Two years in Brenham, Texas, 1988–1990 — arrival, Memorial Hall, and the wonderfully strange days in between. A California foothills kid at the oldest junior college in Texas. Start the collection →

Growing up in Groveland, California — a Gold Rush town on the road to Yosemite. The Iron Door Irregulars, Hippie Bro and the duct-taped Datsun, Crazy Irvin, Frank from the Dam, and long roads east to Mono Lake and the desert. Open the collection →

Reno, Nevada, 1990 to 1997 — my mother's house as weekend hub, a balloon in the wrong yard, a friend named Nevada Neil, and a snowstorm crossing to the Cow Palace for a show that turned out to matter. The years between Blinn and Seattle. Open the collection →

Seattle, 1997 to 2019, outside the bell desk. 107.7 The End, a backyard called the Gnar-BQ, and a rubber duck that made it to Amsterdam and back. Some overlap with the Westin years is inevitable. Open the collection →

The trips that don't belong to any one era or hometown — starts in Tasmania, won't stay there. Open the collection →

Found in the same garage box as the Whitney notebook: a high school economics report tracking Reebok stock for thirteen weeks in the fall of 1987 — sixty-three days hand-copied from the newspaper, culminating in the largest one-day crash in Wall Street history. A seventeen-year-old kept writing about a South Korea labor risk nobody else was naming, built a dual-axis chart by hand, and got a 75. Redrawn and re-graded, thirty-nine years later.

A notebook found in the garage in 2026, wedged between an original Nintendo and a stack of old coffee makers: MT. WHITNEY: AN EXPEDITIONAL CONCEPTUS 1994. Two twenty-four-year-olds with no car, no money and no permit ride a Greyhound two hundred and ninety miles from Reno to Lone Pine, carry seventy-five-pound packs and an espresso maker up the highest peak in the lower forty-eight, and run an FM radio survey from the summit. Transcribed as written, annotated thirty-two years later — with two pages in Zack Hurley's hand that I'd completely forgotten were there.

Fall 1988. A question — how far can you launch a water balloon, as opposed to merely throwing one? — leads to trips to every hardware store in Brenham, surgical tubing, a hundred-yard test flight, and a full can of Lone Star that flew farther than anything else. Then somebody says the words what if we took it to the cruise, and the science experiment becomes a situation. Featuring a ditch, a sweep of KC lights, and the discovery that the scariest people in East Texas were actually pretty nice.

Spring 1989. A California kid who could field but never really hit discovers that in a small Texas town, baseball isn't a sport — it's an identity. An immaculate infield beside cracked tennis courts, the crackle of the PA drifting across campus, the ting of a bat catching one perfectly, and the spring the whole dorm went to see Major League together. Turns out Blinn sent seventeen players to the majors. Not really about baseball at all — about how many different versions of America there are.

A kid from California, five giant Swedish throwers — hammer, discus, shot put — and a Cadillac painted like the Berlin Wall — all somehow deposited in the middle of East Texas at once. Blinn ran one of the greatest juco track programs that ever existed, and it pulled the whole world into one little German-Texas town. The Swedes leaned all the way into being Swedish, and taught a nineteen-year-old that being exactly who you are is a wonderful thing. The one where all the other stories come together.

The summer of 1989, home in Groveland after that first year at Blinn — an empty condo at Pine Mountain Lake, sleeping bags on the floor, cheap beer, and a friend back from Cal Poly with a cassette tape and four words: you have to hear this. The album was Diesel and Dust by Midnight Oil, and thirty-seven years later he's still listening. A love letter to being nineteen and discovering the world is so much bigger than you imagined.

Sonora in the mid-1980s. Benjamin Figs. The creek tunnels. A first encounter with clear gel tabs from a Dead show, and the late bus home through fields that had never looked like that before.

A shortwave radio that seemed to be talking back. Old Priest Grade at night. Coulterville frozen in amber. And the Tuolumne River — thirty feet of air, cold water, and something luminous moving in the dark underneath.

A Gold Rush ghost town, a mother's boyfriend from D.C. known to all as Hippie Bro, a baby-blue Datsun held together with duct tape and optimism, and the 2 a.m. night a pot of mashed potatoes turned a quiet kitchen into a story still told forty years later.

A hand-drawn map to the secret hot springs of the eastern Sierra, sketched on an Iron Door cocktail napkin and navigated by counting cattle guards. A long weekend that dilated into an epic — Tioga Pass, Mono Lake, a rock-hound mother reading the deep time, Crazy Irvin's one rule, and Frank from the Dam appearing out of the trackless desert exactly when the Datsun died. Of course he did.

Spring break, 1986. A punk-teenager Brooks, his rock-hound mother, and Hippie Bro cross an early-open Tioga to the hot springs, Whitney Portal, and the floor of Death Valley — the Racetrack, the Star Wars canyon, the Furnace Creek Inn. Then the pass slams shut behind them, and the long way home through Trona and the valley heat becomes the trip where the Datsun first starts to die.

The summer he was twelve, a broken-down Datsun decided the rest of Brooks's childhood. Over Sonora Pass to Mono Lake with his rock-hound mother and his friend Zack, then the car dies in Tuolumne Meadows and strands them for a week beneath Daff Dome — a Smurf city built and destroyed, a ropeless climb kept secret, both halves of a divided family converging on the same mountain road, and a yellow wire that brought the car, and the boy, home to the foothills for good. The centerpiece of the series.

Early summer 1982, weeks before Daff Dome, when the Datsun could still do anything. A caravan of hippies takes the gated back roads home from El Portal — Frank from the Dam in the lead with the keys to every locked gate, a river crossing the baby-blue wagon fords on its own power, and a 3 a.m. homecoming to the Evergreen Lodge, where a twelve-year-old is turned loose with a fistful of quarters and a supply of sarsaparilla. The Frank story, and the car's finest hour.

A dark bar in the Lower Haight, a best friend from Groveland, cheap beer, the aspiring Lucasfilm creature designer, and the most unresolvable argument in the galaxy.