The sun intimately hugged the horizon as my drone hovered in the skies above Huacachina. I watched on my controller screen as I directed the camera lens between dunes and clouds, gliding horizontally across the sky in a tender panorama.

The U-shaped tourist hub consisted of only a couple of streets that orbited an oasis at the town’s gravitational center. Though the scenic waterhole was naturally formed, nearby drilling has threatened its reserves. For the past decade, water has been pumped into Huacachina in order to preserve its aquifer. Though it isn’t wrong when locals and visitors announce the lagoon’s technical status as a “natural oasis,” in truth, each passing year further dilutes its claim to geological purity.

The Eden’s placid waters were periodically criss-crossed by sunscreen-slathered passengers in paddle boats. They were primarily children and seniors, and appeared to be overly prepared for the modest lagoon crossing ahead — each equipped with shades, water bottles, and visors. A few held out selfie sticks as they coasted along the tranquil waters like stereotypes at sea. Meanwhile, the town’s more intrepid guests carved, snaked, skimmed, swept, and slalomed across the giant dunes that flanked the picturesque enclave on all sides. Some stuck to sleds while others tried their luck with skis and snowboards, careening far faster down the sheer slopes than their sluggish sands suggested possible. Others crammed into buggies with strangers or friends and went on rail-free rollercoaster rides over the restless hills.

Some rented vehicles, braving the martian landscape on their own as they weaved haphazard trails toward the setting sun. No matter how erratically they drove, nor how precariously close they came to toppling their dune buggies, there was a swan-like grace to the silky patterns they traced.

They etched figure eights like skaters on a frozen pond, and the higher I directed my camera, the more intentional seemed each of the drivers’ micro-movements. The more deliberate became the automotive bedlam. Racy and frenetic gave way to something that looked coordinated. High enough, the patterns carved into the desert appeared like knife scores in butter or elegant brush strokes across a canvas too wide for words. Travelers of a hundred different nationalities teemed through the sun-battered streets in slow-motion as I directed my drone higher and higher into the sky. Even the dime-turning tuk-tuks that darted around the glitzy settlement like dragonflies became fluid as my lens gained height.

The town’s cadence was so consistent — so melodic and multi-faceted — that it seemed more the product of a puppetmaster than simply an accumulation of disordered sightseers and daredevils. How could such a diversity of differently-intentioned people coalesce into something so harmonious?

The rest of the one-horse, twenty-bar town’s temporary transplants were either lying poolside, recovering in beds, downing shots, showering off sand, or completing the trying ascent toward one of the idyllic outpost’s sun-burnished peaks.

From atop a powder mountain of my own, I guided my flying camera and continued watching the milieu from a bird’s eye view. I swooped through the windless, arid sky over boats, trees, resorts, and the town’s most towering dunes.

With few clouds overhead, a strong reception on my controller, and a line of sight that stretched for miles and miles, I felt emboldened to take my drone further and further. High enough, I could see Huacachina in its true context: a tiny, tourist-facing, leisure-soaked respite beside a sea of urban sprawl that goes by the name of Ica. Next to the patchwork city, my hostel and each of the cafes, bars, and restaurants surrounding it looked more like pieces in a carefully curated diorama — a staged setup beside an impoverished expanse of homes. Only a few massive dunes demarcated the boundary between them.

It was obvious that Ica housed the region’s real culture, but it was the Instagram-ready hideaway that was the draw for the algorithm-driven world around it. As travelers, such tourist magnets can be mixed bags. On one hand, they’re weaker embodiments of the nations that house them than just about any other city, town, or settlement. Yet in the absence of authentic culture, tourist towns like Huacachina are passing reflections of whatever travelers populate them in a given moment. They’re in constant flux, and in their relentless turnover, guests are given more opportunities to interface with more people from more places. Rather than providing immersion in the specific country we’ve traveled to, these liminal towns serve as microcosms of the broader world. With few native dwellers to turn toward, fellow tourists and vagabonds take on the role that locals typically fill.

I perched my drone between cookie-cutter dunes and carefully angled its aperture toward the sunset. I snapped photos as wisps of clouds collaged and pirouetted along the horizon. Patches of plum, indigo, and smoky blue hung lazily in front of ensanguined streaks of orange, amber, and gold.

As soon as the sun set beneath distant folds of sand, the hot, oppressive day came swiftly to an end. A rogue gust of wind swept across the desiccated landscape, a curtain of tiny grains revealing its contours as it insidiously careened. Within seconds, it sent my drone spiraling helplessly toward a divot between an indiscriminate school of dunes. I watched in disbelief on my monitor as the camera above ceaselessly circled, but no matter how feverishly I mashed buttons and fiddled with control sticks to try and regain command, I was powerless to stop its meteoric descent. A wind-carved ridge swallowed the machine as it crash-landed in disconcerting silence.

Half of the device poked free from the desert, its lens partially obscured by sediment. My eyes darted back and forth between the controller monitor and the mute-faced, unblinking desert around me as it descended into dusk. I desperately tried to pull context clues from the sandy sameness as it cruelly mocked my futile efforts.

After ten minutes of searching, a sudden movement on my controller caught my eye. A couple of kids had removed the drone from the sand and begun to curiously inspect the contraption. Their ages seemed to vary between eight and eleven. The device hastily traded hands as the children took turns examining it, some of them miming airplane movements as they sailed and pitched it through the purpling sky, and others a bit more discerning. One of them was so disruptively proactive that he turned off the drone to preserve its remaining battery — thereby severing my connection to its camera and depriving me of my lone clue in this increasingly frantic search. As the sun sank, the ephemeral hills blurred together and succumbed to the elemental night.

