge invited me to write for Mountain Gazette: an account of thru-hiking a certain 27-mile trail across the City of Boston, with original photography from Dan Brown.

At a time when we are constantly being told—by people with way too much money and power—that audiences do not want these kinds of stories anymore, I think it’s important to highlight anything which reminds us of the ground truth. That people appreciate long-form storytelling which enlivens the senses and aims for the head. And that experiencing these stories in print can yield a more intimately connective experience than reading them on a laptop or phone screen. (On that note, I will be making a related announcement about Mind The Moss later this fall or early winter.)

SO, if you would like to get your mitts on a copy of Print Ain’t Dead early, you can order it by clicking here. I’m already clearing my reading schedule for January, so that I have ample time to sit down in a fuzzy chair and dig into the works of my fellow book contributors; especially those who’ve also emerged from the landscape more recently, thanks to the support and faith of the Mountain Gazette crew.

Cheers,
Miles

Since we’re nearing the end of Peak Maine Season—that moment in September when 90% of travelers forget the coast and turn inland to chase cider doughnuts and maple forests—this seems like the right week to talk about something special in Ogunquit. If you’ve ever attempted driving into the center of this Southern Maine beach village in the middle of summer, when hundreds of cars lock horns at a brain-bending five way intersection that’s always backed up, you know that there only two possible outcomes.

Maybe you keep your distance from Ogunquit on future summer trips through the region, in the same way that you would steer clear of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. But perhaps the sea salt-dusted ambience of Ogunquit charmed your pants off so assertively that you were able to look beyond the traffic and see yourself here every summer. You check into one of the beachside inns and resorts, you park yourself in an Adirondack chair on the lawn, and you gaze at the craggy shores and the Atlantic Ocean—just like Alexander the Great seeing “the breadth of his domain.” And you weep, just as the Macedonian king wept. For there are no more worlds to conquer.

I can only imagine what it feels like to fall in love with Ogunquit. Because ever since the summer of 2018—when I was doing the Coastal Maine field reporting for a hiking guidebook and I made the mistake of driving through town to avoid some of the tolls on I-95—my relationship with Ogunquit has been one of anxious avoidance. But that changed back in June, when I had to pick up a friend from one of the local beachside resorts where she had been staying briefly with family. (The two of us were heading north for some brushier hiking in the Midcoast region.) Given the prices of lodging, the number of Teslas that I saw in the resort parking lot, and how difficult it was to persuade the lot attendant to allow me to park there briefly and fetch my friend, I expected an unobstructed vista of the ocean, exclusively for resort guests. But what I saw instead is one of New England’s great miracles of public access to the outdoors.

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Two years ago—around this point in summer—I walked into the woods of west Rhode Island searching for the ruins of a lost summer camp. The initial lure was that creeping vibe that you find in movies like Picnic At Hanging Rock or in pretty much any song by Throbbing Gristle. (Great band, in case you didn’t know.) But when I re-emerged from the Arcadia Management Area forest that afternoon, I was wrestling with something bigger and more elemental. I wondered if summer itself would be a different thing, in a cultural and recreational sense, when I’m 50. Because summers are getting really hot.

I guess you could call this week’s newsletter a celebration of sorts—because we have officially made it to the final weeks of the muggiest season, with the crisp afternoons and toasty nights of fall within reach at last. But even when I fantasize about crimson and auburn canopies, the seasonal question lingers. When many of us were kids, fall was beautiful, but also bittersweet. The explosion of colors and the proliferation of sweet, gooey foods felt like a wake for that window of the year when being outside was comfortable. The vapor of winter’s cold breath was already present in the night, and on those mornings when you needed a jacket for the journey to school. These days, that seasonal chill in the air feels less like an ending, and more like deliverance.

Some of you might have heard the word “coolcation” recently. It’s one of those nifty monikers that feels like something cooked up at a destination marketing conference, but it describes something that a lot of us have been doing for years—taking trips to places that offer cooler weather, when our home territory is being slowly roasted. An editor from Texas Monthly magazine who I met in Montreal earlier this year told me that the coolcation is one of her family traditions. In New England, where I live, one of the most attractive elements of Midcoast Maine is the briny air conditioning provided by the Atlantic Ocean. While the coolcation is most likely to be a series of diminishing returns, as worsening summer heat permeates the most remote corners of the world, the emerging evidence that more people are going on coolcations marks a shift in the way we think about the summer—a shift which might transform our seasonal calendar.

One of the big experiential headaches of adulthood is how quickly—and early—your summer weekends become packed with commitments. But the reason why you may find yourself scheduling a hike through Zealand Valley of the White Mountains with two friends two months in advance is because summer is the season that our society has decided to block off for leisure time. Schools conclude regular sessions sometime in June, and elected governments also go into a recess around then (though a handful of politicians use this time to be more active in their communities.) But when summer becomes something that you survive, will our preconception of summer as a time for recreation continue to make sense? And what can an alternative “summer” look like?

It’s worth circling back to the school year when we ask this, because schools really are the foundation of how we look at seasonality today. When kids are in classrooms, and when they’re not, shapes how other institutions and businesses look at seasons. A few weeks ago, my friend Tessa—who’s raising two kids in the K-5 age range—was telling me about how her family has been taking more naps this summer, and she raised an interesting possibility. What if, instead of designating the singular window of summer as society’s leisure time, we had two shorter summers? One of them could start in mid-May and run through June, and the other one could kick off in the middle of August and conclude by October. Obviously this would be highly disruptive in the short term and transformative in the long haul. It would, however, give people more freedom at two times of the year when outdoor air temperatures and humidity aren’t dangerous.

