An Empire in Autumn

To be a Yankees fan since 2009 is probably something akin to being a Spaniard after the demise of the Armada or a Brit after World War II. The empire is still powerful, still has vast holdings and wealth, but the decline phase has clearly begun, old fiefdoms slipping away and a general sense of decadence in the air. For 15 years, the Yankees put together consistent playoff contenders but always fell a bit short, first as a vaunted core faded into retirement and then as a new generation repeatedly collided with skilled and occasionally cheating Astros teams. We waited and waited for a breakthrough.

In 2024, they finally found their way back to the Fall Classic, a triumph after a nervy but steady march through series against inferior opponents in Kansas City and Cleveland. Luke Weaver emerged as a hero to shore up a shaky bullpen, Gleyber Torres rehabilitated himself, Giancarlo Stanton put on his playoff cape, and Juan Soto showed he is worth every penny he will get this offseason. They did not overpower a thin AL, but they took care of business and found some of those dramatic moments that hearkened back to past Yankee greatness. This was only the third or fourth best Yankee team over the past eight years, but caught enough lightning to suggest they could cover up the flaws.

It was a new experience, then, to see them line up in the World Series against an opponent that had all the resources they did but used them much more intelligently. The Los Angeles Dodgers were so deep they could have a full pitching staff on the shelf for the postseason and still be better than everyone else. After the Yankees inexcusably blew a Game One they needed, the Dodgers buried their erstwhile crosstown rivals. The Yankees retained some of their honor with a thunderous Game Four win, but between Freddie Freeman and a relentless order one through nine, LA trounced the Bronx Bombers even with Shohei Ohtani playing like a shell of himself.

The one advantage the Yankees had over the Dodgers was Gerrit Cole, but they won neither of his starts. First, they wasted a dominant Game One outing with an early hook and questionable bullpen decisions thereafter. And then, in Game Five, after sailing through four dominant innings, the defense absolutely unraveled, with back-to-back errors and Cole failing to cover first base before the roof caved in on the Yankee ace. Somehow he gutted his way into the seventh inning, a testament to fortitude, but he alone could not drag the Yankees to another comeback.

That fateful fifth inning underlined some of the team’s glaring flaws. The Yankees somehow outhit and outpitched the Dodgers over these five games, reaching base at a much higher rate and hitting more homers and logging a team earned run average that was nearly a run lower. The defense, however, has been atrocious season, with facepalm-worthy errors at regular intervals. The baserunning, somehow, was often worse, with Yankee runners frequent victims of pickoffs and some curious sends.

New York had too top-heavy an offense, a four- or five-man show with too many free outs toward the bottom. Jazz Chisholm and Anthony Rizzo have their qualities, but their 2024 selves are far cries from prime Tino Martinez or Hideki Matsui or the others who filled their spots in Yankee lineups in the 90s and 00s. (Lest someone argue baseball has changed over the past 15 years, they are no Max Muncy either.) Relying heavily on stars means they can’t go cold, but one of them did: Aaron Judge did just enough at the end to rescue his postseason from utter infamy, but his New York playoff legacy remains an open question. The Dodgers had the talent to cover for Shohei’s shoulder; the Yankees did not have the talent to cover for Judge’s yips.

The future of this team hinges most immediately on the Soto sweepstakes, as the Yankees had better pony up the hundreds of millions necessary to keep their incredible prize. Beyond that, however, the fixes are murky. The pitching, despite some admirable October efforts, still does not feel championship caliber, and there is no obvious single way to fix it. Unless Hal Steinbrenner decides to backtrack on his cautionary payroll notes, it is hard to see them resigning both Soto and Torres, and with Rizzo played out at first base they will have at least two gaping voids to fill. And then they have a slot in the outfield for Jasson Dominguez, their most hyped prospect in years but still an unknown.

For all the Yankees’ money, the fate of their youths will likely decide their trajectory in the coming years. They need some kids to give the lineups balance beyond the stars, and to save payroll in the process. Anthony Volpe had a Game Four for the ages in the Series and Austin Wells might just be the AL Rookie of the Year, but they are not yet in any sort of all-star class. Starters Clarke Schmidt and Luis Gil, dominant at times in the regular season, did not quite look ready for the bright lights of October. Maybe they can stick around and become the next Jorge Posadas and Andy Pettittes, but the transition to stardom is not seamless.

Like most Yankee fans I am not particularly thrilled with the regime running the team right now. These people have not won a playoff series against a team outside the AL Central since 2012. Hal Steinbrenner has overcorrected for his father’s excesses, a corporate manager who maintains the brand but takes no risks. After a quarter century Brian Cashman is who he is, capable of finding diamonds in the rough but also making some absolute clunker long-term deals, always a seeming half step behind in front office innovation. Aaron Boone is his loyal yes-man, a player’s manager to a fault; to his credit his in-game touch showed some progress in the early rounds of the playoffs, but at least three separate decisions in Game One still gall me. It is also hard not to compare the Yankees’ slop in the field to the Dodgers’ fundamental soundness and wonder if certain messages are not coming through the way they should.

Maybe the Dodgers have shown Steinbrenner what can be and push him to think differently. But most likely Cashman and Boone aren’t going anywhere, so their true test should now be their ability to bring along this next generation of talent. Is there an actual foundation here, or are we going to swing through yet another cycle of incomplete rosters propped up by enough dollars to stay in the hunt, never rising to the peak? The tale of baseball’s most storied empire depends on it. Are they a collection of dusty monuments to past glory, or is a renaissance at hand?

Split in Two

This is the fifteenth part in a serialized fiction series appearing on this blog (beginning here). It is in no way intended as a commentary on any real-world institutions or individuals in Duluth.

It is a dreary Easter Sunday afternoon. Thick clouds gather over lower Manhattan and a faint glow emanates from the lights of One World Trade Center across the street. Only a committed core hold out on the 37^th floor of the tower where Mark has held court for the past three years, a few old hands who don’t want to take their work home, or are perhaps on the run from empty homes. A few of the fresh-out babies are there as well, the ones who have survived a year of hell yet are still desperate to please, the kids whose anxieties at Princeton or Yale prepared them well for the next stage of shattered nerve climbing. They work as silent automatons, headphones on and glued to screens, one with the spreadsheets and Bloomberg reports they nervously check to validate the cautious whims they will use to direct capital investments that will make or break companies’ fates.

The exceptions come from a clump of six analysts and a single vice president in a breakout room in the far corner. Not one of them needs to be here, but they sense a triumph near at hand. Most are mid-twenties seekers and true believers in the cause, though there are a veterans as well, seekers astute enough to latch on to the baby-faced 25-year-old with floppy blond hair who leads the team.

“We’re really going to kill this thing, aren’t we,” one muses.

“They would’ve laid off thirteen hundred people.”

“It was a shit merger from the start,” says Mark. “Gotta see past the shiny objects.”

“I’ve been here fourteen years and this is the most I’ve ever felt like part of something…real,” muses one of the veterans.

Mark shrugs. “Just went to Dora and told her I had a bad feeling about it. To give me six studs and the weekend to see if I could find the dirt. We did.”

“No one freaking tells Dora what to do,” the veteran counters.

Mark tugs a stray lock down over his right eyebrow. “I do.”

“Fuck, you’re gonna be a managing director by 27,” Mark’s least favorite of the group says. “And you actually have, you know, human skills.”

Mark shrugs. “Y’all kick ass. But we’re only getting started here. I’m claiming you all for me. This office is gonna be ours. But right now, I’ve got a date with one of my bros and you’ve all got lives to live. Get outta here.” He dismisses his team, and they head on their way. Two invite him for a drink, but he shrugs them off, leaving only his newest charge, Leslie, who makes a show of collecting the detritus from their ordered-in meals. Mark suspects what’s coming and pre-empts the question as soon as their last companion clears out.

“You saw the flaw in the plan.” Mark levels his stare at Leslie and catches her flutter of shock, but she betrays nothing further.

“You fudged some of the prospectus on the Detroit plant, right? I swear it looked worse yesterday.”

“Would’ve been a little disappointed if someone didn’t catch it.”

“Why?”

“That deal was the wrong thing to do.” Leslie ogles at her new manager as if she’s uncovered sudden gold.

Mark sizes up his newest find, one he snapped up after he overheard her previous boss lamenting her exactitude. She’s the same age as him but could pass for much older: short, stumpy, wears no makeup, a protruding lower jaw gives her a firm, certain air. Mark likes to think he can tell the difference between girls (or boys, for that matter) whose lack of effort displays carelessness and those who have made art of it, and he pins Leslie as the latter.

“Not what you expected out of me?” he asks as he swings his bag over his shoulder and leads her toward the elevators.

“Not what I’d expect out of anyone here. I’m impressed.”

“Is that why you didn’t say anything?”

“In part. But more because I knew you were just going to find a way to steamroll through it if I did.”

Mark nods. “You’d be in the street with some tire marks. You’re the best damn analyst I got, but you’d better believe I was stacking the deck to make sure no one would take you seriously if you did say shit.”

“Well, congrats.” The elevator doors slide open to reveal the empty lobby. “But Dora has to see this too, right? She’s the smartest person in this whole place.”

“Let’s just say I’ve got a thing or two on Dora.”

“Dirt? Do tell.”

“Let’s just say she owed me.”

Leslie cocks her head to invite the details. Mark surprises himself with his candor.

“I got her out of a shitty situation. Like, really shitty.”

“Work-related?”

“Relationship-related.”

Leslie bores her eyes into Mark and invites him to go on.

“Found out one of the other VPs she was sleeping with was going to blackmail her.”

“Other VPs?! Does that mean you were…”

“Shit had already happened by the time I learned those details. I haven’t slept with her since.”

“Since,” Leslie snorts in incredulity.

“Gotta play the game, Leslie. You’ve got the technical skill. Now you gotta get the people part.”

“Does it require sleeping with my boss?” she stops in the lobby and stares at him, and Mark locks his eyes with hers.

“Never. I’m here to handle that for you. No one should have to get mixed up in that kind of game. Unless you want to.” Mark adds a flicker of a laugh, one that will let her take his line as a joke if that is all she wants.

“Doubt I’m your type anyway. I started in on a PhD in Greek philosophy before I decided to sell out and come here.” She walks toward the doors, but now is the one who Mark stops dumb.

“That’s…exactly my type. For real.”

“You’re more than meets the eye, aren’t you, Mark Brennan?”

“I still mean everything I just said, but…want to come out with me to Billyburg tonight?”

“Now I know why you didn’t want to throw us all a little party.”

Mark decides to play along with this deflection. “I try to separate work and life. That group there, it’s a damn good team, but not many I’d want to party with. I’m choosy.”

