The scariest thing about writing this blog is that my dreams might not come true.

I started the blog during my cross-country train trip with a solar-powered e-bike, but when that trip was over, the blog morphed into a chronicle of my attempt to build... something.

At first, that something was “Infinite Woods”. I envisioned Infinite Woods as a solar-powered climate research institute. I wanted to create a place for people to work together on the climate issue while living a life of solar-powered abundance. I imagined it would be a non-profit, cooperative, community-driven. I imagined there would be students and researchers and professors on sabbatical, hanging out in the woods. Basically, I imagined creating a para-academic institution that would allow me to remain in contact with the world of climate science, while also affording me and others more opportunities to work outside, with our hands.

Infinite Woods has been on my mind because I recently got to hang out with some of my favorite climate scientists at a beautiful wedding in upstate New York, and — damn! I still love hanging out with climate scientists. What a talented, funny, deeply ethical bunch of humans. The hardest part of leaving academia, without a doubt, has been how much I miss that community and those close friendships. A weekend wasn’t enough; I want a reason to hang out with people like that for a month, a semester, a season. I want the people in that world to be able to experience some of what I’ve been learning during my transition out of academia. Which is all to say that I still think Infinite Woods should exist. And in many ways, I’m better positioned than ever to build it. But there’s no doubt that that project is on indefinite hiatus.

So there: I wrote about a dream, and it hasn’t come true. That’s not so scary, is it? Perhaps the path to Infinite Woods is just longer than I realized.

This fear of writing my dreams aloud derives from shame. I’m 36, and a few years ago I rebooted my career in a completely new direction. After 10 years as a climate scientist, I started learning carpentry, and as a consequence I’m far less professionally established than many of my peers. Sometimes I feel shame about this. I catch myself thinking thoughts like: What if this blog turns into a series of big ideas that don’t pan out? If my first few ideas fail, all of a sudden I’ll be 45 and have nothing but a bunch of false starts to my name. What if my pursuit of big ideas makes me seem naive? What if my bouncing around means I’m just a dilettante? A Jake of all trades, master of none. What if I’m never able to provide enough stability to warrant starting a family?

I try not to listen to these fears because I don’t think they’re helpful.

But some fears I do listen to. An aspect of doing manual labor that I appreciate is that it has calibrated me to a level of danger that puts other worries into perspective. The stakes can be very high in the work I’ve been doing. A poorly-built structure could collapse and harm someone. When I’m walking around on the rafters on a Sunport, I am highly conscious of the fact that losing my footing could change my life forever.

It’s true that as Kingdom Sun scales up, I am doing less manual labor than I used to. But Kyle and I are still very much in the startup phase, and we have to wear a lot of hats. I often wear the “moving precious and heavy cargo” hat, thanks to the terrific hauling capabilities of my electric truck. On a work day I might go to our shipping container and load up a metric ton of solar panels in the bed of Big Dog, and then hit the sawmill and fill the roof rack with timber, and then drive all of that to a job site several hours away.

When I’m doing this type of work, I am always razor-alert. I’m razor-alert because the scariest thing — the actual scariest thing — that has ever happened to me involves hauling. Yep, I have hauling trauma now, and it changed me.

The scariest thing that ever happened to me occurred during that long gap in blog posts, so I’ll have to fill you in a little. As Infinite Woods faded from the blog, I started going hard on building something else: saunas. I attended a sauna-building workshop in upstate New York. I built a sauna at my family’s cabin in New Hampshire, the story of which I partially related in this blog. Then I moved to Vermont and helped build a sauna for my friend, and then I realized I needed to up-skill, so I got a full-time job helping to build a super-insulated, eco-friendly house. At the time I was living off-grid in a tiny house, harvesting rainwater off the roof for dishes and showers. I strung some solar panels out in the lawn and fried my eggs with sunshine. It was glorious.

Then it got super cold. My little solar-powered life became significantly less charming when my rain barrel froze. So I packed up and drove my electric truck across the country, to California. (OK, I also moved for love.) But if you’re trying to be solar-powered, Vermont is hard mode. You have to work up to it.

Looking back, I now think of this phase of life as my “throwing s*** at the wall and seeing what sticks” phase. We had incorporated Kingdom Sun that summer, before I headed for California, but we hadn’t really hit our stride yet with the Sunports. We were cold-calling businesses with big sunny roofs, hoping they would take a chance on some smart guys with a shipping container full of solar panels and no track record.

So I was throwing s*** at the wall, and when I arrived in California, I knew what s*** I wanted to throw: I wanted to build a mobile electric sauna that would be powered by my truck. I imagined that the sauna would create community; I imagined it would help me find the people who like jumping into cold water and shivering and sweating together. I imagined the sauna would be a prototype for something that I might build and sell to others. I imagined it could become the first solar-powered mobile sauna.

The only problem was, I didn’t have a workshop in which to build anything. So I started working my network of Vermont builder friends, and pretty quickly got linked up with an extremely talented builder who had relocated from Vermont to Oakland. He had a somewhat dilapidated shop, out of which he built super cool, geometrically-fascinating microcabins. I met this builder at his own birthday party at his shop, and I loved the design of the cabins immediately. It struck me as the work of a genius. I was given an impromptu job interview at that birthday party: he tasked me with installing a somewhat tricky bench in an in-progress cabin. I screwed up the pocket screws a bit, but I knew enough to explain why it had gone wrong and what I would do differently next time.

I guess my interview performance was good enough, because I started working in the shop the next week. The deal was basically that I would help with building the cabins, and in the meantime we would work together to design and build a sauna that shared the same geometrically-inspired design as the cabins. If it went well, I could eventually head up the “sauna division” of this scrappy design/build operation. We didn’t put anything in writing and I was paid under the table, which I recognize makes me sound naive.

For a while it seemed like it was going well. I was learning a lot from this builder. At my previous carpentry job, I had only done “rough carpentry” — a.k.a. framing — and while framing needs to be structurally sound, it is typically all hidden from the end users of a building, so the tolerance for errors and ugliness is actually pretty high. When building these microcabins, I was involved in not just the framing, but also the creation of finished interiors that the end users would be up close and personal with. I had to grow into a new a level of precision and sophistication to be able to make something beautiful inside and out.

I learned a lot from this builder because he knew a lot, but I hesitate to say that he was a good teacher. I’ve devoted a lot of my life to teaching, and it was always clear to me that creating a sense of safety for the student is priority numero uno. The student has to feel that it’s ok to make mistakes, or they will be too scared to venture out of their comfort zone, and that’s where the learning happens. As my time in the shop went on, I started to feel scared to make mistakes because the owner was prone to anger. Some of my mistakes were out of ignorance, and resulted in damage to shop property — silly things like using an impact driver extender bit instead of a hex nut driver (this shreds the extender bit), or running a table saw blade too close to the fence (this scuffs and scores the fence). Other mistakes seemed to be more related to my occasional spaciness (leaving a tool out, or a corner of the shop unswept). In the tense conversations that followed these mistakes, I always owned up to them, offered to replace what was broken or damaged, and assured him I would do my best to improve. But I could feel the exploratory part of myself starting to contract. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a carpenter after all. Only an idiot would do that thing I did.

We started building the sauna prototype in January of 2025, and by the beginning of March it was 80% finished and looking extremely cool.

There was a tiny house convention down in San Diego coming up, and the owner of the shop was planning to bring down one of the microcabins to exhibit. Earlier in the build we had agreed that it could be very impactful for the fledgling sauna division to also display a sauna prototype at the convention, but as the date approached, I was feeling that the sauna was close but not quite ready for primetime. I had been pushing really hard to get it even to 80%, and it had become a somewhat all-consuming pursuit — I wasn’t sleeping that much, and my relationship was strained. With a lot of trepidation, I voiced that I didn’t feel up to the final sprint to get the sauna finished and hauled down to San Diego. The owner’s response was, essentially, an ultimatum: “I’ve already paid the registration for the larger spot. If you back out of this, it’s going to be hard for me to trust your commitment.”

I know, huge red flag. But I was in too deep. For the next week I pushed myself to the limit to get the sauna finished. The day before I had to leave for San Diego, it wasn’t quite done, but I hooked up the trailer to Big Dog and drove the sauna down anyway. My range with the not-very-aerodynamic sauna trailer was about 120 miles, so I had to make a lot of charging stops. The night before the event, I was up late finishing the last pieces of trim on the event grounds in San Diego.

The convention was a blast. People loved the sauna. It was made of 100% cedar, so it smelled amazing inside, and it felt good to just sit in there and talk to the people who wandered in. It was without a doubt the most beautiful thing I had ever built, and I was so proud of my work. I could sense that there was a market for these saunas, and I imagined I’d soon be building and selling them. The night of the second day of the convention, we fired up the sauna and invited people to come hang out in it. Spontaneous friendships were formed. It was working!

Exhilarated and grateful that I had made the convention, I brought the sauna back to Oakland and nestled it safely in the yard of the shop.

The next week, the owner of the shop had some feedback for me. He felt that the way I had presented the sauna at the convention had not given him enough credit. He wanted me to make it more clear that this was a sauna that he had designed and I had built. I said that when folks had asked if I had designed the sauna, I would gesture at the nearby microcabin — clearly a design cousin — and say something like “The owner of this design firm put a lot of work into designing those cabins, which was a great starting point. He and I riffed on that design to make it work for the sauna.” I also stood up for myself a little, and told him that I felt I had made around 20% of the important design decisions in the sauna, so it didn’t feel fair to have a strict design/build distinction between the two of us. He minimized my design contributions and called one of them a mistake.

A few days later, the owner informed me that the sauna needed a new home. The microcabin business was accelerating after an impressive showing at the convention, and the shop needed to be reconfigured to make space for building more cabins at a time. I was surprised, but as I thought about it, I could see the benefits of no longer sharing the shop. Perhaps some of the friction between us had just been a symptom of there being too many cooks in the kitchen. I could rent my own shop space, and then no one would be annoyed but me if I forgot to sweep.

So I towed the sauna out of the shop that day and parked it on the street in front of where I was living. A day later I rented a parking space in a storage unit in Alameda, about 20 minutes away, where I could store the sauna trailer while I figured things out. Then I got a text from the owner of the shop:

Yeah, I had taken the impact driver. This was the impact driver that I had used to build the sauna, that I had used every work day for the past 4 months in the shop. It was the impact driver that I brought on the road with me while hauling the sauna down to San Diego, and I needed it to safely haul the trailer to its new home, which I was figuring out on the fly. So I took it with me, without asking.

It actually took a few days before we found a good time for me to bring the impact driver back, but a few days later I brought it over. I was under the impression that we were going to strategize about how to use the sauna prototype to drive sales for the sauna division.

I found the owner sitting at the shop table. He said, “There’s been a couple of things in your time here that have really bummed me out, and this impact driver was the last straw for me. You stole my fucking property dude!”

I said, “I didn’t steal it, I used it to do the same things that I did when I took the sauna down to San Diego. You asked me to move the sauna out so I did. I feel like you’re making a way bigger deal out of this than it needs to be.”

What followed was one of the toughest conversations of my life. It was a dressing-down. He was yelling at me, and I yelled back, which I never do. Every infraction I had made in the shop was resurfaced. He attacked my character, called me arrogant and entitled. He said my intuition when it comes to carpentry is lacking. He said the whole sauna thing had just been him doing me a favor. I told him I thought we were both invested in the saunas, that it was mutually beneficial. I said it felt like he was blowing up our relationship over something minor. He said, “No, you don’t understand. We’re done.” My body was shaking and my heart was breaking, both from the sense that my sauna dream was evaporating before my eyes, and because I realized that I had made a huge mistake in choosing this person as a mentor. I somewhat dissociated during the showdown, and found myself thinking about other mentors I’ve had, and how they would never have talked to me like this. And I realized that my good-mentor luck had run out.

We agreed that I would buy him out of his share of the sauna prototype. We would have no ongoing professional relationship. I signed a non-compete stating that I would not build saunas with this design that I had helped create. I signed it because I didn’t want to build saunas with that design anymore.

In the weeks after getting kicked out of the shop, I was disoriented and shaken up. But I also quickly realized that not interacting with this person on a day-to-day basis was drastically improving my mood.

There were still some final details to finish on the sauna — the last 5%, I’d say — so I would bring it out of storage and park it on the street in front of where I was living in Oakland and pick away at them. It was pretty challenging without a shop; the friend who I was living with at the time was extremely gracious in letting me borrow tools and store cedar lumber in the backyard. I was in limbo, but definitely still getting value out of the sauna. Friends came over to use it right there on the street. I even brought it as entertainment to a friend’s birthday party.

After one such outing, I was driving the sauna back to the storage unit when I heard a crash behind me. I looked in my rearview mirror and the sauna was gone. Well, not gone, but about 50 yards back, off the trailer.

My heart stopped. I pulled off on the side of the highway.

Just looking at these pictures makes me cry. I thought I had destroyed what I had poured so much time and energy and money into, the best thing I had ever built, the poisoned fruit of my first abusive work environment.

At the same time, I realized how phenomenally lucky I was that the sauna had ended up where it did, off to the side and not in a traffic lane. I later reconstructed that it had taken that path because of a small shower platform that I had installed on the back of the trailer the day before. As the sauna slid backwards off the trailer, the leading edge hit that shower platform and deflected the sauna off to the side, out of the path of traffic. The fact that I didn’t cause an accident, or hurt someone, or kill someone, is a miracle. I don’t believe in God, but I said “Thank fucking God.” I called 911. I called my mom. I called my girlfriend, sobbing. She later said she didn’t know I was capable of making those sounds.

The police came and closed down the lane. We tipped the sauna back down onto its skids, and a tow company with a forklift came and put it back on the trailer. It was, remarkably, in one piece, but there was a lot of damage to the front. I attached it to the trailer — correctly this time — and somehow brought it the rest of the way to the storage unit.

It’s hard for me to write about a mistake this colossal. Only an idiot would do that thing I did.

So yeah, I have hauling trauma now.

I couldn’t even think about the sauna for at least a month. But eventually, I got up the nerve to fix it. I bought a bunch more material, copper and cedar, pulled off the damaged bits (mostly on the facade), and gave it a facelift. While I was fixing it up I had to bring a friend with me for moral support. (Thanks, Will.)

I had also started to do some research into the mobile sauna scene in the Bay Area. I liked one group in particular with a great name — “Wanna Sauna” — that typically popped up in Marin. One evening, sitting in their sauna, the owners and I naturally got to talking about my mobile sauna. I didn’t mention to them that it was The Sauna That Lived. It was too raw. But it turned out that this other mobile sauna business had accidentally double-booked themselves! There was a gig they couldn’t make, and they wondered if I could fill in for them. I would even get paid. I had just finished fixing my sauna. I said yes.

The day of my first paid mobile sauna gig, I took my time hauling the sauna safely to the spot, which was right on the beach, overlooking the Golden Gate bridge. The event itself was a celebration of a lady’s hundredth day in a row of cold plunging in the ocean. She and her friends had a little picnic on the beach, and took turns hanging out in the sauna. People loved it. After the event was over, and the the paid guests had cleared out, I kept the sauna hot for a while and invited my friends to come and join. As the twilight deepened, we alternated between jumping into the ocean and getting warm in the sauna.

As you can imagine, this event was deeply healing for me.

Had my sauna dream come true after all? Or had it not come true in just the way I needed? The whole episode had begun to take on air of mania. Frankly, it had been a bit of a disaster. I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to build saunas for a living anymore. Not everything I like has to be a profession. But it’s easy to fall into that mindset when your professional identity is in transition, and you’re dead-set on doing something you’re passionate about.

I don’t bear any ill will towards the owner of that design firm. I find myself using carpentry tricks that I learned from him all the time. I have come to recognize that my labor was exploited, that he used abusive tactics to push me past my limit in service of his business. But I also recognize that, by ignoring the interpersonal red flags in our relationship, which had been present from quite early on, I had effectively treated him as a means to an end. I wanted my sauna dream to come true, so I sucked it up and stopped being honest with him.

Anyway, these days I’m glad that the sauna thing didn’t work out how I had planned. That failure allowed me to refocus my energy on solar, which I think is the bigger story anyway. 2025 was a crazy year for solar in the United States, because the 30% residential tax credit was expiring at the end of the year and people knew it. Kingdom Sun was really starting to take off. We had found a great product-market fit with our Sunports, and we’d sold a bunch. Vermont was thawed out from the winter, and now it was time to build.

I brought the sauna to a friend of a friend’s driveway in Oakland, where (in exchange for being able to use it) they would host it for free until I returned. It’s still there.

I packed up again and drove my electric truck back across the country, to Vermont. And I poured myself into Kingdom Sun.

The scariest thing isn’t that our dreams might not come true. The scariest thing is that our actions can hurt people. The scariest thing is that we can lose people. But we have to take our chances anyway.

—Jake

P.S. This post absolutely poured out of me, but I did break the same-day rule that I introduced in my last post. The rawness needed some editing after a night of sleep.

Where do I even begin?

I think there’s only one possibility: Right in the thick of it.

It’s Friday, July 17th. I’m in Waterbury, Vermont, home to the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory and about 5000 people. This is a bustling metropolis by Vermont standards. I drove here this morning from the “Northeast Kingdom” — a.k.a, my neck of the woods, the most remote and undeveloped part of a very remote and undeveloped state.

I’m in Waterbury today because my business, Kingdom Sun, is building a solar carport for a customer here. We call these structures “Sunports.” A Sunport consists of a timber frame and a roof made of solar panels.

This is a Sunport:

So is this:

And so is this:

The Sunport we’re building today will provide shelter for two vehicles and produce more energy than the customers use in their home, effectively zeroing out their electricity bill with room to grow.