The problem with Tessa’s idea, as far as we could tell, is what on earth you would do with the month of July. Even if it were possible to resume school and work for just a month—in a way that actually got people back on track with their projects—would a single month of progression and production really be worth it? And also, how many schools could serve the dual functions of Learning Institution and Heat Shelter? Take the Boston Public Schools system. In 2023, the same year when I took that sweltering hike to the abandoned summer camp in Rhode Island, nearly a third of BPS facilities lacked air conditioning units; a reflection of under-investment in public schools, and also the outdated infrastructure in many northeastern cities. Still, Boston is chipping away at the issue, installing new AC units and and trying to make its schools summer proof, in acknowledgment that summer ain’t what it used to be. So in theory, some years from now, treating July as a time for hunkering and hustling could be feasible.

But given the prevalence of “hustling” in American culture—this notion that virtue is found through work, and any struggle evinces a lack of work ethic—I’m going to put another possibility out there. What if we added another month to summer? We could adopt Tessa’s suggested mid-May to early October timeline, but rather than doing all the legwork of reconvening everyone inside for the most fetid month of the year, we could simply let people endure July on their own terms; in venues of their choosing.

I can already hear the groans from people who actually have to contend with raising children and balancing parenthood with paid work. If I were in their shoes, I would be rolling my eyes too! In a nation that doesn’t guarantee childcare, like the U.S., a longer school recess would be a significant hardship for millions of families. Not to mention, summer can be an emotionally exhausting time for parents. While I don’t fully agree with the retroactive condemnations of school closures during the pre-vaccine months of the COVID-19 pandemic (let’s not forget that tens of thousands of people were dying), the prolonged loss of time apart from one another pushed a lot of families to the edge of sanity. As an introvert who needs recharging time, I empathized with any parents who suddenly found themselves deprived of the ability to take a breather.

And yet, part of what made the pandemic precautions so disruptive was their sudden rollout; how rapidly they were conceived and enforced. Again, 2020 was an incredibly stressful time, and I maintain that flawed interventions were highly preferable to zero interventions. But you have to wonder if things might have been better if we had been given more a little more time to think about how school closures, as a response to the viral contagion of a pandemic, would work best. When I think about the forces that jeopardize public health—forces that we will need plans for responding to—it occurs to me that climate change offers us significantly more runway for mapping things out, proposing transformative ideas, field-testing them, and fixing the “bugs” accordingly.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that if we are going to reevaluate how we treat the summer, as regional heat waves and droughts become deadlier—this is the time to start throwing shit at the wall. Consider another recent development here in Boston. This month, the city is launching a guaranteed income pilot program in which a pool of young adults experiencing homelessness will each receive a monthly $1,200 for two years. While universal basic income could never be a singular solution to the widening wealth gap in America (labor unions and more public housing are essential pillars too), it would be a profound expansion of the social safety net; the same safety net that’s currently full of holes for working parents struggling to afford daycare for the summer months. Short of an epochal event like the passage of the New Deal, it’s very hard, if not impossible, to solve intersectional problems all at once. But changes to the safety net would at least nudge us closer to becoming a Work To Live country, as opposed to the current Live To Work dystopia in which survival has economic and climatological dimensions. By addressing the former, we could deal with the latter a hell of a lot more effectively. And a longer summer vacation might be less disruptive.

What I know is this: The longer we avoid experimenting with transformational ideas, and accepting that those experiments are going to be messy at times, the more we will suffer when worsening environmental factors force change at a faster and much more turbulent pace. Right now, we have the margin space to creatively confront the changing face of summer and the challenges that it poses for so many of us. Letting that opportunity slip away, by accepting the same canards from political leaders that now is not the right time for being bold and innovative, would be a shame. It would raise the likelihood that some years from now, restorative summer walks through our favorite parks, gardens, and nature preserves will be golden memories; flickering for a moment as we crank up the AC and box fans, lower the shades, and marinate in place.

We should all be afforded the time and space to enjoy being outdoors, at times when being outdoors actually feels good. Many of us have enjoyed that time and space for the majority of their lives. Today—for the sake of everybody—it’s time to renegotiate.

This week’s newsletter is different than any other I’ve written. While I still hope to get you outside and poking around, this is about as topical and “of the moment” as Mind The Moss gets. Because this week signals the escalation of a nationwide emergency.

Some will insist otherwise, but I think it’s safe to say that if any of us found ourselves living with violence—from the state, a paramilitary group, or a household member—we would try to go someplace else. And if our lives were at risk in that moment, then our priority would be resettling in a less violent place as fast as possible; even if it meant relocating to another place in a manner that didn’t tick all of the legal boxes. Again, a lot of Americans insist that they would follow all of the rules, if they lived abroad and were squeezed by circumstances dangerous enough to necessitate immigrating to America. I have a hard time believing these people. Especially the ones who have kids.

Nonetheless, the misinformed idea that there’s a correct and reasonable way to move to the US—and the notion that it’s fine to kick out anyone who doesn’t migrate that way—has infectious allure in America. It’s one of the reasons why Donald Trump won the presidential election, after running a campaign in which he slandered undocumented immigrants as “animals” and “not human.” It appears to be an obsession for Stephen Miller, the White House policy advisor who dreamed up the family separation policies that we saw during Trump’s first term. Miller has been the driving force behind Trump’s mass deportation agenda and back in late May, he ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to crack down more aggressively and indiscriminately in communities where immigrants are living and working. Specifically in Los Angeles.

As you’ve probably read and heard over this past week, LA residents have been taking to the streets to protest the worsening sweeps by ICE officers—one of which targeted a Home Depot where day laborers and contractors often coalesced. Having lived in LA during my 20s and having seen how LA often responds when groups of Angelenos are abused or stripped of rights (ex: the temporary clawback of same-sex marriage rights in 2008, when conservative voters passed Proposition 8) these protests are a familiar and affirming thing to witness. Where Trump’s homeland security director Kristi Noem sees “a city of criminals,” I see and recognize a world class city where people show up for each other when it counts. By taking to the streets to confront ICE officials and the federalized National Guardsmen who’ve been sent to quell the protests, Angelenos are invoking the centuries-old tradition of using our walkable spaces as a forum for public expression. But there’s another important reason why walking LA’s streets, as a means of protest, is an especially fitting way to push back against these mass deportations.