“Not even Jing? She’s pretty chill.”

“So chill she’s human melatonin.”

“Zack?”

“Fun sponge.”

“Nolan…”

“Fucking tool. I have some standards.”

“Does that apply to women who think you’re hot, too?”

“Depends what I’m looking for, and how many drinks deep I am.”

“You go hard?”

“Well, my roomie and I had thirty people over last night. Got about two hours of sleep before I rejoined y’all.”

“Hadn’t heard that side of you around the office. Though I did find your Met Gala glamor shots, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.”

“We shake it up. A few finance bros, sure, but just the ones with class. Some starving artists. A few techies, effective altruists. At least they try to talk like normal people, even if they’re sad-ass utilitarians stuck in that philosophical suckhole. A couple people in fashion, gotta keep things pretty. We know how to mix up a good crowd.”

Leslie nods in respect. “Where are you? East Village?”

“Nah. Too cliché. Upper East Side.”

“That’s a trek. Can you even get there with just one subway transfer?”

“I walk to the Four at Fulton. I trail run for fun, a few blocks ain’t shit. And yeah, I like my easy access to the Met and to bangable old widows.”

Leslie shakes her head. “What’s the party tonight?”

“Not really a party. Just wine night with my boy Matty. You game?”

“If you don’t mind my girlfriend joining us.”

“Two for the price of one? I’m in.”

“I think you might be disappointed. When I say girlfriend, I mean girlfriend.”

“Knew there had to be a catch,” Mark sighs. “But I can be awfully convincing.” He bats his eyelashes, cracks a smile to take off Leslie’s edge. She shakes her head and carries out a quick exchange on her phone.

“Well, you’re in luck. Catherine’s going to the Mets game.”

“Shame. Better luck next time, Matty. I’ll send ya the place.”

II.

Evan casts a longing gaze at the poster of Rome on his cubicle wall. He sniffles, coughs, the vestiges of a late spring cold that has kept him off his game all week. He stares blankly at the document on his screen, flips over to a browser and checks some hockey punditry for the second time this morning.

“Hey Evan. Have a moment?” Bella, the lone other employee under forty in his office, sinks into the chair next to him without waiting. He hastily navigates back to his blank document, even though she has already seen his screen and would never be one to judge him for it anyway.

“Hey. I know you’ve got a lot on your plate, but…how about taking over administering the systems change grants? It would be great for you.”

“I mean, yeah, I’d love that,” he says. “Some of the best shit we do.”

“Good,” she beams. “I know you love that stuff. Would be a great next step for you, too.”

“Do you not want it anymore?”

“Well…” she swallows and looks around to make sure they are alone. “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m putting in my notice tomorrow.”

“Oh! Damn.” Evan crumples the tissue in his hand and pitches it blindly at the basket beneath his desk. “Can I ask why?”

“I got a job with a marketing firm in Minneapolis.”

“Sure. But…why?”

Bella looks up and heaves her troubles up out of her chest. “I feel so stuck here. The only move up is into Kyle’s seat, and he’s only 44 and he’s not going anywhere. Nothing really open around here.”

“Would you have stayed if you could’ve?”

“Probably. But the things that make this a nice place to live also mean you just don’t have many options.” She shrugs and makes her exit, leaving Evan to swill the dregs of his teacup around in aimless loops.

He retrieves the tissue from its landing spot next to the trash can and returns his attention to data entry. Normally this would be a mind-dulling duty, but for once it offers a welcome decompression, a task with no need to process others’ emotions. Outside his cube, Kyle and another older man in the office return from the kitchenette and trade fishing stories, a debate as to whether they’d have better luck on Lake X or Lake Y that drifts into tales of conquests past, and Evan fights back the urge to capture the audio of this Minnesota stereotype and send it to Mark. Next he catches Bella and Carrie, the foundation president, bemoaning an appointment to a neighboring town’s planning commission. He hammers at his keyboard with greater and greater force, annoyance surging to a peak before he distracts himself with some pictures of Bridget on his phone. He knows she has a list of home improvement projects waiting for him back home, but with the right incentives perhaps he can get her to agree to just a good, long marathon in bed. What more does a boy need?

Carrie summons a handful of staff into a hybrid meeting on grants to support local workforce needs. She laments the number of high-achieving kids leaving Duluth for college, many to never return. Normally this is a piety in these circles, but Bella, perhaps emboldened on her way out the door, mounts a defense of kids seeking out a new life. Evan has some thoughts he wants to volunteer but two virtual attendees redirect everything before he can form the carefully crafted sentences he seeks. One reminds everyone that too many children of color don’t even have the opportunity to leave in the first place, and another blames the trouble on a restless masculinity inherent in capitalism that leads kids to dispose of their nurturing homes. Carrie tries to slide past their existential concern about the foundation’s efforts and a cautious fencing match ensues.

Everyone else retreats inward, unwilling to do battle with the more forceful presences. With race and masculinity invoked, Evan, the only white man in the meeting, knows he may only now sit and listen. He glances back at his computer and trades emails on grant logistics with a department head at a nearby Tribal nation. Normally this quiet diligence would be satisfying, but Bella’s news gnaws at him, sniffles forgotten as his mind races. After a safe period of post-meeting détente, he walks into her office.

“Got a moment?”

“Sorry?”

“Was hoping you had a moment.”

“Oh…sure.” Like most people in this office, she is thrown by a sudden interruption. Evan tries a sheepish smile and relaxes his shoulders, hopes he can drain away her tension.

“What’s on your mind?”

“You leaving just triggered a lot of thoughts. About this place. About my role here. About how I can do good work and like the people around me and not see any great alternatives…and still feel stuck. You nailed it.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“Are you the same guy who wrote that essay on why you wanted to come back when you started here? Quoted that author you got a few people in the office to read?”

“Wendell Berry.”

“Yeah. The guy who wrote about people who are stickers. Talked about how there’s value in being loyal to a place and the land and its people and all that.”

“That’s the dude.”

“Seems like you’ve evolved a little there.”

“Maybe. I did leave, for a bit. My best friends left.” Evan lets his words catch up with his thoughts. “I was so glad you said what you did, because I’m thinking of people like us when we were high school kids, and if we’d heard that conversation, people saying it would be better if we could just be happy with the opportunities we had here. I would have wanted to barf. And part of me is glad I came back…but there are doubts. Especially when I sit through meetings like that one.”

“Evan, everyone here loves you. You’re the boy king. You know that, right?”

Evan nods. “And I kind of hate it.”

Bella laughs. “What do you mean?”

“I’m kidding, kind of. But I feel like I’m this object that’s loved for what I represent. Not for who I am. A caricature of it, maybe, but not really.”

“Say more.”

“I’m a good story. This object to be held up and admired. I’ve heard from some other places, they’ve said to me, ‘we’d love to have you but we can’t steal you from Carrie.’ How do you think that makes me feel?”

“They mean it as a compliment.”

“I know. But sometimes it feels like this city is run by some freaking cartel that doesn’t want people to advance. Wants them to just stay as they are, play these roles they’ve already written for them.”

“I literally just handed you the most fun grant portfolio we have.”

“Wasn’t enough to keep you here.”

Bella grumbles, exasperated. “Or this is just a small city with not that many jobs that pay. At least they want you. Enjoy being the bright shiny object while you can. After a few years they take you for granted.”

“I’ve already kind of felt that. Noticed I’m not getting the same stray requests for my opinion that I used to.”

“Get used to that. I was the shiny object once too, you know. The smart young person, here to change the world! Then six years go by and you’re just part of the system, whether you want to be or not. And they find a new shiny object.”

“Me.”

“I think so. You might even have something on me…the hockey star who moves home, marries his high school sweetheart, only ever respectful and polite…”

“The good dude rebelling against that capitalist patriarchy or whatever.”

“Oh, that’s good! I love what a cynic you are now.”

Evan opens his mouth to expand on this theory, but an old instinct kicks in: he’s skated too deep, left himself too open to a counter. He won’t go there. Not here, not with Bella. That is something to share with Mark and probably no one else. Mark will whip him for it, of course, tell him he should go get his MBA, make more money and do some good with it. But Mark had also understood, and that kind letter from the Brennan family trust likely didn’t hurt his application for this job. Perhaps he is just the client of a different cartel.

“Always been a bit of a cynic,” Evan muses. “Think it just got lost because I’m young and have energy and do care about our work. But I won’t pretend this is my life’s calling. Maybe that’s why I’m good at what I do. I don’t get caught up in the passion of it. I just get it done.”

“But do you actually…like it?

“I don’t dislike it. I know it’s a good spot. And yet there are days where I just want to fucking quit.”

“But you haven’t, yet…”

“I need a better offer. I don’t run from things.”

“Well some of us are fine with running from things to shake it up.”

Evan grimaces. “Sorry. Not meant to be a judgment. I’m rooted here in a way you’re not.”

“That’s a choice for you, though, isn’t it?”

“Sure. But it’s a little different from a choice of happy hour bars.”

“Fair.” Bella starts to turn back to her computer but fires one last question at him. “But that desire to quit, where does it come from?”

Evan shrugs, parries with an answer about meetings like this morning’s. The answer isn’t on his lips. Instead it comes to him an hour later, fresh off an inefficient hour of logging metrics, daydreams flitting in and out like the wisps of fog over Lake Superior he can see out the window. It comes from the same place that rolls its eyes at this ideal of masculinity he is supposed to represent. He is hungry, unworthy of such praise, deadened by each unmemorable day of busy work, each second feeling like lost time and leaving him hungry to break out and do something reckless for once in his life.

He looks around his cubicle, a testament to those few days he does remember vividly. A group of hockey boys at the state tournament, arm in arm with his mom on senior night at Minnesota, honeymooning with Bridget in Utah national parks, slumped on a trail next to Mark high in a Himalayan pass. And then there are the unseen pictures, the voids: his dad’s body sprawled on the floor, his mom crying on his shoulder, a teary appeal to Bridget for forgiveness. Perhaps he has lived too vividly, felt too deeply. The reassurance of routine will never be quite enough.

III.

Mark bails on his subway and walks from Midtown up Central Park East back home. His shoes pinch his feet, a light mist has begun to fall, and a panhandler accosts him within twenty paces of the station. He shuts down the urge to return fire and slows his pace once he’s clear of the man. He gazes skyward at the glittering city lights, allows a smile to reach his lips: here, he muses, is the logical endpoint for his ambitions. He is proud of what he built in Minnesota, and a part of him will forever be at home at Yale, his most pure selves perhaps that brash kid after a game with Evan or that casual bro hosting an intellectual dinner party before a pre-arranged happy ending. But those were interim steps, places he knew he could not linger lest life pass him by.

