Month: September 2026

The Back Roads

In the Allegheny Mountains of Northwestern Pennsylvania, outside of a tiny town called Tionesta, if you take a gravel road back a couple of miles, you will find a small cabin with a big screened-in porch at the end of the road that settles into a hillside, overlooking a manmade pond stocked with native fish. You’d see a salt lick to the north and south of the cabin, gleaming from squat stumps and attracting the crepuscular neighbors and a few stray porcupines. There is a field of clover for the deer, a fire pit with grates above it for roasting hand pies (Wonderbread and butter with a heap of canned pie filling in the center) or making “hobo” dinners (a less PC name for vegetables stacked in tin foil). Tucked around the woods are small forts built of plywood and logs, and often have makeshift fences built by 12 year olds. A spring runs from the mountain above, down to supply the cabin, and draining into the lake, which overflows to a stream below that, and empties in a larger tributary into the Allegheny River. On the gravel road you took, you may be slapped with birch branches as you drive by, some stripped of a twig or two where a little hand has removed it and chewed it down to the pulp, letting the sweetness of the green pith sap flood the tastebuds as a tie-over til lunch or dinner. You may also see blackberry bushes stretching their brambles toward you, daring you to trade the reward of the fat, bursting berries for a few pricks in your skin. There are three fingered alien hand leaves of sassafras, waiting their turn to have a piece of their roots dug up and boiled into a blood thinning winter tea, light pink with milk and sugar.

Veer off of the main gravel road and its treasures, taking a left onto a footpath after the first high meadow– the only place on the mountain where enough cell phone service can be garnered for a midnight phone call to a boyfriend back in civilization, if you can steel yourself against the rustling of leaves and trees in the dark. Go near the mound that is colloquially known as the fox den (and for good reason– foxes are often spotted here). If you choose this path in August and maybe early September, and if you look down among the scrubby brush, before your eyes land on the soft pine needles below, you will be rewarded with an abundance of huckleberries. At first, you might not see them. They don’t shimmer like the blackberries, and often have a matted, muted tone to them, blending into the small green leaves that protect them. But once your eye is trained, suddenly a kingdom arises from the late summer green, and your mouth will salivate and pucker and pop with the stunning delight of a warm huckleberry. They are at once the taste of summer and the harbinger of fall, a burst of daylight as the moon is rising.

If you fill your pockets and don’t become too greedy, neatly plopping one or two at a time in your mouth as you walk, you can take this back road– this well trodden path– all the way down to the cabin without ever touching the road. It’s easy enough for me, as I’ve taken it a hundred times, both in my body and in my mind. I’ve taken it at night and in the day, in early morning and at dusk. This is a path that has formed the shape of my shoes and the roundness of my desire to return– a desire as full and poignant as a huckleberry.

In early September, at the break of the weather from summer to fall– I love a good break in the weather– I traveled this road again for the first time in two decades, on a small wooded path in Long Beach, Washington, where an accretion of land meets the Pacific Ocean. Halfway to the dune grass, the path splits, and a rusted chandelier hangs on a low hanging branch, beside which is a huckleberry bush as tall as I am. These aren’t the scrubby spreading kind of my childhood, but the taste is the same. Each morning and evening I took this walk for a week, grabbing a few huckleberries each time, leaving plenty for the bears behind. I took a few extra and clumped them lavishly on my oats one morning, with real maple syrup from my friend’s trees in Vermont– another well trodden path. I luxuriated in the simplicity of time, how it is not linear or singular, but circular and plural and not confined by place.

I would like to reduce the sensation to nostalgia. I would like to diminish this exploration as a self-indulgent journey into the past. But I am not listening to the Spice Girls records (well, most of the time) and I am not squeezing myself into old JNCO jeans, or even swooning over the sight of an old yellow Ford Ranger like the one I drove through high school and college.

I am finding the back roads of myself. It’s more trepidatious, as it requires not only a journey back, but a new path forged forward.

In a white house on a hill by the Connoquenesing Creek outside of a small shut-down steel town 45 miles north of Pittsburgh, you will see a light on in the east facing gable, warm and early and laced with white curtains. Climb into the room, and there is a captured attic bedroom with a sloping ceiling next to a twin bed, mauve and magenta carpeting that splits into baby blue at the doorway. The walls are a pale pink, and covered with drawings and writings and handprints of a teenage girl and her two best friends, who spent a whole sleepless night painting and eating snacks and having one last stab at childhood while looking into the dark open mouth of their graduation.