I met with the homeowner at 9 am to discuss a few details about the trench for the electrical conduit. Then the crew started rolling up — five guys, plus a sixth hauling a trailer full of timbers. Earlier this week we installed the foundation piers, and today the frame is going up. We call this raising day. It’s all hands on deck. Very exciting.

I’m curious, readers: Is this more or less where you thought you’d find me?

My last post was a little over two years ago. At the time of that post, I was still employed as a climate scientist. I had burgeoning interests in carpentry, solar, and all things Vermont, but Kingdom Sun was just a glimmer in my eye. I found a notebook from that era of my life, and it contains a doodle of what became our company logo:

On one hand, I do think that you can extrapolate the trajectory I was on two years ago and it would land right about here, building timber-framed solar structures in Vermont.

On the other hand, the path here actually involved a lot of meandering. There were whole chapters of life contained in that slice of time that I’m still working through in therapy. I’ve racked up way more than my fair share of airplane miles, a climate contradiction about which I am uneasy. We built 12 Sunports last year, and it nearly killed us. I believe that sometime soon I will find a way to write about some of these experiences on this blog.

One update that I want to share now is this: I am no longer employed as a climate scientist. My research funding was cut by the Trump administration last year. When it happened, I had already brought my research commitment down to a 25% appointment (to make time for working on the business), so it would be fair to say I had 3 of 4 limbs out the door of academia when the funding cuts came. But, but, but: I was enjoying what I was still involved in — mentoring a graduate student and advising on a cool research project about hurricanes in very warm climates. I wasn’t ready to give it up entirely. I definitely wasn’t ready to lose my health insurance.

I don’t have total clarity about why I haven’t been able to write a single post over the past two years, but one reason is definitely AI. (Sigh. Must everything be about AI now?)

Like many people who identify as writers, I experienced the advent of large language models like ChatGPT as an identity threat. It forced me to think deeply about what good writing is.

I have come away from these reflections more convinced than ever of the value of human writing. Also, as I have previously observed, constraints are of utmost importance for all creative endeavors, and that is extra true now that machines can write for us.

With that in mind, here are the new constraints/rules for this blog:

1. I have to write my posts within a single day. If I start in the morning, I must post it that night.

2. No AI-generated text. The words you read here are a 100% direct download from my brain.

3. I don’t want to write into the void. I’m writing for connection, to find and communicate with people who share my interests. If you appreciate that I’m writing this, please tell me in a private message or comment. Please tell every writer you follow that you want to read more from them.

Sound good?

Given that I need to get this post up tonight (see rule #1 above), I need to wrap things up. But first, I’d like to address what you are surely wondering: If we’re building a Sunport in Waterbury today, how do I have time to write this post?

The answer is that I, myself, am no longer responsible for building the Sunports. Last year, Kyle and I did mostly build them ourselves. (Kyle is my exceptionally capable business partner.) We learned the process inside and out, stripping it down and learning what each bit should cost. This allowed us to begin hiring out the construction and solar installation work — subcontracting — and focus our energy on sales, marketing, customer relations, business development, etc. In other words, a lot of computer work, with some good old-fashioned schmoozing thrown in for balance.

That’s right, my personal quest for sustainability has led me out of the world of scientific computing, into the world of manual labor through stints of farming, carpentry, and solar installation, and now… back into the matrix. I write a lot of code these days, which does somewhat satisfy my itch to build stuff. I miss being more involved in the physical construction of Sunports, but there’s obviously a limit to how many of these things Kyle and I can build ourselves. We want to get to a point where Kingdom Sun is building 25 or 50 or 100 structures a year.

And today, I get to write this post while watching a Sunport get built. This structure will improve a family’s life, save them money, and push the world toward the solar-powered future. How can I complain about that?

That’s all the time I have today. Please say hi!

—Jake

Happy summer solstice to all my fellow sun-worshippers!

I am not a religious person, but I do celebrate the solstices and equinoxes. My celebrations look different every time. Sometimes I can only manage to find a moment for contemplation, but when I have more time, I like to make art. One year I made a burning teeter-totter sculpture for the fall equinox, hoping to capture the themes of balance and the transition from light into darkness.

The scientist in me enjoys the fact that solstices and equinoxes mark objective turning points in the annual waxing and waning of daylight. I also like how these junctures divide the year up into four manageable chunks, each with a distinct emotional flavor and symbolism. And this year, coincidentally, I acquired my F-150 Lightning on the spring equinox. So I figured that today, the longest day of the year, is a perfect occasion to share some reflections on my first three months of Truck Life.

A headline statistic: In the first three months of owning my truck, I’ve put 5000 miles on it. 

I have to say, I’m a bit shocked by this number! The average American drives about 15,000 miles a year, whereas I’m on pace for 20,000. I’ve been eating up pavement about 33% faster than the norm in the most car-addicted nation on the planet.

These are EV miles we’re talking about, so at least I didn’t spew a 5000-mile long plume of carbon dioxide and particulates out of my tailpipe. (My truck doesn’t even have a tailpipe.) But still, driving a 6000-pound machine for 5000 miles takes a lot of energy, and that energy had to come from somewhere.

How much energy, exactly? At my truck’s efficiency of 2 mi/kWh, 5000 miles requires 2500 kWh of energy. I used that energy over the course of about 90 days, meaning I was using about 27 kWh per day, on average. That’s equivalent to consuming a little more than 1 kW, continuously.

I like to think of 1 kW as a toaster. Meaning, if I had put a toaster on full blast back on March 21st and just left it running for the past three months, that would have used about the same amount of energy as my gallivanting.

Does that seem like a lot of energy to you? So I added one perma-toaster to the grid, that doesn’t sound so bad! Well, for comparison, the average American household also uses about this much electricity. (This site claims 10,500 kWh per year, or 28.75 kWh/day.) So, in terms of total average energy demand, my truck has been equivalent to a typical American household! 

That seems fitting, given that I have practically been living out of it. The truth is, I’ve been a tumbleweed, and people are noticing. My therapist told me, “You’re hard to keep track of these days.”

Fair enough. I have been all over the place. I took the truck all the way down to Richmond, Virginia, for a solar development conference, and was pleased to find that the Tesla Supercharger network makes it easy to take long road trips up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

I took the truck to Québec to visit a Nordic sauna, and juiced up at a DC fast charger with Hydro-Québec branding. That was almost certainly the cleanest electricity I’ve put into my truck. Québec is dammed to the gills, and their grid is essentially fossil-free.

I took friends hiking in the mountains in New Hampshire. I pitched my tent in the truck bed and camped on the shore of Lake Champlain in Vermont.

Over all those thousands of miles, the truck performed flawlessly. Until yesterday, when I got a flat tire on the way into town. I steered to the nearest gas station, watching the tire pressure drop precipitously. I paid 2 dollars to temporarily pump the tire back up, and then limped to an auto shop around the corner.

While inspecting my tire, the mechanic at the shop asked me why I went electric. This was in the middle of the first big heat wave of the summer, so I decided to just go for it. With sweat dripping off my brow, I said, “Heat waves like this will just become more common as long as we’re burning fossil fuels. So I’m trying to get off them.”

Perhaps not the wisest thing to say to an auto mechanic with his hands on my truck. After all, his profession depends on servicing fossil-fueled vehicles! (Electric vehicles need mechanics, too, but are far simpler and require far less maintenance than traditional cars. Meaning, a world of mostly EVs is a world with far fewer car mechanics. This is already happening in California.)

The mechanic paused for a moment, focused on plugging my tire. Then he said, with a smile, “Whatever works for you, I guess. I’m the opposite. I like to feel the engine in my bones when I’m driving.”

As much as I love my whisper-quiet electric truck, I get his perspective. I recently had reason to take my old ride — a ‘94 stick-shift Corolla — for a spin around Boston. I became one with the machine, weaving through unimaginable traffic and New England’s worst drivers. It was a blast.

Progress always involves leaving good things behind.

As befits spring, the past three months have been a time of very rapid change in my life. There has been a lot of instability. My concept of “home” has more or less dissolved. It’s been really, really hard.

But the summer solstice has a different vibe. A solstice is a pause. Now is the time of year when the daylight is maximized, and for a brief moment, it stays that way. (Today, the derivative of daylight with respect to time is zero.) It’s right there in the etymology: sun stop. The sun has arrived.

I, too, feel that I have arrived. This summer, my good friends Ben and Jana have invited me to live in a very cozy tiny house on their land in Vermont. It’s off-grid, so of course I’m setting up a sweet solar system.

I also got a job doing carpentry for the summer, which means my office views are getting a massive upgrade.

Oh, and my truck has a name. It’s Big Dog. I think it’s pretty self-explanatory.

I may not achieve this, but I have a goal of setting up a solar system that is big enough to meaningfully charge Big Dog. How big would that solar system have to be? A typical “Level 2” home charger that you would install in your garage provides about 6 kW of power, so that’s a good number to shoot for. Coincidentally, this is also about the size of the array that I would need to cover Big Dog’s energy consumption over the past three months. (I’ve been averaging about 50 miles of driving per day, which means I would need to produce about 25 kWh/day. With perhaps 5 or 6 peak sun hours per day in the summer in Vermont, an array of 5-6 kW should do the trick.)

That would be about 20 panels. I already have the panels, but the other system components (racking and the inverter) would be pricey, probably a few thousand dollars. So you know what I’ll be saving my carpentry wages for!

—Jake

I had heard that people cry during solar eclipses, and I get it now.

Most eclipse weepers probably turn on the waterworks during the “totality” phase, that awe-inspiring stretch of time when the sun is briefly replaced by a psychedelic black hole. But not me. My emotions are right at the surface these days, and I sprung a leak before the partial phase of the eclipse had even begun.

My night of stealth-camping in the truck was mostly comfortable, although I did wake up pretty cold at about 3 am. I turned on the truck’s heater for a while to take the edge off my chill. This cost me a few kilowatt-hours, or about 10 miles of range — well worth it to stop the shivering and allow myself to drift back to sleep.

Once the sun was up, I rolled the truck back over to the library and reclaimed my parking spot. Almost immediately, other cars started to pull in. Parking lots started filling up by 9 am. A free popcorn stand had appeared, and was doing steady business. The town was alive!

I had seen a sign advertising a “solar eclipse brunch”, so I headed over just early enough to grab a table before there was a big line out the door. The atmosphere in the café was electric. Of course the eclipse was all anyone was talking about. The man at the table next to me asked the server if he ought to head up to Quebec, to get a slightly longer dose of totality, or if he should venture further east to avoid any clouds that might be coming in from the west. The server didn’t even hesitate: “I think right here at Island Pond is just about the best spot you could find.” I had to agree. For now, at least, the sunny conditions we all hoped for had arrived. Warmth was streaming in the windows. My brunch came with eggs, and you can guess how I ordered them.

After breakfast, I headed back to the sandy lake beach, where folks were staking out tents and setting up picnic blankets. People had clearly traveled far, some having driven through the night due to the shifting cloud forecast. I set up my camping chair and watched the sun ascend ever higher over the frozen lake. The day was getting warmer by the minute, and the view was spectacular.

And that’s when I started to get emotional. The more I contemplated the symbolism of the day, the more I began to see it as a culmination of my personal evolution over the past few years.

During my time as a climate science researcher — roughly the past decade of my life — I have had a particular focus on clouds. This began back when I was 21 years old, soon after I decided that I wanted to apply my physics background to the climate problem. On a hike in the beautiful hills above Berkeley’s campus, an ex-string theorist (who went on to become my PhD advisor) convinced me that clouds were the biggest unsolved problem in climate science. Looking back, I can imagine what I must have been thinking to myself. “You’re telling me that clouds — these beautiful, shapeshifting ghosts in the sky, which I have marveled at since I was a kid in the cornfields of Illinois, are full of physics mysteries? And they are directly relevant to global warming?”

OK, my internal monologue probably wasn’t that eloquent. But I was sold. And once I started grad school, it didn’t take me long to really fall in love with clouds. I thought about them like it was my job, because it was my job. I went to conferences and gave talks about what I had learned about clouds. I got into academic brawls (settled in the literature, of course) about why certain types of clouds form where they do. It’s fair to say that during this phase of my life, I came to identify with clouds. My Instagram account is mostly pictures of clouds (with a few bugs mixed in for variety). Friends often send me pictures of the sky, asking me to explain some strange cloud formation. In my office, a cute stuffed cloud is perched on the shelf next to all my textbooks.

As my dad once wrote to me, life is good when you’re doing something you love. For many years, being a climate researcher felt like the best job in the world. But I don’t want to have my head in the clouds anymore. I’ve had enough of writing papers about clouds and the physical climate system.

How did it come to this? I started to suspect something was wrong about three years ago, when I went “on tour” to talk about a paper that I had recently published with my postdoc advisor. The paper was in a high-profile journal, and the publicity tour should have been a celebratory moment. But on my campus visits I was having out-of-body experiences. While giving my talks I felt like I was pretending to be excited about my work, and I hate pretending.

I knew I needed a change of pace, so the summer after that dissociative publicity tour, I took a “sabbatical” from research to work on an organic vegetable farm in Vermont. I will always be grateful to my postdoc advisor for supporting me in this decision, which proved to be pivotal. Within a few weeks of starting to work on the farm, I realized that I felt happier, healthier, and less anxious than I had in a very long time. I loved being part of a team with the common goal of growing delicious food. I loved being valued for my strength and stamina. I loved working outside, how attuned I was to the rhythms of the seasons and the weather. I loved the way deep, intimate conversations seemed to just flow as the crew weeded a field of carrots or harvested beets. I made lifelong friends. Only half joking, I started to refer to the academic track I had temporarily stepped off as the “smartypants contest.” (To my many friends in academia, please forgive me for this phrase — I’m not talking about you!) It was just a few months, but that summer on the farm was when I started to deliberately turn away from clouds.

And at the same time, I began to turn towards the sun. While working on the farm, I lived in a little cabin that didn’t have running water or electricity. So, after a few weeks of reading by candlelight, I rigged up a simple solar electricity system. This was very satisfying, and I noted a distinct spark of curiosity. I began to daydream about working on the climate problem in a way that was more hands-on, more boots-on-the-ground. There’s more to solving climate change than putting up solar panels, of course, but the clean energy we can harvest from the sun is going to get us most of the way there. Plus, clouds weren’t really doing it for me anymore, and the sun is, like, totally the opposite of clouds.

These thoughts were floating around in my head when I cautiously returned to the smartypants contest in the fall. I was worried that my mental health would take a nosedive when I returned to Boston, and it did. I pushed through another semester, got another paper out, but it was a struggle. Then, in an attempt to recapture some of the excitement and well-being I had felt on the farm, I went on the solar-powered Amtrak/e-bike adventure that was the genesis of this blog. And it worked! It felt amazing to be out in the world, connecting with people, thinking hard about energy and how we might get what we need without fossil fuels, and writing about it. Then the trip was over, and I went back to my research, and I became pretty unhappy again. I felt there was a clear pattern: I felt good and excited when I was actively engaged with all things solar, whereas working on my cloud research made me depressed and anxious.

So I started to run away from clouds whenever I got the chance. If you’ve been following the blog, you basically know the rest of the story, right up to the moment when I drove my electric truck to Island Pond to see this eclipse.

So there I was, thinking about all this, when suddenly I realized something.

Everyone at Island Pond was running from the clouds, too. We were all there for the sun.

This made me want to cry, but I didn’t want to worry the happy families surrounding me on the beach, so I packed up my stuff and walked through a lumber yard to find a more private spot on the lakeshore. There, I took in the rest of the pre-eclipse and the first half of the partial eclipse, letting the waves of emotion wash over me in a cathartic release. As totality approached, though, I realized I was ready to be back with my people. I returned to the beach, which was way more packed than when I had left it, and settled in for the show.

It turns out the difference between totality and a 99% partial eclipse is literally night and day. When the world went dark and people started whooping, I removed my eclipse glasses and looked up into the Eye of Sauron. It stared back at me. I experienced an auditory hallucination of a roaring, yawning drone.

And, with perfect comedic timing, a manmade cloud — a plane contrail — drifted in front of the sun just at the moment of totality. I had to laugh.

—Jake

I’m coming to you live from the back of my truck cab!

I’m currently parked outside the Island Pond Public Library in the town of Brighton, Vermont. I’m in this particular parking spot mainly so that I can siphon off some free Wi-Fi and get this post up. Then, when it’s time to sleep, I’ll roll over to a more secluded spot for a night of “stealth camping” (i.e., sleeping in the back of the cab).

I had originally planned to head west toward the Burlington area for the eclipse, but I’ve been checking the New York Times’ fantastic interactive eclipse cloud forecast religiously, and the pesky clouds keep creeping in from the west. So, I decided to target the northeast corner of Vermont instead. As of now, the NYT widget shows Island Pond just escaping the clouds during the eclipse tomorrow, but I’ll check this widget again in the morning to see if I need to fine-tune my location.

I arrived here at Island Pond this afternoon, under perfectly clear and sunny conditions that I hope will stick around throughout the day tomorrow. The trip north was super smooth. There were more cars on the road than usual, and way more campers and vans, but there wasn’t really any traffic to speak of. I drove most of the way, then stopped at a DC fast charger in St. Johnsbury, VT to top off my battery. This wasn’t strictly necessary, but I’m being conservative with charging because I definitely don’t want to have to charge during any chaos that unfolds tomorrow.

Even today, there was already a line to charge, and I am fascinated by the etiquette around queueing up for these chargers. Both chargers were occupied when I arrived at the Chargepoint station in St. Johnsbury, which is unceremoniously located on the side of a warehouse at a Ford dealership. So, I pulled in alongside the other EVs to stake a claim on the next available charger. Several more cars arrived after me, and each time the driver would walk over and ask the people who were plugged in how long they would be. “I have no idea,” said the driver of the blue Ford Mustang Mach-E. “I need to drive 86 more miles today, but I want to get to 100, 110 miles of range before I leave just to be safe. I’m at 50 right now. I have no idea how long that will take.”

