Cooking! As with many things I love - singing, dancing, drawing, parenting - I’m incompetent but enthusiastic. For cutting onions I wear padded carpentry goggles which hug close to keep out sawdust. I can cut about 80% of the onion pretty well and then the last moon of onion is just a mess. Our knives are never sharp enough. This recipe called for four medium onions and an astonishing ten cloves of garlic. I got all this and some San Marzano tomatoes (shaped like submarines) at the farm stand across the road from my house. Our neighbors are magnificent farmers and we get to watch the whole symphony of the soil from April to November every year. They’ve started hosting cooking classes for idiots like me. I’ve missed all the classes, but I feel as though I’ve absorbed the key message: all these vegetables can be converted into food.

Converting the Romano beans into food called for 1 tablespoon of sugar. To hell with that, I thought, and instead put in 1 teaspoon of rather intense crushed red pepper given to me by a Nepali spice merchant, a friend of my sister’s. I knew I’d catch flak from the grandmothers, but I don’t like putting sugar in things that are not dessert or dance maneuvers, and besides this would be an opportunity to impress my sister with my freewheeling approach to spices. Only a fool follows recipes!

Earlier in my career as a filmmaker, the opportunity presented itself for me to stay in the world of food and farming. At the time I told myself I was restless to explore other things, but I think part of me was also turned off by the culture around what we were increasingly calling “sustainable food.” Even among folks with dirt under their fingernails, there was a certain hauteur that I found uncomfortable; I didn’t belong there.

In March I filmed a man in Tucson who had emigrated to the United States from Colombia. He described feeling at home neither back in Colombia nor here in the States, a feeling he labeled “cultural dislocation.” He had just turned eighty, and it struck me that perhaps he was honestly expressing something many of us feel but do not admit to ourselves: life can be a never-ending quest to figure out where you belong.

Cooking up our neighbor’s Romano beans, I got to thinking a familiar thought that I hadn’t thought in a few decades, that growing food is a good way to combat a sense of dislocation. Even if you don’t believe in the spiritual power of working the land, you cannot deny that eating food grown nearby is an act of eating one’s home. The food becomes you. You are made of your land, your location.

I struggle to find a sense of belonging in the documentary film community. Even my local film festival, which I used to love, isn’t a place where I feel all that welcome, even when they show a film of mine, which is getting rarer and rarer. For years it was an important part of my development as a filmmaker, entwined with my love of this place, so I’m sad and even grumpy when they reject my films these days — especially my two latest which were both shot in this very county. I’m more sad than sore. They of course don’t have any obligation to support local filmmakers (especially increasingly grumpy ones like me), and frankly I think the programmers have generally good taste. I guess it’s just the old adage that you mustn’t love an institution, for it will never love you back.

I’ve long had a tempestuous relationship with validation. On the one hand, I like getting some signs that I’m doing good work. On the other hand, I’m not convinced that most sources of validation are trustworthy; a lot of what “does well” is garbage. This leaves me in the ridiculous position of curating where I get my validation, which of course becomes a sort of echo chamber — I want approval from the people whose taste I like, who would naturally be the sort of people to approve my work. People who don’t give me accolades? Clearly they have bad taste. This is an old chestnut, one of humanity’s stupidest.

But still, isolationism - arguably one of the reasons I moved back to northern New England, away from the epicenters of entertainment, the endless networking, posturing, clamoring for celebrity, likes, followers, ROI, the list goes on - isolationism takes a toll. So when a festival asks to see a cut of my latest work, I oblige, warming to the idea of being welcomed back at the campfire.

Years ago I played video games like “Street Fighter” where each player has a sort of energy counter at the top of the screen which fills green or hollows red depending on whether you’re pummeling or getting pummeled. I don’t fight people on the streets, but in the filmmaker life it’s sometimes all too easy to track one’s energy counter. Film festival asks to see your work? You surge into the green. They reject your work! You recede into the red. One minute you feel right at home; the next you’re wondering where you belong. It’s been 23 years of this; when does it settle down?