I scanned the crowd for signs of the kids, but as people funneled out of the desert and toward their respective dwellings, they congealed into impassable clumps. I let out a few “Has anyone seen my drone?” pleas in both English and Spanish. But as citizens of every nationality rushed past, I was quickly overcome by the sense that I was fighting an ocean with only buckets. Defeat washed over me in crushing waves until my last few appeals were rendered meek and mousy. A cold bead of sweat trickled down my forehead and along my cheek as I trudged up and down the dunes. I made no effort to swat or dry the forming rivulet as the bulbous drop slid its way neckward and began amassing backup.

Each successive shade of blue that cloaked the desert further cemented in the bitter reality that I’d lost my camera — and all of its footage.

Using deep breaths in a fruitless attempt to quell my beating heart, I was unsure whether my hypertension owed more to the fear of all of my lost photos, or the exertion of sauntering directionlessly between dunes. Until I found myself dry-heaving a few meters from a group of bantering buggy drivers, I repressed the signs my body was giving me that I was inching dangerously close to the limits of my stamina and calf strength. Hunched over and looking fully the part of a flustered gringo, one of the workers approached me. “Está bien?” he tried first in Spanish. Seeing I was too encumbered to devise a coherent reply, or too poor a Spanish speaker to make head or tail of his query, he moved on to English.

I sullenly explained my predicament and he nodded along in near complete understanding before returning to his colleagues. What commenced was an exchange that involved 3–4 phone calls, each placed by one of the separate chauffeurs, and a few sparring matches of rapid-fire Spanish that soared so far beyond the bounds of my comprehension that I sat in befuddled silence until a verdict emerged from the chaos. I fought vertigo as my heart returned to a sustainable pace, trying faintly to interpret whatever isolated words slipped free from the impenetrable fog.

Sometimes, it’s more stressful to know a language a little than not at all. When in a room of only Russian or Mandarin speakers, I can rest easy in the knowledge that no amount of listening skills will circumvent my lack of pre-k vocabulary. So long as the situation isn’t too dire, I can turn my brain off and wait for the return of words and speakers I understand.

Yet with languages I know only loosely, I need to actively search for footholds to latch onto and apply far more focus than discourse ordinarily demands. So the passing bits of familiar Spanish that I encounter in conversation that actually compute often create more confusion than clarity. They compel me to search for meaning in strings of ideas that, very often, are just too thick and multi-layered for me to ultimately process.

(Of course, none of this is to say I should stop learning language — only that there are few moments when I’ve felt the harsh sting of assimilation as keenly as I did while marooned beside my backpack, shoddily translating nouns as they whizzed by, and watching the approaching night strip whatever chances I had at recovering some of the most stunning photos I’d ever taken.)

The buggy driver conference continued, but the sparse words I picked up did little to fill me in on whether their prognosis was positive. After a few minutes, I wondered whether they’d determined I was a lost cause and were just waiting to see who drew the short straw and had to tell me. Maybe they’d moved on already to occupational chatter, or some spirited debate about where to get dinner.

“Friend, come with me,” one of them finally spoke up as he signed for me to get into his vehicle. His English was a bit shakier than the previous driver’s, so I tried my best to confirm we were on the same page before complying. But the language barrier proved too immense for a coherent exchange on our battle plan.

When the buggy’s engine kicked into gear, I wasn’t sure whether one of his colleagues had found it, where we were going, or whether it was simply our plan to comb the colossal desert before the final glimmers of sunlight receded. As we began carving violently up the nearest dune, I inched my arm toward the seatbelt with subdued motions. I neither wanted to die nor betray my welling doubt about the nature of this pilgrimage.

It was clear that efficiency was the guiding light behind each of the buggy pilot’s gas-happy maneuvers, and that each towering ridge we surmounted was little more than a trivial speedbump standing between point A and point B. As the ramshackle metropolis of Ica came into frame, it became apparent that he had a specific destination in mind, and that he greeted each sandy precipice we’d cleared as precisely the sorts of waypoints that other drivers search for in buildings and street signs.

The driver stopped on a dirt road in front of a house made largely from plywood and aluminum. Seconds later, out of it sheepishly walked a barefoot ten-year-old with his mother at his side and my drone in his hand. He was wearing a sand-dusted T-shirt and wordlessly handed me the drone with a gentle smile.

As I got back to my hostel and looked at my flying camera in the light, I saw that it had a couple of chipped propellers and one of its four appendages had been fractured. But given the fateful fall from the sky it had completed an hour earlier, it fared surprisingly well. Recovering the device at all seemed unlikely. That I could still turn it on and still get the device’s damaged blades to spin — that all of its footage had survived — seemed like a minor miracle. But more than a miracle, it was a reflection of the kindness of strangers and a reminder that, when traveling, very often it’s the misadventures that make for the most memorable experiences.

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More than ten shirtless men sat atop the semi-truck as it trundled over the craters that pockmarked the streets of Iquitos. Beneath them were sacks of grain, rice, flour, fertilizer, and animal feed that were piled as high as the buckling flatbed would permit. In the most populous city on Earth that can’t be reached by cars or roads, sights like this weren’t so uncommon.

Some of the bare-backed workers watched the evening’s clouds roll by overhead, their gaze as stoic as sentinels. Reflections of street lights and telephone wires swept across the whites of their eyes.

The connective cables were shadeless silhouettes underneath the reddening sky, rising and falling like waves of an ocean or slurred notes on an open-ended staff. They thinned and gathered with no discernible pattern as they snaked between homes, wrapped entire towns in their baby anaconda coils, and circumnavigated the sprawling, isolated city in an operation that was as methodical as it was animalistic.

Wherever there was a break in the powerlines, another series of filaments came into frame and flitted across the tired eyes of the truck’s intrepid passengers. And just as suddenly as the network of wires shuttered out of view, giving way to distant canopies and rust-mottled rooftops, the melody would resume — swelling and receding as the electric symphony’s subsequent movements flared into being. The utility lines skated along the cresting clouds in a way that was at once suave and haphazard, ordered and erratic. Stark black waned and violently waxed while amber, blush, and cerulean blue bled like watercolors through the open sky behind it.