When the state targets someone as an “illegal” resident, subject to be torn out of their community and dumped into another country or even a foreign prison, they effectively lose their freedom of movement; their right to go for a walk to the grocery store or the park without risking their life. And so, the protesters spilling out into LA’s streets and open spaces are doing something that a widening number of LA residents cannot do.

As far back as January, immigrants in communities across the U.S. were retreating from public life and basically going into hiding. Church attendances declined. Small businesses like hair salons saw fewer customers walking through the door. Migrant parents kept their children home from school, fearing what might happen if federal officials showed up there—a fear that was horrifically vindicated in April when the Trump administration deported a 4 year-old child undergoing treatment for Stage 4 cancer, along with their mother. An administration capable of doing something like that and defending the action when criticized is not going to toe any kind of ethical line at the entrance to a kindergarten classroom or a cafeteria. And so, as the raids and deportations escalate, many parents and children have been sheltering in place.

If the phrase “sheltering in place” evokes something vaguely visceral inside you, that’s most likely because the closest many Americans have come to experiencing the terror and confinement of being an undocumented immigrant in 2025 was the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The stay-at-home orders that were enforced in those deadly pre-vaccine months impacted most Americans’ freedom of mobility. It wasn’t anything close to what migrants are suffering right now—we could still go out for walks to see local friends, patronize businesses that were still open, and clear our heads in forests, wetlands, and gardens. I did a tremendous amount of walking that March and April, to such an extent that I actually managed to hike every single path in the Middlesex Fells Reservation (a hulking woodland on the northwest side of Boston.) Nonetheless, the travel and mobility restrictions that were in place, such as the cross-state travel limits, required a lot of Americans to make some mental adjustments. And some of us never really adjusted to these rules. The pandemic fucked up our heads in too many ways to count. Temporarily losing the right to take a last minute road trip up to Vermont or hit some sports bars on a Saturday night undoubtedly pushed many of us over the edge; to the point where some grew more impressionable to xenophobic rhetoric and logic.

So I can only imagine the anxiety and spiraling anguish that must happen when you’re forced into hiding at a time like this; a time when supportive bonds of community are so important for our individual and collective mental health. And because I spend one day each week writing a newsletter that touches on the many physiological and social benefits of walking—of being out in the world on foot and crossing paths with others, whether you’re in the streets or out on the trails—I can’t hide or dance around the fact that what’s currently being inflicted upon immigrant communities repulses me. And I can’t really think of anything else to do, on this particular week, beyond expressing it.

As I watched the protests in LA and contemplated the final spark that ignited them, I thought of the children traumatized by seeing ICE agents smash the windows of their car and wrestle their parents out onto the curb. I thought of the group of Venezuelan men who were frog-marched into El Salvador’s CECOT “mega-prison”; a facility that sounds more like a fluorescent-lit death camp, in a functional sense. I thought about how the Trump adminstration proudly shared footage of the men having their heads shaved by prison guards. I thought about my colleagues who are not U.S. citizens and of my undocumented neighbors whom I haven’t met, wondering if they could be next.

I hope all of this repulses you too. And I hope that the protests happening in LA and now spreading to other cities are a crystal clear announcement that it’s time to get angry, and to take that anger to places where we can still be out in the world on foot.

That looks different for each of us. For you, it might be taking part in one of the ICE protests. It could mean attending a vigil, a rally, or another form of gathering in a real place where people treat each other like real human beings. Or it may simply look like getting out into your community a lot more often and engaging with what’s out there.

Whatever it looks like, get out there and be part of the world. Be part of the landscape. And let it shape or nurture your vision for a future in which human dignity is honored.

The act of protesting is becoming more dangerous these days—particularly the act of protesting Trump’s stupid military parade, for which he threatened DC dissenters with a “very big force” For WIRED, Louryn Strampe, Lauren Goode, and Boone Ashworth co-wrote this excellent guide on how to go to a protest and stay relatively safe. The guide goes much farther and deeper than the standard texts on this subject. This article not only covers your legal rights, but also how to avoid the scenarios in which you have to assert them. It walks you through packing the right gear, keeping a close eye on your surroundings, and listening to your gut if things get heated. WIRED’s guide is not only an instructive thing to read right now, but it also might help you determine whether the exposure of going to one of the ICE protests is something you can take on. If the risk factors feel too high for you, there’s no shame in that! You could still pass the guide along to other friends or family members who might be able to attend. And you can amplify the protests through your social media channels. The more these photos and videos of the ICE protests appear in online spaces, with words of solidarity, the better.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the likelihood that some might take issue with the lack of nuance in this week’s newsletter, on the issue of immigration policy in America. There will be a time for nuanced discourse about how immigration law in this country should work. Now is not that time. Thousands of our neighbors are being brutalized by the state. Communities are being ripped apart by an administration whose views on immigration are devoid of nuance or humanity. I look forward to a day when we can hash out the more granular aspects of how we ought to live together, going forward.

But today, we are on a battleground; not a debate stage. The protests in LA and other cities signal a widening recognition of this fact. So as they say in Canada, elbows up!

Mountains have never been The Thing that draws me into the outdoors. Whenever I see t-shirts or posters that invoke that old John Muir chestnut about how mountains are calling—and how we must answer the call—I know that I’m more likely to let the phone ring. If you’ve ever experienced the wonder of a ribbon-like dirt path leading through a ferny glen, the thrill of stepping onto a bog bridge that bobs in the peat muck, or a hidden path that snakes between buildings in a commercial area of town, you know that hauling ass to the summits is far from the only doorway to Nirvana.

