Chapbooks | Tour of No Regrets

My favorite way to share stories is through chapbooks, delivered by USPS magic to your mailbox. I write about travel, camping, nature, aging, grief, companionship, and how we care for our planet and each other. Here are a few excerpts:

Wild Moraine might be a coming of age story, if the age were 69 and counting.

Aboard the UnCruise Wilderness Discoverer

Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska

It’s adventure camp for retirees, plus a few sons and daughters brought along to lower the median age. I prepared for the trip with a personal trainer (“Your job is to make sure I can get in and out of a kayak without doing a bellyflop”), an independent-woman-in-the-wilds reading list, buying knee-high mud boots and funky bright blue round eyeglasses, intended to signal that I’m creative, maybe a tad quirky, and definitely worth befriending.

On the first night, Expedition Leader Julie compliments my specs, and I respond, “Thank you. I bought them so people would think I’m super cool and like me.”

I may have left my grace in the Juneau Airport baggage claim, but I’m glad to be here, if a little anxious about what’s next.

On our first float, a humpback whale surfaces near our kayaks. Closer than I’ve ever been, he dives and surfaces, over and over again, five times total.

My kayak disembarkation was indeed belly-floppish, but I wasn’t the only one, and the crew was encouraging and helpful. My exit strategy would improve during the week.

Peter was right about Lamplugh and her rugged beauty. We kayaked to her edge, peeking into her well-earned crevices. She’s only a few years older than I am, by a half century or two, and I wonder if her back and knees creak, and if she wakes in the middle of the night when a little sorrow sneaks into her dreams? Does she store any regret in those cracks, or does regret no longer serve her, and best buried below?

Does she wish she were pure blue and white, or does she take pride in her moraine—evidence of power and perseverance, courage and compromise, and life pushing forward?

Can she hear our prayer at her altar of mud and lichen and clay and stone and ice?

This is Where We Love was my response to the 2024 election. I took myself on a solo writing retreat at the coast and figured out what’s next.

The drive to the lighthouse isn’t particularly beautiful this time of year. I pass cows in the dirt, ragged fences blending into the ragged landscape. Broken barns and abandoned farmhouses. Signs warning of dangerous cliffs and drifting sands. Two young deer, crows on power lines, a critter who didn’t make it across the road.

Point Reyes National Seashore doesn’t have the in-your-face beauty of Big Sur, Monterey, or Mendocino. It’s a come-as-you-are piece of wilderness. A little scruffy, this side of funky, often windy, and always welcoming. It’s been our place for thirty years, and we return often to this area that feel both the same and different all at once.

***

The lighthouse welcome sign warns that there are 331 steep steps down, urging us to take responsibility for our fitness level and hydration. My fitness level is less than optimal, and my hydration is back at the car. I do some mental math— I can climb thirty steps back up and stop ten times. It will be fine.

The walk down is easy enough. The lighthouse is mine alone, and the weather is spectacular—sunny, cool, and clear. The climb back up is brutal. I regret not exercising more last week. I regret not eating lunch. I regret my left-behind water bottle. I regret math. My legs feel weak, my stomach feels queasy, and my lungs are screaming. I tell myself it is ok to stop and rest. To not love pain. To be a little afraid. To regret my choices.

At the top of the climb, a hawk lands five feet away. He grabs a tiny mouse before flying back over the cliffs.

I add another item to my to-do list: metaphor gathering.

Your Stuff is Still Your Stuff is the story of the baggage I carried to Portugal, and what I learned and unlearned about myself.

We climbed up the hill to Chiado to visit O Trevo, a small, noisy tasca where Anthony Bourdain feasted on Bifana and made them famous. We ordered two marinated pork sandwiches, no cheese, mustard please, fries, and beer an ddined on the steps of the statue of 16 th-century poet Luis Vas de Camoes.

I watched a man balancing an armful of art, trying to engage with anyone who would make eye contact. I invited him to show us his work, and he silently laid out five canvases and ten prints—vibrant, joyful paintings of boats and buildings and flowers floating into the sky. He might have been British, or maybe I misunderstood his newsboy cap and accent. He was missing a few teeth and was wearing flip-flips and a faded purple t-shirt under his not-very-clean-but -not-really-dirty blazer. His worked showed his love of color and noticeable skill, as if Chagall and Kandinsky had blended into an enthusiastic child with a cosmic paintbrush.

I’d ask a question, and he’d pause to light, and relight, his cigarette, taking minutes between responses. I complimented his work. I empathized with the challenges of making a living as an artisit. We talked about the weather. When I asked how much for the prints, everything stopped. He rearranged his work and looked away. Steve suggested that perhaps he wasn’t selling, just sharing. I wasn’t sure exactly what we were doing, but our dots were no longer connecting. I gave him the euros in my pockets and shook his hand before walking down the hill.

Coffee with Birdsong and Pine is my love letter to camping in Northern California.

