Beaten Paths, 2017-2025

~200,000 miles on a map, textured with territory

~200,000 miles. Worth zooming in; many paths are doubled or more. Many places became homes. Infinite life left to explore. Light blue is hitchhiking, for the backpack that’s been to all 50 states; dark blue is driving my bus Lucy, with Starry Night painted on her side; red is driving the ProtoTown bus Alice for a job I love; purple, nearly indistinguishable from dark blue, is driving other cars.

No matter how much of the world we map, the territory continues to grow. These lines in the sand are transparent windows on a changing land, while the textured face of the unknown grows infinitely blanker. It is thus up to us to see it anew, generation after generation. We must become explorers again and again.

On the white map is the faintest hint of an old America, and the America we think we know. It is a bare waterdroplet in a whitish cloud floating over the new America that truly lives today— the growing texture of this living territory— greenwashed mountains, valleys and rivers, people and their stories deepening and widening through time.

But every droplet of experience implies the full width of the unknown ocean within which we must be woven. Every beaten path widens the window of paths we could beat.

Look through the clear water crystal from just the right angle with a little imagination— like a beam of sunlight breaking into color— and we might see a glimpse of the America that could be.

We can see it from anywhere. Wherever we are on this map or beyond, wherever you hold your screen to the world— or here, in the desert, on the Joshua Tree dry lakebed, facing uphill towards the sunset and the snowy peak of San Gorgonio, the first water we see after 500 miles in the westbound wasteland— we can imagine the promise of the Pacific.

What the map doesn’t show is the depth of the territory: the thickness of the forests, the heights of the peaks, the blackness of the canyons; the muchness folded in every mind, the stories staining every road in striated layers like a cake of time, the creative hum of humanity in incessant dialogue.

These lines in the map are made of conversations with drivers, and adventures with friends. They’re made of selves. Where they fold upon themselves in a pile, they’re made of homes. Yours and mine, and everyone’s.

There is a version of ourself that lives in Colorado. There is a self that lives in California, and a self that lives in Texas. There is an Aidan from the Northeast, and one who is home in the Northwest of our dreams. The lines in the map connect these selves into one story. I dream of more stories than I can imagine.

The rich texture of any home approaches infinity— any of your homes, any of mine, tiny dots of ink on the map. To know the muchness of one home is to know there must be such unbelievable muchness hidden in any blank spot on the map. The unknown can become home, too.

I wonder how much more I might experience in eight more years of this endless adventure discovering America.

It’s a good life. This is a good place.