And yet, so much of our outdoor recreation culture is shaped by the idea that scaling the mountains and trekking across the most remote and superlatively beautiful lands are the aspirations that all hikers should build toward. There’s a kind of lichen-crusted machismo fueling this idea, and it’s vocalized through phrases like “peak bagging” or terms that underscore individualistic strength and accomplishment. When was the last time you heard someone talk about "visiting a mountain” as opposed to “climbing” or “conquering” a mountain? I’m not saying that flexing in the mirror is inherently wrong when it comes to hiking and outdoor adventuring. But these days, it feels like a lot of us who enjoy and promote outdoor recreation are doing a little too much flexing. And the reason why this concerns me is because it can have an indirect gatekeeping effect.

Imagine if cooking culture—which has grown and diversified so much over these last few decades—primarily trained the spotlight on dishes that require a lot of culinary muscle, like Beef Wellington or Fugu sashimi. Consider the implication that easier or more cost-effective dishes such as coconut milk veggie curry yielded lesser kinds of gratification and skill. Would you cook, if this were the culture? I probably wouldn’t.

But we can have it both ways. We can celebrate recreational accomplishments of all shapes and sizes; recognizing their differences without propagating a hierarchy of achievements. This is how cooking culture has evolved, and this week, I would like to introduce you to a remarkable grassroots initiative that offers a glimpse of what a similar evolution might look like in outdoor recreation. It’s an initiative that makes a gargantuan concept—walking across an entire country!—feel improbably accessible, inclusive, and refreshingly free of the strongman vibes. And it’s known as Slow Ways.

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A few weeks ago, I was in Buffalo to experience something that I had wanted to see for over a decade—the city’s linear park network, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted during the mid-19th Century. The Buffalo Olmsted Parks were basically the precursor to Boston’s Emerald Necklace. A chain of interconnected green spaces bridging city neighborhoods and offering a reliable respite from the cacophony of urban life. But when I arrived in Buffalo to take my inaugural ramble through the Japanese garden at Delaware Park, I ended up stumbling across an even more consequential innovation from Olmsted; something that was camouflaged into the place where I was staying.

For easy access to the Buffalo Olmsted Parks, I ended up at The Richardson Hotel; a relatively recent arrival to the city’s lodging marketplace. Housed within a gargantuan complex of Romanesque buildings that brings to mind Marlinspike Hall—aka Captain Haddock’s estate from the Tintin books—The Richardson features tall copper-roofed towers that can be seen from several points across Buffalo’s University District. The hotel is located next to SUNY Buffalo State University, and its visibility makes it a local landmark. But the landmark nature of The Richardson isn’t just architectural—it’s also medical. Because, as I learned upon entering the lobby and finding an entrance to a little museum tucked within the guts of the hotel, The Richardson campus was where Olmsted got to field-test the theory that spending time in natural green spaces can be a tonic for mental recuperation. It’s a Big Idea which has echoed across generations, with outcomes that are heartening and troubling, depending on where you’re looking.

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Around this time each spring, when the mud flows like wine and brief interludes of sun force you to shed layers that you’ll have to throw back on as soon as the clouds and wind converge, I can hear the opening notes of one specific song—“These Streets Will Never Look The Same,” by the now-defunct Portland, Oregon band Chromatics. Why? Because in 2013, a year after the song was released, I found myself listening to it on rotation, as a way of staying sane during the longest commute that I’ve ever known.

The situation looked idyllic at first glance. I had relocated to the White Mountains and agreed to work as a spring caretaker at Zealand Falls Hut—the lower elevation crown jewel of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s backcountry hut system. Nestled in a vast and secluded valley with beaver bogs, glacial boulders, and cascades, Zealand Falls Hut first charmed me when I was a wee lad, visiting the place with my parents. It sits on an exposed overlook from which you can stand on the porch and gaze out toward Mount Carrigan against violet sunsets. The thought of being the sole occupant of Zealand Falls Hut during the off-season charmed my pants off. But I was so thrilled by the prospect of spending a spring there that I overlooked something rather important.

The access trail up to Zealand Falls Hut—the Zealand Trail—is a gentle and enchanting passage from hemlock woods to wetlands with wooden bridges and stepstones. But that trail begins from the end of a 3.5-mile dirt road that branches off from Route 302 (the interstate weaving through Crawford Notch.) And during the winter and spring, that road is closed to vehicles. In the winter, with enough snow, you can glide up and down the road on cross-country skies. But during mud season, you have no choice but to walk the saturated, spongy road. This meant that whenever I needed to return to the valley to pick up some more cans of tuna, to send an email, or to buy a new Virginia Henley romance paperback at the closest bookstore, I had to walk 6.3 miles. Twice.

At first, when I moved my clothes and sleeping bag into the hut and started to absorb the fuller reality of what I had signed up for, the commute seemed like a burdensome nightmare. It would consume the majority of my free time between 8am and 5pm; the hours when I had to check in with the AMC HQ by radio, confirm that the hut had not burned down in a woodstove fire, and sometimes inquire about any missing overnight guests who were on my reservation sheet. This was over a decade before “slow travel” became the talk of travel magazines and influencers. The thought of a long, out-and-back walk through the same forest each week—not because I felt like it, but because I needed to take care of business in the valley—seemed to necessitate a phone full of MP3 tracks. And that’s how I found my way to that dark, mournful Chromatics track.

The elements seemed to compliment each other. The portentous synths and the tall, leafless tree trunks. The brittle guitar notes and visible flecks of ice on the river that rushes beside the Zealand Trail access road. Adam Miller’s eerie and vocoder-bathed lyrics and the occasional hum of the wind blowing through the valley. Some of us will spend our lives looking for the perfect song to accompany their daily commute, and I was fortunate enough to stumble upon one within a week of becoming a hut caretaker.