He had no idea! I see that as a big problem for EV adoption. Filling a gas tank is so fast that no conversations with other drivers are necessary at the pump; you can count on a pump opening up in a matter of minutes. But EV charging will never be as fast as pumping gas, so we need new norms and practices. Those charging norms need to be supported by extremely intuitive user interfaces. This driver should have been able to set his desired charge, plug in, and get an accurate estimate of when it would be completed. Not everyone is going to be excited about doing mental math all the time. (Rant over.)

But I like mental math, and I was within earshot, so I offered to help answer his question. I looked at the charging station screen, which said he was charging at about 25 kW. (That is not particularly fast for a fast charger. Tesla Superchargers top out above 180 kW.) That means he would add 25 kWh in an hour, and I assumed his Mach-E would be more efficient than my big ol’ truck, so I figured he might get closer to 3 mi/kWh — meaning he’d add about 75 miles of range in an hour. “I’m guessing you’ll be done in about 45 minutes,” I said.

My own top-off took about an hour, which was fine by me because it was beautiful out — I just grabbed my book and sat in the bed of the truck while I charged.

Then, it was a quick 35 minute trip to Island Pond. I had originally planned to park at a trailhead here, but when I arrived at the trailhead there was a sign saying it was closed during mud season, so I figured I shouldn’t risk it. I’m not getting any cell service around here, so I went to a grocery store to ask about free Wi-Fi in the area. That’s how I got the tip about the library.

After rolling over to the library and convincing myself I’d have a good setup for the night, I ventured out for a kettlebell workout on a dilapidated lakeside tennis court. Then I ate the leftovers I brought for dinner (roasted broccolini, carrots, and cauliflower, plus some polenta, arugula, and a chicken sausage).

Well-exercised and well-fed, I retired to my truck. The sun set three hours ago, and with no clouds to insulate things, the temperature has already fallen to 32 degrees, heading for an overnight low of 28 — but I should be cozy in the truck, swaddled in blankets. And I can always run the cabin heater if I get really cold.

So, my e-clipse update for now is: So far, so good. It took a bit of extra planning, but I think I’m set up for a really spectacular eclipse viewing.

And wherever you are tomorrow, I hope you have a chance to tune in somehow. It’s going to be magical.

—Jake

The good news is: I. Love. My. Truck.

About a week ago, I drove up to the family cabin in New Hampshire, where “mud season” is fully underway. Mud season is a phase of spring that looks like piles of melting old snow, temporary meltwater streams, and deeply rutted dirt roads. There’s no way my old ride (the ‘Rolly) would have made it to the cabin in these conditions, but in the truck I floated up the sloppy, hilly final stretch to the cabin.

This will surprise no one, but I’m enjoying getting to know how my truck’s efficiency and range are affected by factors such as temperature, wind, and driving speed. If you’ll bear with me while I nerd out on the numbers… I departed Boston with about 60% state of charge, and used another 40% of the truck’s battery on the 100-mile trip to the cabin. That implies a total range of about 250 miles, well short of the EPA-estimated range of my truck (320 miles). I have heard that one should consider that EPA estimate a best-case scenario, but when I looked into how the EPA estimate is obtained, I learned that it involves putting the car on a treadmill; personally, I do not consider a run on a treadmill to be any type of best-case scenario.

In any event, I drove on a cold day, and batteries are definitely less efficient in the cold. Plus, most of the drive from Boston is on the highway, and cars are less efficient at highway speeds due to increased aerodynamic drag. EVs, in particular, also lose efficiency on the highway because there are fewer opportunities for regenerative braking (most EVs return energy to the battery while slowing down). So, all in all, I think 250 miles of winter highway range is a reasonable number for my truck. This implies an efficiency of about 1.9 miles per kilowatt-hour (mi/kWh). I’ll round that up to 2 for quick mental math, but I’ll also pretend that my truck’s battery is 125 kWh (it’s actually 131 kWh). That way, each 20% of the battery equals 50 miles of range in the winter, on the highway. If I assume those same numbers under other circumstances, I’ll be super conservative and never strand myself with a dead battery. Who’s got range anxiety now?

Anyway, since I arrived at the cabin with only 20% battery remaining, I decided it was time to charge. Charging is a super easy process at the cabin, and I have my family to thank for that: several other family members drive electric vehicles, and they had already paid to have a big honkin’ NEMA 14-50 outlet installed in the driveway. (If you want yet more numbers, it’s a 30 amp, 240 volt outlet, which allows us to charge at a rate of 30 x 240 = 7.2 kW. This is a standard rate for the “level 2” EV chargers that many folks install at home.) This means I can simply plug in and wake up to a fully charged truck.

The next day, I headed to the Harbor Freight store in town. Since I’m planning to use this truck for carpentry, I need a way to carry lumber around, and after considering the options I settled for a rust-proof aluminum rack with an 800-lb carrying capacity. I finished installing the rack just as it was getting dark, and then popped down to the lake for a sunset cold dip.

I put the rack to the test the following morning, when I headed to Goosebay Sawmill & Lumber to pick up cedar decking for the sauna platform. This place is a fully-electric sawmill that produces as much solar power as they consume in their milling operation, so obviously I am a big fan and try to patronize them as much as possible. The cedar boards were 16 footers, which I believe is just about the limit of my rack, but I had them cut down to 14 feet at the mill since that’s the long dimension of my platform. (I get to keep the 2-foot offcuts, which will be useful for all kinds of projects.) After loading the boards up on the truck rack and securing the load with ratchet straps, I was on my way back to the cabin. As expected, I did notice that the truck’s efficiency took a small hit with the lumber up there — but overall, the hauling experience was extremely smooth.

There were rumors of an April Nor’easter coming later in the week, so I was highly motivated to take advantage of the window of fair weather we were experiencing. I laid the deck boards out on the platform, using a metal bracket to leave a small gap for drainage between boards, and fastened them to the floor joists using coated screws. This process took a few days in all, but it was extremely enjoyable work. The weather was crisp and sunny, the birds were chirping, and I was working with my hands and making steady progress.

I was hoping to get the boards finished with some Outdoor Defense Oil before the storm arrived, but I ran out of time. So, I just tarped the platform and hunkered down for the projected 1+ foot of heavy, wet snow.

The storm rolled in overnight, and when I woke up the following morning and flicked the light switch in the bathroom, nothing happened. Power outage. Looking outside, the world appeared as if it had gotten a generous coating of icing at the Frosted Mini-Wheat factory.

I had anticipated that we might lose power, so I had fully charged the truck before the storm. In fact, I was kind of happy about the power outage, because it provided a perfect opportunity to try out the truck as a backup “generator.” There is an official way to use my truck as whole-home backup, but it’s expensive to install, and I think it’s a bit overkill for our situation at the cabin. My setup was significantly more DIY: I just ran an extension cord from one of the outlets in the truck’s bed onto the porch and through a kitchen window. (This required leaving the window open a crack, so I stuffed a towel in there to prevent a cold draft.) I attached a power strip to that, and then sent one extension cord to the kitchen appliances (fridge, toaster oven) and the other to the Wi-Fi router. These are pretty low-power devices — I was pulling about 300 watts except when I used the toaster, which brought it up to about 1 kilowatt. But even if I were using 1 kilowatt continuously, the truck’s battery would keep things running for about 5 days! Walking up and down the road, I could hear all our neighbors running gasoline generators. I have to say that my solution felt pretty nifty by comparison.

So, that’s the good news: despite the storm, I’ve been trucking away. Building. Vibing. In my element.

While I waited for the snow to melt, I decided to check in with the town zoning administrator about the allowed height of the pavilion I was planning to build on the platform. And that’s when I learned the bad news.

It turns out that, the first time I looked into it, I misunderstood this whole zoning business.

We are not allowed to build a sauna on our property where the platform is. It’s too close to the lake.

I’ll own up to that as a colossal oversight. Of course one expects to make mistakes, doing something for the first time. But this one really stung. At least I’m certain I won’t make this particular mistake again.

After a one-day deep depression, I convened a family press conference. I presented two options: 1) Pivot to purchasing a barrel sauna kit, which could be easily disassembled and moved if we ever got slapped with a zoning complaint; or 2) Start the build over at a new site that is farther from the lake, and enjoy the lakeside platform in other ways.

We decided on option 1, the barrel sauna. I’m definitely disappointed that I won’t get to use the knowledge I learned in my sauna construction class, and the barrel sauna won’t provide quite as nice of an experience as the sauna I was planning. But I’m sure I’ll have other opportunities to build saunas soon, and in the end, I just really, really want the sauna at the cabin to be right next to the lake.

So, I’ll order a kit, and at some point I’ll have some family or friends help me put it together. And I think that’s the end of the sauna saga. I’m OK with it.

If I’m not going to be writing about the sauna build, what is this blog going to be about? Well, it’s been a few weeks since the equinox, and my attention is turning toward all things sunny: the arrival of warmer weather, exciting summer plans, and most of all… the eclipse.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, there’s a total solar eclipse in two days, and I’m determined to see it. My plan is to catch the show somewhere near where New Hampshire and Vermont meet Canada. (I had originally planned to head towards Burlington, but the latest forecasts show clouds building in from the west in the early afternoon, so I think it makes sense to pivot further east.) Tens of thousands of fellow sun-worshippers will also be descending on the Northeast, and it’s gonna be a whole scene. Traffic is supposed to be a nightmare. In fact the governor of New Hampshire recently discouraged people from taking EVs on their eclipse adventure, noting the lack of public charging stations throughout most of his state.

To which I say: Challenge accepted.

—Jake

It’s June 21st, 8 pm, and I’m camping in the woods with my friends.

Actually, we’re glamping. We didn’t hike in to our site — we drove right up to this clearing in the forest a few days ago, following mostly class IV roads. The last 10 miles were off-road and our electric truck handled the rugged terrain beautifully.

There was no preexisting infrastructure at our remote site, but we brought all the amenities. For example, we have a hot shower. It’s powered by a 6 kilowatt (kW) on-demand hot water heater that runs off the truck’s battery. The showerhead and pump provide a low-flow 1.5 gallons per minute, but out here it feels luxurious. There’s nothing like taking a hot shower in the woods, looking up at the stars, after an invigorating dip in a mountain-fed river. That’s been the vibe around here.

Not that we would, but we could run that shower for 12 hours straight (total energy cost: 12 x 6 = 72 kilowatt-hours, or kWh) and still have plenty of juice to drive back home. What I’m saying is, our truck has an absolutely massive battery: 131 kWh. That’s equivalent to ten Tesla Powerwalls, enough to power an entire energy-guzzling typical American household for several days.

Today was the summer solstice, and — sun-worshippers that we are — we’re celebrating with a homemade Solstice Soufflé. It won’t surprise you to hear that our off-grid kitchen is quite elaborate, with induction burners, an oven, and a fridge/freezer. Our solar soufflé is a massive Red Giant, due to a special ingredient: pureed alpine strawberries, foraged during yesterday’s big hike. (Stars like our sun eventually turn red and swell in size when they run out of hydrogen to burn in their cores.)

Endless hot showers, soufflé for dessert — like I said, we’re glamping. We’ve all been glamping before, but this level of luxury in the woods usually means there’s a noisy generator somewhere nearby, burning fossil fuels and spewing out carbon dioxide and other pollutants. Not so in our case. We charged up the truck for this trip using the 7 kW solar array we built back at our farm, so all the energy we’re using — including the energy it took to transport us here — is clean as a sunbeam. This fact is surprisingly liberating. It’s enabling a true abundance mindset out here when it comes to energy. No one’s gonna shame me for my long shower, because there’s plenty of sunshine to refill our tanks. There’s plenty of water in the river, and plenty of room for all of us in these beautiful infinite woods.

OK, fantasy over. I hope my day-one fans enjoyed that callback to my first post. Alas, it’s not the summer solstice. But it is the spring equinox (or it was, a few days ago), which I honor as a time of transition from darkness to light.

This equinox post is timely, because I’ve been thinking about transition a lot lately. I’ve been going through some big changes in my relationship to my academic work, and I want to open up about something that has been lurking under the surface of this blog all along.

Specifically: I have fallen out of love with doing climate science research.

This is hard to admit. But I’d like to use this platform to process some of these feelings, even though it is scary to do so, because this blog has always been about my personal quest for sustainability. And the way I’ve been working on the climate issue — A.K.A., mainly by writing research papers about the physics of clouds and climate — has become personally unsustainable.

Oof. That still hurts to say. I really used to love my job.

So, how should one deal with the loss of vocational passion? Many people go through something like this at some point in their working lives, and it can be very isolating. It’s a dissociative experience to be surrounded by colleagues who are still feeling the love, but not feeling that connection oneself.

But I’m determined to find a new way to work on climate and environmental issues that is both financially and emotionally sustainable. I’m not exactly sure what the next phase of my working life will look like, but I hope that by writing about my wandering, I will help other wanderers feel less alone.

Oh, and while that solstice camping trip was a fantasy, the electric truck is very, very real. Here’s the truck, charging at 6.5 kW while I work at the Newton library:

Big news, I know. (I’m sorry if you feel I buried the lede.) I’ll definitely be writing about my adventures with the truck on this ol’ blog.

Anyway, readers, I’ve missed you. Did you miss me in your inbox? Did you celebrate the equinox? What should I name the truck? As always, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

—Jake

My last post was all about the mistake we made.

Well, readers, we learned from our mistake. And we bounced back.

The day after the mistake, we had Home Depot deliver some 16-foot-long 2”x10”s for the replacement rim joists. We also had all the normal joists (which are 12-foot 2”x8”s) delivered.

The lumber appeared at 9 am, less than 12 hours since I had placed the order. This was money very well spent. With cousins Gabe and Anthony joining, the crew was four strong, and we quickly got everything moved down to the build site.

We ripped out the mistake, cut the new rim joists, and got to work re-installing the edge post. Luca kept a helpful watch during this phase.

By lunch we were past where we had ended the previous day, and with a much stronger frame than if we had stuck with the original plan (to split the long side into two pieces joined at the post). The way I see it now, I’m glad we made that mistake; it gave us a reason to change course.

After lunch we finished the frame of the deck. Everything was level and felt rock-solid, and we thought it looked great.

Our cousins departed the next day, and Paul and I got to work installing the joists. This was a new process for us, but Paul looked up a neat trick for holding a joist in place while installing it: you temporarily screw scraps of wood to the top of the joist at both ends, so it sits at just the right level while you set the joist hanger in place. (The joist hangers are the U-shaped metal brackets that support the joists.) Nailing in the joist hangers was a pretty satisfying process, but it gave us both sore shoulders.

By sunset on Tuesday, we’d installed 3 joists and were feeling really good. We packed up all our tools and lumber on the end of the platform and put a tarp over it, because there was rain in the forecast for Wednesday.

As it turned out, the storm was a snowstorm for us. We woke up Wednesday to more than a dusting of winter — about 3.5 inches of wet snow! The ‘Rolly wasn’t going anywhere, and the surface of the lake was transformed into a slushie.

The cabin looked so cozy in the snow.

And we were very glad we had tarped our tools!

The temperature rose above freezing the day after the storm, so the snow began to melt, but the sky continued to spit water all day. We just hunkered down inside and made preparations for Thanksgiving. Our bodies were thankful for the mandatory rest day.

The next day, feeling rested and well-fed, we quickly got a bunch more joists installed while the sun melted the snow around us.

We left the joists in the center of the platform for last because we still needed to dig the final foundation footing. (To support the weight of the sauna stove, my plan calls for the two joists nearest the stove to be doubled, and one of those doubled joists sits on a post connected to one of the concrete-on-gravel foundation footings.) It was cold out, but the ground wasn’t quite frozen yet. And by this point I had already dug and leveled 6 of these holes, so it went fast. We cut the last post, got the double joists in, and….

BOOM.

Cover shot! (My emo album is out in January.)

But we weren’t quite done yet. The holes for the foundation footings needed to be backfilled with dirt. It got real cold after Thanksgiving, with temperatures dropping down into the teens. The lake fully iced over in our last few days there, and — more relevant to the backfilling — the ground froze, too. So the piles of wet, clay-rich dirt I had dug out of the foundation holes had hardened into icy slabs. I found that by bashing through that layer of frozen dirt with a splitting maul, we could get down to some softer stuff. Luckily, Rosa was excited to join in on this part, and together we got into a great working rhythm. It’s a such a joy to labor with loved ones.

The platform and the icy cove look great great together, don’t they?

And that’s where things stand for now! It was so fun to have Paul and Luca spend some extended time up at the cabin, and to have so many other friends and family members join to help us out along the way.

I hope more folks (maybe some of you readers?) will become involved in the next stages! It’s looking like the next building window will be in January 2024.

In the meantime, I’m looking for a good local sawyer so we can source our lumber for the floorboards and the next steps of the project without relying solely on Home Depot. Enjoy the holidays! Let’s all take a page out of Luca’s book and chiiiiillllllll.

—Jake

If you're not making mistakes, you're not learning.

I’m trying to keep that in mind today, to take the sting off the big ol’ blunder we made. I could have waited to write a post until it’s fixed, to preserve my reputation as a carpenter. But I wouldn’t do that to you, reader — I know you’re here for the raw, behind-the-scenes view of building a sauna for the first time, and that’s bound to include some blunders.

So, here’s the story of Blunder #1.

