Text and Trails

In ways I have not felt since family church attendance and teenage religiosity, I’ve undertaken some changes to my life and habits of late. This surprised me, to be honest. After a solid 20 years as a set in my thinking go-it-alone atheist/agnostic*, I wasn’t planning for or seeking a change of pace to my…

[What a year! Enjoy a little overview with links to snippets of adventure that wend through 2020 in backpacking trips with DC UL and also solo (and duo). Total mileage for me came out to about 387 trail miles, which is probably just about average for a year spent living in the DC area. I…

2020 meant many things to me, not surprisingly or even remotely unique. But 2020 was, in the end, a year of trees; a year in trees. This has been a surprising, enriching tree awakening that began around January 1 and blossomed into a spring of discovery in the neighborhood and the mountain trails I frequent.…

I came across Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett’s The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again in David Brooks’ October 15 New York Times opinion column “How To Actually Make America Great Again.” It’s worth quoting at length. Here’s what David wrote: “The Upswing,” a…

Note: This is a review of Samantha Shannon’s The Priory of the Orange Tree. I avoid spoilers but touch on general themes, world build, and plot dynamics. You have been warned. The Good. The Priory of the Orange Tree came to my attention via the best possible path: received as a meaningful gift picked out…

I’m not here to say I’m non-partisan. That doesn’t seem technically possible when actually voting in a two-party political system, unless someone is committed to writing in unaffiliated candidates. I’m here to say how excited in a completely non-partisan manner I am to vote in-person on Election Day. (Note: My political leanings have changed over…

“Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin.” Isabel Wilkerson’s Warmth of Other Suns moved me in ways few books have. Reading Caste, her second book, was a different but no less profound experience. While the former was about the past,…

Warning: This post requires some knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying to understand its myriad references. I can’t remember the exact year. Probably 1993. I do remember the basements, however. Plural. We were forced into multiple dark corners for this particular hobby, it being the time when some parents still worried that we were enacting…

Cross Posted from http://www.dculbacking.com You might ask how I accidentally ended up with a DC UL Backpacking crew. In this case, what started as a Purple Lizard map hike that I intended to do as yet another solo adventure in this time of socially distancing ended up being shared by email to a few backpacker…