The shelves are lined with books and journals filled to capacity, the dresser topped with trinkets– pink glass bears and dried roses– from ex-boyfriends, and the closet stuffed with CDs both bought and gifted and rotated evenly in the prominently displayed stereo in the next room. In the glow of this morning, you will find a teenage girl huddled under her blankets, a white cup with a rainbow streaked across– her mother’s favorite mug– of black tea, tan with milk and sugar resting on the nightstand her father built beside her. On her lap, a half filled journal, black faux leather with an illustration of a blue iridescent feather quill on the front. It cost more than $30, and she saved for weeks to buy it at Barnes & Nobles, checking every weekend that it was still there. Once purchased, she did not hesitate to use it. Empty books are meant to be filled, not cherished for their clean start, as eventually, a clean start is only the burden of not starting at all. Next to her is an open Bible, somewhere in the Corinthians. This is likely her third or fourth time through this book. She sometimes wakes up with nightmares about Nebuchadnezzar and fires from the book of Daniel, or with visions of swords and horses from Revelation, but she persists, and is determined to crack the code of herself through this singular text. She won’t find out for several years that this text was created by people– men– who knew nothing about the sacred heart of a spiritual seeker, and especially nothing about women, and that in fact the text she was reading was not meant to help her, but to imprison her– to keep her in line. But this vignette has little to do with that. It has everything to do with a warm lamp and a curious spirit.

This back road of myself has been recently reopened. I’ve exchanged coffee for tea; Marcus Aurelius for the Bible; a journal I’ve made myself– a complicated historical stitch and handmade paper– for the mass produced one I determined special. This road is comfortable and confronting, with few guard rails and several connecting dirt roads. It’s slow, full of potholes and speed bumps, and dappled with a forest of thought that makes me believe the outside world is out there, up there somewhere. But it isn’t intruding right now. Here, I can almost breathe again.

Taking these back roads has softened me. This year, I’ve steeled myself against the loss of my dog, against a long 5 month tour, against a neurotic and destructive presidency, against the nagging feeling that I will be hardened forever and then I will die. I’ve been hesitant to open up these channels in fear of becoming unproductive, overly sensitive (again), or simply silly. These are the roads I have resisted, for fear of being trite or repetitive. I’ve tried to judge myself less and let the feeling take me where it will. It’s hard, especially while trying to protect myself from old wounds or opening to new disappointments and hurts. I’m trying to be zen, for Chrissake. So, I’ve been trying to remember that I don’t begrudge myself for taking the dirt road back to my house in New Hampshire– why would I begrudge myself the wooded path that brings me home to myself? This is not merely a foray into saccharine sweet memory, but a practical route to the life I’ve been gifted. Every experience a footstep, every footstep a road.

And so now it happens sometimes like this– that I find myself in Tacoma, Washington, and on the recommendation of a new friend, go to a local bakery. This bakery, named after a favorite bird from another familiar back road, has all the offerings a physically and spiritually hungry woman could imagine– cinnamon sugar focaccia, lavender blueberry cake, tart lemon bars. And, something I haven’t had in over two decades, kolache. I ordered a sundried tomato and pesto to share with my Someone, heated. I felt the warmth of it as we carried it back to our truck, readying ourselves for Portland traffic ahead. When I opened the brown container and opened the wax paper, cutting softly into the hot kolache, a smell drifted from it as familiar as my left hand.

“This smells like my mother’s pepperoni bread,” I said. And then I started to cry. Rather than forcing it back or expounding, I simply let it linger, walked the full path of the memory, and let it bring me back to where I was standing, on a sidewalk, in Tacoma, Washington– an entire country from where I first knew this smell. Then, I got into the truck and ate it appreciatively, thinking of the hundreds of meals my mother had made– some specially because they were my favorite. The allowance of this internal journey gave way to an allowance of forgiveness– for my mother and for myself– for the meals we missed, too.

This is the nature of rediscovering the back roads. Home is not stagnant. It is always shifting, always changing. If you try and catch it and hold it tight, it will become hostile, stone, bitter– a poor man’s recreation. But continue to move, keeping walking and believing in the road home to yourself, and it will change with you. It will reward you for your steadfastness. It will welcome you back. It will soften the resistance, and you will find home again.

Selling Sticks

“Hey, Mal– you wanna buy a stick?” my Someone called over to me. We were in Cortez, CO, setting up for a three hour gig at a Farmer’s Market. We were running late, there was a potential electric storm on the horizon, and the wind had just whipped through making merch set up impossible. I answered without knowing the impetus.

