Snow brings a stillness to the world. Life hides away, burrowed under, tucked in. Sound is muted, lost in the hush of falling flakes. Only the soft brush of wind through the pines. I would like to say that Winter's first snow dumped a substantive number of feet, but it did not. It dumped a few inches. Not much, but it is something. An imitation of winter. It may well be that that's all winter is anymore, an imitation of what once was. Things are always changing, not always in the way we want. Only the future knows for sure, but I do feel a certain foreboding of doom for the person I saw driving the car with the bumper sticker "F**k Summer." For the most part, this is why we are here, to experience the winter, which in my family was supposed to be a synonym for snow. Alas Wisconsin winter is also a synonym for gray, sunless, and cold, with or without snow. This is part of why this world needs snow. Snow bathes the world in white, reflecting and multiplying the scant light on gray days. You need the snow to overcome the gray skies. Light or no, the kids have done their best to get out and enjoy what little snow we've had. Snow is also a buffer against the wind and cold for plants and animals. And us. Plenty more pipes freezing without a blanket of snow to insulate the ground from the worst of the cold. The frost here can reach many feet down into the soil by midwinter. More snow on the ground lingers longer in spring, insulating the soil, keeping it warmer longer through march freezes. Without it, it takes longer for seeds to germinate, roots to come to life, sap to thaw. There have been a couple of sunny days. One of them saw flocks of swans swimming by our beach. Further up the bay things get shallower and the water is already covered in ice and snow, but water still flows free in front of our cabin, which brings the bird life to us. Swans, Goldeneyes, Ravens, and Bald Eagles are all frequently around on the lake, along with Chickadees in the woods. The ice on the shore in the photo above lasted a few days, but as of this writing, the lake in front of us remains ice-free. A few days after the first snow it warmed up again and a hard rain washed it all away. Around Christmas it turned cold again and dropped a few more inches of snow, but once again it warmed up and the snow disappeared. As I write this winter is well underway and there is still little more than a light dusting of snow on the ground, about the same amount of snow we got a few years ago in South Carolina. I am still hoping for one good blizzard, but we'll see.

We didn't have long to settle into the cabin. A week later the kids and I flew out to California to visit my parents, trading the last of fall for some warmth and extra sunshine at the beach. I am a stranger in my hometown. The California of my youth is gone. Everything paved over, open spaces enclosed, old hangouts long since shuttered, streets rearranged, more houses added, always more in progress. A couple restaurants I used to frequent remain, but the neighborhoods and local hills are unrecognizable. The beach is the only thing that looks mostly the same. The ocean eternal. The thing I notice most when I return is the traffic. Not the dead stop, freeway-as-parking-lot traffic, that was always there, but you can avoid it if you stick to the coastal cities. What I notice now is the insane number of cars. Driving down suburban streets, on the roads to the grocery store, even when there is no "traffic," you feel crowded, harried, and vaguely harassed having to navigate it all. It's a constant low-level background stress that I am unaccustomed to -- was it always this way and I only notice it now? Or has it become worse? We've spent the majority of the past eight years in the wilderness and small towns. What we think of as cities -- Pensacola, Kill Devil Hills, Ashland -- most people think of as small towns. It's only when I go to a city like the sprawling metropolis of southern California that I realize how out of touch I am with such places. The people here are different, live differently. I feel acutely out of place. Like being in a foreign country. Joan Didion, self-appointed spokesperson for a certain type of Californian, wrote that "California is a place where the boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we ran out of continent." Americans first came to California like a flood[^1], like an icy spring river people built up in the east until they finally broke free in 1849. When all that ice from a spring flood rushes downstream it inevitably hits obstructions. The ice gets stuck and forms a temporary dam. If the sidewalls don't give, then the flood water will actually reverse course and rush back the way it came. California is the temporary ice dam on which the entire history of western civilization piled up and then reversed course. California isn't where we ran out of continent. California is where we ran out of civilization and all our ideas were forced back the way they came, which is why, whatever happens in California today, happens everywhere else in the coming weeks, months, and years as those ideas continue to wash back across the rest of the country. So what is left after all of western civilization recedes? Traffic. Cars and cars and more cars. Places called The Fun Zone. While most of this area is intent on redoing itself every 10 years, there are pockets of things that are unchanged here. The Fun Zone is one of those rare places in the Newport Beach area that hasn't changed much since