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.

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.

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.