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 fly such a contraption. He was deft and delicate as he guided the futuristic device through the suburban skies. The sunset approached and his mid-flight camera twisted and gyrated in order to properly capture it.

Colin gracefully angled the camera’s lens toward the setting sun, up toward clouds, down toward trees, and over the roofs of a thousand unwitting denizens. They were none the wiser as to the aerial acrobatics my friend was performing over their houses, sweeping every which way and panning cinematically from side to side.

As I looked toward the monitor controlling it in lock-eyed fascination, he offered me the reins. “Ar — are you sure?” I stammered. Whether or not he trusted me, I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t think I had half of the skill and dexterity that it surely must require to guide such a modern marvel through the atmosphere. It wasn’t quite the same responsibility as piloting an airplane, but I figured it could only be marginally less complicated.

My lack of confidence wasn’t enough to dissuade Colin. He happily handed me the controller and I tentatively leapt at the opportunity. To my surprise, the few seconds it took to trade hands wasn’t enough to send his camera hurtling from the sky or crippling any unsuspecting birds in the process. More shocking still, in my few minutes fretfully tending to the control sticks, it remained reassuringly airborne. It was surprisingly user friendly. I moved it from side to side, up and down, forward and backward. Once I finally relieved myself of my duty and allowed him to helm the ship once more, Colin nonchalantly cradled the controller in his hands and pressed a mysterious “H” button that stood fixed at the controller’s upper center.

“Return to home,” the tablet shot back in an automated voice that sat firmly in the middle ground between Alexa and Siri. And with that thoughtless click, the mechanical humming bird began its methodical descent. It honed in on the location from which it launched with machinist precision and lowered itself to earth without a hitch. As if to brag, Colin hardly even watched as the process unfolded, maintaining conversation with fellow partygoers as the thousand-dollar device descended.

Blades of grass blew to the side as the pocket-sized helicopter landed, instilling certain terror in every insect within earshot. Colin picked up the now-motionless device, pressed the off button, and tucked it inside a little black case that had hung discreetly from his shoulder.

“I need to get myself one of those things…,” I said to myself.

And a couple of paychecks later, I had finalized my purchase. My winged new toy was on its way to my house, and soon, I, too, could fly it over the heads of oblivious suburbanites. Over houses, above the antennae of my city’s tallest skyscrapers, over the desiccated sands bordering Las Vegas and the tropical beaches of Puerto Viejo. Toward the towering Volcano that framed La Fortuna and through the verdant mountains of Monteverde.

I brought the drone from Costa Rica back to my hometown in Pennsylvania, and from Pennsylvania all the way to Peru. I launched it into the Lima skies from the roof of my hostel, and watched the city shrink with a certainty that was as awe-inspiring as it was dispassionate. There’s a strange dichotomy in seeing our world pared down to its rawest rhythms. It’s at once majestic and indifferent. Humbling and empowering.

The people on the streets were rapidly reduced to tiny heads, each engaged in their separate routines. Their frenetic motions began to soften and the sum of separate parts started to form patterns. As with the law of averages, correlations only become clear once we zoom out. A sample size of a million will always show more than we can process from the hundred nearest passersby.

Ramshackle homes melded with skyscrapers, and cars shrunk into whirring beams of light, each weaving their way through the most gaping metropolis I’d ever seen in person. A little higher, mountains entered into view and the sprawling city grew more and more minuscule. The towering vistas dwarfed the city’s largest buildings and gave context to humanity’s fundamental smallness.

I hovered the drone above the wind-battered shores of Paracas and directed it two entire kilometers into the distance, the furthest I’d pushed the device to date. (In perfect conditions and without obstacles interfering with its line of sight, the flying camera has a range of up to 10 kilometers, even if I’ll likely never be brave enough to broach that upper limit.)

A few of the town’s children gathered around my controller after watching the tiny aircraft take flight. They ooh’d and ahh’d and asked questions that, even with their age-12-and-under vocabularies, I was woefully unequipped to answer without the assistance of a translation app. But there was a delight in being able to witness their spellbound gaze at the sight of their shrinking town, and to share in it.

We watched together as the slow-moving, seaside bureau — and its roughly hundred ceviche vendors — were reduced by expansive desert and endless ocean.

There’s a strange guilt in being that foreigner who wanders into town with a First World arsenal of luxuries. I’m displaying a kind of wealth that’s uncommon in many parts of the world. But I never use my drone in order to flaunt.

To some United States citizens, a drone is scarcely more exorbitant than a designer purse, yet infinitely more useful. It’s orders of magnitude less profligate than a sports car purchase. At roughly the cost of a smartphone, the asking price is something that citizens of the States will hardly bat an eye at. It’s no wonder why they’re becoming increasingly common. In a decade, they may no longer elicit wonder for much of the world at all.

