Alex Mercer 
The seat was 14B, a window on the wrong side of the engine, and the man across the aisle had already decided his phone conversation outranked the rest of the cabin. That was a Tuesday in late August, somewhere over Ohio, and it was the flight that finally made me get serious about noise cancelling. … Read more
The first real cold front of September rolled through on a Tuesday night, and by Wednesday morning the goldenrod field behind the farm stand looked like someone had shaken out a quilt full of embers. Monarchs — dozens of them, then hundreds — dropping out of the trees as the sun climbed, spiraling up on … Read more
Every cross-country driver eventually has to deal with St. Louis. You can skirt it on the outer ring, sure, but if your route puts you anywhere near the middle of the country, odds are you’ll thread the needle where the Mississippi bends west and the Gateway Arch rises out of the riverfront like a silver … Read more
The last red-eye I took before figuring this out was a Newark-to-Lisbon ordeal that left me looking like I’d been air-dried in a dehydrator. I walked off the plane at 7 a.m., caught my reflection in the jet bridge window, and genuinely did not recognize the desiccated creature staring back. Ten hours in a pressurized … Read more
The bugle started as a whistle somewhere back in the timber, thin and almost electronic, like a kazoo played through a pipe organ. Then it broke open into a ragged scream that rolled across the sagebrush and hit me square in the chest. I was standing on the shoulder of a gravel road in the … Read more
There is a stretch of the Sierra Nevada where the calendar stops mattering and elevation starts running the show. Every September, while New England is still arguing about whether October will behave, the aspens on the eastern slope of the Sierra turn gold in a wave that starts above nine thousand feet and works its … Read more
The sun came up at 4:52 a.m. last June, and my campervan turned into a lantern. Six windows, no covers worth the name, and a bedroom that lit up like a display case the moment the horizon cracked. I draped a fleece blanket over the cab seats. I bought a suction-cup blackout panel that surrendered … Read more
When I started planning my second campervan build, I did what every earnest DIYer does: I taped butcher paper across the garage wall and drew the layout I’d been imagining for two years. Bed platform here. Garage storage there. A kitchen galley with just enough counter for a camp stove and a cutting board. My … Read more
The first time I crested the hill into the Wallowa Valley, my photographer grabbed my arm before I’d even stopped the truck. Below us: a ribbon of river, a lake the color of glacial milk, and a wall of nine-thousand-foot peaks catching the last of the light. We had driven six hours from Portland and … Read more
The board flipped at 6:15 p.m. on a Thursday in Denver. One minute I was halfway through a mediocre slice of pizza at Gate B22, and the next, my hometown flight joined a cluster of red CANCELLED entries stacking up like bad news has a way of doing. Around me, two hundred people exhaled at … Read more