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 →

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.

In the dead-quiet autumn after September 11th, a laid-off Westin bell captain with a bicycle and too much time rode north out of Belltown to pick up a rubber duck. It was TB1A — one of the seven devil ducks that started the entire trackable system, and, it turns out, the twenty-sixth trackable object ever activated on Earth. What followed: six confessions that produced no real sins, an Amsterdam trip financed by unemployment, a duck that crossed the Atlantic and came back, a federal seizure by the National Park Service, a Dalmatian in Melbourne, and a Christmas Day burglary. Twenty-five years later, standing in the same Vondelpark, he went looking for the other six — and found out what his duck had actually done.

A Westin doorman's birthday barbecue at Green Lake — the "Gnar-BQ" — that turns into an entire Seattle weekend in one afternoon. A baseball-practice mishap with a Jack Russell, an emergency-vet cliffhanger, a Lake Forest Park skate crew doing tricks over the bonfire, a wall of death metal, and a piñata that detonates into a hundred tiny liquor bottles. Beautifully disorganized, completely unforgettable.

Seattle, the summer of 2000, the height of the first Survivor craze. A graveyard-shift Westin bellman who lived in a basement with three ferrets and had just finished War and Peace gets cast on 107.7 The End's radio version — "End War" — and is locked in an RV in the station parking lot under the webcam. The story of the Russian Lit Guy: the alliances, the hot-mic disaster, the vote, and the water jugs poured out on live TV. The first Seattle Stories piece.

Two trips to Tasmania, five years apart. Once by accident, on a ferry spotted from Bondi. Once on purpose, on foot, across the Overland Track. A trail family, a tiger snake under the deck, Paul Watson at the market, and the long pull south toward Antarctica and the things that were nearly lost.

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.

My mom's house as weekend hub, a power walk to the craps table, and the night Jim rolled three 11s in ten minutes — then walked away. We did not.

A giant Korbel Champagne bottle balloon loses lift over East 6th and Valley during the Great Reno Balloon Race, my mom bursts into my room yelling that it's about to crash in the yard, and a hot-air balloon comes down in the middle of the street — followed by a very confused chase crew asking to use our phone.

UNR in the '90s. The Sundowners. The Ominous Pinniped expeditions. A Slayer show at the Westin Seattle. The kind of person who made a place and a time worth remembering.

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.

New Years Eve, 1991. Four guys drove over Donner Pass in a snowstorm to see the Chili Peppers. Pearl Jam and Nirvana were opening. Nobody knew it yet, but the world was about to change.