To my surprise, I started to look forward to my long walk home—which I undertook at least twice a week. The initial walk from the hut to Route 302 hadn’t completely lost its sole-crushing weight—no sountrack was good enough to make me lose sight of the fact that this was only the beginning of a squelchy 12.6-mile journey. But when I found myself back at the access road in the early afternoon, after acquiring provisions and circling back to missed messages, my mood had changed considerably. I knew this road intimately. It was the only thing standing between me, the hut, and a gooey potful of Annie’s mac and cheese. There was nothing else to do but enjoy some quality time alone with the road and the pine woodlands through which it snakes. And I could bring one of my favorite bands with me. Somehow, they fit into this desolate landscape too.

But even on the moodiest of these return journeys on the Zealand Trail access road, it never occurred to me that I was experiencing something that used to be a ritual for nearly all of mankind—something that millions of us have long since lost touch with.

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Each April, millions of gallons of snowmelt and rain churn through the once-frozen New England landscape—turning tiny creeks into muscular monsters, whisking tree branches away like feathers, and cranking up the volume dial on waterfalls great and small. Watching these beauties re-liquify is *the* superlative event of springtime in the northeast. I don’t care what any outdoor influencers with massive platforms say about “the mountains calling” right now. The waterfalls are waking up and unlike our peaks, which can get surprisingly treacherous during spring (as we covered last weekend), most waterfalls can be found and witnessed with only a modest risk of overexposure.

The annual thawing of our cascades is such an ecstatic lived tradition for many of us New Englanders that Mind The Moss has always acknowledged this seasonal event; usually in a roundabout way. But at some point, lived traditions demand formalization. And the other morning, while leafing through the oldest, dustiest, and mossiest of the newsletter archives, I realized that Mind The Moss has almost zero dedicated “issues” centered around a major outdoor happening. In 2021, when the newletter was a baby, I (reluctantly) put out a Leaf Peeping Issue, knowing that the allure of all those red and golden maple leaves was far too strong to resist. But I haven’t published another Leaf Peeping Issue since then. So I believe that it’s time to officialize this current moment.

From now on, Mind The Moss will feature a special Thawed Waterfalls Issue. Today, you’re receiving the 2025 version—which will focus on cascades of note in four out of six states in New England. (Next time, we’ll shake things up with a different selection.) You could spend a lifetime squelching through the country to watch these waterfalls being resurrected by rain and warming air. So, I’d like to introduce you to not just eight spattering specimens here in the northeast, but also a bonus waterfall located beyond New England. For those of you whose cascade lust can’t be contained by one region.

RHODE ISLAND

Little Rhody will always have a place in my heart for its BIG character. I mean, the fact that Rhode Islanders eat strips of sauce-only pizza and call it “party pizza” is already a God-level flex. But one very rare instance of the “Little” in Little Rhody resonating is the quantity and scale of waterfalls in the Ocean State. Simply put, there not a lot of them, and you have to get somewhat agnostic about what qualifies as a waterfall in Rhode Island. Take the Round Top Brook Management Area in Burrillville, tucked away in the wooded northwest corner of the state. The draw here for the occasional visitors is a little fishing pond surrounded by reedy wetland plants. But near the fishing area, you can find a manmade drainage that presents as a wall of falling waters. And thanks to a little network of trails on the property, you can squeeze in some muddy sauntering too and find your way back to the cascade for a labored “We meet again…” moment.

But if getting in some squishy mid-spring steps is your real goal—with the waterfalls serving as more of a bonus—then I recommend getting yourself over to the Barden Reservoir loop trail in the town of Foster. The spot where the water leaves the rez is another built cascade, on a bigger scale than what you’ll find at Round Top. But the circular journey around the water is what glowering April afternoons were made for.

CONNECTICUT

For anyone who scoffs at the idea that the Nutmeg State is the neglected child of the New England brood, consider that back in 2010, our regional destination marketing organization temporarily removed Connecticut from its online map. While the state had failed to pay its dues to the organization, the fact that Destination New England responded by wiping Connecticut off of the regional map felt like a Freudian move; a long-suppressed impulse creeping to the surface. But the notion that Connecticut is merely a suburban extension of New York grossly understates the beauty lurking in the state’s woodlands and ravines. Indian Well Falls, one of the most elegant plunge cascades I’ve ever seen, is hidden in a gorge on the west banks of the Housatonic River, near the post-industrial sprawl of Shelton. And most travelers drive right past the short n’ scrambly access trail to these elegant little falls. Connecticut Exclusion!

Or it could be that some of these passerbys are on their way to Enders State Forest northwest of Hartford, where a more in-your-face series of heavenly waterfalls spill through a misty ravine. While Enders Falls doesn’t have the diamond in the dirt charm of Indian Well Falls—in the way that the big, reverby guitar loops on U2’s “Where The Streets Have No Name” lack the raw minimalism of “Exit”—it’s a stunner nonetheless.

MASSACHUSETTS

Whenever a place or creature goes deliberately unnamed by the people who look after it, I’m intrigued. If I’m over at somebody’s house for dinner and the host—clearing the leftover hors d’oeuvres from the living room—suddenly goes “Looks like the dog at the rest of the cheese,” I have to wonder what’s going on there. Same goes for any known and beloved cascade that’s just called “The Cascade.” There are actually two of these waterfalls in Massachusetts. One of them is located in the grittier easternmost end of the Middlesex Fells Reservation in Malden. It’s a surprisingly robust waterfall, spilling down black rock ledges and at its most voluminous each spring. It’s the only cascade in The Fells that feels like a waterfall in the classic sense, and you can actually walk there from Oak Grove Station—the end of the MBTA Orange Line—in about 1.4 miles!

The other cascade—the bigger of the two—is a thundering landmark in the forest of North Adams. The 2.1-mile out-and-back trail to these falls actually begins by a local school, with the initial trail signs nailed to utility poles before the pavement changes over to dirt, mud, and stone. Since the later stages of the trail are pretty much the streambed fed by The Cascades, you’ll want waterproof boots for this one and you might consider saving the walk for the balmier weeks of spring. But once you gaze upon the titular Cascades roaring away in their gorge, you can understand why this waterfall is a special place for North Adams residents. And suddenly, the lack of a proper name makes sense. If you live near a big ass waterfall, would you really call it “North Adams Falls” or whatever? I mean…what other big ass local falls are there?