The blunder came at the end of a near-perfect weekend. After my last post, I took a quick 24-hour trip to Boston to check in on civilization, celebrate Rosa’s birthday, and return the CR-V. But I came back to New Hampshire promptly on Friday night, hitching a ride with my friends Jon and Camille. That’s right, the build crew is still growing! Jon and I had the same climate research fellowship at Harvard and we’ve been fast friends since, but I’ve been missing him since he started his new job as a professor in Vancouver, Canada. Lucky for me, he’s currently back East visiting our mutual friend Camille (also a climate scientist). One could argue that my friendship with these two was forged in the fires of COVID at this very Seeley cabin, back in the era when we would all take tests before podding up for getaway weekends.

It was so good to have them visit, not least because they essentially took over cooking for the whole weekend. Paul and I have been eating really well, but there’s always something elevated about the stuff Jon and Camille whip up. Come to think of it, Paul also threw down in the kitchen this weekend, producing a perfect flourless chocolate cake after minimal prodding. (My culinary contribution was blueberry protein smoothies.)

And make no mistake, this was not a “we cook so you can build” arrangement. Jon and Camille also joined in wholeheartedly with the outdoor manual labor, and with so many hands and paws on site, we made rapid progress on the sauna build. By sundown on Saturday we had all six posts notched out to accept band joists, in rough position on their footings, and perfectly leveled.

Somehow, in between all the cooking and building, Jon and Camille also managed to use the electric chainsaws (one corded, one battery-powered) to take down four dead oak trees in the vicinity of the sauna site. This prevents a future treefall from causing damage and, after some additional processing, will also provide fuel for the woodstoves in the cabin and sauna. Hauling those big logs up the slope to the cabin is incredibly hard exercise; I only carried one log, and I definitely felt it the next day.

Sauna building is hard work in general. To soothe our sore muscles, we swear by the sunset hot tub/cold plunge combo. We are lucky to be building this sauna at the edge of beautiful Randlett Pond, which is perched in a saddle between two small mountains (Ladd and Levitt) and has lovely cold water this time of year. I like to go in for a plunge first thing in the morning, but with a hot tub nearby you don’t have to be Wim Hof to want to get in the pond. Our “hot tub” setup is closer to the house than the sauna site, and it’s really just a pair of outdoor baths filled with hot water piped through a long hose from the cabin’s hot water heater. We love the experience, but I never forget that it’s a fossil-fueled experience. It’s actually the last such experience at the cabin: we’ve electrified our home heating (heat pumps), cooking (induction stove), and have installed a level-2 EV charger. There are electric hot water heaters — even “tankless” ones that can provide the on-demand hot water it takes to fill our hot tubs — but for now, we’re still dependent on propane for hot water. I think it’s OK to have a little fossil fuels, as a treat, but I’m always scheming about how to make a solar-powered hot tub.

Anyway, we went to bed on Saturday relaxed and feeling accomplished. It seemed like we’d be able to get the band joists up on the posts on Sunday, which would be a major milestone on the path to a super sturdy deck.

Sunday morning, we cut the band joists (which make up the perimeter of the deck). We’re using 2”x10” pressure-treated lumber and doubling all band joists, and we planned to make the end joists (the 12 footers) out of single boards. On the other hand, to make the long 14-foot rim joists out of single pieces of wood, we would have needed to buy 16-foot boards and cut them down. We decided that would push the hauling capabilities of even the CR-V, so we instead bought 8-foot boards with the intention of cutting them down to (roughly) 7’ and splicing them together on the edge posts, like so:

After cutting everything to size, we started working from one corner, using clamps and the 3-4-5 trick to check for square. Once everything was lined up, we traced the outline of the metal post base on the cement blocks and then popped the edge post out one last time so we could screw the metal base into place with concrete screws.

That’s when things started to go off course. While drilling the second hole, the bit hit a rock embedded in the concrete and couldn’t punch through. We flipped the block and re-traced the base, and successfully drilled a new hole on the other side. The first screw went in fine, but then the second screw snapped off halfway in, leaving that hole useless. We swapped that block with one lower down in the base, but when everything was put back together it seemed that the blocks were no longer sufficiently centered under the post. We didn’t really understand why that would have changed, but instead of slowing down and figuring it out, I decided we needed to enlarge the hole, add some more gravel, and shift the footing. It was demoralizing to have to get the shovel out again, but we had the footing back in place and centered again without too much trouble. We put the post back in place, popped the rim joist on, and checked for level.

It was not as level as it used to be. It used to be nearly perfect, but of course after adding more gravel while re-doing the footing the post was now slightly too tall. We could have stopped the cascade of errors at this point by cutting off a sliver of the post, but instead we squinted at the level and talked ourselves into the idea that it was “level enough.” We proceeded with putting in hardware, using carriage bolts to lock everything together. We even nailed in the bases of the two posts we were working with.

The sun was about to set, so we decided it was time to quit. We took a step back, and…

It just didn’t look right. That edge post is too tall, plain as day. I knew pretty much immediately that we’d have to re-do it.

It’s a bummer. The waste of time and material bothers me, and I’m disappointed that I let impatience win out over perfectionism this afternoon. I was feeling the sting of failure during our hot tub/cold plunge ritual, but began to feel better when Paul offered a calm assessment of the situation and didn’t seem fazed by the idea of having to do that corner again. We decided that splitting the 14-foot rim joists in half is not a good idea after all, because of the additional degree of freedom it introduces. So we’re changing the plan to use single pieces on the long sides too, and I think that will result in a better deck.

So, a big ol’ blunder, but things are looking up. We’ve got some nice long 16-foot boards arriving in the morning (courtesy of Home Depot delivery — always an option if you can’t haul yourself). Jon and Camille departed this afternoon (so long for now, friends!), but my cousins Gabe and Anthony arrived shortly thereafter and will be helping out tomorrow. I think we can get back on course in no time.

If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not learning.

—Jake

I woke up on Tuesday excited about Paul and Luca’s imminent arrival.

My mood improved further when I saw that a coating of snow had fallen overnight! I thought it looked really nice, and it wasn’t a big problem for working outside since it had mostly melted by 10 am. Still, it did remind me that we’re getting close to the season when a big snowfall can really delay things. I don’t have any set timeline for when this sauna has to be finished, but I am trying to make a bunch of progress during “stick season” — the time after the leaves fall but before the ground is consistently covered in snow and ice.

Perhaps because I knew reinforcements were on the way, I decided to make Tuesday a big physical day. I started the morning by revisiting one of my foundation holes. This was the hole closest to the big boulder, in the lower left corner of the site plan below.

The first time I dug this hole, I had encountered a chunk of what I assumed was that big boulder. It appeared about 10 inches underground, so it surprised me, and the rock was jutting out above the clay layer that is supposed to provide a level surface for the concrete blocks. I had thought that an extra bit of gravel could smooth things out, but I never really liked that solution. So I took the shovel back to the spot, did a little more digging, and… lucky me! That pesky rock wasn’t actually part of the boulder — it was its own entity. That meant I had a shot at getting it out of there without resorting to fracturing the boulder (doable, but slow). I could tell it was separate because I had gotten it to budge ever so slightly, but it was still mostly buried so I didn’t yet know how big it was.

It turned out to be a few feet in diameter and probably weighed several hundred pounds. I barely got it out of there with the power of leverage (and resigning myself to getting very muddy). After a few hours of effortful excavation, it was incredibly satisfying to have a level surface in that foundation hole.

I needed a break from digging, so after lunch I made yet another trip to Home Depot to pick up yet another half-ton of gravel and concrete blocks.

By the time I had carried all of that down to the site, I was totally exhausted and it was getting dark. But I was determined to get the back 3 concrete pads in place and level, so I donned my headlamp and worked past sunset. I was drop-dead exhausted when I finished the last pad, and was super grateful to have leftovers all ready to go for dinner.

I was feeling like a creaky old man, ready for bed at 8 pm, when Paul and Luca showed up and provided a jolt of youthful vigor. It’s so great having them around! Luca is at home in the woods, it seems, and Paul is enjoying some time away from the hustle and bustle of Chicago.

After a much-needed full night of sleep, the three Seeley Sauna Schleppers went out again the next morning to do some more schlepping. Luca was a very patient helper on our errands.

Paul had driven up in a Honda CR-V borrowed from family in Boston, and we wanted to take advantage of its superior hauling capacity to pick up a bunch of lumber for the deck. The joists that run perpendicular to the lake’s edge are 12 feet long, which strictly speaking is a few feet too many to fit in the CR-V. But I have some heavy-duty straps, which we used to secure the wood that stuck out the back. We closed the tailgate as low as it would go, and for extra insurance, Paul and Luca sat back there and kept a hand on the pile of lumber while I drove slowly back to the cabin. New Hampshire: Live free or die!!

After hauling all of that lumber to the site and getting a start on notching out the corner posts to accept rim joists, it was well past time for a frisbee break. So we headed to our neighbors’ big field and got out the last of our energy just as the sun was setting. “I can’t believe how quiet it is here,” said Paul. What a spectacular late-fall evening.

I’m feeling ready to move past foundation work, and we’ve done enough schlepping to last at least a few days. Spirits are high, the build crew is growing. It’s time to frame the deck!

—Jake

I wish you could just plop a sauna down on the ground.

Alas, as any professional builder will tell you, a solid and level foundation prevents headaches during construction and protects against structural problems down the line. It’s definitely worth the time to do the foundation well, so I’ve spent the past three days focused almost exclusively on that task. Unfortunately, neither of my construction classes covered foundations, so I’ve been learning-by-doing and supplementing my education with YouTube videos and phone-a-friends.

To give you a sense of the challenge, I should describe the lay of the land. The lakeside spot I selected for the sauna is not level: the land slopes upward away from the water, with about a 1.5 foot rise from the edge of the site closest to the lake to the other edge. There’s also a large boulder within the footprint of the planned structure, mostly buried, but with an exposed dome that rises about a foot above the surrounding ground.

So, clearly, I have to build the sauna on top of an elevated deck that floats above the boulder and corrects for the sloping grade. The deck will be supported by posts going down to ground level, but those posts need to sit on something more solid than the ground itself, because the ground at my site is springy, like a gymnastics mat, and it would settle unpredictably under the weight of a building.

Why is the ground so springy? Early in this process I dug an exploratory hole, which revealed several distinct strata: compacted leaves on top, giving way to decomposing leaf litter held together by the roots of small shrubs; below that, a spongy brown soil reminiscent of peat (hence the springiness), crosscut by fairly substantial roots from the neighboring pines, maples, and oaks; and, below that, a layer of wet, gray clay, which contains a lot of melon-sized rocks.

That clay layer is only about a foot and a half down, and it gets really hard to dig any deeper due to those big rocks. (The shovel sparked the first time I hit one.) That poses a problem: a common approach to foundations begins with digging below the frost line, which in chilly New Hampshire is about 4 feet down. That’s impossible at my site.

So, with the advice of a family friend who knows a thing or two, I am implementing the following solution for foundation “footings”: I dig down to that clay layer, pour in about 2 inches of gravel, and then set a stack of 4”x8”x16” concrete blocks to bring things back up to ground level. Then, a metal post base secured to the top of the concrete blocks with masonry screws provides a secure housing for a pressure-treated post, which goes up to connect to the elevated deck. Since the footings aren’t set below the frost line, this system is designed to allow a bit of wiggle room to accommodate any frost heaving that does occur. I wouldn’t trust this for a large structure like a house, but for a small outbuilding it seems good enough. (I hope!)

To support the deck, which will be 12’x14’, I need to build seven footers: one for each corner, one in the middle of each of the long edges, and one more near the center of the deck to help support the sauna stove (which can weigh several hundred pounds when loaded up with sauna rocks). The deck is a bit bigger than the sauna building itself, which will be roughly 8’x12’ and set back into one corner of the deck, like so:

What do you think of the layout?

Anyway, I’ve done a ton of digging over the past few days. Luckily, I love digging holes. Always have. I read the book “Holes” when I was a kid — the story is set at a juvenile corrections facility where children are forced to dig a hole 5 feet wide and 5 feet deep, every day — and I remember thinking that sounded like not a bad way to spend a summer. What does it for me with digging is the unambiguous goal and the constant, visible progress, plus the fact that it’s a really killer workout. When I worked on the farm two summers ago, one of the first jobs I was given was to dig foundation holes for a new barn that was being put up, and this masochist was super stoked.

Anyway, this has been some challenging digging, mainly because of the roots and rocks. Some of the roots can be snipped out with pruning shears or loppers, but some are so big that I had to resort to hacking them out with an axe. Not that I minded that, either!

To make sure I was digging these holes in the right places, I set up a grid using some grade stakes and masons line. This was tricky to do by myself. To make sure that the corners were square, I used the 3-4-5 trick1, but it was hard to keep the measuring tape anchored in the right place on the line.

Once I had the holes dug, I did a run to Home Depot to buy the gravel and concrete blocks. Someday I hope to be able to do such an errand in an electric pick-up truck like the Ford F-150 Lightning, but for now I’m driving my manual-transmission, gas-guzzling ‘98 Corolla, affectionately known as the “Rolly.” I looked up the carrying capacity and decided I could haul about 1000 pounds of rock in my superannuated sedan. Let me tell you, the Rolly was riding low on the dirt road back to the cabin, but I took it slow and she performed like a champ.

Pouring the gravel into the base of the holes is a breeze, whereas getting the stack of concrete blocks to sit level is extremely painstaking work. But it’s all worth it for the moment when that little bubble of air sits pretty between the lines.

After three days of work, I’ve now got 6 out of 7 holes dug (I’m leaving the hole in the center of the platform until a bit later in the process), and level concrete pads in the 3 holes closest to the lake. To make sure the whole system works, I also installed the first post base and pressure-treated post. The post base claims it fits a 6”x6” post, but I had to chisel out about a quarter inch to get it to sit flush at the base.

And that’s pretty much where things stand for now! I’m proud of the progress I’ve made by myself, but I’m really excited that, starting tomorrow, my brother is coming to help. And he’s bringing his new puppy, so the photos on this blog are about to get a lot cuter.

Thanks for following along!

—Jake

[Taps mic] Is this thing still on?

It’s been awfully quiet around here! Suspiciously silent, one might even say. What gives?

When I started writing, way back in January, I had the simple goal of documenting my cross-country ebike/Amtrak trip. I didn’t give much thought to what would happen beyond that roughly two-week period.

But I had so much fun writing The $7K Omelette that, when the trip ended, I wanted to keep the train movin’ somehow. And some of you wanted to keep hearing from me, which I found highly motivating! So, to keep things lively and on-brand, I began to transition this blog into a chronicle of my climate-focused community-building effort, codenamed “Infinite Woods.”

That was in March, when I put up my last post1. Now it’s November, and — at least where I am — there’s snow on the ground and the sun is tucked in by 4:30 pm. So I’d understand if, over the past many months of spring, summer, and fall, you’ve wondered:

What the heck is Jake up to?

Well, my radio silence has not been due to a lack of progress on Infinite Woods. We actually made a ton of progress on that front — more than I could have hoped to achieve in such a short amount of time.

Unfortunately for you curious cats, I’m not yet ready to write in detail about those experiences here.

For now, you’ll have to accept a very abridged version: During the first Infinite Woods Build Weekend, which took place July 21-23 in Vermont, we built a 10’ x 10’ tent platform (pictured below).

The fine folks on that purty platform are the courageous climate crew that camped with us for the inaugural build weekend. Our main objective was to construct that platform out of hemlock lumber that we had previously harvested and milled ourselves, with the neighbors’ help. (If a tree falls in Infinite Woods and no one blogs about it, does it make a sound?)

Even better, the entire weekend of construction, cooking, and camping was 100% solar-powered, supported by our custom off-grid wood shop and kitchen, which Charlie and I had assembled before the crew arrived. Let me tell you, it’s a great feeling to turn on a table saw and know that the kinetic energy of the spinning blade was, only 8 minutes ago, riding on a particle of light as it left the surface of the Sun2. It’s a great feeling to cook pancakes in the woods with friends, and know that the sizzle in the griddle is just yesterday’s concentrated sunshine.

It was an emotional experience for me, not least because we had overcome the Great Vermont Flood of July 10-11. My pose in that picture says it all: hands on cheeks (😱), in disbelief that we actually pulled it off. Blissful summer in Vermont.

One big reason that experience was so emotional for me is that it felt like I had found “a calling” of sorts.

Building infrastructure to support environmental community resonated with me on a deep level.

I knew I wanted more of it, and that brought me to Burning Man for the first time. On my first trip to the “playa”, I helped design and build a solar-powered ice factory for the punny camp known as Ice Ice Maybe.

We handed out tons of free ice and smoothies (a big hit in the desert, as you can imagine), and we also generated enough power to run all the camp’s lights and other electrical equipment — meaning the camp had no need for its fossil-fuel-burning generator!

I had a great time for the first 5 or so days of Burning Man, and then came the second flood of my summer. (Am I a cursed climate scientist, bringing weather disasters wherever I go?) An inch of rain fell from the sky, and the ancient lakebed on which Burning Man takes place turned into a giant puddle of clay. Things got slippery and heavy real fast. My camp got out of there as soon as we could, but we were pretty miserable for a few days.

Despite the muddy ending, my experience at Burning Man confirmed my passion for building infrastructure. After two consecutive successful solar building experiences, I started to wonder:

Am I meant to be a solar builder?

Well, I’m pretty positive that I’m meant to be solar-powered. Everyone knows I get real stoked about solar-powered stuff; that much has been pretty clear since day one on this blog. But am I really meant to be a builder? Building that tent platform was a ton of fun, but it was a pretty simple structure. If I’m really meant to be a builder, I need to like building more complicated things. Things that people would actually pay decent money for.

So, to get some more experience, I asked my family if they would let me build a sauna and a cabin at our vacation house in New Hampshire. And they said yes! (I’m very lucky to have access to this place, and to have a family that supports my dreams.) With the seal of Seeley approval, I took two construction classes — one in upstate New York, and one in Vermont — that focused on sauna design/build and framing, respectively.