Here, he can build for the long haul. There is always something fresh here, always some new world to see around every corner. When he stops his work obsession, shuts down his self-centered monologue, he can sit back and play nonstop observer, take some little burst of stimulation from whatever fresh turn comes on a gloomy Sunday at Sixty-First Street. Nowhere ignites the fire quite like this.

Spring has arrived in Manhattan, and even with a few stray drips this street is stripped of any Minnesotan austerity, any bleak empty scenes, and here he will never be trapped in some clifftop fortress or lonely tower or even back in the goals he guarded on a hockey rink. Here he blurs in, joins this gentle flow down the sidewalk, past the pretzel vendor, past the gaggle of tourists fresh off a bus, past the Upper East Side dames’ opinions on stray sons-in-law audible from half a block off. He shares a nod with a bored teenage boy trailing after his family, his blasé look bringing a grin to Mark’s face because he knew he once wore that exact same expression.

He glances up at the window of an apartment a few blocks from the Met. It is dark now, its current occupants gone, perhaps merely part-time residents. It was here that a New York financier built a life with his wife and three children, and on the steps below that a bedraggled blonde twentysomething waved a baby in the face of that wife and asked her if she knew what her cheating husband had wrought. Within the year the place had sold, the mother and her brood exiled to a suburban abode, and that baby, improbably, was the new favored son, the prince anointed by fate to inherit the crown.

What compels someone who has everything he needs to seek out more? There had been stray clues, Mark knows. He flits back to the saved file of correspondence with his dad from the year he’d spent in boarding school: book recommendations, grumpy political missives, meticulous interpretation of Wall Street returns with examples to catch the eye of a young reader. He realizes with a start that his own promise may indeed have been the fuel for his dad’s drive. Beneath all that cold calculation was some animal instinct, some loyalty that rooted a body in no need of a permanent place. And that son he raised? His most fundamental desire is now for that exact same thing, for a family in which to ground his ravenous desire.

But there is a difference. Today Mark did something his father never would have done. He’d made a decision that was not in his investment bank’s best interest. He’d put his trust in a bunch of fallible humans: that most of his analyst team would be blind and lazy, that the one smart one who saw through him would buy into his mystique, that his dangerous game with Dora had made him too big to fail. Somewhere along the line, whether through all that reading or enough philosophical chatter with Evan or just sheer oedipal rebellion, he’d found a higher calling.

Mark closes his eyes. He is back in a dingy bar half-swallowed by the thickets that have retaken an otherwise abandoned block in Detroit. The air is thick with sweat on a sticky July night. The dim lights flicker. A rapper spits rhymes to soul-hammering beat. Mark grinds up on a busty girl with bubblegum pink braids in a skirt little larger than a thong, tongue protruding from his lips in thirst, their knees buckling in unison as they drive toward the floor.

A circle forms around them. He pushes harder. She turns around and envelops his mouth in a kiss and the two of them pop back up. Mark plumbs the depths of her throat with his tongue, pulls back, leaps above everyone on the floor, punches the sky with his fist before he comes back down in her arms. The crowd laughs, grins, nods in respect. The rapper beckons him to the stage. The girl pushes him up and Mark springs to accept the microphone. He gives the rapper an easy embrace and takes command of the room.

The lights go up at bar close. Mark’s dance partners, names never learned, sort back with the people who brought them. He has no one here. He finds the cap that had been stolen off his head at some point on a barstool, replaces it, and heads home down the dark streets of Detroit, watchful but untroubled, as if he knows he’s bought himself safe passage. He is alone, but that is alright.

Is this his fate, to be most himself when no one knows him? To dispense some joy to strangers here, some benevolence to a distant city there? Why can’t he close the deal on the thing he wants more than anything? Some ancient split still seeks resolution, quests for a wisdom he does not yet know.

Mark blinks back to the present and flips to another file on his phone. He knows exactly what Leslie would say if she saw this spreadsheet, girls in columns with scores for subcategories in looks and career potential and pedigree and personality. Leslie, for the record, scores an 86, the third-most of the 47 names on the spreadsheet, though he needs to apply a lesbian penalty that will drop her into the middle of the pack. This was the one wrench in the plan: he can’t just dangle certain possibilities in front of her and expect results. He needs to give her extra attention, keep her close. No, fuck that: she is worth knowing on her own terms. That’s what makes him better than his dad.

Mark jogs the last few blocks to his condo and changes out of his work clothes. From the next room he can hear the thumping of his roommate Landon’s bed as he masturbates away his evening, as he does every day. Mark decides to shop for a new condo tomorrow, one where the only pursuits take place in reality. He shoots Leslie a picture of himself with his shirt off in front of the sink.

‘Are you 16?’ she replies.

‘Gotta look good for the girl who knows my secrets, even if I’m not her type,’ he answers.

IV.

Evan stops at a liquor store to pick up a bottle of Bridget’s favorite just-above-the-bottom-shelf pinot noir. Before he heads for the house, though, he abruptly stops at a ribbon of parkland lining a ravine and strolls down toward into its depths. He picks his way along the path, mud clinging to his new white sneakers. Bridget’s scolding already echoes through his brain, a sudden anxiety amped up to a level he struggles to suppress. The creek thunders down with a rush of snowmelt, but he still stops to dip his hands and toss some chill water back through his hair. He shivers, exhales, and drains his worries way.

He wants to find some name for the particular misery of spring in Duluth. Lake Michigan has its permacloud and Joan Didion had the Santa Ana winds, those fell gusts that stream down the canyons and bring depression and fire to Los Angeles. But here it is just the thick mists of stasis, a sneaky nagging doubt that the day of deliverance may never come. But it always does, he knows; always will resolve itself into a balmy lake breeze on a warm summer day, an explosion of green after a long slog of grey, a renewed cycle that makes him believe. This fog has come to be a home, a peace with an inability to see far beyond the obvious, a comfort with the obscurity and a carefully knit humility that he quietly strives for without advertising it, his offering up to some heavenly accounting that he clings to in spite of it all. It is the blanket that swaddles him, an acknowledgment of reality, and it makes the belief in those moments of clarity that much deeper.

He recalls a walk along this very stream nearly ten years ago. A new boy with New York style had rolled in to his first Duluth high school party and made all the boys’ jaws drop with his audacity with girls. By the next morning though the hero of the night was hung over, trying to sweep that hair back into place, his sheen washed away to a hollow core that chilled the lone witness to his vulnerability, that patient, quiet, famously well-behaved teammate who’d barely left his side since the start of the party. Evan nursed him through his headache, took him out along this path so Mark could unload his bitterness at his parents, unpack his jumbled pride and haunting in his own sexual prowess. The allure entranced Evan, even if some internal barricade kept him from ever embracing the Mark life. He is the inheritor of some older belief, some moral code that he cannot name but more than anything else has left him where he is today.

Now he strides up this same ravine alone, unable to quite accept that this is what he has become, all those wild possibilities gone, a course determined, doors closed and growing nerves that some looming specter will sweep in and topple his carefully built home. He needs to escape the fog. Mark, he suspects, would jump at a spontaneous vacation. But he drained the travel budget and then some on Nepal and the wedding and the house, and all he has is right here before him. He cannot expect some flight of fancy to provide some insight that he now knows will not come.

Evan counts the investments made, the sunk costs masquerading as bold choices. His marriage. His hunger for babies, to raise a child to share the parks he’d run as a kid, the ice rinks he’d skated, the schools he’d stalked. To be the dad his wasn’t. Sunday morning brunches with his mom. A career rooted in place, his social capital deposited in one small group of people instead of some Twin Cities wealth-building network. The house, scored in a cheap real estate market, and the pile of renovations it needs before he could ever trade it for something worthwhile elsewhere. Duty, obligation, burden in a town where nearly everyone knows him, his history, any dalliance known at once.

The progression from his dad’s death on through his first few years of adulting has felt like an incessant reminder of his lack of power, that not all stories are his to tell. But some are. Some glitter, give life, the Renaissance boy born again, baptized in these waters that will forever renew him. He cups his hands in the creek and again splashes a bit of this dream over his face, a ritual grace, one with his people and his place, phone out to capture this poetry, perhaps someday refined and edited to a point where he can take it out of this realm of personal myth and upward toward some statement of his agency, his life unencumbered. And just like that, he has won again, rumination slain and mind set loose running up the path in front of him.

Evan knows why he is unsettled. Bella’s news was merely a catalyst. He’s slept poorly over the past week, trapped in a recurring dream, one where he climbs into the beacon of a lighthouse that towers over the Duluth waterfront. It is exhilarating, but the world up there feels fragile, vertigo-inducing. He dare not climb higher. Is this a warning, Icarus too close to the sun in his dream of stray glories? Or is it a fear for him to conquer, there for the taking? He does not know the answer but at least now he has a question, and he is hungry to answer it.

Mark takes a ferry across the East River and meets Matt at a wine bar in Williamsburg. They snort at the pretension around them, two boys still dressed for a fraternity kegger rather than these bohemian Brooklyn trappings. Mark’s gaudy cross necklace hangs out over his pastel polo as an intentional provocation in a godless city, and Matt’s shirt is halfway buttoned up to reveal the tank top beneath. They are both slumped in poses to expand their presence, to draw in the eyes of passersby.

“Lady from the office is joining us,” says Mark as he snaps a photo of the two of them and blasts it to his social media following, now in excess of one million through some combination of his body and his career and New York beautiful people intrigue. Matt shrugs, nonplussed, at the picture of Leslie he shows him.

“I know, I know. But she’s sharp. Gave me shit. And she knows her shit. Most comfy person in the role I’ve seen.”

“You split her in two yet?”

“Turns out she likes girls.”

“When has that ever stopped you?”

Mark smirks. “Didn’t, that one time in Paris. But I can tell this one’s going nowhere fast.” They order a first wine bottle, which Mark sends back on a whim, but he has just proclaimed the second offering acceptable when an Uber disgorges Leslie.

“Well look at you two, just oozing sex.”

“It’s what we do,” says Mark, waving Leslie into the chair next to him and tipping the wine bottle into her glass. “Leslie, meet Matty Casillas. My best bud since second grade. Stayed tight even as he went to Princeton. My roomie now. Or the one I’m keeping after I throw out the sad one.”

Leslie gives Matt a measured nod. “You sleep with your bosses as much as this fucker?” she asks, with a jerk of her head toward Mark.

“I like this one,” Matt says with a grin.

“Told ya she was good. Answer the lady’s question, bro.”

“My boss is a sixty-year-old divorced bachelor from Tenafly.”