I was a kid. Things have been cleaned up, repainted some, but it's mostly the same. The minute I mentioned it to the kids, they were all in. Arcades aren't what they used to be. There's no dropping quarters in the slot anymore. Everything is by card these days. I would complain, but honestly, I thought it would require a cellphone to pay for it so at least that's not the case. The games are still pretty fun, and they still end all too soon. As does your money. They've retained the essentials. For all the cars, and more cars, it's still surprisingly easy to slip away from all the traffic and people in Orange County, which makes it all the more mysterious to me why everyone is packed in one spot. We hopped in the car one Saturday morning and headed out to Modjeska Canyon, home of the Tucker Wildlife Sanctuary and the namesake home of the 19th-century Polish stage actress, Helena Modjeska. Modjeska Canyon is only about 30 minutes from my parent's house, but it's a completely different world. Instead of cars and traffic there's scrub oaks and riverbeds. And birds. The wildlife sanctuary is usually a good spot for birding, but there weren't many the day we went. The trails were closed for fire season so we didn't get to hike either. Like the Fun Zone, not much appears to have changed out in Modjeska Canyon since the last time I was there, thirty or so years ago. That's impressive in these parts. Anywhere really. I'm not sure how the community out there has managed it, but good for them. I'd never been to the Modjeska house site. I'm not even sure it was open to the public the last time I was in the area. To me the highlight was seeing a palm tree right next to a redwood. Granted, it was planted by Modjeska, but somehow it grew and has survived over 100 years now not more than a few meters from a palm, some scrub oaks, and other proper dry country trees. A thing out of place. I can relate. Not the Modjeska house, I just liked this little guest cabin because the acorn woodpeckers have clearly been working on it for a while now. And then next thing we knew, we were back at the airport, surrounded again by strangers so conversant with things that confuse me, like paying for stuff with your phone, wearing pajamas in public, and coffee that taste like sugary milk.

For a long time I had the idea that one day I would write a book about this trip and call it The End of the Road. It was an incomplete idea, but it seems to me we are, culturally, at the end of a metaphor when it comes to The Road. I had the idea that you could trace a thread from tales of the road when it was a trail (Journals of Lewis and Clark, etc), to when it was a dirt road (Laura Ingalls Wilder all the way through to the Air Conditioned Nightmare), to when the highways appeared (Kerouac), to avoiding the highways and going back to the two lane road (Blue Highways, et al), and then finally I could close it out somehow with my own tales of life of the road (waves hands vaguely). The end of the road. The kind of sweeping generalizations I've sketched out sound good if you don't bother to think critically about them. In the end the only thing I salvaged from the idea was the title. It hung around in my head. A metaphor waiting to happen. I knew there would be an end. Everything has an end. Then a few days ago I was watching an old episode of Anthony Bourdain's television show. He went out to the high desert of California to hang out with the musician Josh Homme. Homme takes Bourdain out to what Homme calls the end of the road, but then Homme says something I thought was perhaps the most road-worthy thing I've heard: "Here we are at the end of the road... which, it turns out, isn't a bad place, it's just where they stopped building road." This prosaic statement feels apropos for our own end of the road moment here. A few weeks ago we packed the bus away and have no plans to travel in it again. We bought and have been building out a school bus, which will replace the Travco for us. The Travco finally got too small. It was time for something else and we all felt it. We were ready to move on, end of the road or no. Sometimes the end of the road is just where the road stops. The past and the future, side-by-side in the present. And, no, I don't know what we're going to do with it. Most likely we'll sell it. I have no time frame for that, but if you're interested, email me. We had originally planned to leave here this fall in the school bus, which I have been working to build out as a comfortable home since we bought it back in April.Unfortunately Lyme disease derailed that plan a little, which is part of the reason we rented the cabin (the other being that we wanted to experience a northern Wisconsin winter). We moved into the cabin with only the bare essentials. Clothes for the winter. Cast iron skillets. Kitchen knives. Pillows. Camera. Notebooks. It was kind of a larger scale version of that thing they tell you to do to see if you should get rid of your stuff: put it in a box and seal it up and if you haven't opened it in six months you don't need it. We're using the bus as a giant box. When we've needed something, we've gone to get it, but honestly we haven't needed much. We settled into the cabin pretty quickly. The kids took the upstairs loft area for themselves, there's a big open area below and then a bedroom and bathroom down the hall. In that sense it's very similar to the bus, mostly one big open space. These cabins are quite popular in the summer, but relatively few people come