VERMONT

Ah, Vermont. A land of abundance when it comes to waterfalls, trails, and mud season hiking restrictions. Because Vermonters are mindful of their backcountry trails making it through the sloppiest season without suffering damage (which can happen when a lot of people are clomping across soft, muddy trails), a lot of the state’s best waterfall trails are closed in April and early May. But this doesn’t have to be a disappointment. It can be a license to enjoy a more decadent outing—the town waterfall walk. There are few better places for trying this out than Middlebury, where the frothing, titanic mass of Middlebury Falls thunders through the heart of town. Amble down Main Street and as it crosses above Otter Creek on an old bridge, you’ll see the falls exploding through the archway on the west side of the bridge. Then continue walking down Main Street, pop into Two Brothers Tavern for a Heady Topper, and return to the falls for Round 2.

Now if you finish your walk and think, “Hey, I could get used to this,” you can level up immediately by driving over to nearby Vergennes, walking half a mile from the parking lot for an aerospace systems compan to the promisingly named Vergennes Falls Park and looking across the water. You’ll see a trilogy of cascades called Vergennes Falls, which are downstream of Middlebury along Otter Creek. (It’s a real shame that Otter Creek Brewing closed their doors in 2022—that would have been the natural finale.)

THE 2025 BONUS WATERFALL

Some things you only experience once and yet, you hold onto that memory like an ice cream cone that’s melting all over your hands on a broiled July afternoon. McArthur-Burney Falls burned itself into my brain back in early fall of 2019, when I was visiting the Shasta-Redding region of Northern California to look at…well…waterfalls. Volcanic activity in this area, which occurred millions of years ago, created lava tubes and other passages through the earth that were later flooded by snowmelt and spring rain. The results are some of the most behemoth-like waterfalls in North America, and the big fish in the pool is easily McArthur-Burney Falls. Dubbed “The Eighth Wonder Of The World” by Teddy Roosevelt and spilling down an immense basalt cliff face, the falls are roughly 129-feet tall and the plunges are so voluminous that the spray can leave you soaking wet after a storm, even if you’re simply observing the falls from the trail that descends to its base and follows its waters into the woods before looping back to the cascade. That’s partly why I chose McArthur-Burney Falls for the 2025 Thawed Waterfall Issue. Spring is when the Shasta-Redding area gets a lot of its limited rain.

I stood at the base of McArthur-Burney Falls at the end of a very dry summer that saw multiple wildfires in the region and this cascade still left me speechless. So imagine how insanely loud, powerful, and drenching the falls might be in springtime, as the rain mixes with melting snow from the surrounding peaks! In the event that you make it to the Eighth Wonder Of The World, please let me know how it was. And maybe take a fisherman style rain suit. The kind that’s ubiquitous to commercial scalloping trips.

ADVENTURE RESOURCES

Round Top fishing area cascade
0.5-ish mile to reach the cascade, with potential for a longer trail loop
50 feet of elevation gain
CLICK HERE for a Google Map to the parking area
NOTE: Bring bright orange clothing if visiting between now and late May!

Barden Reservoir cascade
4.5 miles loop
410 feet of elevation gain
CLICK HERE for a trail map

Indian Well Falls
1.6 miles loop
367 feet of elevation gain
CLICK HERE for a trail map

Enders Falls
0.9 mile out-and-back
111 feet of elevation gain
CLICK HERE for a trail map

The Cascade (Middlesex Fells)
2.8 miles out-and-back…or improvise a longer loop hike on nearby trails!
266 feet of elevation gain
CLICK HERE for a trail map

The Cascades (North Adams)
2.1 miles out-and-back
265 feet of elevation gain
CLICK HERE for a trail map

Middlebury Falls
CLICK HERE for a Google Map pin for the falls

Vergennes Falls
1 mile out-and-back
45 feet of elevation gain
CLICK HERE for a trail map

McArthur-Burney Falls
1.1 miles loop
167 feet of elevation gain
CLICK HERE for a trail map

Contrary to what you might have heard on cable news or your neighborhood Facebook group, violent crime in America has been plummeting in recent years. But if there’s any time of the year to keep an eye over your shoulder or resist the urge to flip off a crazy driver on the interstate, it’s April. For reasons that continue to elude us, April is when a lot of people seem to indulge their most aggressive and homicidal desires. It’s such a distinctive and recurrent pattern that some criminologists refer to April as “The Killing Season.” Assaults and murders occur more frequently during the beginning of spring, whether it’s a terrorist attack like the Oklahoma City bombing, or a state-sponsored event like the 1993 Waco siege, which was carried out by law enforcement officials.

It’s worth noting that April starts with something much less distressing; April Fool’s Day. A dedicated day for mercilessly pranking your friends, family, or coworkers can make for some hearty guffawing But it also offers a release—after a long winter of being sequestered away indoors with all our thoughts and feelings. That isolation pushes millions of us into a dark place. So when it’s suddenly warmer and sunnny enough to go outside again, a lot of re-emerge from our homes with wild hair, feral eyes, and a posture that brings to mind a reanimated corpse. Winter’s demons still have their claws in us. Ideally, we can shake them off by switching someone’s coffee sugar with iodized salt and having a laugh when they start gagging. But I suspect the ravages of winter also inspire more destructive actions—the type that Fox News loves.

So this week, I’d like to offer a more passive idea for processing all of those lingering feelings from the darkest months of the year. It doesn’t involve doing anything mean or deceptive, and you can do it alone or in the company of friends. As long as you live in a town or city where the landscape is undergoing a thaw process, you’re all set. My go-to trick for mentally adjusting from winter to spring is a simple three-step process.