“I don’t see what the hang-up is there,” Leslie teases.

“Ever seen a sixty-year-old dick?”

“That’s a pleasure I tend to avoid.”

“Didn’t know you’d partaken, Matty,” says Mark, stroking his chin.

“Not high on my list of preferences,” says Matt.

“Y’all need a chapter of sexaholics anonymous.”

“Gotta play to win,” says Matt. “Where you from?”

“Chelsea. Stuyvesant, then Columbia. City girl all the way up.”

“Just some casual drinks among the controlling elite,” says Mark.

“C’mon now, bro, you got some Flyover cred from your days in Minnesota,” says Matt. “And your mom…you heard this kid’s story yet?”

Leslie blinks in surprise. “He left that part out.”

“Give me two more glasses and I’ll tell you the whole thing.” Mark leans back in his seat. “That’s what we all do now, right? Pour out our souls and earn our pity points?”

“All oppressed in our own little ways,” says Matt.

“I like the sound of this,” says Leslie, perking up. “You telling me this walking erection here is a scarred little Midwestern boy?”

“Marky’s seen way more than a lot of us,” says Matt. “And he’s richer than all of us, and smarter than all of us…some people just get it all.”

Mark shrugs. “Life to the fullest, or some shit like that.”

Leslie frowns. “You do grab the attention better than the other gunners in that office.”

“And that’s what you’re after, right? Attention-grabbing shallow assholes like me and Matts?”

A silence hangs over the table. Matt looks back and forth between his seatmates, unsettled. Leslie purses her lips but keeps her eyes fixed on Mark.

“Well, for starters, you’re smart enough to say that. And you do play at it. But I can tell you’re after…something. You’re not just some crass shithead who knows it. And you’re definitely not pretending you’re not it, which I appreciate. You’re after something.”

“Pussy, mostly,” Mark muses. He draws the expected laugh out of Matt. Leslie shakes her head.

“I’ll haul it out of you someday.”

“That’s the beauty of Marky Marks,” says Matt. “He knows. It’s fuckin deep.”

“But does he really know?” Leslie asks, her eyes boring into Matt.

“What do you mean, really know?”

“Like, does he say he knows, or does he feel it deep?”

Matt breaks into a sudden smile. “You know, my dad kinda goes off on this. There are two words for ‘to know’ in Spanish, you know. Saber and conocer. Conocer means you’re familiar with something. You kinda get it. But saber is to truly know. To really get it.”

“Well there you go. You know the difference. And now I get why he likes you, even with your dong hanging out of your shorts like that. Because you ask that. But the question is still there…”

Mark frowns at this brewing alliance. “Hey now. Said I needed two more glasses before we go deep.”

“You really need booze to get there?”

“Matty, remind me to uninvite her from our next party.”

“Fuck, bro, I really think you’ve met your match.”

“I finally find it and it turns out she likes girls. This world, I tell you.”

“Keep trying, boy. We’ll get there.” Leslie turns her attention to Matt and starts to extract his biography. Mark drifts out for a spell, lets them trade their own stories and absorbs himself in the wine list. By the time he is two glasses deeper the conversation has moved far from his own past and he is discoursing on French viticulture, and talk between the three of them then wanders to European travels to the fertility rates of nations to intentional communities to this kid named Evan who Matt insists is Mark’s soulmate. By the time they polish off the third bottle they have degenerated, and though Mark advocates for a move to a dance club Leslie says she must sleep and Matt reports a booty call in Bed Stuy whom they then spend a half hour appraising, Mark and Leslie peeling in laughter at their unsolicited input. A sheepish Matt gives them a pair of middle fingers as his Uber pulls up, but he wraps them both in a bear hug before heading south.

Mark grabs a ride for the two of them back to Manhattan. He is still pulsing with energy, ready for the next adventure, but Leslie is fading, lets her head slump on to his shoulder in the backseat. Mark summons all the willpower his drunk body can muster to resist reaching out a hand or turning his head to meet hers.

“I like him a lot,” says Leslie. “Matt. Smart. Filled with energy. Comfortable with who he is. But he’s caught in it deep.”

“Oh no, a single twentysomething boy is hooking up with a girl,” Mark yawns. “The horror.”

“You know what a gross cycle this is.”

Mark shrugs. “I won’t pretend it’s the absolute best. I’m past the point where smashing something new every weekend still feels fresh. And Matts is definitely on the same page.”

“And yet you both do it.”

“We choose reality. Life to the fullest. Not many people can do what we can. Why waste what we’ve got?”

“I don’t get it. You’re as sharp as they get, you can see everything that’s wrong with this culture…but then you just live this whole Dionysian life.”

“There are worse fates than being the god of parties. Just in search of my Ariadne,” Mark muses.

“You do know your shit.”

“I can play.”

Leslie sits upright, filled with sudden fire. “Maybe you’re Dionysus. But you’d hate being a god. I can tell already, you’d get bored. You want more than eternal debauchery. I think you’re more like Ariadne’s other lover. Theseus. The prince who’s here to slay the minotaur. Change the course of history…even if you’ve got human flaws. You’ve got the power, the money, the charisma…”

A warm smile blossoms across Mark’s face. “See, that’s exactly what I mean about choosing reality. Flawed human reality, and loving the world in spite of it.” He pauses. “Just got to fill a void in my own life first. I need someone to lay me a thread through the labyrinth.”

“Are you really still trying?”

“You’re the first girl I’ve met who’s turned on by extended Greek myth metaphors.”

“Shut it. You’re the one making them!”

“Fuck I wish you were straight.”

Leslie purses her lips. “Kiss me. I can play.”

Mark leans in even as he is pummeled by simultaneous instincts: a surge of sexual hunger, a burst of anxiety over the material he has handed Leslie over the past six hours, an even more ravenous hunger, a strange vision of a platonic confidante for life, yet more desire to proceed in terms so lurid he would never dare voice them even to Matt. He takes a deep breath.

“Nah. Either there’s something here or there isn’t. If you don’t want it—and I mean really want it—it’s gonna be a mistake.”

“Careful now. You’ll make me think that sexed up bro is just a performance.”

“It is. What’s the chase without acting the part?” He pauses. “It’s not that I don’t want it. Fuck, I want it. But I’m at a point where I know exactly what I want.”

“You think the world’s going to just give it to you?”

“This world is mine. I’ll make it happen.”

“You’ve got the whole world, but I get the feeling intimacy is on some other planet.”

Mark takes his time. “It would be for you too, if you’d grown up in the family I did.”

“Are we actually going to go there?”

“I will, if you want to hear it. But if I’m gonna do that, I’m gonna need to hear your story too.”

“Intimate,” Leslie muses. “It’s a start.”

VI.

“I’m not thirsty.” Bridget levels a stare at Evan, home an hour later than expected, his sneakers coated in mud and the wine bottle held out in a bashful offering.

“So only one glass then?”

Bridget shakes her head as she pops a plate of macaroni in the microwave for Evan. “Okay, pour it, Mark.”

Evan grins, screws the top off the bottle, and pours two glasses into the mason jars Bridget hands him. “I can only hear him if he heard my thoughts at work today.”

“Uh oh. Now what?”

Evan frowns, but the news bubbles out of him with an excitement he did not expect. “Bella told me she’s leaving today. I’m going to get the systems change grants.”

“Oh my god,” says Bridget, clinking her glass to Evan’s. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“It’s some of the best stuff we do,” he says. “Real, deeper change. Not just keeping the same things going. Really trying to think deep and fix what’s broken.”

“And there’s a special new endowment for all that, right?”

“Yup. About time I got it. I do know more about endowment than anyone else in the office.”

Bridget throws an elbow into his side. “You’re the worst sometimes.”

He gives her a long, deep kiss before he takes the plate from the microwave. They sit at the narrow kitchen table in their 70s rambler, the can light Evan needs to replace buzzing above them. Bridget asks about the previous year’s grants and Bella’s new gig and Evan listens to her stories from the emergency room today, two car accidents and a woman in from a domestic situation, a kid off his bike, the usual spate of overdoses and a few laggards for the drunk tank from the previous night. Every day when he gets home Evan gets a reminder of why he does what he does, what that soul-deadening grant work and idle thinking about long-term investment has the potential to do.

They drift to the couch. Evan puts on a hockey game but it’s more out of habit than anything, and he mutes it as Bridget retreats to some romance novel on her tablet. He wants to follow suit, reaches for his book on Renaissance Florence, but his eyes cannot quite track the words on the page. Rebirth, he muses as he looks around his dark living room, out at the quiet street and the neighbors across the way floating into the exact same routine, a night they’ve repeated eight hundred times in the three short years they’ve lived here, are set to repeat again and again for years to come.

“I chatted with Bella, after she told me,” he chances. “Really good conversation. First time I’ve told someone at work about how restless I can be.”

Bridget sets down her tablet and glares at him. “Leave it to you to feel absolutely ambivalent about getting a promotion you want.”

Evan laughs. “And I do want it! But it’s so easy to forget that. Or to think about what else you could be doing with precious time.”

“You’re that dude in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ aren’t you?”

“I don’t need some freaking angel to keep me off the ledge.”

“Well…I think you have one if you need it.”

Evan grimaces. “Maybe I do. However we describe what I believe.”

Bridget is smiling again, but it is a burdened smile, one that knows Evan needs more than a sweet nothing in return. “It might not be a guy from heaven who needs wings. Or even me. But you’re the biggest believer I know, you know.”

“Got to be reborn. Again and again.”

“You know a good thing when you see it, don’t you?” She sets her glass on an end table and leans over to nibble at his ear.

“I’ve been known to keep them when I find them, too.”

He lets her sink her head into his chest, but even now it takes a moment to let the peace come. He is too caught up in his own world, bitter at his inward morass. How can he be so uncaring, he scolds himself. He holds stock-still so he can muster deep breaths, match his heart rate to hers, let the anxiety drain away. He is here, and that is enough.

When is enough not adequate? When could he go for more? Evan wants to pour all these jumbled emotions out to Bridget, use her as his confessional. But something stays his hand. To spew out his own obsessions under the cover of intimacy would be to defeat the point of this union, built not on earnest brooding but on reconciliation and peace. There are some things Bridget does not need to know about him. He’s always loved her for bringing out the best in him, not for letting him be some static self. That was his exact complaint about his job to Bella today, and why should this be any different? He is forever in motion, forward somewhere, a surfer on a wave.