Deconstructing wilderness and other tales

Redwood National Park

Orick, CA

Last night I dreamt that I was explaining the concept of camping, this specific version of small rig/big tent/state park camping, to a group of visiting aliens. Or maybe it was a post-apocalyptic lecture in the class I keep forgetting to attend. Either way, it was tricky to communicate that long ago, individual living units would be scooped out of the wilderness, or what was wilderness before the scooping and paving, tree removing, bathroom building, amphitheater establishing, kiosk stationing, and trash and recycle center organizing. Each campground would have between thirty to one hundred (more or less) wilderness units, or campsites as we called them, for folks who bring simplified versions of their homes, either a tent with sleeping bags, a green Coleman stove and collapsible chairs, or little vans and trailers with little beds and sinks and littler bathrooms, and they’d stay for a few days and nature-up, before returning to comfortable and worrisome lives in the suburbs and the cities with bigger beds and smaller trees, and not nearly as much dirt.

Today we walked through four or five redwood groves, each full of trees, dead and alive, covered in vines, ferns, moss, and other trees, with sun and shade and the air full of quiet, persistent patience. We were alone, gathering some persistence and patience for our personal use.

We drove to where the Klamath River meets the ocean. We watched pelicans gather, dive and fly, and kids and dogs scamper. We ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which were especially tasty for a Tuesday afternoon. We read a bit, wrote, and drew a little. We came upon ceremonial grounds for the Yurok Tribe, though we didn’t know the specifics, just that we could feel something else here, and it wasn’t ours.

We stopped in the National Park Visitor’s Center to ask about the ceremonial grounds, and only one ranger seemed to know. We had a lengthy discussion about the communities here—tribal, trees, elk, and the sad, empty town nearby that forgot to thrive as the Gateway to the Redwoods. We exchanged book recommendations, white privilege indignation, and some hope for the future. As we were leaving, he said, “Remember, wilderness is a social construct.”

While we were cooking dinner back at the campsite, a nine-year-old girl named Haddy came by, with her cousin and brother, offering to do three bike tricks for a quarter. She could turn 360 degrees on her bike seat. The boys stood on top of their seats and all three synchronized impressive wheelies for an encore. I gave them each a quarter and said I would pay them again tomorrow for new tricks. Haddy showed me her special rock, the one she keeps in her fanny pack, and tells little kids it’s her pet turtle, Rocky. She only charges them a dime for petting privileges, because they’re kids, you know.

This morning, I thought about the book we’re reading, and yesterday’s conversation about the intentionality of the Yurok—how they treat the wilderness with respect and gratitude. Maybe I could change things up on my end.

So I gave thanks. Thank you trees for hosting the moss and birds and bugs and each other, and for hosting all of us. Thank you for helping me see, breathe and belong. Thank you for still standing, for still growing, despite all we’ve taken from you. Thank you for your shade and needles and cones and sap and wood and roots that go further than we can see. Thank you for being here first.

Since I can’t see the tops of the trees, I focus on the burly bottoms, pulled out of the ground, now with a family of ferns. Four trunks twisted into a corkscrew, a wall of branches, dripping with moss, hovering over the trails. A creek, a tiny bridge, a bird. Burn marks, braided bark, spider webs. Light, dark, green, blue, brown, damp, dusty.

Haddy’s gang has grown to six or seven kids, and we hear them traipsing up the creek, laughing and poking and tossing rocks back into the water. She learned how to stand on her bike seat, too, and shows me for free, claiming I overpaid yesterday.

We make our evening campfire last, tending to our final pieces of wood. Our neighbors are a group of thirty-something friends, loud but also entertaining, especially the guy in the kilt, with half his head shaved and the other half in a French braid. At dusk, we hear the guitar, and beautiful, strong, confident, joyful singing. They know all the words to all the songs—sea shanties, folk songs, musical theater. I almost cry as they whistled and sang their way through the Lumineers song, Home is Wherever I’m with You.

We stay past the last strum, until the quarter moon moves out of sight.

Just the Noticing is a collection of camping stories from Joshua Tree to Lake Tahoe.

The Protection Plan

Santa Cruz Mountains, CA

The forest is layered with oak, madrone, sycamore, and pine, hovering over a carpet of poison oak. Trunks gather by four or seven, weaving themselves into a puzzle of sticks, leaves, and sunlight. The pattern is confusing, but maybe the pattern is simply reaching out, leaning in, and wrapping around each other. Do the trees whisper, “Here, take my branch, I can grow another,” or do they hold each other up without a word?

Sitting with my morning coffee, looking up and out, I watch and wait. The tallest tree calls so softly that I’m not even sure she’s speaking to me.

“It takes a forest,” she says.

“I know, and it’s lovely what you’re all doing here,” I respond.

“Actually, I meant you.”

“Me?”

“You.”

“Oh.”

She slips back to her forest tending andI return to my coffee, which is on the cool side of warm.