“Of course I want to buy a stick, who’s selling them?”

And then appeared a small boy, dark brown eyes and hair, grasping literally at sticks in his little hands. His name was Jackson.

“Well, let’s see them,” I said, gesturing toward the table. He laid out the sticks, mostly skinny, with variations in length and circumference. I took my time, touching each stick carefully, choosing one or two to hold up to the light and set down again.

“Are these sticks locally sourced?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, and he pointed across the town green to a tree. “They’re from right there.”

“So they’re free range sticks, too?”

“Yes,” he said more confidently, shifting in a universal way that indicates Lady are you gonna buy a stick or not?

“It’s going to need to be a very good stick, for my dog,” I said, pointing back at Puddle, who was licking her paws on stage waiting for the show to begin.

“Well,” he responded carefully, “I can do one stick for a dollar, or five for three dollars.”

Now we were getting somewhere.

“I’ll give you the whole bundle for five,” he added, nudging the pile toward me.

“All right,” I condeded, other customers lining up, “I’ll take one for my dog, and my friend here would like to buy one, too.” I looked at my Someone.

“Yeah, I’d like a stick,” my Someone said. We chose, thanked Jackson for his business acumen, and called over to our friends behind us that they may now purchase the third and fourth best stick in the batch.

We returned to our set up. I promptly handed the stick to Puddle, who took it graciously, and chewed it down to mulch before sound check began. Jackson and his mother approached after our friends had also dutifully handed their stick to Puddle, and I complimented Jackson on the quality of stick that Puddle had obviously enjoyed. I saw his mom nudge him, and he handed over a free stick for the dog, a reward for her obvious delight.

The electric storm didn’t materialize, and we played a three hour set with some of the worst sound on the tour. After the show, we were gifted hot sauce and pepper jelly from Jackson’s mom, a return for “treating him like a person.” Jackson doesn’t always get treated that way, as indicated from the illustrious gifts, but it’s not something I noticed. To me, he was a kid being a kid, negotiating a world in which we are taking common resources and transforming them into commodities to sell. Some of us sticks. Some of us oil. Some of us words. In the end, it’s gritted down to mulch in the jaws of a dog or of capitalism or of people’s brains to grow the next thing. The commonality of it is shockingly simplistic. But then add the human complication of value assignment, and here we have wealth disparity, resource guarding, and some people going hungry. All from a pile of sticks.

We spend an inordinate amount of time pressuring children into being an example for humanity. We prize them as a symbol of purity, of good heartedness. We also applaud them when they act like adults– tiny capitalists are adorable. And I think we have it wrong.

I grew up in a church that told me that I should have faith like a child, but that I was also born bad and needed God to come out of the sky to die a brutal death for how horrible I am. This leads to a lifetime of believing that I deserve the bad things that happen to me, and having to talk myself into not giving up on my pitiable life. I recently picked up a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and it is undoing a lifetime of trying to untangle myself from this core belief of self loathing.

Aurelius insists that we are part of nature, and that nature is inherently good. That the things we do that harm ourselves or others are actually against our true nature. Because our true nature, when we let ourselves be, is good.

Something about Jackson made this make sense. Because if we are going to say that we need faith like a child, that we should be trusting as children, that kids are the example we need of kindness in the world, then we are saying that children are the closest to our true, natural form. This means that we, too, are good people who want to help others as a default setting. To cause others harm is to go against who we truly are. To say that I was born bad and pitiable is to tell myself a lie. To say that I need a God to come and die for me, for how bad I was, is also a lie.

But then, the world becomes a strange landscape of snares. Suddenly, the number of things that go against our nature are prominent and abundant. The first, money. Also, power. How do we possibly eradicate these unnatural hinges of society?

This is where kids really can help. Or, at least one kid.

Jackson went back into the farmer’s market. He went to visit a woman who paints his and his sister’s face every week, for free, and he asked the woman if she was hungry. The woman, pregnant, said yes. Then, Jackson walked his stick money to the food truck and bought the woman a pizza, draining his profit.

Because maybe it is true that we are beyond the point of return for money being our central point of contact. But we can still move within our true nature around it. A kid can turn stick money into food for someone else. A folk singer can turn a song into food for thought. An oil mogul– well, that guy could probably benefit from the words of Jesus and Buddha and Marcus Aurelius and every other naturalist about giving away all we own for the benefit of others.

It doesn’t take a God falling from the sky to figure this one out.

Just maybe a few sticks.