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A few months ago, I saw a guy drinking a beer in a sauna. Granted, this wasn’t one of those spruced-up bourgeois saunas where they give you a white terry cloth bathrobe upon check-in. This was a no-frills sauna with an ancient stone wall full of cracks and a bunch of middle-aged guys with tattoos and beards sitting on the wooden benches and basting in their own juices. One of them had a tallboy of Rolling Rock and he kept taking generous glugs from it, as waves of 200 degree heat swept across the upper benches. Now, I’m no stranger to an occasional shower stout during the summer, but given that saunas are renowned for promoting circulation and reducing inflammation, I wondered if crushing a 16 oz. beer in the sauna might cancel out the health benefits.

Most of us do this to ourselves in some way or another—pairing a restorative activity with a second activity that undermines the first activity’s therapeutic effects. For me, the problematic pairing that I haven’t been able to fully quit is scrolling on my phone when I’m out for a walk. It’s not that my phone is distracting me from my surroundings and my exposure to safety hazards. I always put my phone in my pocket whenever I’m approaching a street crossing, a water crossing, or a steep surface on which tripping could lead to a hospital visit. The issue is that when I return from a walk that included some solid phone time, I don’t feel restored. It’s similar to when you’ve woken up after five hours of sleep, when you know what it’s like to start your day after seven or eight hours in Dreamland. It’s the sensation of being unsated; vaguely ragged and unhappy.

And this past fall, after a few lapses, I began wondering: Are phones ruining our walks?

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Last week really tested my ability to limit the amount of national news that I consume. In particular, I kept checking my phone for the latest updates on Elon Musk—a private citizen and the world’s richest person—hijacking our treasury payment system with the help of a bunch of 20-something accomplices; including one who went by the name “Big Balls” on LinkedIn and who dropped out of Northeastern to join Musk’s wrecking crew. I’m guessing that it won’t take long for this coup to become very real for us. As soon you shut off money spigots for the infrastructure and services that 90% of the people in America rely upon, they will notice. And they will be extremely mad about it.

But when I think about what’s happened during the early weeks of Trump Part II: The Revenge, the things that really concern me are the things that won’t feel real to many of us; the stuff that’s happening out on the edges of our communities and our minds.

Whenever I head back into Boston after having dinner with my parents in the suburbs, or going on a trip to the mountains, I drive past a complex of austere buildings near the intersection of Melnea Cass Boulevard and Massachusetts Avenue. This is the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department’s South Bay House of Correction—a prison in which a daily average of 840 people are detained, as they complete sentences of two-and-a-half years or less. I’ve probably driven past the complex more than 200 times in the last decade, and while it always carried a vague sense of foreboding (“ooh, there’s the local prison again,”) the reality that several hundred people were stuck in those buildings didn’t fully permeate my consciousness. Until one night when I walked there.

On November 25th in 2014, a grand jury in Missouri decided not to indict Darren Wilson; the white Ferguson cop who shot and killed an 18-year old Black teenager named Michael Brown, who was unarmed. The Black Lives Matter movement was young and evolving, and by nightfall, solidarity protests had started in major cities across America. That evening, I joined over 1,400 Bostonians on a march through Roxbury to the House of Correction. And as we approached the police barricade stretched across Mass. Ave, each of us thinking about whether we were willing (or prepared) to get arrested, I saw something that still lingers in my mind to this day.

In the lit windows of the prison were the silhouettes of the human beings who were incarcerated there in the winter of 2014. They were watching the protests. Some of them raised their fists, but most of them stood still; static forms that could have just as easily been any of us. They seemed to cast a fragmented shadow over the street.

Today, whenever I walk or drive by the prison, I can still feel a cold sensation of being under the shadow. My nerves tense up, knowing that I’m just a few feet away from an institution built to inflict pain and degradation. While only the most sadistic sheriff’s departments would ever admit to this, cruelty and neglect are features of our prisons. Last spring, a 35 year-old mom from Dorchester was sent to the Suffolk County House of Correction after being involuntarily committed for intoxication. She died while in custody at the prison. A suit filed by her family alleged that the guards didn’t bother to check on her even as she experienced vomitting and chest convulsions. As she laid dying on the floor of her cell, the guards were apparently shooting the breeze nearby.

I’ve been thinking about American prisons and mass incarceration quite a lot over the last few months. Until 2019, the Suffolk County House of Correction sometimes held people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—the federal agency that Trump intends to use for mass roundups of undocumented immigrants. And the thing is, immigration enforcement is just one example of how Trump and his deputies plan on using incarceration as a weapon. As part of their crackdown on the existence and bodily autonomy of trans people, the Trump administration has already tried to transfer incarcerated trans women to men’s prisons. And as of this week, Trump and Co. are considering a grotesque offer from El Salvador’s strongman-in-chief, President Nayib Bukele—a deal in which the U.S. would get to transfer incarcerated immigrants and incarcerated U.S. citizens to Bukele’s notorious “mega-jail” in El Salvador that can hold 40,000 people. Given the certainty of protests against Trump’s autocratic agenda, and the certainty of arrests at many of those protests, one has to wonder who Trump would try to deport. Would “dissidents” be broadly vulnerable? Would Trump and his team just ignore the blatant illegality of deporting U.S. citizens? And if so, would that heightened exposure make the violence of mass incarceration feel real to more of us?

I’d expect that the answer to that question is, “Nope.” Most people only have so much capacity for thinking about really bad things that may or may not happen, and fixating on looming unknowns is a guaranteed way to burn yourself out. But at times when the landscape around you is changing in a way that poses some new risks, for others and for yourself, keeping an eye on those changes is important. Suppose that you’re out in Montana’s vast backcountry in August, on a multi-night backpacking trip, and you start smelling smoke. You climb one of the pine conifers and you spot a small forest fire on the distant horizon. It’s far enough away from your vantage point that you don’t need to panic just yet. But still, there’s a fire out there. It could get bigger and spread in your direction. So as you make your way to the nearest road or extraction point, you’ll have to climb another tree here and there, to keep an eye on what exactly the fire is doing.