I learned a ton, and now I’m excited to put it into practice. I arrived in New Hampshire yesterday, and started working in earnest today. Here’s the lakeside spot where the sauna will be built:

When I found this spot, I felt that it had a sense of place already. I liked the little cove with the protruding rock, and the view to the lake framed by the two evergreen trees.

So, it’s time to get back to basics. It’s somatic season: cold water, hot sauna.

Time to get building!

—Jake

You need all-wheel drive and snow tires to get to Infinite Woods in the winter.

I found this out the hard way, when I tried to drive there in my ‘98 Toyota Corolla. It had been snowing for a few days on the weekend I visited, and I did have the snow tires on, but Infinite Woods sits on a pretty serious hill. A plow had recently come through so I was able to get most of the way up the hill in second gear. But, right at the steepest part of the driveway, the snow had been compacted into a slick of ice. The top of the hill was in sight when I realized I wasn’t going to make it. The motor’s RPMs shot up as my front tires hit the ice slick, while my forward motion ground to a halt. I threw the car in neutral, pulled the hand brake, and stomped on the foot brake, which kept me perched below the ice. If I let up either brake, I would begin to slide backwards, so I let myself drift back down to a flatter section of the driveway. Then I called Charlie.

Charlie knows this driveway well; his parents bought this piece of land in Vermont about 15 years ago, and built their house here. After receiving my SOS, Charlie came down from the house, eager to give the driveway ascent his best effort. He did beat my high-water mark but couldn’t quite finish the climb even after we laid down a bucket of gravel and salt on the slickest spots. More snow was expected; the plow would need to come through again, and my car was in the way. So, we decided to retreat, rolling the ‘Rolly back down the hill, through the tree-tunnel driveway and across a small bridge over an icy brook, and abandoning it there for the weekend. Charlie’s parents came down and scooped us up in their Vermont-proof compact SUV. “I wish our first meeting wasn’t a rescue!” I said, clambering in.

Readers, it’s been a while since I’ve posted, and I don’t blame you if you feel a little disoriented at the moment. Last you heard of Infinite Woods, it was a pipe dream — a code name for the community-building project that emerged from a chance encounter between me and Charlie out in California. But things are moving fast, and I did indeed recently visit the future site of Infinite Woods. I’m more excited than ever about where this project is headed, and I mainly want to use this post to update you on that front.

But first, why has it been so quiet around here? I’ll be honest: I’ve had major writer’s block since returning to Boston. Anyone who’s ever tried to write consistently for an extended period of time has experienced this, so I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later. But I have a hypothesis as to why it’s hitting me now, and I think it’s worth spelling out because it’s actually closely related to the goals of Infinite Woods. The hypothesis is this:

On my Amtrak/e-bike trip, my life was simultaneously novel, simple, and constrained. I have come to understand this trifecta as a creative sweet spot.

The bad news — bad from the perspective of writing, at least — is that, being back in Boston, I've flipped to the other end of the spectrum on each of these dimensions. My life has become simultaneously much more routine, complicated, and unconstrained.

Ah, routine. Routine was hard to come by on the road; no set of circumstances persisted long enough for me to settle into a rhythm. This endless shifting started to get old toward the end of my trip, and I began to crave the familiar. On the other hand, when I was on my trip, new posts flowed out of my brain fairly effortlessly every few days, and I often wondered: Am I good at blogging, or are a lot of interesting things just happening to me?

There’s no denying how stimulating it is travel across the country at the speed of a train or bike. My trip was a constant stream of evolving terrain (mountain, desert, plain, bayou, forest), physical and logistical challenge (train chases, inclement weather, gear malfunctions), and fascinating people (Pat, the Poet from P-Town! Michael and Jenny!) It was hard not to write under those circumstances; in between posts, my brain was a jumble of unsettled experience, and writing provided a welcome pause for reflection and categorization, a time to make making meaning of all that raw data. If there wasn’t a routine, at least there would be a plot!

But now routine is back in full force, and (perhaps as a result) I seem to have lost the plot. After recovering from my mildly calamitous return, I fell into a nice rhythm for the spring semester. Run to work. (There’s a shower at work.) Do science. Run home. Cold plunge at the lake. Cook dinner. Visit with friends. Watch TV. Read. Most days go something like this. Progress in academic research is measured in minuscule advances in understanding, separated by weeks filled with little but head-scratching; from the outside it can look a lot like running in place. (If you follow me on Strava, expect to see days with two mirror-image runs along the Charles River, indistinguishable except for the direction.) I tried to write about this a few times and bored myself very badly. So, I think that’s part of my writer’s block — I’m back in some sort of groove, hoping it doesn’t deepen into a rut, and learning that I’ll have to observe more closely to find something worth writing about in my day-to-day.

But my return to Boston has also drastically increased the overall complexity of my life. I think it is objectively true — in terms of the mass of possessions in my orbit, the diversity of responsibilities I have, the number of relationships I’m maintaining, and so on — that things have gotten more complicated. On my trip, I carried everything I “owned” with me in my backpack or on my bike; at home my stuff is everywhere, on floors, in closets, in different houses, in garages and offices and gym lockers and cars. On my trip, I really only had one objective — always some variant of “get from point A to point B”. By contrast, these days I’m always balancing several complex objectives at once, personal and professional, social and spiritual. Relationship-wise, when I was on my trip, I socialized mostly by chance and sent electronic missives out for the curious on my own schedule; now that I’m back in civilization, there are so many people I want to see, and all of us are all so busy, that I have to use Google calendar to set up a coffee date. Calendaring is not one of my strong suits. For me, all of this complexity adds up to a significant baseline mental load. I’m reminded of something Michael, the fellow bike blogger, said to me. Michael lives in hectic Manhattan, and he told me that whenever he goes on a bike trip, after a few days, he feels a transition take place in his mental state. A feeling wells up: Things are simple again.

For me, such a feeling of simplicity is deeply connected to creativity. I am finding it harder and harder to think clearly and generatively when immersed in the bustle of urban life. Somehow the sheer complexity of activity around me crowds out my ability to notice and attend to new things; it’s as if I’m trying to paint, but my canvas is always already thick with other people’s splashes of color. I realize that not everyone feels this way; for some people, the stimulation of the city serves as a creative muse, while the quiet of the countryside is oppressive. But I have always been drawn to quiet places, and this pull has grown stronger as I’ve gotten older. My favorite place on the planet is my family’s cabin in the woods of New Hampshire, where it’s very easy for me to find brain space.

So, things have turned both more routine and more complex lately, and that’s sapping my creative mojo. But my life has also grown less constrained — shouldn’t that make up for it? On my trip, I was literally weighed down by my e-bike and 75+ pounds of gear. I was often constrained in space (e.g., stuck on a train car for 36 hours) or cramped in terms of available activities (e.g., when staying at a campsite without cell service or Wi-Fi). But now that I’m back in a city like Boston, almost anything I could hope to do or learn or eat is always at my fingertips. My job, as a climate scientist at the postdoctoral level, offers enormous flexibility in terms of where, when, and how I work. I have 24/7 high-speed internet, and institutional access to the world’s knowledge archive through Harvard’s library. There’s unlimited free coffee at my office and multiple (optional) seminars per week. I’m in an intellectual mecca; choose any topic, and there’s bound to be an expert within striking distance. I can satisfy a hankering for any type of cuisine with ease. The abundance of material and intellectual resources is astonishing. Shouldn’t all that freedom spark some creativity?

And yet, I have felt creatively barren in Boston! I think there is something general at work here: one of the great paradoxes of creativity is that it seems to thrive under constraint. Total freedom can be paralyzing, whereas obstacles, limits, and boundaries shake us out of our default modes of thought and lead to innovation. Psychologists who have studied this phenomenon find that certain types of scarcity seem to give our brains license to see the world differently.

This isn’t only about screen time, but my struggle with phone/internet addiction is a perfect example of the general problem of “underconstraint”. When I have my phone in my pocket, every passing question or curiosity that flits through my mind tends to lead me down a rabbit hole of internet research. I lose my sense of presence in the physical world and go somewhere else, temporarily disembodied; I emerge from the rabbit hole 20 minutes later, ostensibly a bit better informed about something but none the wiser. And when I go to make something new — when I try to be creative, that is — the ability to endlessly read about or watch YouTube videos of other people doing something similar undermines my drive. With unconstrained access to the internet, I get the sense that there’s nothing new under the sun; content consumption, masquerading as research, hamstrings the impulse to make something myself. As much as I try to impose constraints where there naturally aren’t any — by setting screen time limits, leaving my phone at home, working in conditions of relative sensory deprivation — I still struggle to titrate the torrent of content heading my way. Is it even possible to sip from a firehose?

So: routine, complexity, and lack of constraint — that’s my explanation for why my creative energy has been in short supply lately. What little mojo I have managed to muster has been put toward to my job as a climate scientist, which actually requires a lot of creativity to do well. My type of science also involves a lot of computer work — coding, exploring data, plotting things. After a day of creative and mentally laborious screen time in service of science, the last thing I want to do is open up Substack and stare at a blinking cursor on my laptop. Instead, I want to run. I want to plunge into the ice-cold water in Newton. I want to be embodied again.

You know where I felt connected to the wellspring of creativity? At Charlie’s family’s place in Vermont, during that snowstorm that was too much for my Corolla. The serenity of their little slice of New England hits you immediately — 100 acres in the heart of Vermont, close to the state capital of Montpelier, their land is about one-third open pasture and two-thirds forested. The woods there are marvelous, the typical Northwoods mix of conifers and hardwoods, hemlock and fir, maple and oak. The house sits on the flank of a sizable hill studded with several natural springs and bordered by a babbling brook. There’s an old barn nestled into a sugarbush and a small spring-fed pond. I can attest that it is a tranquil paradise.

We XC skied on their land every day of my visit, meandering through the trails they’ve cut through the forest and zipping up and down the big exposed hillside, which is a perfect grade for doing laps.

Currently, Charlie’s parents live on this property, but they are planning to relocate to Connecticut. We have their support in transitioning the property into the site of Infinite Woods as their move unfolds. For now, we are in full-on planning mode.

So, what is the plan with Infinite Woods? Our goal, in a nutshell, is to create a solar-powered environmental research institute in the woods. Obviously, having access to Charlie’s family’s land in the woods of Vermont gives us a huge head start on this goal. Research institutes come in many varieties, but what we have in mind is probably closest to a sabbatical destination such as the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. (We definitely aspire to convince the Albert Einsteins of climate to come stay a while.)

For the most part, we don’t imagine folks living and working at Infinite Woods permanently; environmental scholars and climate-focused entrepreneurs would come stay at Infinite Woods for a while (a week, a month, a semester, a year) to hash out an idea, write a proposal, prototype a piece of technology, or finish a book. They might bring their families. This means that Infinite Woods will host a rotating cast of brilliant, passionate people dedicated to understanding and solving the most pressing environmental challenges of our time. The continuous novelty of new folks with different skills and vibes passing through will keep the creative energy fresh.

We will have a variety of private accommodations available, from spartan yurts to cozy cabins, as well as less-private communal bunk rooms. But staying at Infinite Woods will always be highly participatory — don’t expect to just hole up in your cabin! Communal duties will include firewood harvesting, maintenance of the solar arrays and renewable energy infrastructure, tending the community garden, and food preparation and preservation. These duties won’t feel onerous when you experience the simple luxury of a soak in the hot tub (fired by wood you dragged in from the woods yourself!), or when you cook dinner (with ingredients from the garden!) on an induction stove (powered by sunshine captured earlier that day!). When you take a fully-charged e-bike from the stable and cruise to a nearby pristine lake for a swim, you’ll return with a clear head and finally crack that problem that’s been stumping you for ages.

And sitting behind all of this vibrant activity and connection will be the fundamental meaningful constraint of the place: we won’t burn any fossil fuels. There’s a reason society uses fossil fuels for everything: they are so energy-dense that they make it very easy to get around, easy to stay warm and clean and well fed, easy to produce things very cheaply in vast quantities. Foregoing fossil fuels forces one to be mindful about energy use, yes, but it also encourages deep questions about how time is best spent. Without the unconstrained energy-on-demand provided by natural gas, propane, gasoline, or oil, we’ll have to do things a little differently. The problems we’ll have to solve at Infinite Woods are a microcosm of the problems facing society at large during the energy transition — problems such as how to shift the variable power generated by solar, wind and hydro to match when that power is actually needed. People who stay at Infinite Woods will see with their own eyes the size of the solar array that is required to charge our communal electric truck (hopefully, the Ford F-150 Lightning). Guests will come away with a visceral feel for the massive amount of energy on tap that Americans have come to expect, and the challenges that lie ahead as we aim to decarbonize all of that.

So that’s the vision: Infinite Woods will be a place of continuous novelty, simple luxury, and meaningful constraint. If it sounds like a perfect antidote to my writer’s block, well, you’ve got me there. But I’m not alone in facing creative obstacles. My hope is that building these values into the fabric of the institution will enable everyone who stays with us to approach environmental problems with unusual clarity and creativity.

Where on earth does one begin with a project like this? There are infinite “woulds”, if we had money to spend. But at the moment we are self-funded and our budget is limited.

So, we’ve been doing research. Vermont is rife with organizations and institutions that we can learn from — from environmentally-conscious co-housing communities, to idealistic back-to-the-land compounds, to meditation retreats. During the weekend I visited, Charlie and I took a trip to Knoll Farm in Waitsfield, VT, where cofounder Peter Forbes gave us a personal tour. Knoll Farm grows organic blueberries and Icelandic sheep for profit, and plows some of those proceeds into a not-for-profit retreat center called The Refuge. The Refuge “offers space for deep conversation, reflection and celebration”, hosts conferences, and every summer offers fully-funded fellowships for BIPOC leaders and their allies working for environmental and social change. It’s a very cool model.

Charlie and I were particularly enamored of Knoll Farm’s environmentally-sound solutions for heating and septic. Peter showed us their “Tarm”, a super-efficient wood boiler. The boiler heats two large, superinsulated tanks of water to between 130 and 160 °F; this water is then circulated in pipes to the cluster of buildings that make up the farm, providing cozy radiant floor heating and hot water for bathing. This is a type of “district heating” model that is super common in Europe but almost unheard of in the US. The farm burns 6 cords of wood per year (a cord is a 4’ x 4’ by 8’ pile of stacked wood). This amount of wood is very easy to harvest sustainably from their 400-acre property: a common rule of thumb is that you can sustainably harvest one cord of wood per acre, so they’re well under that limit.

You might object that burning wood releases carbon dioxide. True! But that carbon dioxide was very recently removed from the atmosphere (when the tree grew, it built itself by pulling carbon from the air). So, burning wood is actually net-zero from a carbon perspective, as long as you’re not harvesting unsustainably (i.e., contributing to deforestation). Put differently, when you sustainably harvest and burn wood from a forest, you are essentially rerouting the trees that would have fallen and decomposed on the ground — releasing heat and carbon dioxide slowly, over many years — and causing that decomposition process to happen all at once in your stove or boiler while capturing the benefit of the heat. Boom! Biomass burning isn’t a good solution for home heating in densely-populated areas and places with atmospheric “inversions” that trap smoke down near the surface, but in rural Vermont, it makes a ton of sense. We’re pretty sold on a Tarm-like system for Infinite Woods.

Charlie and I were also geeking out over the composting toilet system at Knoll Farm. It smelled pleasant, like a saw mill, due to the saw dust that one adds after doing business. The system requires virtually no maintenance and produces nothing but nutrient-rich dirt out the other end. To be honest, it was such a nice bathroom experience that it made septic tanks and sewers and the common practice of defecating into potable water actually seem kind of gross, as well as downright wasteful. Suffice it to say that Infinite Woods is all-in on composting toilets.

Research is crucial, but a question we’ve been asking ourselves is: What is a concrete step we can take now, that will serve as a proof-of-concept and help to build momentum for the overall project?

I’m really excited about where we’ve settled on this: As a first step, and beginning as soon as this summer, we’re going to be building a solar-powered communal bathhouse, complete with a multi-level sauna, cold plunge, and wood-fired hot tub. This might seem like a strange place for an environmental research institute to begin, but we think this is a perfect starting point for several reasons. For one thing, it requires building much of the same infrastructure that the rest of the institute will need (solar panels, electricity, running water, bathrooms), so it serves as a perfect beta test. Also, who wouldn’t want to come sauna and hot tub in the woods?? A rustic bathhouse is an immediate draw that will entice people to come visit and get invested in the project.

If we do it well, I think the solar-powered bathhouse will go a long way toward helping us raise the money required to build out the rest of the vision. And we will do it well; Charlie’s dad is an expert potter and is keen to use his studio on the property to make tiles for the bathhouse, and Charlie’s godfather is an architect and has graciously offered to do some pro bono design work for us. And, as you know, I’m very passionate about somatics and the therapeutic effect of cold-water swimming and sauna. (This is one of the many passions that Charlie and I share.) With the Newton cold-water crew, I’ve seen firsthand how these practices are shortcuts to building community.

So that’s where things stand. This coming weekend, Charlie and I will be visiting a Nordic spa in Quebec to see how they do it way up north. (Now there’s a type of research I can get behind!) I’ll continue to write about our progress as often as I am able, and if you feel moved to contribute to our effort in any way — financially, or with your expertise, or just by offering your manual labor — you know how to reach me.

—Jake

P.S. Happy Spring! It’s sunny and nearly sixty degrees today in Boston, and the crocuses, daffodils, and wild irises are popping off.

The final hour is perhaps the most dangerous phase of a round-trip spaceflight.