around in the fall. The first weekend we moved in there were some people in the other cabins around us, but that traffic tapered off quickly and we pretty much have the place to ourselves. We're still right beside the lake, with an even bigger beach now. And I won't lie, the view of Long island and the tip of Madeline Island is much nicer than Ashland (which is the view from Memorial Park). It's very quiet here. I can hear the road sometimes when I'm around the cabin, but down by the lake there's nothing but the lapping of water on the shore. The dog and I go down to the lake shore and watch the sunrise in the mornings. Although sunrise is quickly receding to later and later in the morning. Soon we will be walking to the lake shore in the dark if we keep getting up at 6AM. There is a certain full circle feeling for me, being back in the cold, the long nights, it reminds me of when I lived in Massachusetts years ago, which is where I first started publishing this website (the first entry is dated September 12, 2003). Memories come back as the leaves tumble down out of the trees. I remember the way the world would turn to a kaleidoscope and then it all would bleed away and be replaced with a colorless world of snow. Black and white, shades of gray. Midday sunshine that does nothing to warm you. Long winter nights. I think most of all of sitting at the small table by the window in the kitchen, drinking coffee in the mornings, watching the snow drift down, knowing I would soon be walking across town in that cold stillness, the magical quiet of the world in snow. As my head chef and mentor used to say, "there is no bad weather, just bad clothes."

Every year for the past couple of years, when September rolls around we start getting ready to hit the road, packing away the paddle boards, washing the bus, and burning through the last of the firewood. Sometime around the middle of the month we say goodbye to friends and head for the plains. The drive out of the trees always feels good to me, the long vistas of the midwest are like drawing a breath after being under water. It's some small recapitulation of humanity's movement out of the forest, on to the prairie. As William Least Heat Moon points out in PrairyErth, it was leaving the trees that made us human. In some way we are all children of the prairie and plain. This year we did none of those things. This year we stayed put. We stayed in the trees. Evolutionary recapitulation be damned. We watched the chlorophyll fade from the world, leaving behind impossibly yellow birch and iridescent orange sugar maples, brilliant against the unchanging pines overhead, swirling colors of leaves littering the green carpet of moss below, until the forest in the morning was like walking inside a stained glass window. This year we left the paddle boards out and enjoyed one of the warmest, driest autumns anyone in these parts can remember. It wasn't until early October that the evenings took on a chill enough to keep us on the shoreline, and the mornings turned a softer purple as the sun swung south. The familiar turned foreign. Gaps in understand were filled in. Paths we've walked daily became new and golden. When I was younger, living in southern California, I had to go and find Autumn. I would try every year to make the long drive up 395 to the Sierra foothills, where a smattering of aspens and cottonwood trees that grow in the washes would turn various shades of amber and apricot. There are no mountains like that here, but this area beats the Sierra foothills for fall colors, and that's part of why we're here -- to see new things. We move around to explore the world, discovering what we do not know and getting to know it in some fashion. This manifests in all sorts of things, from the mundane (I can give you street by street directions around a surprising number of places) to the more profound experiences and friendships we've formed around the world. Sometimes it also means not moving. There are certain things that must be experienced first hand. Can you really know Georgia if you haven't spent a summer there without air conditioning? Can you really know Charleston if you haven't been there for a hurricane? Can you really know New England without passing a fall? Can you really know northern Wisconsin without spending the winter? You cannot. You also cannot pass a northern Wisconsin winter in an RV. Or at least it isn't much fun. I know someone who did it and he suggested we rent a cabin. So we did. Like most in the area, the campground where we spend our summers closes October 15 (which last year saw the first snow storm, this year it was 55 and sunny). This year we said goodbye to our fellow travelers and friends, and drove the bus over to the cabin, unloaded the very least amount of stuff we could, and moved it to the storage area where it will spend the winter. Not much changed really. We're still in the woods. We still have to fill propane. We still have to dump the holding tank system. There's a few extra feet of counter space, a bedroom with a door, just one though, the other is a loft, open to the rest of the house, not unlike the back of the bus. We're on a property that's roughly the size of Memorial Park. The paths have changed, but they look much the same. The trees look about the same and the sunrise hasn't changed much either. We'll be here until the campground opens again next spring. We'll be here watching the world change, waiting on the snow, and getting to know a northern Wisconsin winter.