The new and unrestrained Trump administration is the inferno that we need to keep an eye on now. But one key difference is that a forest fire is something you can see and smell. With an autocratic regime, sometimes you can’t see any flames until a terrible policy has been implemented. What you can do, as a way of reminding yourself what’s out there and what may come, is familiarize yourself with institutions that an autocrat will use to inflict suffering. Just as I did in 2014, in a different context, you might walk by a prison and absorb the reality that mass incarceration happens in close proximity to places where the rest of us play, work, eat, and sleep. And that decades of mass incarceration, under both Republicans and Democrats, have brought us to this point.

A couple of weeks ago, a teenager in Lynn, Massachusetts got into an argument with her brother and allegedly pushed him. A neighbor called the police, who arrested the young woman. But upon being initially released, she was intercepted by ICE agents, taken back into custody, and transferred to the Cumberland County Jail in Portland, Maine, which ICE uses as one of their facilities. The fact that she and her family were legally in the United States, awaiting the outcome of an asylum claim, was not enough to spare her from the gaping black maw of our incarceration machine. And if you were out on Portland’s beautiful urban trail network in late January, enjoying the winter sun with a stroll on the Fore River Parkway Trail, you walked right past the prison in which this young woman was being traumatized, along with many others. She was released in early February and reunited with her family. But the Cumberland County Jail has the capacity to hold 570 people; all of whom cast their own fragmented shadow over the Fore River Parkway Trail and the deciduous trees and seasonal wildflowers that line it.

And even now, in the second Trump era, these shadows are still invisible to most of us.

One of the most audacious and disturbing films that I’ve seen is The Zone Of Interest; Jonathan Glazer’s portrait of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. Höss lived with his wife, Hedwig, and their children in a villa built next to the concentration camp walls. Glazer never takes us over the wall, using sounds and implications to convey the horror of what’s happening on the other side. In the press tour for the film, which won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Glazer repeatedly said, “This is not about the past. It’s about now.” He elaborated on this in an interview with The Guardian’s Sean O’Hagan. “The reason I made this film is to try to restate our close proximity to this terrible event that we think of as in the past,” Glazer said. “For me, it is not ever in the past, and right now, I think something in me is aware – and fearful – that these things are on the rise again with the growth of rightwing populism everywhere. The road that so many people took is a few steps away. It is always just a few steps away.”

I don’t know if taking the first steps down the other road—of recognizing institutional cruelty and resisting it—can be a means of divergence. I don’t know if looking at our prisons out in the field and fully digesting what these prisons have been used for, is enough to make their terrible shadows visible to more of us. But I do know this. If you walk by a prison at a time when it still contains prisoners, there’s still a chance to do something about it. If you walk by a prison that no longer contains people—a prison which has been turned into a historic site with tour guides, exhibits, and an ice-cold silence—then the worst has already come to pass. And all you can do is stand there.

• Since this week’s newsletter looks squarely at the chaos and horror of what’s happening under the Trump administration (something that other newsletters allude to) I want to take a moment to direct your attention to some of the most incisive reporting on these events and the journalists who are doing this work. Legacy media outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post have been late to the scene on covering many of the biggest stories of the last few weeks, such as Elon Musk and the DOGE crew taking over the treasury. WIRED has been on the frontlines of covering that story, and given the synergy between Trump World and the Silicon Valley ruling class, I suspect that WIRED is going to be an essential publication over these next several years. I subscribed yesterday.
  

• As I wrote about back in December, when announcing that Mind The Moss would transform into a newsletter about “walking into a better world,” a lot of journalists who once worked for legacy media outlets have launched their own newsletters or small-scale publications. Why? Because the journalism industry has been in a state of collapse for the past two decades, more readers are getting their news through social platforms, and ultimately, you have to go to where the readers are. A few of the independent journalists I’ve been following for coverage of recent events are Marisa Kabas (who publishes The Handbasket), Frankie de la Cretaz (who publishes Out Of Your League), and Hamilton Nolan (who publishes How Things Work.) If there are others you’ve enjoyed, I’d like to know about them too.
  

• Mind The Moss is an independent publication too. I got my start in the traditional media landscape before pivoting to independent journalism, and I’m proud—and very grateful!—to say that Mind The Moss is 100% financed by readers like you who decide to become paid subscribers. It’s heartening to see readers stepping up and supporting independent media; because we’re going to need it over these next few years, as legacy companies owned by billionaires continue to stumble and censor. So if you would like to help Mind The Moss continue to exist, take a moment to become a paid subscriber today. Thank you, and see you out there!
  

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This weekend, despite…well, everything that’s happening right now, I’m going to Dallas to visit my dear friends George and Zarya and their three year-old daughter, who’s now becoming a professional walker herself. We try to see each other each winter and of course, we’re going to do the requisite Texas Things, like gnawing on juicy beef ribs at Terry Black’s BBQ or sprinting through the crosswalks as amphibious assault vehicle-sized trucks rumble toward us. But if I’m being honest with myself, the activity that I’m most excited about is grabbing a cup of coffee, picking a park or a greenway, and spending the morning walking and talking.

I like to leave it at that, because it doesn’t really matter where we’re walking or what we decide to talk about. We might amble past the palm trees at the Galleria Dallas mall, ranking the states that are most likely to become “climate havens” in the event of an ecological collapse. Or we could discuss Trump’s psychotic decision to freeze federal grants for social services and the likeilihood of a backlash while we explore the Katy Trail—an excellent multi-use path through downtown Dallas that’s frequented by jacked-and-tanned young people. Whatever the subject, wherever the setting, all I know is that a good old “Walk-And-Talk” leaves me feeling inspired, nourished and more grounded. And more capable of getting through the next few days or years.

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