In the case of NASA’s retired Space Shuttle program, the spacecraft would begin its descent from low Earth orbit and graze the tenuous outer atmosphere at a blazing 17,000 mph, colliding with air molecules at such velocity that the frictional drag would heat the underside of the craft to 3000 °F. There’s no margin for error in this maneuver: a few damaged heat-resistant tiles on the underbelly of the Space Shuttle Columbia caused it to burn up on reentry almost exactly 20 years ago, on a February morning in 2003. As a space-obsessed adolescent, the Columbia disaster left an impression on me. I still remember what I was doing (morning post office errand with mom) when the TV news started to show video of the unfolding catastrophe. In the footage, one fireball in the sky multiplies into a swarm of meteors streaming earthward; pieces of the disintegrating vehicle fell to the ground in a debris trail stretching from West Texas to Louisiana.

I don’t mean to trivialize a tragedy, but my return to Newton has called to mind the final voyage of the Columbia. When I first got home, I lost consciousness within five minutes of entering the house (I’ll explain). My personal debris trail — the e-bike and 75+ pounds of gear that I had hauled all the way across the country — is still mostly strewn about on the ground in the garage, on the porch, on various floors and closets where I dropped it a little over a week ago. A few days after getting back, I organized an event that was broken up by eight firefighters and seven cops, who showed up with two firetrucks, an ambulance, and at least three police cruisers (again, I’ll explain). Two days after that, I tested positive for COVID. In my comfortable and privileged life, this qualifies as a disastrous run of events. But don’t worry — I’m in surprisingly good spirits.

I had originally planned for this post to be a retrospective on my Amtrak/e-bike trip, but I think it makes sense to save the reflections for a future post. If the quality has suffered, it’s because of the brain fog from COVID.

My train arrived at Back Bay station in Boston last Tuesday afternoon, almost exactly on time. This concluded a very lucky streak with Amtrak punctuality: of my seven train segments, the only notably late arrival was the 1-hour delay into Alpine, TX. (Because Amtrak shares the tracks with freight, long-haul Amtrak passengers should be prepared for delays of 24+ hours. This surely suppresses ridership.)

Unfortunately, while deboarding, I somehow lost my gloves. This is not unusual; I lose things. On my trip I had already lost my water bottle, my favorite bag for exercise equipment, and my AirPods. Over the years I’ve cultivated an “easy come, easy go” attitude toward material possessions. (I have since found my AirPods.) But it stung to lose my gloves, just as I needed them most for my final ride in the coldest climate of the whole trip.

Clearly, I should have bought a new pair of gloves. But I was so eager to be home that I decided to suck it up and bike bare-handed. The ride home was 8 miles, and it was just above freezing out. My hands were useless by the time I got home, stiff and numb. After fumbling with my keys at the door for a minute, my grandma came to my rescue to help me over the threshold. She offered to make me a cup of tea, which at the time sounded like a divine intervention.

Inside the warm house, a wave of relief washed over me as I contemplated how far I had come with my bike and gear — all the way from California! I mentally ran through all the logistical challenges I had overcome, all the sketchy situations I had slithered though without major accident or injury. But as my icy hands started to re-warm, I began to experience shooting pains that radiated up from my fingers and palms. It felt like I was rummaging my hands around in a bucket of broken glass. Soon I started to feel very lightheaded. I thought maybe my blood sugar was low, so I started frantically munching grapes from the bowl on the kitchen counter. That didn’t seem to help. Hoping to get more blood flowing to my head, I lay down on the dining room floor. My grandma was busy with the tea and didn’t notice anything amiss, so she continued to converse with me as my field of vision started to gray over. Her questions sounded as if they were coming from the end of a long tunnel. I didn’t want to make a scene or worry her, so I got up without saying anything and managed to walk to the TV room, where I got horizontal on the couch and finally accepted that I was going to pass out.

I don’t think I was out for very long. A little shaky and clammy, I walked back to the kitchen and found my cup of tea waiting, still hot. I texted my partner: “Immediately fainted wtf.”

I’ve since learned the medical terms for the shooting pain in my hands: peripheral vasoconstriction and reactive hyperemia. The body’s priority in a cold environment is to keep your core temperature up; since my hands were so exposed on my ride home, the circulatory system inside my fingers contracted (vasoconstriction), to limit the flow of chilled blood to my core. Inside the house, when my brain sensed that I was back in a warm environment, it tried to push more blood back into my fingers (hyperemia), but apparently my blood vessels hadn’t yet gotten the message that it was safe to unclench. A painful fluidic traffic jam ensued.

This doesn’t exactly explain why I fainted, though. I’ve certainly endured worse pain without losing consciousness. I think the pain must have interacted with an emotional component, some surge of brain chemicals that was released upon completion of my trip, producing a dramatic final flourish. Talk about a mind-body connection.

But even that isn’t the whole story. The truth is, I’m prone to fainting. There is clearly a genetic component: my mom and brother are similarly afflicted. Over the winter holidays, my brother and I swapped stories of all the times we’ve hit the deck, while my partner listened on, horrified. The time in the training room in college, a sudden sharp pain in my shoulder — Bam! On the floor. The time my brother got up to pee in the night and stubbed his toe — Boom! On the couch, no idea how he got there. The time I was getting IV anesthesia before wisdom teeth surgery, and the nurse said “Whoops, nicked a valve!” — Ding! Out like a light. The time on the beach in Hawaii, when the lady broke her arm — Whump! Flat on the sand. And on and on.

Prior to last week, my most recent fainting episode occurred this past summer, a few days into the research "sabbatical" that I spent on a farm in Vermont. It was July, during a hot and muggy spell when it would soar into the 90s in the afternoon and barely let up overnight. I had spent the previous two days working full-time on the farm, and the work was much harder, physically, than my typical day as a climate scientist, yoked to my computer but air-conditioned. After two days sweating it out in the fields, my body desperately needed rest, but I had slept poorly the previous night. I fainted on my way to the outhouse shortly after waking up. I regained consciousness on the ground outside my cabin, naked and spread-eagled, staring up through the bright green tree canopy. The irony did not escape me: "Climate scientist escapes to farm and suffers heat stroke." My kind hosts on the farm drove me to the hospital, where I was given some IV fluids and discharged.

On one hand, fainting is common and generally thought to be pretty harmless, and I can definitely laugh about it in retrospect. But it’s also frightening. An episode of vasovagal syncope is, ultimately, a little blip in a body’s ability to maintain appropriate blood pressure, a tiny version of heart failure. I’m hoping that writing about it openly will make it seem less scary, to me and to others, when it inevitably happens again.

The rest of the work week was comparatively placid. You might imagine that I would be eager to ride my new e-bike to work, but I don’t actually intend to commute with it. I was a bike commuter for years, but last fall I realized that the combination of potholed roads, unprotected bike lanes, and infamously aggressive Boston drivers is just not for me. Fighting for my life in traffic first thing in the morning provoked such a surge of stress hormones that it would set a bad tone for my whole day. So, last semester I switched to running to Harvard along the Charles River path, a practice that I gladly resumed last week. By running instead of biking, I both get more exercise and arrive at work in an infinitely better mood. And I don’t think having an electric motor would significantly change the experience of bike commuting, so I’m not planning to use my e-bike for that purpose while I live here. Instead, I’ve been using the e-bike to haul groceries and firewood.

I was stockpiling firewood to prepare for the cold-plunge-and-sauna event that I helped organize this past weekend. One of my greatest joys from last semester was falling in with a crew of dedicated cold-water swimmers at the local lake in Newton. Our little community formed spontaneously on an unseasonably warm day in late October, when the air was just summery enough to make it seem like a good idea to get in the lake. The cold water was so invigorating that several of us decided to make a thing of it, and since then we’ve been going roughly twice a week. The ritual became increasingly elaborate as the season changed and the water temperature dropped; we each ordered dry robes, booties and gloves, water thermometers, then chipped in for a sauna tent and portable wood stove. We typically submerge up to our necks in the water for 5 minutes, distracting ourselves by chattering insanely about anything that comes to mind, and then rewarm in a car or the sauna, riding out the waves of shivers together. We all feel that this practice has a huge, positive impact on our mental health, keeping seasonal depression at bay and making us feel like general badasses. Prolonged cold water immersion must feel like a near-death experience to some deep part of the brain, and survival feels so sweet!

I dearly missed the cold-water crew and ritual while I was away on my trip, and couldn’t wait to get back into it. We planned a big reunion on Sunday afternoon, pre-Super-Bowl. Starting around 1 pm, we set up the sauna on the beach at the lake in Newton, split a bunch of firewood, and got the stove going. Soon we were sweating in the tent, so we ventured into the lake, using a shovel and our hands to bash through the layer of ice to create a path into the deeper water. Friends and family of the core cold-water crew joined us, up to eight people fitting into the sauna at a time, alternating between sitting and plunging, sweating and shivering. We shared a bottle of wine in paper cups. It was such a joyful, communal experience!

I was basking in the good vibes in the sauna when the authorities arrived to lay down Newton’s Laws. (Sadly, I don’t think my training in physics helped during this encounter.) I emerged from the tent and counted 15 officials, split roughly evenly between firemen and policemen. The parking lot at the lake was full of trucks and cruisers parked in a hurry, lights flashing. The head of the fire squad was red-faced and furious, and his priority was to put out the fire in the stove immediately, despite the fact that there was clearly no imminent threat. It was bad timing: I had just packed the firebox with a load of fresh wood, and the stove was cranking. In pursuit of this goal to extinguish all fun ASAP, he instructed his squad to do all sorts of unsafe things, like dismantling the chimney and dumping the basket of sauna rocks, both of which were blistering hot. He had one hapless fireman fully close the dampener on the chimney, causing smoke to puff out of the firebox. “That’s a good way to fill the tent with carbon monoxide,” I said, expressing my profound disappointment by offering passive-aggressive fire safety tips to the firemen. Eventually they brought out a water extinguisher and doused the stove.

One particularly smug and paternalistic police officer, surveying the scene with his thumbs through his belt loops, said “You guys can’t do any of this. That water is very cold, very dangerous. That ice can cut you. That fire could get out of control.” Catching sight of the half-empty bottle of wine outside the tent, which had been split between eight people, he added, “And you guys are drinking. None of this shit is allowed!”

I don’t mean to demonize everyone that broke up our gathering. I was definitely dismayed by the lack of composure of the head fireman, who seemed desperate to escalate the situation at every turn, and that one policeman in particular was acting like a real asshole for no reason. But, for the most part, the underlings seemed regretful, or even ashamed. They could tell they were disbanding a community-driven event that promotes mental and physical well-being. Some clearly got a kick out of the crazy folks hanging out in bathing suits at the lake in the winter. Out of earshot of the head honchos, some were curious about the pragmatics of the stove and tent. Some assured me that if it were up to them, they’d be leaving us alone.

In the end, we didn’t get fined, and I didn’t get a clear picture of what laws were broken, exactly — maybe trespassing, maybe something to do with “open fires.” But I’m certain that we won’t feel comfortable doing this again in this location. It’s such a shame, but it’s not the end of the world. Our practice will have to change, but it’s not going to stop entirely. For a while now, we’ve been debating what we should call our group. After our run-in with the law, we’re going with The Newton Cold Water Rebels.

I admit, I was in the pits on Monday. Mostly, I think I was gutted by the end of the lakeside sauna ritual. Then, Tuesday morning, only two days after cramming into the small tent with a bunch of friends, I woke up feeling weirdly allergic. I took a COVID test, and it came back positive. Damn!

This is my second round with COVID; I also had it a little over a year ago, when the Omicron variant was first circulating widely. I’ve been boosted multiple times and my symptoms are manageable; I’m just hoping that our unlawful sauna gathering doesn’t also turn out to be a super-spreader event. (So far, no one else has any symptoms.)

At this point, my biggest beef with COVID is how it messes with plans. Both of my bouts of COVID have coincided with plans to meet up with Climate Up Close, the climate outreach organization I helped found. The first time, I missed the beginning of our outreach tour in Florida but was able to join for the end, so it wasn’t a total loss. This time, we had planned to have a writing retreat at my family’s cabin in New Hampshire this coming weekend, but the timing of my illness is so perfectly bad that we’ve decided to reschedule entirely.

So, it hasn’t exactly been a smooth landing. Coming off of my trip, I really wanted to hit the ground running. There is so much to do — science to catch up on, Infinite Woods projects to work on and write about, relationships to reinvest in, fitness goals to pursue, blog posts to write — but I’m stuck in quarantine, isolated, fatigued and not feeling particularly sharp of mind.

I guess I just have to practice patience. Accept the mandated slow-down. Save my energy for the next phase of growth.

—Jake

If all goes well today, I should be home in a few hours.

I’m so ready. I’m ready to sleep in my own bed again. I’m ready to go hard in the kitchen, four burners and the oven all cranking at once. I’m ready to resume my polar plunge and sauna ritual at the lake in Newton. I’m ready to be back in my office at Harvard, working on science and attending seminars and journal clubs. I’m ready to wear different shirts, a different pair of pants; ready to winterize with jackets and scarves and mittens. I hope the snow is ready, so I can get in some cross-country skiing before the cold lets up.

I think this will be my last travelogue-style post of the trip. I’d like to follow up with another post of reflections, lessons learned, etc. (I’m telling you this so that I’m accountable.) From there, the blog will transition into post-trip mode, and who knows what form my posts will take.

But for now: back to the travelogue.

Since my last post, my mood has been up, down, and up again.

As the train approached New Orleans last Friday, I was buoyed by the enthusiastic response that my Infinite Woods teaser was receiving here in blog-world. I feel your energy, readers!

My “up” phase of mood continued to build during a whirlwind 36 hours in New Orleans. I was hosted by Adam, an old friend from high school back in Illinois. We had a beautiful Saturday to work with — sunny and in the 60s — and Adam planned a perfect 15-mile biking tour of the city, with many stops to keep hunger and thirst at bay. At brunch, we shared a $24 crawfish omelette mainly for the blog tie-in, and I had some of the best jambalaya of my life from a very average-looking corner store.

We mostly rode our own bikes, but when we hit the Audubon Park, Adam took the e-bike for a lap. Adam thought it was fun, which is high praise: one of Adam’s passions is to drive very fast in very nice, very loud cars, and I wasn’t sure the virtually silent 250-watt Bosch motor on my Tern Vektron S-10 would cut it for him. After biking alone this whole trip, it was a pleasure to finally share both the bike itself and the joy of biking with a friend.

For the sake of completeness, I’m going to describe our evening as well, although it has essentially nothing to do with the themes of this blog. After our bike adventure, Adam and I donned “fun” outfits (Adam: sweeping purple cape, Zoro mask; me, making do with my limited wardrobe: short orange running shorts, white linen shirt), and lined up to watch a very raunchy and politically-charged parade called Krewe du Vieux. I’m keeping it PG on the blog, so unfortunately there can be no pictures of parade floats.

We then segued to a party hosted by the heir to an Australian butter fortune. People call this man “The Butter Baron”, but not to his face. Guests entered the party through a large white double gate, which opened into a verdant courtyard in the space between two houses, both in the baron’s possession. A mermaid was swimming in the courtyard’s pool; a live band played from the balcony of the back house. Several attendees referred to the atmosphere at the party as Gatsby-esque. I swear I’m not making any of this up.

Huge shoutout to Adam for showing me a good time, as always.

I’ll admit, I didn’t get a ton of sleep Saturday night. Even though I hardly drink, the general bacchanalian excess of New Orleans definitely got to me, and I was in a foul mood on the train platform on Sunday morning. The trip from New Orleans to New York City would be my longest Amtrak segment yet, and I’ve been feeling more and more homesick; I haven’t slept in my own bed for over 6 weeks now. I’m not camping any more, so all my gear just feels like a lot of weight to lug around. My bike, in particular, weighs about 50 pounds, and while boarding the train in New Orleans, as I lifted my bike into the cargo area, I heard a “pop” and felt a sharp pain in my right wrist. Uh oh. I think it’s an ulnar sprain; I definitely have physical therapy in my future.

So, as I sat in my train seat — bleary-eyed, homesick, newly injured, looking down the barrel of a 36-hour train segment that offered little prospect for bodily rejuvenation — it was clear that I had entered a “down” phase of mood. Then, two unrelated events turned things around: 1) my mom offered to upgrade my Amtrak fare to a roomette for this segment of my trip; and 2) I met a pair of long-distance e-bikers who write a climate blog. (I’m sorry, what?)

First, a tribute to my mom: Ma, I can’t thank you enough! Once the upgrade was confirmed over the phone, I was ushered through the labyrinthine halls of the sleeper car and shown to my roomette. Having a roomette feels like having a berth in a spaceship. It’s a small space, approximately 3.5 feet wide, 6.5 feet long, and 8 feet tall. Amtrak claims that two people can share one; I’m not sure about that, but the roomette is absolutely crammed with cleverly engineered features. There’s a fold-out sink, fold-out table, two chairs that combine into a lower bunk, an upper loft bunk that raises and lowers, cubbies for luggage, outlets, an intercom speaker, thermostat, reading lights, six windows with curtains, and countless switches, levers, and buttons that call to mind a 1970s conception of the future. There’s even a toilet in the roomette, which I thought was one convenience too many.

My main gripe about the roomette concerns the fold-out sink. The flow of water is controlled by binary on-off levers — one for hot and one for cold — and water only comes out if you’re actively depressing a lever, meaning you’re automatically down a hand when using the sink. Even worse, the pressure is set to “firehose”, so the water comes out with such velocity that when it hits your free hand, or your toothbrush, or the metal bowl of the sink, it ricochets in all directions and soaks everything in the vicinity. I would pay a lot of money to see an Amtrak instructional video on how to use that sink in a dignified manner, because I’m positive it’s impossible.