Some of the riders had fashioned mattresses and cushions from the bags of grain, more concerned with getting a few minutes of shut-eye than watching their heat-choked metropolis clunk cloddishly by. Some sat upright, legs swaying back and forth like pendulums in the swampy summer air. Their shiny skin glowed an igneous orange as it refracted the final rays of the setting sun.

Some pointed toward pedestrians like myself, more transfixed by the passersby who were out of their depths in the mosquito-swamped climate than the avant-garde orchestra of moto-taxis weaving frantically in and out of traffic. To them, the outsiders were more striking than the scarcity of seatbelts on their teetering tower of assorted goods-and-grains-repurposed-as-pillows.

As the hulking lorry lumbered down the streets with the earth-rattling immensity of a tank, its passengers were completely unperturbed by silly little things like safety, and its driver was even less perturbed by the looming prospect of a moving violation from the city’s threadbare police force. We were infinitely more out-of-place than the tuk-tuk drivers preparing to careen across the narrow path of the leviathan vessel, the backfiring motorbike to the riders’ immediate right, and the stray dog bolting through the horn-blaring bedlam.

More than the ceaseless drone of insects and more than the entire families crammed onto the backs of rusted e-scooters, for those who’d spent their lives in Iquitos, it was the fumbling gringos like myself who so often stole their attention. More than any of the sights that inspire tourists to take out their phones and snap pictures, it was the tourists who became attractions: temporary transplants struggling to integrate with the restless whole of the sweltering, Amazonian city.

Iquitos fielded its fair share of sightseers, but it didn’t make every Peru visitor’s “must-see” list in the same way as Machu Picchu, so it was often relegated to the sidelines. Unlike in Cusco, where you’re frequently no further than an empanada’s toss from the nearest traveler, interlopers stood out like neon fanny packs in this city carved from rain forest.

Puerto Miguel was a village of roughly a hundred residents and required a two-hour motorboat ride from Iquitos to make landfall on its dolphin-silvered shores. There wasn’t even a golf cart within the jungle-bound villa. A single sidewalk evenly bisected the outpost, and it appeared to have been recently laid.

Half of the enclave’s residents earned income selling groceries or gasoline to the other half. One house provided cellphone service to the entire neighborhood. A building across the street doubled as the patchwork settlement’s court and jail. It was painted in a dull red and green like a Christmas store weathered beyond recognition. Its foundation was stained by the silty streaks of the slowing wet season. As with much of the town, it wore the scars of a building that routinely waged war with the flanking river. Some structures seemed to have been partially swallowed by the annual torrent. A few had been rendered uninhabitable.

Near the town’s center, a rooster, a toddler, a pair of dogs, and an Amazonian cousin of the anteater engaged in a standoff, each fruitlessly attempting to translate body language across species lines. They stared at one another with rapt attention, advancing and retreating as they skittishly tried to pinpoint where play ended and peril began. The ragtag quintet weaved underneath a home that sat on stilts and onto a sandy court as kids ages 5–15 traded a frayed volleyball back and forth.

None of the competitors paid any mind to the farcical band of misfits distractedly darting between them. Far stranger to them were the visitors who’d landed in their town by motorboat and now ambled tentatively along its single walkway. Some set aside their game completely, gawking and pointing at the tourists like children at a lion exhibit. A couple of them approached us and asked our names in Spanish. One offered us a bracelet he’d spent his afternoon working on.

I desperately clenched a makeshift handle screwed into the ceiling of our shuttle as it rattled down the switchbacks that lined the Sacred Valley. Sinking further and further into the crevasse between the seat and sliding door with each stomach-lurching turn, I scanned the other occupants of the vehicle to see how they were faring. There were tradesmen, women preparing to sell crafts, and kids asleep on laps. Mothers looked placidly forward, utterly unfazed by the driver’s breakneck pace around each precipitous bend. Farmers tended to chickens whose aberrant clucks never loosened our gas-happy captain’s grip on the wheel or stole his laser-focused attention from the pothole-latticed byway.

But the most astounding of all to me were the school children who were so accustomed to this commute that the towering vistas outside their windows didn’t even elicit a second glance. They were numb to these daily rollercoasters. And they were so confident in their cowboy chauffeurs that they didn’t stop to question whether they’d arrive at their point Bs on time and in one piece. For them, these rides were every bit as quotidian as my daily routines used to feel for me. The only difference was that the normal I knew growing up was waking up each day, eating toaster waffles as I watched cartoons, and boarding a yellow school bus less than a block from my home.

All through elementary school, I felt as though my little suburbia more or less represented the human condition, and that a magnifying glass pointed toward much of the planet would reveal the same. The circumstances I was born into were all I had to frame my concept of normal.

When I watch my life play out in my mind’s eye, it all feels so obvious. The games of cops and robbers and the entire K-12 school system, our recess times and our units of measurement, our taxes, fashion trends, boisterous football matches, pledges of allegiance, and runaway insurance costs. Our hot showers and abused air conditioners. Our stuffed fridges and overflowing grocery stores. How could it have ever been any other way?

My friend and I walked along a trail only 20 minutes from his Pennsylvania home as we fought off ticks, dangling tree limbs, and overgrown brush. Out of the blue and breaking the silence that punctuated our labored breaths, I asked him what it was like to be a twin.

As an only child, people have often pointed the equivalent question toward me. And in my 20+ years of being confronted with the typical, “So — what’s it like to be an only child?” query, I’ve never really figured out a good response.

My friend, a philosophy major, part-time drummer, and full-time twin, ruminated for a minute before giving me a reply. “I get asked that a lot and, honestly, it’s the only life I really know… what’s it like to not be a twin?” he countered, turning the question on me with a genial smile and a breathy laugh as he wiped a bead of sweat off his face. The frank and efficient response may have owed in part to the August heat, but the brilliantly succinct retort immediately struck me.