What if we were to pull up and move, he asks a Bridget in his brain. Try something new. You’re a nurse, we can go anywhere. I can figure it out, it might take a bit but once I’m in the door somewhere new I can only go up. We could get away from these winters, this fog, away from the old dramas that feel small now. He tries to imagine her response, her hurt at pulling up her deep stakes. No: he knows she will let him choose, follow him to whatever end his wandering might take. Perhaps not all the way, she’s never been one to seek the edge, but she will keep him within her sight, summon him back if he starts to gaze too wistfully.

“Evan?”

“Mmm?”

“Let’s make a baby.”

Evan bursts into a ravishing grin. “You really want it?”

“I don’t want a baby. I want your baby.”

“Best rebirth I can think of.”

Porkies

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is a land that fades gently into the wild. Culturally it has much in common with northern Minnesota, old mining and timber towns now enjoying the tourism burst of beautiful lakefronts, but it feels a step further from creature comforts, from big city money pouring north. Its towns are old, some them easing back into the woods, back into a Hemingway story and then out of time, like the ghost towns of the west but swallowed by maples and hemlocks and an undergrowth of ferns. These forests feel more capacious and less cloistered than the coniferous northern shores of Superior, less guarded in their secrets. The UP is an open book, no hidden agenda or ambitions: just some remote country surrounded by stunning lakes.

On an unseasonably warm September weekend, I head for the UP with my mom and her partner, Doug. Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park, or the Porkies, is Michigan’s largest state park, and it clings to the south shore of Lake Superior not far from the Wisconsin border. There are roads down all the splashing waterfalls on the Presque Isle River on the west end and to Union Bay and Lake of the Clouds on the east end, and a long loop around them to the south, but the vast majority of the park is a wilderness, accessible only by foot.

We are in the Porkies for a five-day backpacking trip, but that comes with an asterisk on day one. Cotten cabin sits a mile from the trailhead, tucked in an idyllic maple grove along the lakefront beside a small stream. It is rustic but newly built, large and with two bedrooms extending back off the large great room with a wood-burning fireplace and ample counter space to prepare our freeze-dried meals. Dinner comes at a picnic table down by the lake, and the sunset is stellar. Owls hoot out their persistent questions off in the distance, and the lake sloshes gently, constant but never quite uniform in its rhythms. I write by candlelight and drift into the night, easing into adventure.

The second night brings more of the same. The hike here is a long one, over twelve miles, and while there are regular rises and falls around creeks and ravines, it traces the lakeshore nearly the whole way. Campsites are wedged between a low ridge and the shore, with the trail winding up and down to meet them. Campsite LS-18 is an absolute jewel, tucked away from the trail in the halls of a maple grove that lets just the right amount of light filter through to keep it both inviting and cool. A long stony beach pulls us to the lake, and the seating around the fire ring features a few stone thrones. We could have stayed here for days.

On the third day we have the rare backpacking joy of a leisurely morning, a luxury more accessible in the Midwest than the West: the temperature change will be moderate, there is no threat of afternoon thunderstorms building in the mountains, and our next campsite is guaranteed. We are free to sit on the rocks, swing in a hammock, and read a bit more. The backpacker’s paradox, fleetingly achieved but delectable when it comes, when off the trail and all the camp chores are done: the bliss of nothing to do. It is hard to stop lounging in the looming heat.

When we do get moving, the trail promptly climbs upward past small windows of lake view through ridgeline scrub oak. It is a still day, the air growing sticky, and a road walk from a parking lot to the Lake of the Clouds overlook is momentarily jarring, with motorcycles rumbling by and blaring music. The crowd at the Porkies’ most famous point on a Friday in September does not exactly exude physical fitness, either, but they are here to take in the commanding view over lonely Lake of the Clouds, hemmed in by the Porkies on three sides and emptying down the long river valley of the Big Carp to the west.

We lose the crowd when we descend and set up camp on the south shore, just back from the water in a hemlock grove. The occasional motorcycle rumble echoes downward and eventually some people at the camper cabin on the opposite shore clunk around in canoes on the lake, but no one passes our site all day. Seven swans are a-swimming in the lake, or rather bobbing up and down, showing us their rears as the seek out food. Instead of the long sunset over Lake Superior of the past two nights, dark comes quickly here behind the ridgeline, and we are content to let the daylight dictate our evening.

On day four we clamber up to the overlooks, drink in the view, and enjoy the upper reaches of the Big Carp River Trail, which tracks the ridgeline between its namesake’s valley as it feeds down from Lake of the Clouds and then makes a right turn into Lake Superior. From there our path sinks through a thick hemlock forest, twice fords the Big Carp, and then tumbles past a series of cascades on the way to the lake. Our site tonight is just far enough from the mouth of the Big Carp back east to be annoying, and although it is well-situated on the lakeshore, it is a bit overused by sloppy campers.

Our final morning is an eighty-degree day, a strange mid-September occurrence that has us baking as we retrace steps back out toward the parking lot. Unseasonable weather aside, this has been a satisfying end to a summer of travel bookended by walks with both of my parents. (As my mom and I toured the Porkies, my dad was somewhere on the opposite side of Superior, undertaking the second half of the Superior Hiking Trail through-hike he began last fall.) It is the first time my mom and I have backpacked together, and while a few moments on this hike call back to her fondness of a childhood family hike at Sleeping Giant in Canada, we also fall back into memories of our earliest camping trips. Sometime very early on she and I camped in Beaver Creek Valley in southern Minnesota (all I remember is mud), and I vividly remember a visit to Rock Island off Door County in Wisconsin, in which I first surveyed the depths of a pit toilet and declared that I would withhold expelling any waste until we got home days later. Whatever form they take, these retreats into the woods are part of who we are.

Perhaps the greatest joy of this trip, however, comes from the logbook in Cotten cabin. Many of the entries are the typical rhapsodies of cabin visitors, but here, the younger authors have taken the genre to a new level. In a trend started by a 16-year-old Leah, many have illustrated their cast of characters for their weekend, with drawing of each actor’s head along with basic descriptors such as their ages or “my best friend” or “needs a haircut.” (In my contribution, our descriptors are “oldest,” “old,” and “younger, but increasingly old.”) There are rival perspectives from dueling siblings and artistic masterpieces devoted to the mice who apparently populate the cabin. (I also add an owl.) “50% annoying, 50% OK, 100% brother,” one kid judges his younger sibling; Ian, meanwhile, recounts how he made a figure out of candle wax that looks like something his mom will not let him name in writing, though the tadpole-like illustration does rather convey the point.

Where do all these gems go when the journal fills up, I wonder. I hope the parents have snapped pictures of a few of these ephemera, these jolts of life in a place and time, moments that can pierce through any forthcoming teenage moods or young adult anxieties. This is the beauty of the written word: to observe life and to leave a record of it, to write a history of what is good in one’s world: honest, insightful, good-natured even when frustrated, to take what might otherwise fade into vague memory and give it narrative form. Here is to all of those memories hikers can make when they head into worlds far from home and daily obligation, to the stories they write that they will forever carry with them, whether faithfully recorded in a logbook or stashed away in a corner of the mind. These journals show exactly why we do this.

WRT V, Part 3: Of Sorrow and Triumph

This is the third in a three-part series. | Part 1 | Part 2

On the second to last day of my road trip, I cross South Dakota from southwest to northeast, almost entirely on back roads. I start in the Pine Ridge Reservation, which I expect to be jarring. It is.

The first markers of the new world I enter are the roadside markers reading “Think” and “Why Die?” While they are part of a statewide program to memorialize drunken and other reckless driving deaths, they are legion on Pine Ridge. Trailers begin to appear alongside the road, almost all in a state of decay, some fitfully patched up, others crumbling into these hard, rolling hills. In the town of Oglala, they just densify, each yard collecting broken down vehicles, mined for parts to keep one running. Drivers honk at the stray dogs who run in front of cars. A few men walk down lonely stretches of highway with no obvious aim.

The town of Pine Ridge stirs to life on this Sunday morning, a few kids ambling up streets and a group congregating outside a church. The reservation’s schools and health center at least look shiny and new, and the town now manages to offer some basic necessities in business and a few apparent research operations or other outposts from the outside. But it is still a tenuous borderland, still struggling to resist the entropy and despair that hang like a pall over Pine Ridge. There is one growing type of business that shows sign of new entrepreneurship: cannabis shops.

A few miles further east, I come to Wounded Knee. Here, in December 1890, over 140 Sioux camped beneath a white flag were slaughtered by the US cavalry. The massacre was the final blow in the Plains Wars and the end of an era, the frontier closed and reservation life made universal. Whispers of a mobilizing ghost dance spooked the Army, and after a single mystery shot, the guns above the creek blazed indiscriminately, killing Native men, women, and children, along with a number of US soldiers through friendly fire in the bloodbath below.

Today, a single sign by Wounded Knee Creek marks the site of the massacre, and a still-active cemetery atop a hill hosts the mass grave at its center. All is quiet when I pull up, but my arrival sparks some activity. An older man walks up the backside of the hill, introduces himself as the cemetery’s caretaker, and shares its history. His great grandmother, he says, is the one who showed another Sioux chief the blood coating the snow a few days later. He is reverent, adds some words in Lakota, though he also laughs easily as he talks of his grandchildren, for whom he needs to buy some Pampers.

Next, a younger man in a well-loved Seahawks jersey joins him. He adds some details on the 1973 occupation of this site by the American Indian Movement and subsequent standoff with federal forces. He had broken out of here to go live and work in Pipestone, Minnesota, but he is home to help restore water to his mother’s trailer down below the hill. He sells me a dreamcatcher. As I leave the site, two women with a young child arrive and begin setting up a table to peddle additional wares. For a variety of reasons I normally avoid giving handouts, but I leave Wounded Knee with a lighter wallet and no qualms about it.

Over these past two hours I have borne witness to an American moral disgrace. In some ways the tales of Native resistance and a delicate dance with an unbeatable government power take me back to the highlands of Chiapas in Mexico, right down to the vendors profiting off queasy, sympathetic tourists like me. But the affluence not far up the road seems to have particularly perverse effects on Pine Ridge, where residents can buy into one or two of the markers of modern American life but none of the rest, or are left with the detritus of a throwaway consumer culture and the accumulation of failing junk. I could haul in statistics on astronomical unemployment or obscene maternal mortality or life expectancies in line with the bleakest corners of sub-Saharan Africa, but my eyes are enough to capture the depths of the perdition here. Forget becoming great again: the US will be great when it can prove Pine Ridge is not a permanent state.

When I drove west in 2020, I struggled with questions about the state of the world, wrote moody fiction about a struggling soul who brushed up against the horrors of Pine Ridge. This time I drive freely, unburdened by what has been. I have borne witness, know I will find the words to capture this time on the edges of American life, a solo traveler drifting through and blending in with different worlds. I have a job in which I help chip away at the troubles in these lands, such as an outsider can. I am easing through, in control, pushing at edges and turning my eye my one great looming doubt, the place where my pursuit becomes tentative, comes up short.