Anyway, in all seriousness, having the roomette made an immediate, huge difference in my mood. I closed all the curtains, climbed into the bunk, and conked out for a four-hour nap.

I’ve written previously about how, throughout this trip, kindred spirits have seemed to just manifest themselves into my life. Well, the serendipitous meetings have continued with the case of Michael and Jenny. They approached me first, before boarding in the train hall, complimenting my bike and peppering me with inside-baseball e-bike questions: How many watts is the motor? The weight without battery? They had already checked their e-bikes onto the train, but I could tell they were legit just from their small mountain of well-worn Ortlieb panniers. Game recognize game!

We lost each other during the rush of boarding, but caught up again in the aisles of the train, tripping over our words in an ever-intensifying realization of kinship. Michael asked me, “So is it because of climate that you don’t fly?” I replied that although I do fly, I’m still climate-motivated. I was waffling internally over mentioning my climate blog (self-promotion still does not come naturally to me), when Michael said, “We write a blog, Carbon Stories. It’s climate stories, as seen from a bicycle.” Jenny smoothly handed me a contact card with the details of their blog.

Clearly, we had even more to talk about than I had first realized. But the adrenaline of boarding was wearing off, and I was fading fast. I excused myself for my nap, and by the time I woke up, my new friends had read my entire blog and littered the comments section with encouraging and informative comments. We had agreed to meet for dinner in the cafe car, which was coming right up, so it was my turn to dig into their blog.

There is a wealth of incredible content at Carbon Stories. Early in the blog’s history, before Jenny started joining him on trips, Michael would post frequently while on the road, travelogue-style, with accounts of bike mishaps and serendipitous meetings (sound familiar?) But recent posts are more epic in scope, one per bike trip, and contain well-researched deep dives into environmental issues that are tied to the places he and Jenny ride through, such as coastal erosion and sustainable shellfish harvesting in Prince Edward Island, or the irrigation challenges of ranchers in the drought-stricken southwest. Interspersed throughout the stories are Jenny’s beautifully detailed and hand-illustrated character portraits of folks they meet through their travels. Michael and Jenny are both deeply artistic humanists — before retirement, Michael was a theatre professor, and Jenny worked on Broadway — and their blog blends these sensibilities with a passionate engagement in climate and environmental issues and a serious dose of athleticism (they carry spare battery packs so they can ride up to 100 miles in a day). They’ve been at this together for the past five years, with the goal of taking a trip every other month. Did I mention they’re retired, each with grandkids? To say I was inspired is an understatement.

At dinner, three hours of fellowship flew by. From my perspective, anyway, I felt that we were basking in mutual recognition, astonished by each new dimension of overlap between us. It was clear that I was in the presence of sages, and I was green. For all the mistakes I had made on my trip, they had solutions. Jenny has perfected the art of bringing fresh, healthy food on the train, which she generously shared with me. I have the reputation of being a bottomless pit at mealtime, but Michael could keep up. We had just polished off some peanut butter and rice crackers when he busted out what looked to be a pound of chocolate, and said “This chocolate is gonna rock your world. The weight in the saddlebag is worth it.”

When our train stopped in Washington, DC, Michael and I geeked out over the swapping of the engine from diesel to electric (outside of the Northeast Corridor, most Amtrak trains are diesel-powered). Michael asked the conductor if any of the $66 billion earmarked for Amtrak in the Inflation Reduction Act will go toward further rail electrification, but the conductor didn’t think so. “We’re barely keeping this equipment running as it is. That will mostly go toward track maintenance and expansion.” This conductor clearly didn’t think too highly of Amtrak upper management: he had just finished graffiti-ing “WASH ME!!” on the side of the newly-conjoined electric engine. (At first, I thought he was inscribing our point of origin, in Washington, DC, but it turns out it was a message for the higher-ups.) “It’s disgraceful how dirty this shit is…” the conductor muttered as he walked away.

Michael, Jenny, and I continued to hang out throughout the trip to New York City, and we’re already talking of doing a trip together at some point in the future. I feel blessed to count this remarkable pair as new friends.

There’s a reason so many classic movies are set on trains. A train is a world unto itself, full of nooks and crannies, history, quirky characters, a caste system of “haves” and “have-nots” (due to my roomette upgrade, I briefly became one of the “haves” on the leg from New Orleans). This is all true of an airplane, as well, but most plane flights are too short to allow much of significance to unfold. A long-haul train trip has room for a whole plot.

As much as this trip has given me, I think I’m just about ready for this plot to wrap up.

—Jake

I know I just posted last night, but I’m in my feelings today.

I’m still on the train to New Orleans. There’s not much to report on that front. I slept poorly, which is to be expected since I didn’t shell out for a roomette. Actually, this leg of the trip is taking a toll on my body in several ways. It’s been hard to get exercise or fresh food. I look haggard, and I just feel… meh. I got out for a walk during the hourlong stop in Houston, which made a big difference in my mood. Even walking around highways and underpasses can feel nice when you’ve been cooped up.

So, I don’t want to talk about the train. Instead, I thought now would be a great time to slip in a quick meta-post, about what this blog has meant to me and what it might mean to you, going forward.

I’ll start with what this blog might mean to you. Dear readers, I am so thankful to everyone who has encouraged my writing by engaging with me on this platform. Three of you have even communicated that you would like to continue hearing from me after this particular trip wraps up, by pledging to pay me a yearly subscription fee through Substack. I was and am flabbergasted by this gesture of support. While I don’t think I’ll turn on paid subscriptions anytime soon, please know that your pledge of future financial support puts a fire in my belly.

By extrapolation from the aforementioned superfans, I am going to assume that there’s a chunk of you who like what’s been happening around here. But we’re at an inflection point: I’m rapidly approaching the end of this train trip, and once I’m back in New England, back in my typical routines, my headspace is going to change. I can’t promise I’ll be the same writer once I’m outside the reality-distortion field of a long-haul Amtrak trip. I think I’d like to keep writing, but I’m not sure how often, and I’m not sure what I’ll want to write about.

That’s where you can help me out. If you plan to keep reading, it would be super helpful for me to know: What type of content do you want more of? Please fill out the poll below. (I’m sorry that you can only choose one answer; if you feel constrained, feel free to express your outrage in the comments section.)

Thanks for taking the time to fill out the poll.

Next, I want to say a few words about what this blog has meant to me.

Maybe you think I’m being too sentimental about this — so I went for some expensive bike rides, caught some trains, and wrote about it. Big whoop! But it has felt like a big deal to me, and I want to say that out loud. Writing this blog has meant a lot of practice thinking out loud, which is scary. Sure, I can edit my thoughts before posting — but what if I think something fundamentally stupid or boring or cheesy? There’s an insatiable critic inside of me, which is the definition of a double-edged sword. Knowing that you readers are getting something out of my writing makes all the self-doubt worth it.

Also, this may be news to you, but writing this blog has been a way for me to practice grieving out loud. Some of you know that my dad died from leukemia about 10 years ago. Somehow, he managed to write a very moving blog during his illness, which my mom has since turned into a beautiful book. I thought that inhabiting a medium that my dad had used to such powerful effect would be a way of reconnecting with him. It totally has. I’d certainly encourage you to check out his blog, although the subject is much heavier, and you’ll probably cry more reading it. (I hope my blog hasn’t made anyone cry yet.) Most of what is good about my blog, I probably learned from Dad.

So, it turns out there are a lot of answers to the “why” question. In the early stages of this adventure, after I had concluded two blog posts in a row by promising to write a future post that would explain the “why”, a friend asked me if I was putting it off because I didn’t actually know the answer yet myself. It was a joke, but it was also right on the money. To a large extent, I set out in this direction because I just had a gut feeling that good things would come from it. It wasn’t rational, exactly, but there was an energetic pull that was undeniable.

Following that gut feeling has paid off — in many small ways that I have written about previously, and one big way that I would like to tell you about now. For some time I’ve been feeling very passionate about building community around climate issues, and I had a hunch that a great way to meet like-minded folks would be to do something a little wacky — to fully invest in an exaggerated embodiment of some climate-related interests of mine, to really commit to the bit. That has absolutely panned out: on my academic visits and in everyday encounters throughout this trip, people with a passion for climate have seemed to just come out of the woodwork, perhaps responding to the same spirit that had moved me.

In the course of my adventure, I met one particularly important kindred spirit. His name is Charlie, and shortly after meeting, he and I realized we had been dreaming the same dreams about building a new type of climate community: a solar-powered research institute and retreat in the woods of Vermont.

So, we’ve decided to team up for a really big adventure that will make this solar-powered e-bike shenanigan look like child’s play. We’re calling this community-building project Infinite Woods.

I’m incredibly excited to keep working on Infinite Woods with Charlie, and I’ll definitely be writing about our progress. I hope you’ll stay tuned.

—Jake

Oh, to be back in Tucson!

I ended my last post on a high note, congratulating myself on a solid stretch of solar-powered mobile freedom. My experience in Arizona was so joyful that I could imagine other people wanting to do what I was doing, which was a new feeling for this trip. I caught myself daydreaming a future of solar boondocking with friends — a whole climate crew sipping on sunshine, hiking and zipping around on e-bikes together, cooking communal meals with our mobile kitchens. (If this sounds like your idea of a good time, you know how to reach me.)

Well, times have changed. For the past few days I’ve been in oil-and-gas territory in West Texas, and it appears that my era of energy independence is over. This phase of the trip has involved a series of mishaps, concessions, and compromises that, while certainly not the end of the world, have left me feeling a little defeated.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Monday

Back in Tucson, the morning after my last post went up, I had to catch an 8:45 am train. I set an alarm for 6 am, thinking that would give me an hour to pack up camp, another hour to bike the 16 miles from the horse ranch to the station, and still leave plenty of time on the platform for transformation into train mode: packing the contents of my panniers into a big duffel, folding up the e-bike, charming the Amtrak employees into waiving the baggage fee, etc.

When I awoke, it was far brighter than I was expecting for 6 am. The sun was clearly about to poke above the horizon, and my watch informed me that it was in fact 7 am. Apparently, I had somehow botched the whole alarm business. I had to laugh. It was as if old Jake (absentminded, logistically-challenged) saw the emerging Jake (competent, careful planner) patting himself on the back, and reared up to say: “Not so fast, buddy.”

I laughed, and then I busted my ass for 90 minutes to catch that train. I packed up camp in 30 minutes flat, put the bike in Turbo (the highest level of e-assist), and shouted a final thanks/goodbye to Lou as I peeled out of his gravel driveway. Google maps estimated that biking to the station would take an hour and fifteen minutes, putting my arrival at 8:45 am: probably not good enough to catch the train. But Google maps didn’t know about the 400 watt-hours of sunshine I had at my disposal. I was pretty sure I could make the trip in under an hour.

I pedaled as hard as I could, never more thankful to be on the pedestrian-only Tucson Loop. I would have had zero chance if had been contending with cars and stoplights, but with the bike path to myself, I was able to keep my speed around 20 mph nearly the entire way. I grew simultaneously incredibly cold and incredibly hot: the air whipping past me was barely above 32 °F, and my hands, feet, nose, and ears were underdressed and soon grew numb. My arms, legs, and core, on the other hand, were far overdressed and pouring sweat. But I didn’t think I could afford to stop and adjust. I just kept pedaling and eyeing the estimated arrival time, which was steadily ticking downward.

As I rolled into Tucson at about 8:20, I could hear the train’s whistle coming up behind me. It was comical; the train was clearly going to beat me to the station, but by how much? I pushed through the final leg, now on city streets, and barged onto the platform, where I was accosted by an Amtrak employee.

“Are you trying to catch this train?” he asked.

“Yes, am I here in time?” I huffed, out of breath.

“Yeah, but you have to wait like everyone else. Boarding line starts over there.”

Shoot — got off on the wrong foot with that employee. But I had made it.

Thrilling, skin-of-your-teeth experiences like that are what sustains a poor planner’s bad habits, and I rode that high for the entirety of the 12-hour train trip to Alpine, Texas. I was in such a good mood that I didn’t even mind the hour I had to spend in the train lavatory, washing the Dr. Bronner’s off of everything in my backpack. (In my rush to pack up camp, I hadn’t put the bottle of soap in a Ziploc bag. The Dr. Bronner’s always has to go in a bag.)

Working on my laptop in the train’s sightseer lounge was delightful — there is something about the endless motion outside the window that I find very conducive to deep thought. Our route passed through El Paso, across the border from Ciudad Juarez in Mexico. El Paso was a long stop, with time for passengers to get off, walk around, smoke a cigarette, or — in my case — pay a visit to the burrito lady, who apparently has been meeting the Sunset Limited train three days a week for over 20 years. Her burritos were, unsurprisingly, super legit. Shortly after leaving El Paso, we were treated to an epic, whole-sky-on-fire sunset.

As we neared my destination of Alpine, TX, it became clear that the train was running over an hour late. My plan, which was starting to seem not-so-good, was to bike 26 miles from Alpine to a campground in Marfa, TX. This would be my longest bike segment yet, and my legs were still smarting from the surprise sprint to Tucson earlier that day. Due to the late arrival, I would be starting at about 10 pm, and as I looked out the train window, it appeared that Alpine, TX was living up to its name: mountainous, elevation 4,500 ft, often quite cold in the winter. With a growing sense of doom, I realized that my bike route to Marfa would be primarily along a two-lane highway with a speed limit of (checks Wikipedia) 75 mph.

There’s no sugarcoating it: I had made a bad plan. Just because Google maps will plot a bike route for you doesn’t mean anyone in their right mind would actually ride that route. (App idea: bike route planner with safety bumpers for those without a death wish.) I was waiting by the train door with all my stuff, steeling myself for what would surely be a tough ride, when I saw that my seat mate was getting off the train too. We hadn’t spoken much on the train, but now I made fun of him for wearing shorts, probably to make myself feel better about how unprepared I was. He asked if I was backpacking, and I clarified that I was bikepacking, as if that made it better. But it turned out that he was headed to Marfa, too — and getting picked up by a friend with a car. Before I knew what had happened, I had blurted out: Might this friend have room for an additional passenger, a folding bike, and a bunch of solar gear? A quick text exchange ensued. His friend thought it was worth a shot.

As we stood there chatting, I learned that my seatmate, whose name is Pat, lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He had flown into El Paso, where he caught the train, and was headed to Marfa for a poetry workshop run by the very friend who soon pulled up in a Prius and honked. This friend, I learned, is both very generous and very well-known (they have an excellent poem in the current issue of Harper’s). It was tight, but my bike and everything else fit in the Prius, and as we drove the two-lane highway to Marfa in the dark, with semi-trucks roaring past in the other direction at 80+ mph, I knew I had made the right decision. I like to challenge myself, but there’s a big difference between hard and downright dangerous.

The poets delivered me safely to Marfa, and I set up camp in the dark, a little starstruck under the big open sky.

Tuesday

The next morning was cold and overcast. I had full batteries, so I made some oatmeal for breakfast inside my tent and biked to town to get a few groceries. I set up my solar panel and pointed it where I thought the sun was — it was nearly impossible to tell, with all the cloud cover — and pulled a measly 10 watts. I love clouds, but they are not your friend when you’re solar-powered; there was no chance I could refill my battery enough to cook dinner. Bummer.

Seeking warmth, I spent most of the day working on my laptop at a coffee shop in town that adjoins a laundromat, where I gave my two outfits a long-overdue wash. Marfa felt like a ghost town, probably because it’s not tourist season and fewer than 2000 people live there anyway. Plus, the weather was awfully dreary. The forecast called for the overcast to turn to an all-day chilly rain for Wednesday.

I biked back to my tent shortly before dark to make sure that my rain fly was staked properly to keep things dry during the coming storm. While I was inspecting a line, my bike fell over behind me. “That’s weird,” I thought — it had never lost balance like that before. Then I realized it had fallen because my rear tire had gone completely flat.

The prospect of fixing a flat tire in the coming cold rainstorm got me thinking that it was time for another compromise. I was camping at El Cosmico, which the local Marfans accurately refer to as a hipster trap. In addition to decently affordable tent camping, which includes access to communal outdoor baños, El Cosmico also offers several more substantial but overpriced lodging options, including trailers, teepees, and yurts. I walked around the site, weighing my options, and came upon a handsome yurt with a green door. It looked cozy. Then, around back, I saw that this yurt had a heat pump. That sealed the deal — if anything gets me as excited as a bunch of solar panels, it’s a heat pump. I upgraded at the front desk and moved into my yurt for the storm.

Boy was it luxurious in there. After days of careful energy rationing, suddenly I had unlimited electricity. The heat pump, pulling up to several thousand watts from the grid, could easily keep the yurt at a comfortable 70 degrees — or significantly warmer, if I wanted a sauna experience. I could simultaneously run the heat pump, my induction stove at its maximum power of 1300 watts, a space heater, and a fan, all while charging my e-bike, laptop, and cell phone. Famine to feast!

Once I was unpacked and comfortable, I thought about fixing my flat, but I had already decided that I wasn’t going to try to bike back to Alpine to catch my next train. The rain storm we were getting was going to be an ice storm in Alpine and other parts of Texas, and that highway wasn’t going to get any safer. So, while I needed to fix my flat, I also needed to find a ride back to Alpine. I decided to prioritize finding the ride. I headed into town, ready to flirt like my life depended on it.

But the only person at the Hotel St. George bar was Pat, the poet from P-Town. He couldn’t be my ride — he’d be busy with the poetry workshop on Thursday, the day of my train — but that was OK, because he was quickly becoming my Marfriend. I gave up on my ride search for the night, and Pat and I hung out at the bar. I ate dinner while he drank decaf.

Wednesday

The next day, I spent the morning in the yurt fixing my flat tire. The storm had arrived as promised, and the rain was making a ruckus on my roof. Nothing makes you appreciate shelter like a storm.