But still, to play with such toys today shoves in people’s faces a kind of technology that many have simply never encountered — especially in Third World countries. On a few occasions, children and adults alike have expressed bafflement at the notion that such a machine even exists. (Admittedly, my first experience with a drone was hardly different. That these devices had come so far was news to me — and that they could be next-day-delivered through Amazon was a more earth-shattering revelation still.)

At the same time that there’s a discomfort in demonstrating all that drones can offer, there’s something beautiful in sharing in the humility that our shrinking civilization can impart. For years, I’ve been as confused as I am frustrated with the masses of people who file into airplanes before proceeding to shut their windows, close their eyes, or resign themselves to a rewatch of Meet the Fockers. Under different circumstances, the novelty of looking down at the earth from such staggering heights could never be diminished.

People pay colossal sums to reach mountain peaks and eat meals with panoramic views of their surroundings. But because air travel has become standard to much of the world, so often it’s treated as a banality, if not an outright inconvenience. People set aside the wonder in watching the lives we view as giant being rapidly rendered insignificant — all of the routines, problems, and fears we so often struggle to minimize. They downplay what it means to careen through clouds faster than the speed of sound.

There’s a mixed effect when the remarkable becomes everyday. Smartphones have become so ubiquitous that it’s a rarity for us to sit in amazement before what the achievement represents. We’re so umbilically attached to them that we hardly stop to consider life without them. We sooner wallow in the absence of internet than revel in what it means to have erected something so incomprehensible to begin with. We sooner despair in middle seats on airplanes than grapple with the leaps and bounds it required to watch sunsets while soaring over the Pacific.

But for people who’ve never experienced air travel, who’ve, very often, never set foot outside their country of origin, they’re more susceptible to the awe that such astonishing feats of innovation should rightfully inspire. They see the towns in which they’ve spent much of their lives from a bird’s eye view and marvel at its breath-stealing smallness. They see the parts, and the astonishing whole that they comprise. They see how they fit into the grand fixture of everything, if only for a minute. And there’s a shared reverence to those moments that transcends language barriers. It reminds people what it means to be tiny pieces of a world too big for words.

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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 the rugged. An expedition that would fulfill the travelers who craved something more intrepid than a bus ride full of tourists to chariot them up the mountainside.

I hadn’t realized that the notorious trek through the Andes actually consisted of thousands of kilometers of interweaving trails. Nor had I realized that Machu Picchu had become such a wildly sought out destination that even the most feral paths weaving toward it had been divvied up into different, predetermined adventures. This was largely done to accommodate the sheer bulk of travelers who harbored my same desire. Between all of the various treks that conclude at the sky-piercing, Incan city, the annual agglomeration of people who wanted their time on that historic peak to feel earned stretches into the hundreds of thousands.

Were it only the singular trail, it would have likely succumbed to a similar fate as Mount Everest. When the idea of summitting the world’s highest mountain once conjured images of inhuman, earth-shattering accomplishment, in modern days, that prodigious achievement has been diluted by the flood of photos showing a seemingly endless line of adventurers patiently waiting their turn to snap a couple photos or leave their fleeting mark on the flag-festooned peak. But where Everest has been reduced to a pay-exorbitant-sums-in-order-to-play Mecca for thrillseekers and seasoned climbers alike, the partitioning of the Inca Trail has helped to retain the feeling of cultural and natural immersion that it’s intended to offer.

Our guide informed us on night one of our 4-day-trek that very few people actually hike what’s most traditionally considered “The Inca Trail.” But the specific peregrination that we’d signed up for was far from unperilous.

We descended from an icy mountain pass with grazing alpacas and wild horses at our sides into a land of such overbearing humidity that we had to deliberate between whether to strip down and leave ourselves vulnerable to the divebombs of voracious insects, or remain sheathed within our suffocating fabric and endure the throes of our own pooling perspiration. We crossed over bridges with raging rivers flowing beneath them, half of which were scarily bereft of guardrails, and one of which, our guide told us with a slightly unnerving nonchalance, had a sunken bus residing in its roaring depths. The only evidence to corroborate his claim was a misshapen swell poking out from the rushing water.

At one point, our guide grabbed a stick from the ground and used it as a makeshift weapon to ward off the poisonous, Amazonian snakes that sporatically littered an overgrown portion of our path.

We fended off plants taller than people as they whipped person after person who made their way past.

We met a native child who’d cultivated a questionably abusive relationship with a neighboring toucan.