A few weeks ago I was emerging from the subterranean realm of CERN, the high energy particle physics laboratory on the Swiss French border, when I was startled by the sight of a hawk alighting on a vineyard post. A few days earlier, leaving home for what would become both a wonderful & challenging trip, I had startled a falcon rising up from the ditch with a wriggling mouse. How lost we would be without these great birds. How grateful was I, in Switzerland, for the photons bouncing off the hawk’s body, coursing through the lenses of my eyes to collide with my homesick mind, a snap of physics connecting me to home in a faraway land. A kind of belonging.

When I was a boy I’d get homesick even at a sleepover party down the street; a great hollowness would come over me, and I’d make the friend’s parents call my parents to come pick me up. At times, life’s not much more than trying to not feel hollow. Dwindling summer, coast of Maine, forest of oaks, family of mine: fill me up!

At my sister’s house, no one filled up on my lousy Romano beans, but this was a recipe that supposedly tastes better the 2nd day. The grandmothers said, “what’s this that’s spicy?” We lingered until dark, letting the kids have the run of the grass, the edge of the sea, a cousin-made chocolate cake.

Driving home, my younger son Percy remarked that these were his favorite evenings, “night parties at Auntie’s house.” We drove through downtown Rockland, passing the Strand Theatre and its glittering marquee. I told Percy I was going to be showing a movie there in a few weeks, well after the hullabaloo of the film festival, and he murmured, “Pretty nice.” Route 1 north out of Rockland swings you by all the fast food joints, the box stores and the shopping plaza. This always hollows me out, so after Glen Cove I hooked left and took the back road towards home, maybe a longer drive but lo! My energy points leapt back into the green, trees arching over head, smell of wildflowers and dark country road. I spotted a creature in the field, stopped my truck and eased it into reverse, gently swinging the high beams towards the tall grass. A fox! He began to bound away, then turned again in the headlights and looked right at us. “A fox!” Percy exclaimed from the backseat. “My first fox!”

Driving on, my heart full in my chest, pounding a little with this small thrill of the wild, I heard Percy put his window down. “Drive slower,” he said, craning his head towards the night air, as if it could fill him up. “I like the summer smells.”

Leaving Maine in the summer is inadvisable, because most other non-Canadian places are hotter. But my back has been hurting from time hunched at the edit desk, and stress is chewing at my sleep, so it is - as Ishmael put it - time to drive off the spleen. And anyway I said I would. I’ve gotten our new project - a film improbably called The Work in Progress, which opens in theaters on September 4th - to the locked phase, where it goes to the magical laboratories of the sound mixer and the color grader, giving me 5 seconds to breathe before the next push. Time enough to pack gear for a few days of filming in Europe.

I don’t often work alone on a shoot anymore. With some films, like The City Dark or Thirteen Ways, it was often the only way. But in the last decade or so I’ve been lucky to find the funding to muster a small crew of 3-4 people. When the team is good, it’s a marvelous feeling. And they bring most of the gear.

My camera is good, but not what a cinematographer-for-hire would use. It’s a Sony FX9 which I bought during the pandemic, when my cinematographer couldn’t trek north from Pennsylvania and I wanted to finish shooting The Long Coast, which is one of my favorite movies we’ve ever made. The FX9 has been repaired a few times and I’ve acquired a lot of lenses for it, a 10mm wide-angle, 24-45mm zoom, 50mm prime, 85mm prime, 100mm macro, a probe lens macro, a 70-200mm zoom and a 150-600mm zoom. Some of these lenses have a beautiful heft to them, and you can think about the glass. For this trip I’m packing three lenses and six gold-mount batteries which I’m very proud of, even though I do not think there is any gold involved. I have a blue microphone. A German tripod that, like the Ship of Theseus, is and is not the same tripod my partner Curt and I started with in 2005.

My Dad spent a year of high school in Germany in the 1960s, fleeing I think a home broken by divorce in southern California. I don’t know if he brought a camera with him. You can’t imagine he didn’t, especially because just a few years later, fresh out of college and ineligible for the war because of a bum knee, he started a photography program at a high school south of Boston, stuck with it for 50 years. In the spring he always tasked his students with building their own cameras, an amazing project that yielded all sorts of hilarious football-helmet-cameras and the like, displayed on the high shelves of his magical maximalist classroom — the whole tableau soaking into me like developer, undoubtedly nudging me towards planting a garden in my pickup truck in the Brooklyn 2000s, god knows what else.