As I go I listen to Hillbilly Elegy, now as good a time as any. The politics slip in here and there but the book is fundamentally an account of a broken boyhood, of one kid’s escape from a predetermined fate. JD Vance is the grandson of migrants (the irony drips through here), uncouth Appalachian Kentuckians who lit out for opportunity in an Ohio factory town, endured culture shock and their own demons but found ways, built lives. Two of their children lit upon upward trajectories, but Vance’s mother was the exception, the one who ran through men like tissues and lapsed into drugs. Young JD endures a constant rotation of father figures, jerked from place to place, unstable (despite some clear, precocious talents) until he finally lands in the place that has always been his most stable home: in with his Mamaw, the no-bullshit grandmother who sets a standard and holds him to it. She gifts him a world stripped of its ambiguities, clear in its expectations, no fleeting figures drifting through.

I feel stories like this deeply, am fascinated by how scars in youth can imprint themselves upon people. My own childhood was much happier than Vance’s, punctuated by a few acute jolts of pain instead of the near-constant anxious dread that probably made him the reflexive fighter that he is. Some scars linger, though, and he and I are not unaligned in some of our loose theories around the need for stable guides in a fluid world, of raising children to high standards, of the utmost importance of family life. How we have lived out that belief is very different.

I do not know if Vance has found the stability he craved with the choices he has made, will make no effort to judge his success or failure. But for my part there is no policy platform I would seek to impose on Pine Ridge to cure certain troubles of the soul, no rant about people whose views are different than mine. For me, before I ask what scenes like this demand that I do, I ask how I should be. In this case, the answer is to be a witness, to listen first, and then an attempt to uphold a faith in humanity through steady, daily work.

I have more pride than ever in the work I do because of some of the steps my office has taken over the past year to two to make good on some of these promises of greatness for people who deserve it. But the ties closest to home are still the ones that matter most. Trips like this one with an extended family are part of that work, bonds forged with people who are often not physically close but are some of my favorite humans. This whole year has been full of those journeys, and I cherish them all. And then there is my life in Duluth with my parents. Forget all the philosophical blather, forget the various expediencies: the foremost reason for my homing instinct in early adulthood was to live in joy with the two people who birthed me, even though our family unit is no longer. On that front, I have succeeded.

My project, however, is an incomplete one, and a gnawing void still looms as I dream of my own family life, my own investment in a future. What does it mean to want what I’ve been unable to find more than anything? It means I will pursue it with ever more vigor, with all the hunger, the joy, the panache, with everything I’ve articulated across all these journeys I take. I had thought this phase of life of outward journeys over the past few years may have been a distinct phase but now I understand it is in fact the project of a lifetime, an insatiable thirst for my world that will course through everything I do. I have built many of the necessary habits, slowly and fitfully over time. Whatever I might have believed before, I was never really ready. Now, I believe, I might be getting there. With that revelation I turn off the audiobook and coast into a Western sunset, my peace complete.

WRT V, Part 2: Into the Towers

This is part two in a three-part series. Part one is here.

For a sixth straight year, I am off on a western hiking adventure of overpacked food, bourbon, deep debate, and dramatic scenery. Stalwarts including Uncle Bob, cousin Rob, and friends Amy and Ed are here once again. Our numbers have swelled this year, as van-dwelling cousin Alex and his wife Meghan have timed their meanderings of the American West to join us. Jim, too, is back for the first time in three years, making for perhaps the largest party in the history of this crew.

We gather at Big Sandy Lodge, a resort at the end of a long, car-killing road high in the foothills of the Wind River Range in west-central Wyoming. A collection of spare cabins arcs around an opening in the pine forest, and a small lake frames the view to the nearest peak. The small lodge serves up hearty communal dinners and welcomes in exhausted hikers, and the proprietors’ toddler pulls books from the shelves and insists that I read them. (The first one he hands me is in French.) We lay out our meals on the single table in one of the cabins for the annual debate over necessary supplies, and we later enjoy drinks by oil lamp. We are at the edge of civilization, a final homely house on the frontier.

Eight hikers set out from Big Sandy Lodge the next morning, but a mile in, Jim concedes that physical ailments will keep him from enjoying this trip, and he makes the difficult decision to turn back. Nurse Meghan escorts him, and Alex and I hang with her pack while the other four press on. When we are reunited, Meghan, Alex, and I turn on the jets to catch up, but in our haste choose not to look at a map at the first fork. We thus end up on a path parallel to the one we want, and we are two miles in and beyond some pleasant lakes and mountain views before we appreciate our error. A backpacking backtrack ensues, and our first day adds four extra miles. For a second year in a row, this alleged master of maps has seen his group get hopelessly lost just a mile in. I hereby forfeit my credentials back to the National Geographic Society.

The correct trail is closer to the spurs of the mountains, up rises and past parks with nascent creeks, down a busy trail to Dads Lake, where we finally catch the waiting group. The Winds, we can see here, are not a secret: plenty of families roll in on fishing trips, including a horde of loud kids on the bluff right above our eventual campsite on Marms Lake. But some passersby tell us there is solitude just a bit onward, and the first steps on day two are promising.

The second day has generally become the most aggressive of these trips, and this year is no different. The sheer exhaustion may not match the Colorado Trail’s offering two years ago, but this one may be the most technical. It starts out innocently enough, as we make our way up a valley with a glittering creek that bubbles downward and swing past a series of lakes with sandy beaches, tempting us to stop for a swim. Sheer alpine beauty. We rise above the trees, skirt the aptly named Barren Lake and swing up to Texas Lake, the source of the stream nestled deep in a small cirque. Harsh peaks line its sides, but up one scree field a few figures slowly climb. This is Texas Pass.

After a lunch break and ample incredulity over the path ahead, we make the slow plod up the 800-foot pass. Rob and I pick out the route up, call some guidance back downward. The adrenaline surges at the wind-blasted crest, and after some recovery we step forward into the Cirque of the Towers, the destination this trip, a beauty of a high-country bowl beneath stunning peaks and a haven for rock climbing virtuosos.

The Cirque’s serrated jaws wrap around Lonesome Lake, invisible in the depths below, and we traverse a small snow field and detour to an overlook above another stellar lake before we begin the descent. At first it is lovely, down rock ledges and past another dancing stream, to the point that we entertain camping up here before wisely choosing to plunge downward. This is a treacherous stretch of loose dirt and tentative footholds, less physically exhausting than the climb but perhaps more taxing, and the shores of Lonesome Lake can’t come quickly enough.

We make camp a quarter mile down the North Popo Agie River, Lonesome Lake’s outlet, amid some scrub where forest meets meadow. To the west, the Cirque, dominated by Pingora Peak just right of center, a striking granite pinnacle reminiscent of Devil’s Tower. Beyond it, a jagged ridgeline of rock-climbing conquests wraps southward to the sheer-faced massifs of Pylon, Warrior, and War Bonnet Peaks. To the east, a long run down the valley of the Popo Agie, peaks and cliffs lining the route and closing us in to the north and south. The last remnants of snow cling to the nooks where sheer faces meet boulder fields below, some of them permanent enough to count as glaciers.

We spend two nights on the doorstep of the Cirque. A day hike on day three takes us around Lonesome Lake and into the upper reaches of this great bowl, on and off a semi-formal trail past additional tucked-away camps and a curtain waterfall. One thousand feet higher up, past a labyrinthine boulder field, is a mini-cirque with its own little lake and walls up to the heavens. Atop the jagged Shark’s Tooth, we pick out two ant-sized climbers summiting the peak. When in shade some of the spires look ominous, the guardians of some dark lord’s land in a fantasy series, an otherworldly sinister beauty that has me thinking this may be our most stunning single destination on any one of these trips.

On day four I wake to a drip of water in the face, condensation seeping through the rain fly and dropping to touch the tent fabric. I step out and gaze up at the fog hanging over the Cirque, coming and going as it obscures peaks and slowly lifts. In moments like this nature kills any sense of time, just invites a steady gaze until the magic breaks. After breakfast we push up Jackass Pass, the tamer southern gateway to the Cirque, and bid its spires farewell. Arrowhead Lake poses a choice: either clamber back up a promontory and slide down a Texas Pass-type slope, or swing west along the lakeshore through a boulder field. In keeping with our theme of the trip, we choose the boulders, swinging across gaps, sitting to sink into a passageway or clambering to rise above the furtive crevasses.

Next is a long plunge down to North Lake, followed by yet another rock scramble. On a spire to the right, climbers work their way up a sheer face. Up the trail come all manner of hikers seeking the Cirque: backpackers with bold itineraries, young couples with climbing ropes, day trippers from Big Sandy Lake, teenage fishermen, and a bachelorette party of 11 in matching Wild Women of the Winds hats and their five dogs. One last big drop brings us to the tent-dotted shores of Big Sandy Lake, and we pick out a campsite atop a small rise over the lake where we polish off the bourbon and play cards deep into the night.

The final day of hiking is, after the past few days, an easy stroll downhill, though thick forests and the occasional pleasant meadow along the Big Sandy River keep it lively. It is easy, that is, until the final half mile. Over the course of this trip Rob’s CalTopo app has saved us at numerous crossroads where the paper maps fall short. This time, however, it outdoes itself, and we are left picking our way through a bevy of downed timber and over awkward rocky knobs. Juicy burgers and beer await at Big Sandy Lodge, however, and we unwind, reconnect with Jim, trade stories with three hikers who have been in deep over the past week. It has been another hiking triumph, another journey well-spent, and I head east again in full belief in the power of these wildernesses to take us to new heights.

Part 3 is here.

Western Road Trip V, Part 1: Blank Space

This is the first in a three-part series on a western road trip.

I go east for civilization, for history and culture and the roots of memory. I go west for new beginnings, for the freedom to make sense of that jumbled inheritance.

And so westward I go once again, across Minnesota and eastern North Dakota, back across these roads I am starting to know well. A road trip across the Dakotas and eastern Montana and much of Wyoming may invoke thoughts of monotonous and dullard landscapes, and there is certainly some of this. But some part of me is now drawn to this seemingly blank space, these hardscrabble towns, to people on plains that go on forever, once a frontier but now planted in the middle of an expansive land.