Getting the rear wheel off was quite difficult without a bike stand, but I managed. Inspecting, I discovered that my tube had been punctured by a burr from a plant that is literally called “puncturevine” (or Goat’s Head, or Devil’s Eyelash). I wasn’t too surprised: these little burrs were everywhere. I stepped on several dozen, painfully, throughout my stay at El Cosmico — if my feet were inflatable, I would have been caught flat-footed more often than not. The puncture was so small that I lost it immediately after removing the burr, and I had to submerge the tube in the communal baño to find the leak.

Applying the patch was straightforward, but both bike pumps at El Cosmico leaked enough that they couldn’t fully inflate my tire. I suited up in my rain gear, rode the bike with a barely-inflated rear tire to the nearest gas station, paid two dollars, and filled ‘er up. The patch held! I rode back to camp smiling. It was a satisfying repair — enjoyable, even — and the adventure into the cold rain for air was completely tolerable because I knew I could go right back to my cozy shelter.

Back in the yurt, I made a call to the Marfa Visitor Center and learned that they have a group of retirees on speed dial who offer rides to and from Marfa. I arranged for Belinda to pick me up on Thursday evening and take me back to the train. That was both transportation problems solved — how’s that for some logistical prowess!

I met up with Pat later that afternoon, and he snuck me into the Hotel St. George gym for a workout.

Thursday

I’m writing this post on the train to New Orleans. I’m back in the sightseer lounge, although it’s pitch black out. My ride to Alpine with Belinda earlier today was smooth — plenty of room for everything in her Toyota 4runner. Belinda and I hit it off right away over a shared love of Big Bend National Park; she had spent the previous weekend there photographing and measuring the sizes of bluebonnets, as she often does. The train was only 10 minutes late, and I’m finally getting the hang of the boarding routine.

Looking back, it’s clear that if Tucson was my independent era, the theme of my time in Marfa is: Dependence. Dependence on fossil fuels, for safety and comfort; dependence on the generosity and friendship of strangers, to get around and to keep my spirits high.

It’s an instructive reminder. We’re all in this together; independence is an illusion in all but the most extreme cases. We’re not going to stop global warming by convincing everyone to become solar-powered e-bike nomads; we all want to keep taking hot showers, driving comfortable air-conditioned vehicles, living with an abundance of energy always on tap. That’s why I (and many others) believe the way to stop global warming is by electrifying everything — all the activities and services we need to live safe, comfortable lives — and supplying that electricity with a grid that is overwhelmingly powered by wind and solar.

My all-electric yurt experience was halfway there. Although I wasn’t burning any lumps of coal or burning natural gas myself, there was a lot of fossil fuel combustion behind all that grid electricity I was happily guzzling. The Texas electricity grid’s “fuel mix” is about 60% fossil fuels (40% natural gas, 20% coal), the rest made up by wind (25%), nuclear (10%), and solar (5%).

This is not particular to Texas: no matter where you live in the United States, the grid is propped up by fossil fuels, and most of us still operate fossil-fuel-powered equipment every day. This means that we’re a long way — likely many decades — from stopping global warming. It will be a long battle, and that makes it all the more important to keep the goal clearly in sight: electrify everything, and clean up the grid. The hard part is figuring out how to get it done as safely, equitably, and quickly as possible.

— Jake

I’m a solar-powered creature at the moment, and Tucson seems like the place to be in January.

I have the data to back this up. Check out this map of average sunlight reaching the ground in January:

As you can see, here in Tucson I’m located close to the peak of solar potential for this month. (It’s about to get a little quantitative — feel free to skip to the next paragraph if putting numbers to things doesn’t improve your day.) The units on this map are kilowatt-hours per square meter per day, so a value of 7 (near the red end of the color scale) means that you can expect seven thousand watt-hours of sunlight to fall on an average 3-foot by 3-foot patch of ground here, every day. That’s a lot of juice! Of course, it’s impossible to capture all of it. A good solar panel is typically around 20% efficient, meaning that if you tracked the sun with a solar panel perfectly throughout the day, you could expect to collect about 20% of 7000, or 1400, watt-hours for every square meter of solar panel you have. My panel is a little smaller than one square meter when it’s unfolded, and I don’t like to sit around and babysit the panel’s orientation, so 1000 watt-hours seems like a reasonable upper bound on how much I could collect in a day here. As I mentioned in post #4, my e-bike battery is 400 watt-hours, and my external battery bank is 720 watt-hours, for a total battery capacity of about 1100 watt-hours. That means a good sunny day can almost completely refill my bike and the external battery!

The upshot is, I haven’t had any trouble powering my life here with sunshine. I’ve taken my bike to get tacos, to buy groceries, and to get to trails. I’ve cooked all of my meals (except the tacos I bought) on my induction cooktop, running off the battery bank. And it’s been easy to just point the panels at the sun, go out for a while, and come back to find everything fully charged. It’s very, very satisfying.

I say I’m in Tucson, but I’m actually pitching my tent at a horse ranch 16 miles northwest of where the Amtrak dropped me off. The ride here couldn’t have been more different from the 16-mile ride from Union Station to Pasadena from post #3. The ride in LA was dark and wet; the ride in Arizona took place on a beautiful sunny morning. The ride in LA had me depressed about the state of bike infrastructure in this country; the ride in Arizona was almost entirely on the “Tucson Loop,” a sort of bike-only superhighway that links top destinations in and around the city. My route in Arizona even took me past a utility-scale solar installation! Auspicious.

This horse ranch turned out to be a great find. I knew I wanted to explore Saguaro National Park while I was here, but I couldn’t find any camping spots near the park, and the ones inside the park were hike-in and at elevation. Luckily, the ranch popped up on Google maps, and when I called to explain my situation, the owner said “Everything’s on your bike? Wow! Yeah, just show up. We’ll take care of you.”

And I do feel well taken care of. I’m set up out behind the “saloon”, a space that reeks of tobacco and is full of guitar equipment and off-color wall hangings. It’s been empty, but it’s not hard to imagine a bunch of cowboys sitting around playing poker in there. My bathroom, which is the saloon bathroom, is home to a Big Mouth Billy Bass (The Singing Sensation), and consequently I’ve had “Take Me To The River” stuck in my head all weekend. Lou, the ranch owner, is a super sweet guy. When I was heading out to get tacos on Saturday night, he offered to make me some tacos instead, apparently worried about my safety on the roads. I showed him how bright the lights are on my e-bike, which seemed to satisfy him. Overall, it’s a great vibe at the ranch. I’m hoping the horse theme continues in Texas.

The best thing about the horse ranch is the riding trails that start out the back door of the saloon and lead straight into Saguaro National Park. My first day here, I went for an amazing run in the late afternoon. I didn’t see a single other human out there; it was just me and the other desert fauna — roadrunners, black-tailed jackrabbits, coyotes, and lizards — all us weaving through the flora of saguaros, ocotillos, and chollas. It was paradise.

It was so nice out in the desert wilderness that I did another big run/hike in Saguaro on Sunday. The weather was phenomenal. This being the desert, the temperature variability is large: highs near 70, overnight lows in the mid-30s. I’ve got a very warm sleeping bag, and I’ve been sleeping in my tent without the rain fly so I can see the stars. It’s super nice.

So, I’m sad to be leaving Tucson so soon. I feel that the whole conceit of this solar-powered e-bikepacking trip has been validated by my experience here. As those close to me will attest, I am not exactly what you would call a planner. Things like “logistics” and “thinking of future Jake” are definitely growth areas for me. But that was actually part of the appeal of this trip: it seemed like a challenge that would help me grow. And I did do a lot of planning, in the end — perhaps motivated by the threat of suffering if I didn’t. This leg of the trip has been so smooth that I am giving myself a pat on the back.

Thanks so much for following along! As always, I love hearing from you in the comments.

—Jake

Whew, my time in southern California really flew by. Now that I'm leaving, I'd like to tell you about the neighborhood I’ve been staying in, where my friends Jon and Bella live.

When I first I turned onto their street, back toward the end of post #3, there was a serious vibe change: after miles fully exposed to the rain on wide, flat, densely populated streets, suddenly I was on a one-lane road winding up into a lush canyon, enveloped by trees that muted the rain. A topographic map confirms that their street, Pasadena Glen, snakes directly up a steep-walled canyon into the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains. The neighborhood is contiguous with the Angeles National Forest, which contains the massive peaks that loom over Los Angeles, including the 10,000 footer, Mt. Baldy.

The morning after I arrived, the sky was clearing but everything else was still soaked. We walked out their front door and past towering cacti, coast live oaks, and fully-loaded citrus trees — pomelo, orange, kumquat, lemon. In five minutes we arrived at a small horse ranch, home to three racehorses enjoying a sweet retirement in the hills overlooking the city.

There is a lot of wildlife in the neighborhood: deer, lizards, mountain lions, all sorts of birds. We walked past a tree that had been gouged by bear paws. It was incredibly serene, and more than a little wild.

It is a strikingly peaceful neighborhood. Until it isn't. Shortly after I arrived, Jon handed me a book called “The Control of Nature”, by John McPhee, along with a warning that, since it had been raining for weeks, it might make for scary reading. I appreciated the reference, and the content warning was appropriate: the third chapter of McPhee’s book chronicles Los Angeles' battle against “debris flows”, the violent masses of boulders and liquefied rubble that, under certain circumstances involving lots of rain, burst forth from the mountains in canyons just like the one Pasadena Glen is built into. These debris flows sweep up anything in their path — cars, trees, entire houses.

And once you start to look, the defenses that have been deployed against debris flows are everywhere. The gunite-reinforced channels. The culverts dipping back and forth beneath the road. The massive fence of 1-foot-diameter brown columns, meant to filter out large boulders that might block the culverts. And, most impressively, the debris basin, with its 30-foot “perforated riser,” which allows water to drain out even if the basin were to fill up with boulders.

John McPhee is one of my favorite observers of the natural world, and reading his writing while in the exact place he was describing was next-level cool, even if the subject was a little spooky. McPhee likens the sequence of events leading to a debris flow to the charging of an eighteenth-century muzzle loader: “the ramrod, the powder, the wadding, the shot. Nothing much would happen in the absence of any one component.” As he explains, the debris flow risk comes from a combination of three factors: 1) steep, rapidly eroding mountains; 2) vegetation that is prone to intense wildfires; and 3) infrequent but extremely intense rainfall.

Here’s McPhee describing the vertiginous mountains:

The San Gabriel mountains are as rugged as any terrain in America, and their extraordinary proximity to the city, the abruptness of the transition from the one milieu to the other, cannot be exaggerated. The slopes average sixty-five to seventy percent. In some places, they are vertical... In such terrain, there is not much to hold the loose material except the plants that grow there.

And here’s what he has to say about the vegetation, known as chaparral:

...all chaparral has in common an always developing, relentlessly intensifying, vital necessity to burst into flame. In a sense, chaparral consumes fire no less than fire consumes chaparral. Fire nourishes and rejuvenates the plants.

In other words, fire is part of the cycle of life in these ecosystems. (Human fire suppression and global warming have made recent fires more intense.) The inevitable fires are the first step in the sequence of events leading to a debris flow:

After a burn, so much dry ravel and other debris becomes piled up and ready to go that to live under one of those canyons is (as many have said) to look up the barrel of a gun.

With everything in place, what ultimately sets off the debris flow is an extreme rain event, like the sequence of “atmospheric rivers” that were dumping on California earlier in January, back when I was in the Bay Area. Or, to take a historical example:

In January of 1969, during a nine-day series of storms, twelve inches of rain fell in one night. A debris flow hit [Andrew Ingersoll’s] cabin, broke through a wall, and delivered three feet of mud, innumerable rocks, and one oak to the Ingersolls. The family regarded this as "just a lot of fun," he said.

Hold up, Andrew Ingersoll? Andy is a preeminent planetary scientist and a professor at Caltech. I have read many of his papers. As I learned more about the debris flows and how destructive they can be, I had naturally started to wonder what types of people would choose to live there. Turns out, it’s a mix of professors and people who don’t know better (at least, that’s how John McPhee tells it). Here McPhee is conversing with Leon Silver, a Caltech geologist who used to live way up in a canyon:

JM: "Why does anybody live there?"

LS: "They're not well informed. Most folks don't know the story of the fire-flood sequence. When it happens in the next canyon, they say, 'Thank God it didn't happen here.'"

JM: "Why would a geologist live there?"

LS: "It's a calculated risk. The higher you build, the cooler it is. There are great views. And at night, up there, the cool air off the mountains flows down and pushes the dirty air masses back. The head of our seismological laboratory lives on the mountain front. In fact, most of the Caltech geology department lives on the mountain front."

As well-informed as my friends are now, they admit that they didn’t quite know what they were getting in to when they bought their house. (Of course, realtors don’t exactly lead with the debris flow risk.) But if they ultimately decide to stay long-term, they are in good company:

To the question “Why, then, do people live there?” the answer seems to be that they are like [the naturalist] John Burroughs: they would rather defy nature than live without it.

If you want to read the whole McPhee story (which I recommend), it was originally published in a two-part New Yorker article called "Los Angeles Against the Mountains." (The first part is available to read for free on their website, but the second is behind a paywall. You can always get the book!)

That’s all for now. Oh, and by the way: I’m on the train to Tucson!

—Jake

P.S. I am so grateful to Jon, Bella, and Sulu for hosting me during my time in SoCal. It can get lonely on the road, but not with these guys around. Especially not with Sulu around.

Sorry if I left you hanging, readers! My excuse is that I had back-to-back academic visits at the beginning of this week. (I call this “The Introvert’s Gauntlet.”) Preparing for these visits monopolizes my creative energy for a few days beforehand, and on each visit I give a science seminar and have a full schedule of one-on-one meetings, speed-dating style. I’m really happy with how things went, but this introvert is feeling a little fried today!

There’s no rest for the weary, though. My Amtrak to Tucson is Friday night (in two days), and I need to make sure everything is in good working order before setting out. I have good news about my derailleur: I took it to a bike shop in Pasadena, and a mechanic confirmed my fears: “Yeah, your bike got pretty banged up.” Luckily, the resulting misalignment was all in my derailleur hanger — a sacrificial piece of metal that is actually meant to bend instead of more sensitive parts. It was an easy fix, which he didn’t even charge me for. What a guy.

I’ve put many miles on the bike since that fix, and it’s riding smoothly. I've actually been marveling at how my e-bike is already reducing my dependence on cars. For instance, I considered borrowing my friends’ Prius to drive to UCLA on Monday, but the estimated transit time, with traffic, was a shocking 2 hours. I'm certain that sitting in stop-and-start traffic would have started my big day off on the wrong foot, so I decided against driving. Plus, isn’t this the blog where the guy takes the bike on the train?

The e-bike + public transit route I opted for turned out to be quite an urban adventure. I first coasted the 3 miles and 1000 vertical feet down out of the foothills to the nearest Metro station. To get onto the Metro, I took my bike through a sequence of elevators (up onto a pedestrian bridge over the freeway, down to the platform). Not all train cars have a spot for bikes, but it was easy to find one that did. Two transfers and about an hour later, I emerged roughly 3 miles from UCLA, and zipped the rest of the way to campus on the bike. Total transit time: 1.5 hours, and the bike segments were downright enjoyable. I also found that my commuting adventure was a natural topic of conversation in my meetings, which helped me connect with folks amidst all the science talk. Double win!

I have to say, though, that riding the Metro was a sad experience overall. The Metro is not popular in LA, and I can see why. While the trains ran on time and the route coverage seemed good overall, there were a lot of people who were clearly using the train as shelter. There was rampant hard drug consumption on the platform and on the train itself, and I was yelled at by a manic man who came barging into our train car. When I mentioned to a professor at UCLA that I had taken the Metro to campus, he replied, "Yeah, I took my kids on the Metro once. Never doing that again." It's a sad state of affairs, and a clear example of how different crises can interact — robust public transit is a crucial climate change solution, but in LA, the vast numbers of unhoused people are an obstacle to growing the Metro ridership.

Caltech on Tuesday was an easier commute — about 6 miles each way to and from suburban Pasadena. I spent the day at a house that was formerly occupied by the Caltech provost, but is now home to the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA). All told, over the course of the two visits, the bike traveled about 20 miles and up 2000 feet of elevation and still had a bit less than half charge remaining. I'm extra excited because all of that mobility was powered by... the sun!

That's right, I've been charging my bike's battery with my solar panel, and it's working great. Time for a little energy math. The capacity of my bike's battery is 400 watt-hours. What's a watt-hour? Watts measure the rate at which energy is flowing from one thing to another, whereas watt-hours measure an amount of energy. For example, a toaster uses about 1000 watts while it's toasting, so if you run a toaster continuously for an hour, it will have consumed (1000 watts) x (1 hour) = 1000 watt-hours of energy. My e-bike battery, at 400 watt-hours, can theoretically provide a power of 400 watts for one hour, or 100 watts for four hours, or any other combination that integrates up to 400 watt-hours.

So, how hard is it to charge my bike with solar? My solar panel is rated at 110 watts, meaning that it will produce 110 watts in ideal conditions (i.e., on a perfectly clear day, with the sun shining directly onto the panels). The sun stays fairly low in the sky during the winter, but I've had no trouble tilting the panels to compensate and getting about 100 watts out. At that rate, it only takes four hours of good sunshine to fill my e-bike! It feels great to have fueled my commutes to UCLA and Caltech with an afternoon of captured sunshine. And with these numbers, I'm feeling very confident that I'll be able to keep my bike charged on the trip, even at campsites without electrical hookups.

Alright, math lesson over. I feel like I need a nap, but I hope that’s just my hangover from the visits. I’ll be back soon with more trip updates!

—Jake