Dispatch #17 - Notes From the Sky

Something A Little Different: Vacation Reflections, Book Recommendations, Where I'll Be This Week and Gratitudes

Jul 20, 2025

Greetings from 32,000 feet. I’m sitting in seat 33E, sandwiched between my thirteen-year-old son by the window and my ten-year-old daughter on the aisle. We’re two rows from the violent whoosh of the airplane toilet, somewhere between Grand Rapids and Los Angeles.

Pillowy clouds stretch outside the window, so vast and beautiful my son even paused his movie to admire them. A stripe of deep orange sky hangs just above the horizon before melting into burnt orange, then into a yellow that can only be described as butter, and finally into layered purples — a perfect gradient from cloud to oblivion, like a giant space pride flag.

The rain and humidity of my sister’s farm in northern Michigan are still lingering on my skin and in my pores. My eyes are still mesmerized by the meadows, maples and marshes, along with the newborn calf still wet, her legs crooked, trying to walk for the very first time. I can still taste the blue eggs the hens laid and the wild raspberries we pulled off thorny branches and my mother blended into a pie. My t-shirt has the smell of sheep and cattle and chickens baked into its cotton.

What I’ll remember most are the sounds: incessant laughter and conversation, morning coffee dripping into the kettle, thunder off the back deck, a woodpecker rattling the porch beams, and rain splashing on the roof as we fell asleep.

The flight attendant hands my kids two cans of soda and me three cups of water, two of which my kids will be forced to drink before they’re allowed (another) soda. Pretzels follow. The little girl in front of us is watching The Simpsons and giggling her sweet heart out.

I’m writing this dispatch on the plane because the week has crested the hill and is tumbling quickly toward Sunday - my self imposed newsletter deadline - and because, well, the only thing family vacations suffer from are a lack of putting fingers to keyboard.

Nine days without writing is about seven days too long, especially when some damn fine books were consumed between cows giving birth and long walks through forests of sugar maple and white pine. Reading without writing sends my brain into haywire.

Books and The Meaning of Life

I read Jim Harrison’s The Search For the Genuine, a compilation of non-fiction essays written over half a century. I keep coming back to Harrison the same way I come back to Bukowski and Oliver and Carver, marveling at the way they spin sentences and ideas into a concoction of truth. One particular passage from Harrison’s 1994 essay, Dream As A Metaphor Of Survival:

When I walk several hours the Earth becomes sufficient to my imagination, and the lesser self is lost or dissipates in the intricacies, both the beauty and the horror, of the natural world. I continue to dream myself back to what I lost, and continue to lose and regain, to an Earth where I am a fellow creature and to a landscape I can call home.

My goodness.

And speaking of walking, I also read Nicholas Triolo’s wonderful debut book, The Way Around: A Field Guide To Going Nowhere, one of my most anticipated books for 2025. Triolo is a curiosity powerhouse, a master of prose, and my favorite kind of explorer - one immersed in contemplative thought.

The Way Around chronicles three pilgrimages, first around Mount. Kailash in Tibet, then Mount Tamalpais in northern California, and finally to the Berkeley Pit Complex in Montana. The walks follow a circular pattern called kora, a form of moving prayer Triolo first encountered in Kathmandu. Kora is a several-thousand-year-old ritual in which pilgrims walk around a sacred site or object, a kind of “ritualized remembering.”

In the prologue, he asks:

What are we encircling? What is encircling us? These questions brought me into an intimate sense of stillness-in-motion, a calm aliveness as storms of an unstable future build.
What if surviving the perilous times ahead requires us to identify with a different trajectory, one that relies on questing and returning, achieving and relinquishing, one that centers mystery and humility as a way home? What if our survival demands a different story, which is to say a different shape, the shape of radical attention and restraint in pursuit of human and more-than-human flourishing?
The Way Around carries these questions, each step an attempt to compose a love song underfoot, a storm song, a pilgrimage to nowhere and back again.

Reading his work is like sitting at the end of a dock, legs dangling over a pond, and peering into the water looking for frogs and snapping turtles, only to find yourself staring at your own reflection and contemplating the meaning of life.

I hope all of you will consider following his substack and picking up a copy of The Way Around. And I’m thrilled to report that I’ll be in conversation with Nicholas this Wednesday, July 23, for a special book tour event at Green Apple Books in San Francisco. I am so eager to sit down with our two books and sift through landscapes and ideas. You can RSVP here.

This Week On the Book Tour:

JULY 21: 9am: KQED Forum Radio Hour

My first trip to NPR’s studio in Culver City should be a blast. You can listen to Alexis Madrigal and I discuss my book and the threats to California’s BLM lands LIVE at 9am PST. Never thought I’d be on an NPR and PBS station affiliate but here we are. What a ride! More INFO here.

JULY 22: 12pm: SACRAMENTO

I’ll be in conversation with Wade Crowfoot, California’s Secretary of Natural Resources. DETAILS HERE.

JULY 23: 7pm: SAN FRANCISCO

You can RSVP here. See notes above!

JULY 24: 7pm: OAKLAND

I will be in conversation with my friend and fellow HeyDay author, the great Obi Kauffman, writer of the California Field Atlas series among other books on water and fire. This special HeyDay event is open to the public and will be held at Clio’s Books in Oakland. You can RSVP HERE.

Thank You:

We have officially hit 3K subscribers and are inching closer to 100 paid subscribers, both of which have far exceeded my goals for the first year of this newsletter. Thank you to everyone who has subscribed and a very special CHEFS KISS THANK YOU to all those folks who have coughed up $5 a month or $50 a year of your hard earned dollars to support the time and effort it takes to write each of these dispatches (I spend an average of 11.25 hours writing and compiling these every week).

I’ll be back in your inbox next Sunday, bright and early.

Josh