I fly across Minnesota and eastern North Dakota with few stops and spend an unremarkable night in Bismarck. The next morning I pay my respects at Salem Sue, the silent sentinel at the entrance to the West, and take in the first tentative buttes hinting at the hills and mountains to come. After numerous past visits to the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, I swing off the freeway in Belfield and head for the North Unit. The basics here are much the same, badlands lining the floodplain of the Little Missouri River, scars and pockmarks interrupting the flatlands and beckoning the visitor in. Bison clump along the road and sometimes in the middle of it, and the campground is maybe half full on a Friday night.

I subject myself to a four-mile loop hike in triple-digit afternoon heat. The trail is mostly exposed, shooting straight up the sides of a coulee to vistas of the Little Missouri, where a few bison have taken refuge from the heat. Mercifully, the back side of the loop tucks into some juniper thickets that provide a reprieve from my blossoming sunburn, and I’ve found a campsite that has trees on all sides. Even the scattered sun hitting the hammock is miserable, so I park my camp chair atop my cooler in the shade of the trunk of the largest cottonwood I’ve ever seen and slowly rotate it to stay out of those cruel rays. My new camp gear is enough to earn me some sleep despite the heat, and I do not linger long the following morning, shooting west through the bleak impermanence of North Dakota oil country and down a long stretch of the Yellowstone River before a dive south into the Bighorn Basin.

Behind the Front Range of Colorado and the Bighorns in Wyoming, in front of the great ranges of Utah and Idaho and Montana and Yellowstone, is one of the emptiest corridors in America. It stretches from the Four Corners region in the south to the Yellowstone River in the north, 600 miles of parched country, some of the driest in the nation except along its ribbons of river: the Colorado and the Green in the south, the Bighorn in the north, these powerful waters punching through mountain ranges that separate the basins in this lonely land.

The Wind River Range is a protrusion into these inhospitable climes, thrusting south and east from the Tetons, and it is the 2024 destination for my annual hiking party. The Winds are not really near anything, and that is part of the allure for our journey this year. I spend my last night in the relative lowlands in a town selected because its name sounded fun. But it turns out to be more than that.

Thermopolis, Wyoming strikes me as a triumph of what the West can be. A town of just 3,000 people, it has the good fortune sit right where the Bighorn River slips out of the Wind River Canyon (the Bighorn and the Wind are, in fact, the same river), and the world’s largest mineral hot spring bubbles up beside it dumps on in. The area around the hot spring is a state park, guaranteed free for use by an age-old US government treaty with the Shoshone and the Arapaho, and I happen to visit during Discovery Days, which has a host of Native families picnicking on the sulfurous grounds around the spring. On this 100-degree day I am not too enthused about a dip in 105-degree water, so I make do with a stroll about to drink in the scene, and am too late to see the town’s top-notch dinosaur museum, too. Downtown Thermopolis has bustling shops and a surprising degree of culinary variety and a respectable brewery, where I post up at the bar and meet a couple completing the woman’s cross-country move to be with her snowboard guide partner in Jackson, and later two fishermen from Cheyenne. The snowboarder wins a few hundred dollars in a dice game jackpot, and the five of us watch Olympics and play dollar-ante dice games after that. It is a night well-spent in a town that pulls together the various strands of Western life and makes them into something whole.

From Thermopolis I head up canyon and into the Wind River Reservation. Here the Northern Arapaho and the Eastern Shoshone have land along the Wind and its merging tributaries with names like Poison and Badwater Creeks, which are in fact the two streams flanking the town of Shoshoni. This is deep rural country, though larger towns like Riverton and Lander have cropped up just off the reservation checkerboard and provide some services. From here I head up the old wagon trail route over South Pass and turn off on a steadily deteriorating dirt road into the Wind River Range, where my backpacking party will head for the Cirque of the Towers.

The rest of my fellow hikers head back to Salt Lake City after our hike, either to fly home or to carry on with their van life adventures across the West. My road back, however, is a long but purposeful one. After my descent from the Winds I head east to Casper, over rolling steppes of Wyoming sagebrush beneath moody skies, a pinprick within the great openness of the West. Early 1800s explorers called this land between the 100^th Meridian and the Rockies the Great American Desert, and though it can be monotonous, the austere beauty here fills some hunger, some knowledge that these wastes hold some secrets and that crossing them can unlock some greatness.

I stop at Independence Rock and the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center, markers on old roads west, monuments to the toll these lands once exacted on those chasers of western dreams. Now, I shoot across them in a matter of hours, endure dreary Casper and then spend the next night in Hot Springs, South Dakota, where I see a collection of mammoth remains interred here on the southern end of the Black Hills. Most Western towns tend toward the simple, the impermanent, just the basics set up here to provide the necessities. But they also feel the past deeply, their stories told by the events that once happened here, and they guard these stories better than in the east or the far west where it might be paved over, subsumed by the march of progress. Instead progress drifts through here from time to time, leaves its mark but tends to move on, and the West eases back into a more timeless state.

The next morning I head toward the Pine Ridge Reservation, an experience that deserves its own post. But after that the rest of the drive across South Dakota passes easily enough. Grazing cattle beget sunflower fields beget corn and wheat. There is some momentary Badland delight before Kadoka, a swing past a second Dakota capitol building, and a skirting of some pleasant lakes to break up the endless fields and tired farm towns with a few nice new houses on the outskirts.

I spend my final night of travel at Lac qui Parle State Park, just across the Minnesota border, in a walk-in campsite amid prairie grasses with a view down to the lake that speaks. It is a perfect evening, and I write easily, the crickets amid the oak savanna pulling me back to some of my deepest-rooted snippets of memory, of warm summer nights outside Madison. (Wisconsin, that is: Madison, Minnesota is the nearest town to Lac qui Parle.) The campground is quiet, mostly empty, but a couple of fires crackle and a warm glow emanates from the camper cabins. A few Pleiades streak overhead. Worries drain away, nagging doubts fall into nothing. I have faith and I have a mission, and a blank space in which to write a name.

Part 2 is here.

The Void at the Heart

The gyre widens. History turns at a remarkable pace, assassin’s bullets and late stage dropouts. In one political party, a frantic campaign of whispers and leaks topples a President too clearly past his prime to serve four more years. In the other, an all-consuming figure reaches for a messianic halo and toys with it for about twenty minutes before he gets distracted by a stray thought on Hannibal Lecter and goes back to being the chaotic ego he was born to be. Apocalyptic rhetoric is everywhere. A nation hurtles toward the brink of…something or other.

I can rationalize and lower the temperature, if that is helpful to you. The Democrats have absolutely done the right thing, cautiously navigating all of the institutional inertia arrayed against them in ways that were aggravating but probably necessary. I am skeptical of the darkest claims about what a second Trump term entails; the infrastructure necessary to make a civil war possible does not exist. Instead of a decisive turn to authoritarianism I see instead another lurch toward less accountability, further obfuscation of facts, further insistence on one’s own truths. The United States will muddle through, more and more hurt but far from the fall. If people could settle down and have families and carry on living as they did in the 1930s or in 1968, so can I. Put the phone down and look around: life ain’t too bad for most of us.

We are instead convulsed by imperfect systems and ugly spasms and lone wolf lost boys, each passing event making it clear there is no grand scheme or great conspiracy, just a lot of flawed humans trying and failing to take control of a beast that no one can tame. Energy erupts, some people get hurt, it erupts back in another direction, rising and falling in no clear rhythm. They are the classic, navel-gazing lurches of an empire waking up to the fact that the world around it has changed, that certain myths that sustained it are not quite up to the current task. It is decadent, feels chaotic to those in deep, and has no easy endgame. But human history goes on, as it always has.

If that rationalization is thin consolation, I get that. I have the freedom to retreat into a comfortable life in some out of the way northern woods that many people do not. Politics grows ever more exhausting, and the odds of existential risk do grow the more we go down this cycle. No one knows exactly when it might break, but the risk is there, a looming dread. Even when Congress quietly has some fairly collegial and productive terms—which it has in the Biden years—nothing seems to lower the temperature.

Above all a deep crudeness pervades everything now, ends justifying means and any shared moral language lost at sea. That moralism of past eras was often hypocritical, often not quite reality, but it at least set a standard for conduct and all such measurement. We live beyond virtue, a troubled state diagnosed by Alasdair MacIntyre and struck upon more recently by Robert Putnam, the sage of modern loneliness, who gave a long-ranging and rather bleak interview about his life’s project:

“What stands upstream of all these other trends is morality, a sense that we’re all in this together and that we have obligations to other people. Now, suddenly, I’m no longer the social scientist, I’m a preacher. I’m trying to say, we’re not going to fix polarization, inequality, social isolation until, first of all, we start feeling we have an obligation to care for other people.”

I am starting to think that what we need now are indeed preachers of some sort. The rational mind is good for an argument but thin gruel for humans in search of moral uplift. On some weird level I get the Trumpian evangelists, even as I recoil at their easy peace with Caesar: at least they speak to an underlying yearning. Unlike most other Democrats (save, perhaps, fringe figures like Marianne Williamson), Joe Biden tried to revive that language, may even have those gestures to healing the soul of a nation to thank for his 2020 victory. But as he fades into his geriatric fog it feels like the last gasp of a man speaking to a society that has passed him by, the liberal church in full retreat and a void left in its place.

David Brooks thinks a new progressive social gospel is the antidote to what ails us, but I look around at my mostly liberal millennial circles and see little fertile ground. People who need help don’t seek answers in faith; they go to therapy. Struggles tend to be personal instead of communal, and when they do take on a shared aspect, I am not sure they are better. The godless progressive moralism that has surged in recent years seems to swing between righteous anger and end-of-times despair with all the dogma of religion but none of the hard work of inner moral struggle, to say nothing of the desire to bring forth new life. For many others, including a lot of people who keep up on news and say all the right things, the greater temptation is just to retreat to higher ground when push comes to shove. Drown it out, make enough money to get by, and get on with life. That notion is tempting sometimes.

In 1968, Robert F. Kennedy (Senior) consoled a restive Indianapolis crowd on the night Martin Luther King was killed; it was one of the few major American cities that did not burn that night. Kennedy did something that would seem absurd today, even among supposed defenders of tradition and the classics: he quoted Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the first of the three plays in the Oresteia. The Oresteia is a tale of murder and retribution, a curse placed on the House of Atreus by the gods in which Orestes, the son of King Agamemnon of Iliad fame, is forced to avenge his father’s murder and pursued by wrathful Furies for his trouble. In the trilogy’s final episode, Athena orchestrates a trial that absolves Orestes and turns the Furies into defenders of justice. The cycle breaks. Democratic Athens is born.

Whether it falls to Donald Trump or Kamala Harris or some other turn yet unseen, a victory this November will only feel very temporary so long as American politics remains a war of all on all. I do not know what the solution looks like, if some modern-day Athena can descend from the skies and make us mortals believe in some solution again. But I do think it is worth great effort to ponder what that solution might be. Whatever it is, I expect it will speak the language of souls, of faith and hope, of the pursuit of wisdom, in Kennedy’s words, through the awful grace of God.