It’s impossible for me to put myself inside the shoes of someone who has a sibling. The experience of brotherhood or sisterhood is as foreign to me as, for my friend, the notion of life as anything other than a twin. And I could no more easily understand the twin experience than what it is to be an older brother, younger sister, Chinese teamaker, Tibetan Sherpa, or Amazonian tribesman. I can imagine loose outlines for each of the alien paths. But we can never remove the shells that encase our conscious experiences.

That trite metaphor about “a mile in another’s shoes” that I’ve heard repeated since childhood has only grown more meaningful as the years have flown by. It’s one of the most fundamental truths we have to turn toward when we consider how to be to the people who enter our lives: that we can never, truly, understand what it is to be another.

Growing up, I grasped on an intellectual level that poverty was a pervasive problem across the globe. But I hadn’t had any experiences to ground or calcify that understanding. I hadn’t yet boarded an airplane and flown free from the laws and rails that contextualized my life. I hadn’t ever forced myself to assimilate in another part of the world. I hadn’t seen for myself the reality that life happens wherever you build it, and routine follows suit.

Normal is wherever you plant roots. And the less we’ve seen of the world, the less we understand of all the weird forms that “normal” can take. The less we understand how someone might look at the most mundane and unexamined features of our day-to-day lives and see something remarkable, unbelievable, or outright bizarre.

The more places we go, the more opportunities we have to reflect back on our own fundamental oddity. The more we travel, the more vantage points we find to look toward home with a telescope and see how it fits into our wonderfully grand fixture of weirdos masquerading as normal.

It can be a mind-bending task to look objectively at how we spend our time here on earth. But sometimes, if we’re fortunate, the veils of our internal worlds slip. The scaffolding that keeps us safe inside our own subjective experiences collapses around us, and as we look out from the dust, we see the million other forms that our normal might have taken.

We see the arc of our lives — all of the rules we’ve followed, all of the practices we’ve observed, and all of the ways that we show love for the people in our lives — for exactly as arbitrary as they are. In another nation, or in neighboring regions of the ones in which we already live, there might be entirely different cultures, customs, priorities, and principles that prevail. What we accept as standard is just a spin of the cosmic roulette wheel. We can never fully know what it would be to have lived different lives, been born as different people, or developed different understandings of our world than the ones that our specific lives and paths came paired with.

We’re forever confined to one strange at a time.

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While it might be a sin in some literary circles to confess, I’ve never written an outline for a single article or story that I’ve published. As early as middle school, I’d sooner get a zero on my assignment than commit to a task I considered so mundane. I resisted that outlining advice well before I learned I love to write. Before my affinity for words had entered into even its most rudimentary stages, I preferred writing more rather than less if it meant I could avoid paring down my thoughts to something so stiff and lifeless.

No matter how many teachers and professors told me I’d be served best by arranging each piece into sections before beginning, the directive never clicked. I was told I should frame each paper as introductions, theses, and body paragraphs — each assigned a separate, designated purpose. I was told the bow to tie each essay together should be neat and tidy conclusions.

With structure, the task of writing 1,000 words wouldn’t feel quite so daunting, our instructors repeatedly preached. For some students, I trust that would have been the case. For those who find themselves paralyzed by all of the forms a blank page can take, structure can provide a foothold rather than a cage. But depending on the person, such rigid mandates might leave someone believing writing is something that it isn’t. That, like math, there are correct answers and incorrect ones. That there are rules so immutable they can never be defied.

For those who turn to outlines because it’s difficult to organize their thoughts, it’s often lost on them that it’s supposed to be. We shouldn’t expect the opening stages of any creative or intellectual pursuit to be frictionless. But once we outgrow the training wheels of our first bike, we’re suddenly less restricted in our movements.

Writing is a fundamental exercise in thinking and our minds are so chaotic that they’re difficult to corral. But the practice of sitting with our thoughts long enough for them to meaningfully congeal is much of what this creative endeavor is about.

I couldn’t put words to why my teachers’ prescribed formula for approaching this art felt so unnatural. But always, when I broached a new essay or writing assignment of any sort, I was happiest just launching into my ideas.

Even classes that didn’t call for verbosity in the least I greeted as opportunities to hone my craft. My health teacher told me she’d never read the word “disinter” before reading my essay on Super Size Me. She admitted that she was forced to refer to a dictionary by the time she’d reached my third paragraph. I was awarded 100% on the should-have-been-throwaway assignment.

My AP U.S. History teacher rarely gave me less than a B for my research papers, but would jeeringly remind me, “You know, you really don’t need to treat each of these as an English exercise….” Mr. Lancer was astute enough to notice that citing my sources invariably took a backseat to crafting unnecessarily polished sentences on Andrew Jackson. My love for language was the driving force behind my work, and history never interested me much back then.

Mr. Lancer’s brother and sister-in-law were English instructors at the same school, and I reasoned since he shared their last name, he probably had a few kernels of Lancer writing wisdom to impart as well. (Despite the other two Lancers’ religious insistence on outlines — and unflappable belief that linking verbs ought to be avoided at all costs — their classes were the ones that really began to foment my passion for the subject.) So I was determined to pull that same linguistic value from Mr. Lancer’s class — despite its stubborn status as a history course. Whether the assignment was on the Revolutionary War, slavery, or the Great Depression, my eyes lit up as I got lost in each new essay and research assignment.

This lengthy opening tangent feels especially appropriate because it perfectly conveys both why I began working on this piece — and why I hate outlining. Initially, my inspiration behind this screed was the concern that I’d left something integral out of the previous article I published, and wanting to explain why that happened. I wanted to bring people inside my mind and walk them through the way that ideas snowball, drift course, and divide.

Oftentimes, a narrative will start one way and turn another. Sometimes a brief parenthetical side note will want to evolve into an entire diatribe or dissertation. Other times, as a story nears completion, I’ll realize I’m simply trying to cram too many disparate ideas together, and that each would be better off evolving into its own article. Ideas need adequate room to breathe and develop. And like cells multiplying, one column suddenly becomes two.