We traversed a river that would have swept me away in seconds, each of us confined to a tiny, wobbling cable car. We hiked through shifting climates — all of which suffered from a suspicious lack of showers for a South American wet season — as the useless rain gear on our backs added weight to our loads and the sweltering sun rendered each of us shiny.

We climbed the precipitous mountain that is Machu Picchu on our final day of expedition, pushing the limits of what I previously thought possible. We faced off against an array of stairs so seemingly endless that their terminus was lost in cloud-shrouded oblivion.

Yet arguably the most dangerous part of our hajj to that hallowed peak of Peru was an army of ants scuttling angrily along the ground, roaming free from whatever cathedral- sized nest they undoubtedly called home. On our left was the thundering current that went by a few names, the most recognizable of which our guide informed us was, “The Amazon River.”

Our experienced jungle navigator tried his best to remove a fallen log from the path in front of us. But it was too hopelessly constricted by vines for the stout and soft-spoken Peruvian to make sufficient headway. Spurned by the pounding sun and hampered by the swelling humidity, he decided that forfeit was his best route forward as he quietly panted and halted his battle against the greenery. A bulbous bead of sweat dripped down his forehead and was promptly followed by a few criss-crossing companions. Behind him, we reveled unquestioningly in the brief intermission as we, too, labored to draw oxygen from the swampy jungle air.

So we shimmied carefully around the roadblock, sure not to lean our bags too far to the left and go tumbling irrevocably down the verdant slope and into the world’s most prolific river — or too far to the right and get pulled into the thick of the forest by whatever tree-maiming creature decided to obstruct our path. But as we continued to wind our way through the far-too-vivid woods, we suddenly became aware of a siege of magma-colored predators feverishly trying to invade our boots.

“Are these… fire ants?” I asked with a crescendoing terror that I tried my best to keep at bay. As I considered the river flowing beside me, and listened to the orchestra of unseen wildlife warbling, chittering, rustling, and chirping at my side, I looked again toward my guide and repeated the question.

He confidently assuaged my concern, stating with a measured diplomacy that we should simply flick them aside. The laser focused looked he gave his pant legs seemed to stand at odds with the self-assured answer. But unwilling to wrestle with the reality that fire ants were actively working their way into my footwear, I had no choice but to plant every fiber of faith I had in his dubious assertion, breathe deep, and, one by one, remove every eight legged assailant that attempted to take residence inside my socks.

With each foot step, there seemed to be ten ants ready to latch onto whatever unsuspecting hiker was unfortunate enough to walk their way. The skittering battalion of red surged over roots, stones, and fallen debris. They teemed, swarmed, and zigzagged across every square inch of trail available to us, and with each step further, more and more creatures crawled spastically across our clothing.

They were on my sweatpants and all along the rubber souls of my shoes. A few had breached the inner lining of my hiking shoes and were ferociously trying to ferret inside my alpaca-woven anklets. I shifted my focus from the winding, river-ravaged pass, ensuring each of the aggressors was properly evicted or dispatched.

Later that night, our guide confirmed with a chuckle that he decided to lie to us about the urgency of our predicament earlier, and that we were, in fact, sauntering through a city of ants so large it likely dwarved the population of Lima. (That last part may be part artistic embellishment, but the fifty fire ants on me alone suggested a per capita rate within that patch of jungle I’m convinced would make most Tokyans wince.)

Whether a few bites from the nefariously crimson crawlers would have sent me and my trailmates tumbling toward watery graves, or merely spurred some short-lived hallucinations, it’s hard to be certain. But my guide’s gamble — his white lie about the urgency of the tiny red invaders — was decidedly well-reasoned.

Believe this piece should earn its author more than $0.00? The only way that writers on this platform are compensated for the time and effort they put into their work are through paid subscriptions and donations. If you enjoyed this memoir, it would mean a lot if you considered offering your support. These travel-related articles are among my favorite to write, and I’d love to publish more of them.

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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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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The ride on the water taxi was bumpy and latticed with salty splashes of water wafting in from the windows. The portholes on the ship were sealed shut — but only in theory. They shimmied themselves ajar no matter how many times the weary tourists of the tropics impudently trie…

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Arriving home from Belize with a questionable case of Covid, I make my meandering way toward the baggage claim. With a worsening cough and a growing malaise, the conveyor belt rotates ad nauseam without a single suitcase in sight. As the overlaid metallic surface continues cycling around and around in a grating in…

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There are a few things that are notable about the Cheltenham High School class of 2015, but chief among them is the way we managed to go through a succession of five principals in our four years in the building. It could be argued that some of this administrator-trading wasn’t our fault.

But when our fifth principa…

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