Circulation of Elites

This dude is Vilfredo Pareto. He had a knack for finding patterns in human interaction, including some of the foundational insights into what we now would call sociology, and he wandered into my mind last week as I gazed in stupefaction as two old men lied, conveyed senility, and bragged about their golf handicaps in a competition to control the United States nuclear codes.

One of Pareto’s most useful concepts is called the circulation of elites. Basically, it says there’s a cycle by which vigorous people rise to power, hold it for a spell through a healthy balance of different impulses, and eventually lose that balance and tail off to be replaced by a new elite. The circulation of elites happens in any society, democratic or autocratic, open and free or closed and rigid. Just as some European nations seem to cycle through a new government every few weeks, the Soviets anointed and purged commissars; dynasties rise and then are overthrown, the Roman Empire conquers the world before it declines and falls.

The circulation of elites is a natural life span in any society, and it is reproduced on many smaller scales, much more often trading among competing power brokers and only very rarely taking form as a bottom-up revolution. (And when it does, those tend to be the bloodiest regime changes of all.) “History is a graveyard of aristocracies,” Pareto wrote, tracing how a rising, hungry elite that grabs on to valuable insights can dislodge a predecessor. The change often happens slowly, and then all at once.

How this circulation happens can be radically different, and the ease with which they happen is the difference between a stable, peaceable society and a bloody, chaotic one. Because the churn is always happening, a society needs methods to bring in new talented people and shed off those whose time has gone. It needs to break down the inherited status, clubbishness, and groupthink that can pervade in an entrenched elite. The most stable societies create pathways for talented people to rise and create institutions where no one person can stay at the top forever.

In the United States, that structure that does this has come to be known as a meritocracy. Meritocracy can be something of a dirty word these days; it is often woefully incomplete in practice, and even the best and brightest will sometimes fail at the greatest tasks before them. But it is still probably the best on offer, and on a global scale, a relative ability to keep the circulation going is more important than the absolute fluidity of a social order. A strong meritocracy sets a standard for achievement, creates its own internal ethical codes that filter out some of the most erratic people, and builds the norms and expectations necessary for a lot of people to live in relative peace. As a child of the American system I can poke holes at its incompleteness and internal flaws all day, but I still see the value it provides.

The beauty of a well-functioning democracy is that it provides a fairly responsive and usually nonviolent mechanism for circulating elites and forcing them to display some aptitudes to gain power. The American elite has always shown some capacity to circulate, and while the process can be lurching, it is often better here than in other places.* Leaders who suck get voted out of office, and if their replacements suck they also get voted out of office. The American two-party system, for all its flaws, creates two opportunities to bring forth new talent, both within each party and through rotations of power between them.

This is no less true today. Donald Trump certainly circulated an elite when he blew up a party that had become unresponsive to the electorate. He stabbed at the heart of the zombie Reaganism that was still carrying the Republicans through a world far removed from the one where Reagan built his majority. The fallout from that shift is still taking shape, and beneath all the Trumpian will to power the right is in a fascinating state right now as it invites in new critiques of the American state and tries to figure out what it stands for.

At the top, however, the Republicans are now overdue for another churn. The party has now put forward the same presidential candidate three elections in a row, a deeply divisive man now 78 years old, and the only reason we are not talking about his decline is the much more evident decline in the guy on the other side. The Republicans now exemplify the oldest of the Greek critiques of democracy: the ease with which a system stripped of any other mediating powers can degenerate into mob fervor and the charisma of a strongman. The more this party becomes a vehicle for one man and his family, the less likely its story is to have a happy ending.

The Democratic Party, more of a competition among competing interests than its counterpart, has proven a bit more structurally resilient. In 2020, a fractured field stopped its squabbling and got in line behind the guy best suited to dethrone Trump at the time. The party has a deep bench of interesting rising figures, including a bunch of Rust Belt governors who have directly attacked the causes of the 2016 failure, who could circulate up if given the opportunity. But the Democrats are still subject to the inertia of an old elite that can cost them dearly, both in the decision to line up behind Hillary Clinton because it was “her turn,” and now in the slow-motion train wreck of Joe Biden’s campaign that never should have been. Last week’s debate was, perhaps, an egregious enough peak to wake people to this fact, but it will still take true courage and inventiveness for Democrats to do what they have to do and find a new candidate.

Great people can shape history, but their moments come and go in a heartbeat, especially if they themselves do not change with the times. Knowing when to stand aside for someone new can take uncommon humility, or at least a clear-eyed understanding of one’s role and realistic chances in a broader drama. Ideally, a system should never let it come to that. But we are where we are, and anyone who wants to avoid increasingly ugly transitions of power had better root for some circulation of elites.

Image credit: By Unknown author – [1] [2], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68615041

* Lengthy comparative politics student footnote: Some very autocratic societies can seem stable, but rarely do they come to happy endings. Despots can rule for a very long time through enough fear and control, but when they do finally fall, it can get brutal, as the Arab Spring showed. Imperial dynasties are some of the longest lasting regimes in human history, and while the monarchs and emperors make their divine claims, the brilliance of these systems lurks in the shadows of great palaces. Imperial China owed its stability to a deep bureaucracy that did circulate regularly, often forced by the castration of its most important functionaries. The absolute monarchies of Spain and Portugal ossified quickly, while the nimbler Brits created a system for regular changes in the Parliament behind the monarchial figurehead, and thus an obscure island built the greatest empire ever known to humanity. They even gave up that empire without a serious internal collapse, which, whatever else we may say about its colonial legacy, is a remarkable achievement.

Party systems can also do their own filtering and circulating, and single-party states can lock in the control for a spell. In the early-to-mid twentieth century, Mexico developed what Mario Vargas Llosa called la dictadura perfecta, the perfect dictatorship, in which the Revolutionary Institutional Party (what a name) just ran the show by tacking left and right with the mood of the country, careful to pay off just enough interest groups to keep everyone passably happy. Post-Mao China functioned in a similar way, as the ideology fell out of the Communist Party and the country exploded on to a path of remarkable growth.

But this single party road runs the risk of capture by either inflexible interests or a single strongman, and with no competing party to offer a realistic alternative, there is less of a check on these instincts than in a competitive democracy. Mexico’s regime eventually broke down, toppled by its own cruel reactions to a radical left and as it went broke trying to cover all its bases, though certain legacies of that era, like the single-term limits on office holders, are now saving graces for Mexico’s very imperfect democracy. China is now abandoning its ideological fluidity under Xi Jinping, a shift that is both worrying for short term global stability but in the long run leaves me much more bullish on the American position vis-à-vis its greatest geopolitical rival. Xi may do a lot of damage in the near term, but he is systematically weakening his party’s ability to adapt to changing realities, including his own eventual passing.

Second Linemates

This post is adapted from my loosely scrawled outline for a rehearsal dinner speech I gave at my friend Danny’s wedding in New Orleans this May.

On a February night in 2015, I was minding my own business at a Duluth East-Blaine game at Fogerty Arena, locked in on a back-and-forth affair that saw 13 goals and an overtime. Some guy, having successfully Twitter-stalked me, tracked me down afterward and introduced himself. I promptly forgot him, though I managed to pretend otherwise when he re-introduced himself to me at that year’s State Tournament, and before long I’d been invited to attempt a podcast on high school hockey. The rest is history.

The podcast was the perfect launching point for both of us, and it gave us both the perfect outlet to share our thoughts on the sport we love in our ways. But before long, it became clear that Danny and I shared more than an unhealthy high school hockey obsession. We were born nine days apart, and our moms grew up a few miles from each other in suburban Chicago; years later, we realized we’d competed against each other in high school Knowledge Bowl meets. But our tie was more than mere coincidence: we were also going through a similar phase of life when we met, as we settled down on to roads far from our pre-college plans.

At the same time, though, there was a hunger. Danny was not going to be content just going to a few hockey games. He had to make the best podcast, attend the most games, find those outlets in which a natural homebody became a social butterfly and shared the fun with everyone around him: random connections invited to dinner, jersey-chasing games with high school kids, drinking in the full scene. It applies beyond hockey, too, where he seeks out the best food there is, sucks up all the random trivia, goes deep into his passion projects. To hang out with Danny is to learn the minutiae of every Ken Burns documentary, of the Donner Party or Hemingway, to dive in deep into topics of intrigue.

I made an easy slide in with his family, off on adventures that might involve Karl Pours at the Ryan family cabin or that ridiculous party during the Minneapolis NCAA Final Four at The Butcher and the Boar or us just puttering around Minneapolis when we both lived there. Before long I was passing up much cozier guest lodging in the city for his comfy couch a block off Loring Park: here I would get good food from one of the best chefs I know, good company for both adventurous and quiet nights, and a window into the ever-expanding hockey jersey collection.

Living this way Danny does, with a such strong sense of self, can make it hard to settle down with someone. (I speak here with firsthand knowledge.) And so, when Miranda came along, I managed my expectations about how well she’d handle someone who attended 92 hockey games the year they met. The beginning was inauspicious: we will not speak of Miranda’s first State Tournament, and the time she had to go headfirst through a window at the Ryan family cabin to save the day for Danny’s mom and her friend likewise did not portend a seamless blending of two worlds.

But there was clearly work being done here, a shared journey undertaken. Danny and Miranda were going to make this work. I finally saw it in full a few years ago when they came up for peak fall colors with their bernedoodle Beary—who, unlike his housemate Muffin, is a chill, sweet, kind dog. (I’m convinced Muffin is a member of a Hamas sleeper cell.) There was an ease to their interactions, the rhythm of good-natured humor of two people finding their way to a life they could share. Miranda and Danny can come off as low-key but are astute observers of their world, drive hard for what they want, and have become great company to keep.

And so their wedding in New Orleans this May was the culmination of that shared journey. They power through obstacles and exercise their agency. They brought us together, a party in their favorite city with their favorite people, the rest of us along for the ride to share in it. Here we were, able to spend a week downing delicious food, celebrating at a grand Southern estate, dancing down the streets of the French Quarter for a second line. Who could ask for more? So here’s to the good memories we have made, the good ones we will make, and that shared journey we’re all on with them here. To Danny and Miranda.

A Story Within a Story

As always, a marker on this date.

I don’t believe that grief passes away. It has its time and place forever. More time is added to it; it becomes a story within a story. But grief and griever alike endure.

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

26 years.

A Patient Cycle

Karl Schuettler on Culture, Politics, and High School Hockey

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