Despite the sheer number of times that my writings have turned into something different than I initially envisioned, there’s no other way I’d desire my creative process to unfold.

In this most recent case, the article “We Don’t Know How to Process Travel Anymore” was previously almost double its current length. In short, it’s about the way that modern travel has altered our relationship with the world. Instead of simply examining the cultural vertigo of going to sleep in one continent and waking up in another, that unabridged draft dove more into the way that contemporary travel is something so grand that it calls for words we don’t yet have. We not only struggle to adjust mentally after such geographic shifts, but we lack the vocabulary to even truly make sense of them. I included a long-winded analogy about the amorphous nature of psychedelic experiences. But as the piece stretched beyond the 10-minute marker, it started to feel too loose and incohesive for each of the distinct ideas to be housed under the same roof.

I made the decision to simply split the draft into two separate ones. And I decided that this new one would open with a brief anecdote about the writing process and then transition into my broader observation. But again, soon after I began typing, it became clear that I had more to say about my disaffection for outlines than I assumed, and that, once again, my thoughts about the wordless nature of travel would best be shelved for later when I could unpack them more thoroughly and without the added fog of an overly long anecdote.

Were I to outline my pieces beforehand, it’s likely that I wouldn’t run into such hurdles as often. But it’s these specific hurdles that are one of my very favorite parts of running along this track. I love how writing prose, at its least structured, gives me an opportunity to sit with my ideas in a more organic setting and more meaningfully grapple with the ways they connect. In what order does it make most sense to present my thoughts?

Very often, there’s such a fluidity to the mental process that when we write down our reflections on a subject in the order that they arrive, they present more humanly to others than if we’d constructed an outline. Being at the mercy of my internal dialogue as I write — rather than referring to a few bullet points about what each of my sections are supposed to contain — results in something that feels more lucid, relatable, and conversational. Less mechanical and more reminiscent of the way that our minds actually work.

Considering where an insight is leading, and how to get there without any jarring “additionally,” or “In this other example…” signposting, grants me an opportunity for deeper and more deliberate thinking. Such speed bumps detract from a train of thought’s pacing. Worse, they can derail those readers who crave continuity and logical progression.

It’s for this reason that I’ve held an enduring distaste for subheadings. While in occasional pieces they’re called into action, most often when I see them employed in prose they’re being used as shortcuts. When people don’t know precisely how one idea or event bleeds into the next, subheadings negate the need for such understandings. Vaulting over those natural bridges between notions can leave a story feeling at once jumpy and dispassionate. The logical leaps are as convenient in the moment as they are detrimental in the long term. They sidestep the intellectual legwork that enables a narrative to come together naturally.

As an editor, very often when I review a draft about a breakup, I’ll find that it’s divided into sections such as, “How We Met,” “Where It Went Wrong,” and “Moving On.” Or a travel essay might be carved into infantilizing chunks with the subheadings, “Arrival,” “Exploration,” and “Reflections.” In each case, they not only disrupt readers’ momentum, but give them an unsolicited preview of what’s coming next instead of allowing them to follow along as events unfold on their own.

When constructing new articles, I don’t usually know how to correctly order my thoughts or what form the finished product will ultimately take. So often, I convince myself beforehand that I have less to say on a certain topic than I actually do. And sometimes, it’s in writing about a subject, and sitting with it more deeply than I ever have, that my thoughts take shape. That rumination helps me to see connections that aren’t always apparent to me as I begin my work.

The exercise is as invigorating as it is vital. And when we follow outlines rather than allow thought to flow organically, it can sap the joy in the creative process. That framework flattens what should be a process of discovery into something fixed and preordained. It assumes our thoughts are settled before they’re given the proper chance to develop and cohere.

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Kevin was a burly German man with a face that was as plain as it was approachable, rounded to dull edges and its lower half shaded by a noncommittal stubble. It was a quarter inch shy of a beard, a week beyond clean-shaven, and hung above a gray button-up shirt that clung to his shoulders in the tropical heat of Puerto Viejo. But with each button undone and a woolly beer belly bulging out from beneath the fabric, a soft wind did wonders in making his classically German, side-parted, and slick black haircut look less severe. The loosened flaps of his shirt were slightly yellowed by sweat along the outer edges and billowed in the breeze with an admirably careless grace.

Kevin was one of those people that, I contended, looked nothing like his name.

His Luxembourgian friend, Felix, who flanked me on my other side as we walked along the beach, boasted pale skin that blistered in the Costa Rican climate no matter how thoroughly he slathered it in sunscreen or how cloud-covered the day at hand. He wore thick glasses beneath a head of bright brown curls, and had a skinny build that perfectly fit the bill his name all but broadcast. He was a Felix through and through.

The kindly German, by contrast, struck me as much more of a “Bruno,” or maybe a “Marco.” And he should have been flattered by my stubborn insistence on this front, as, for whatever reason, the name “Kevin” conjures far less endearing images. For me, the Kevin label belonged more to a man who’d settled down and had his personality flattened by the pressures of adulthood. Someone who was characteristically bound by his career and whose greatest thrills came in the form of beers out with friends and small regimented escapes from a life already set in stone. His vacations were primarily of the three-day-long variety, and needed to be confirmed with his boss half a year in advance.

Kevins were surely incapable of wandering free on a continent overseas — bouncing between cities and answering only to their most spontaneous whims.

As Kevin told me about the months he’d spent on the road and shared the stories that latticed them, I was at once wowed by his boldness — his decidedly un-Kevin nature — and undercut by a pang of jealousy. In the midst of my second solo international trip, I was both proud of the scale of my own leap into the world and humbled by the seasoned travelers around me who were in the midst of far grander journeys — who casually rattled off stories of life on six of the seven continents.

Soon-to-be-29 and already dreading my coming decade, I asked Kevin how old he was. Part of that owed to earnest curiosity, but part of it stemmed simply from the compulsive need to compare myself to him, and take stock of how I was faring in my own mission to become a world traveler. “31,” he shot back. Had he said either 26 or 36, I wouldn’t have been surprised. His reply was one that was airily unburdened by the weight of growing older, unworn by the alien terrain that was “the 30s.”

I struggled to voice my following question. My words were roundabout and landed somewhere in the ballpark of, “So… what’s life like now that you’re in your thirties?”

As if he’d already given the matter a healthy bit of prior thought, he shot back without hesitation: “Honestly, ever since I started traveling I don’t even stop to think about getting older.”

As he said the words, it cemented a realization that had been gradually starting to dawn on me. And that slowly hardening epiphany was as obvious as it was elusive. I hadn’t even spent a month in the country, but my three weeks there had already managed to dilate into what felt like a year full of memories — an inconceivable amount of living condensed into a period of time so infinitesimal that it could skate by entirely unnoticed under different circumstances.

Back home, three weeks felt like nothing at all. A few blinks would render the todays into tomorrows. And there was a daunting certainty to that cycle. I felt happy and secure, but insulated from the world where the sheer weight of living comes in doses far too colossal to ever be distilled or contained. I was shielded from the moments where we understand our planet as the slow-moving Goliath that it is.

Even as someone who cherishes the work I do for a living, my adult life has an unsettling way of flying by. No matter how much I love writing, months still meld together. January becomes February becomes December.

Yet when traveling through unfamiliar nations, moving between hostels in foreign cities, and keeping track of the shifting casts of characters within each, it only took a week of life on the road to reduce my world back home into a smaller place. A safe haven that I’d hate to ever leave behind, but one that was eerily ravaged by the ceaseless flow of time. My stagnant routine kept me walled off from the world that allows you to stuff months into days and decades into single years — to populate the passing seconds with still frames that alter the course of our lives.

So I decided to myself a year before the moment came that, wherever I found myself when my internal clock struck 30, it would be traveling. That I would be in martian lands, filling life’s fleeting hours with memories I’d never willingly forfeit. That I would stuff so many mental keepsakes into so little time that I would be as unfazed as Kevin broaching my new decade.

Booking a flight to Peru, the only near-certain item on my agenda was a trip to Machu Picchu. What specifically would occupy the passing weeks, what people would forever define each of the places I went — I was blissfully uncertain. Two months of mystery laid sprawled out before me. Blanks I challenged myself to fill.

I expected I might set foot inside the Amazonian region. But I didn’t know that the rickety motorboat weaving through that hissing, chittering, notorious rainforest would be helmed by a man named Lucio who was blind in one eye, yet somehow retained enough vision in the other one to spot wildlife with telescopic precision. He was stout, standing at little more than 5 feet, yet braved the jungle with a kind of poise and nonchalance that faltered only once, in the presence of the Amazon’s most poisonous snake. He guided our ramshackle vessel through waters deep enough to house multiple species of piranhas and dolphins, and through trees tall enough to effortlessly conceal pumas, jaguars, and anacondas.

I couldn’t anticipate that I’d share lunch with a sexagenarian named Maurizio as we looked out over the snaking rivers that bordered Iquitos. That we’d make our way in and out of town seated on the back of moto-taxis whose drivers would willingly disobey whatever traffic laws landed their endless succession of customers at their chosen destinations. That the stoic motorists would fearlessly brave whatever clouds of exhaust fumes their thousand, equally freewheeling competitors had left suspended above the congested, Amazonian streets.

I didn’t know that I’d find myself in a pitch black room with a family of curanderos that chanted Ikaros as a silent storm of lightning spidered erratically through the darkened sky around us — nor that, throughout the ostensibly illicit ceremony, the chanting ayahuasca overseers would be accompanied by a fellow psychedelic subject who screamed so sexually and so ceaselessly that her vocal tenacity put the shamans to shame.

I didn’t know that I’d hike through the Andes mountains with a few men from the UK I’d never met, traversing rapidly between a dizzying array of microclimates. I didn’t expect the oxygen-starved air and alpaca-populated peaks to be abruptly replaced by a land where sweatshirt-piercing mosquitos and stifling humidity reigned supreme.

I didn’t know I’d lose my drone in the rolling dunes of Huacachina, nor that a local buggy driver would confer with a few friends on the phone, and transport me over those precipitous sand mountains into Ica, where a local kid would come sauntering proudly out of his home with my flying camera in hand. Nor did I know that the damage it sustained would be far easier to correct in the hands of a local Peruvian repairman than if I’d been back in my home country. The ordeal was both a lesson in the kindness of strangers and the inefficiencies to which I’d grown so painfully accustomed back in the star-spangled States.

I didn’t know I’d sit around a bonfire with a group of new friends from around the world, nor that a guitarist would help herself to a seat on a neighboring log and play what was the most beautiful rendition of “Let it Be” that I’d ever heard. Nor had I predicted that the following day I’d climb up to the ruins of Pisac with most of those same people, each of us finding time to revel in the ancient monument’s confounding isolation.

The stark lack of other explorers there to breathe in those same vistas enhanced our own experience at the same time that it made me reflect on the arbitrariness of what we deem “World Wonders.” At roughly 1,000 meters higher than Machu Picchu and with none of the tree-cover shrouding the trek toward its timeless peak, the Pisac archeological site provided some of the most awe-inspiring views from all of my time traveling.

I didn’t know that the day of my 30th birthday would involve me participating in a Temazcal ceremony, cramming myself into a hut comprised of sticks and blankets as searing stones from the blazing fire beside it were placed into a pit at the sweat lodge’s center. I didn’t know that the evening would end with me dragging all of my belongings out of a valley that was infinitely steeper and more demanding on the way up than it had been in daylight — and on the way down.

I didn’t know that I would struggle with altitude sickness for the first time that night as I clambered free from that 45-degree-angled crater and toward my temporary new dwelling. As my heart beat out of my chest, my extremities began to numb, and I labored to draw enough oxygen from the dry mountain air, I wondered for a few minutes whether I might suffer a medical emergency before my 30s were even underway.

I didn’t know that, as my symptoms intensified, a truck would pull over at the sight of one of my new companion’s outstretched thumbs, or that eight of us would proceed to file into the back of the savior-in-plain-clothing’s pickup. And it would have been impossible to anticipate that we’d be tasked with tightly gripping the driver’s poorly packaged new window pane as he made his way forward and backward up the switchbacks that crisscrossed the Sacred Valley. He dropped us off conveniently at the door of our hostel, my breathing still heavy and my heart still beating a few dozen too many times per minute.

As my new friends doled out pats and praises to a congregation of kitties co-inhabiting our commune, I slunk away to my assigned bedroom and slept off my sickness. I emerged from my room to the rejuvenating sight of towering ridges and sweeping highlands as far as my bleary eyes could see.

Turning 25 was the first time that it felt surreal growing older. I’d held in my head a million different visions of where I’d be by the time I reached that weighty halfway marker in my 20s. But by the time I concluded that 25th revolution around the sun, I hadn’t achieved half of the things I’d wanted to by then.

I didn’t harbor the hallmarks of a 25-year-old. I wasn’t established in my career. I hadn’t magically found stability. And the notion of beginning the adventures that were supposed to define my youth felt less attainable for me than they had when I was fresh out of high school, still naively convinced that each of the things I wanted from this life would come naturally. I thought I’d find the hours to devote to each and every hobby I held dear — that I’d become a professional musician, carry on my father’s band in his name, and still have time to spare to be a writer and world traveler.

But now at 30, I’ve finally reached a juncture where I could hardly care less about achieving the dreams I once clung to so tightly. I’m still not the person I thought I might be by this point in life. But I love who I am.

I’ve grown to accept that, with each peak we reach, a hundred more inevitably come into view. Achieving goals rarely gives us a lasting sense of accomplishment. More often, it leaves us craving for more. We refix our focus on the vistas we may never reach, and repeatedly humble ourselves in the face of our radical insatiability.

We’re happiest when we accept that the horizon is unreachable, and when we scramble toward those faraway places all the same — learning to savor our stumbles and delight in the absurdity of being tiny creatures coded to look infinitely onward.

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It was nearly three years ago that I found the opportunity to fly a drone for the first time. My friend Colin brought one to a graduation party, and as he tended to the airborne camera with his measured finger motions, I stood in shock at the talent it must demand in order to …

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Signing up to walk the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, I held an image in my head of a timeless path through an ancient landscape, flanked on all sides by sacred stones and preserved by the apocryphal powers of native Peruvian mysticism. I envisioned something almost processional in its importance — a red carpet for th…

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It’s safe to say that Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates entered my life under fateful circumstances. As a fresh college drop-out, the book served as the only friend I had during a 72-hour period of isolation in the heart of the Shenandoah Valley. Sans even a cellphone, and with only a shoddy pair of tarps for shel…

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When Boo first entered my life, I didn’t know how to feel about having a puppy. Prior to her arrival, the primary images of canines that I’d gleaned were through my grandparents and my few friends who had dogs in elementary school.

I didn’t know what having a dog of our own would entail. I just knew that when we visited Pop-pop and…

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This is a piece I wrote a couple of years ago in honor of my first dog, Boo. It’s one of my favorite stories I’ve ever written, and a timely reshare today. Even five years after she died, it’s still hard for me to talk about her without fighting tears. Thanks so much to everyone for reading.

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From a young age, it was safe to say that I had an addictive personality. Whether cartoons, candies, or computer games — fleeting indulgences traded turns as objects of my single-minded obsession.

Well before I knew what drugs really were, I wondered what they could do and how they could alter our thinking. As early as e…

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Each year at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, there’s a point at which a familiar question surfaces. “Why can’t life be this way?” a hundred different people at a hundred different campsites wonder aloud as music soars overhead, nighttime revelry breaks loose, and people assume the most vibrant versions of themselves.

As t…

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I thought it would be a nice change of pace today to share this story written by my own father, one of the biggest inspirations behind my writing. You can subscribe to his profile here (that way, he’ll feel compelled to share more of his stories in the future).

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Rare are the times when real-world value emerges from the consumerism-driven spectacle that is “Black Friday.” On the heels of the gratitude that colors the Thanksgiving holiday, the American people make an oblivious turn toward 20% off Christmas deals and trample whoever stands in the way of their brand-new air fryer or Swiffer WetJet. They’ll troun…

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Throughout much of my life, I always envisioned my high school reunion taking place inside of the same building I’d graduated from. Maybe that owed to my father forcing me to watch Grosse Pointe Blank with him during my childhood, or maybe it was the TV shows and cartoons I’d seen that depicted reunio…

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This article was written in September, 2024.

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Older than Woodstock and the career of Jimi Hendrix, The Philadelphia Folk Festival is the oldest music festival in the entire country. With origins more ancient than even the first whispers of the Flower Power movement, the event’s enduring tenure within the rural hills of Pennsylvania is a testament to the appeal of the lovably eccentric oddities that define the nearly-week-long spectacle.

While its name may suggest otherwise, it isn’t the folk music that most attendees will claim as the biggest draw. Of course, folk music can be found — and in copious quantities. But as time has gone on, demographics have changed and traditional music has fallen out of favor with younger crowds. Now, few genres of music can’t be found emerging from some disparate corner of the campground, whether from a portable speaker or an obscure instrument that only a handful of people on this hemisphere have heard of.

Recent years have seen discussion over the removal of the word “folk” from the festival’s name entirely.

One of the most emblematic aspects of the event is just how little of its allure hinges on the musical lineups each year. It has hosted its share of greats, and most years’ guest lists will feature at least one or two names that listeners are likely to recognize.

But among the elements that distinguish this musical extravaganza the most are its persevering sense of community and the sheer number of attendees who owe their very lives to the festival’s annual occurrence.

Groups of thirty+ people have been establishing makeshift living rooms within the same made-up plots of land for entire decades. They carry in couches, carpets, and every breed of miscellany one could imagine. Some have married and have children fit enough to help lug in equipment and accouterments, and others have children old enough to be raising children of their own.

Adorning the front of each site like the signs on storefronts are the creative monikers that represent the communities housed within. Some signs are styled from luminary letters; others’ emblems are painstakingly etched onto wood before being embroidered, bedazzled, and painted with a level of care and craftsmanship reserved for only the most diligent of artisans. Other tents sport flags and banners that have lingered through whole generations.

Some of the names written on the displays are of dubious origins, and others may be forever lost to the psychedelic sands of time. Some of the aliases are the drunken byproducts of nearly-forgotten nights, and others spawned from the duly deliberated democratic processes of boards full of hippies hashing it out around campfires with notecards and the ticks and tallies of colored pencils.

But it’s the neon bamboo stalks of “Glow Nation” and the radiant light of “Aurora Borealis” that people use as geographic identifiers throughout the meticulously MacGyver’d metropolis. There’s the “Azzoles Country,” “The Fly Folks,” “Tuesdays,” “Club Ned,” “The Kids’ Table,” “The Neighborhood,” “Canada,” and “The Limbo Room.” Directional posts sprout up from the beaten path and attempt to provide some semblance of navigation between sites within the community of tents.

It was on these muddy, hectic, sleepless, chanting, flailing campgrounds that my parents first met.

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When you fall asleep watching Better Call Saul, perhaps it’s not a total shocker when you’re suddenly swept into a dreamy world and find yourself getting dessert with Mike Ehrmantraut, the notoriously stone-faced, fun-loathing side character that made his debut in Breaking Bad. If you’re like many people, these sorts of riotous incongruities may …

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Slowly nearing my hostel within the highlands of the Mayan mountains, my SUV driver tries his best to attend to my battery of questions about the coastal country through his thick Belizean accent. I watch as the geography rapidly changes along with our elevation, and bucolic fields of sun-battered gold are…

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“Do you wanna see Twisters tonight?” asks my father in an impromptu voice on the idle, sweltering July day. The air is thick with humidity and the clouds overhead brighten and darken with a pendulous uncertainty.

He briefly tries to coax my mother into coming, but unlike the clouds above us, she’s made up her mind. So with enough time to spare to stop for snacks, he and I set out on our adventure.

“Remember when I used to drive you, Ryan, Anthony, and Gabe to the movies and we would rush to grab candy before we’d all race into the theater?” he says with a warm, nostalgic smile, thinking of me and the childhood friends I’ve scarcely seen in fifteen years. We reflect fondly on the time he took us to see Harold and Kumar: Escape From Guantanamo Bay — and when the film’s abrasive antics arm-barred the well-meaning man into sending each of their parents profuse apology texts once the movie had ended.

Moments later, our fond reflection on the childhood mishap is jarringly interrupted by a buzz and a blood-curdling bristle along my arm. A wasp has flown in through the open window, skimmed past me, and found a temporary home on the interior windshield of my father’s blue, dulling-Biden-stickered hybrid. My dad maintains a meditative cool as the colossal-stinger-brandishing creature scuttles menacingly along the glass. Its antennae spasm omnisciently as it rubs its arms and legs together strategically — sadistically.

“Oh god. Oh no. Oh god,” I repeat, taking shield behind the sweatshirt I fortuitously schlepped along for the ride in preparation for the frigid tundra that is our local cinema. I defensively zip up my hoodie despite the swampy day and sport it like the chainmail of a knight — bearing middle-aged discomforts to fend off prospective stabs from the ill-intentioned, sword-sheathing insect.

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The first time suicide entered into my life, it was only as an echo. He was the loose friend of a friend and a young man I’d never before met. I’m not sure our paths ever once crossed. He and I shared little more than a couple of mutual Facebook connections in common.

His name was Dalton and he killed himself at only fourteen years old. I use his real name because I reason that — if his loved ones should ever find my words — they might take some solace in knowing the echoes reached this far… that the ripples of his loss are still felt all these years later.

I can’t remember how I first heard the news of his passing. It might have been a whisper down the hall of my middle school. Maybe it was only conveyed in a text. But I remember what I did when I sat down again at a computer screen.

Unsure what could ever drive a person to take their own life, I visited his Facebook page. And there, draped across his digital wall were the agonized words of a hundred different mourners. Most seemed unsure of what could have driven this jovial teen to bring a swift end to his own existence. Some of the commenters were only his age; they speculated as children do. At young ages, we don’t have the diplomacy to handle this sort of news.

As we grow older, suicide hardly grows easier to accept. We skirt around abrasive realities with unbecoming euphemisms. We struggle with the difficult conversations.

I didn’t know how to feel reading the words of the hundreds touched by his warm presence. I don’t know his warmth from memory, but through the distant words of these grieving strangers, I could tell that he was kind and lively and funny and unique. So many of the things I so rarely expect from those who take their own life.

Before leaving his page, I sent Dalton a friend request. Not because I thought it would be his finger clicking accept — but just in the loose hope that some loved one on the other side of that binary barrier might see it and click that button. Even if it was too late.

Thirteen years later, I still check Dalton’s page from time to time. People still wish him happy birthdays and tell him how much they miss him — how much they wish they could have one final talk. They lament the life he’s missed. And thirteen years later, my friend request still sits there — unattended in a virtual void.

I’m not sure I knew why I friended him — if I understood my morose desire to learn more. Part of me just wanted to learn every detail I could; what exactly was it that could make life so painful that it was worth leaving the world behind forever?

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