For our film about computers, entitled What Are Computers For, we’ve been tangling with the idea of building our own computer, some sort of gigantic wooden replica that exposes the essential simplicities of these machines. They might be simple, but computers are complicated. I’ve yet to get my head around them, and I admire the 16-year-olds who glued glass and paperboard to make the darkened chambers, the cameras obscura where the light finds silver halides and stamps history. Who builds a camera? Who builds a computer? What are cameras FOR?

Gear half packed, 5pm the night before my flight, I took my boys to the Union Fair. Admission was fifteen dollars apiece, and then you buy a bracelet for the rides which costs twenty dollars apiece. So $105 and the three wise men were through the gate. There are a million things to think about at a county fair. Our particular county fair is the Maine State Blueberry Festival, a fact I always took for granted as a boy, since I raked berries for our neighbor on the far side of the hill past the Ferris wheel. We got paid by the pound for raking, and by the hour for winnowing, but one way or another it always worked out to about $5 an hour.

The owner of the blueberry farm, Susan, seemed wealthy but not from blueberries. Her husband was a successful architect, and I always figured Susan had a trust fund to boot. They had a huge house, an Audi, and her sons had gleaming electric guitars. Susan’s father was Rachel Carson’s publisher, and when Carson died of cancer her ward, Roger, was taken in by Susan’s family. Susan said, I think a little regretfully, that her siblings called him Roger the Lodger. I didn’t know any of this when I filmed in Carson’s cabin on the coast of Maine years ago, following Roger as he showed me around the rooms, showed me the tide pools and seaweeds where he spent hours while his great aunt wrote. There was a door frame etched with heights. Roger was shy, we talked about science fiction.

Susan’s husband John died last week after a long illness, and I thought back to my fondest memory with the man, a summer afternoon when for whatever reason I was the lone member of my family to join Susan’s family in their powerful motorboat for a romp around Damariscotta Lake. We zoomed around for a while as their older boys water-skied, a sport I always hated for the gulps of gasoline-tinged water spewing back from the outboard, and besides I’d never skied on snow. A thunderstorm rolled in, and we took shelter at the nearest dock, which turned out to be owned by the owner of the Philadelphia Phillies, who showed us around his mansion while the rain raged and the lightning struck. I’d always nurtured a fondness for the Phillies, my mother’s home team. Years later, I met a woman in town whose sister was killed by a motorboat in that lake when swimming. The woman now spends many evenings taking underwater pictures in the harbor with her iPhone.

One of my favorite spots in the fair is the craft barn, because in one corner there’s always an outrageous display of Tupperware that spans half a dozen eight foot tables. I like to stand at a slight distance and let the scenes unfold. A girl walks by holding a rabbit. An old man watches a young woman rub sunscreen on her legs. A vendor explains to her fellow vendor, “there’s no point trying to get out Saturday night, you wouldn’t be able to move til 10pm. But they’ll let you pack up Monday.” The new guy, who appears to have two lazy eyes, is selling 3D printed frogs.

My older son’s godfather Jack, a retired English teacher, volunteers at his county fair in Vermont, on hand as an EMT in case people choke on their blooming onions. He’s developed an interest in a huckster who runs an English BBQ food truck and affects a lousy British accent. I’ve mulled a movie wandering the English countryside with Jack exploring and chronicling English BBQ, sort of a food show gone awry. I bet my mother, an Anglophile from Philly, would be our driver.

Leaving town after a full hour at the fair, the roads were sun drenched and wildflowers lolled crazily in the ditch. A sign at the Methodist Church read, “Men’s Breakfast, Sat 8am.” I had a 10-minute drive home on country roads, plenty of time to wonder about a breakfast of men before packing up for a trip out of town.

The other day, out of nowhere, some words appeared in my mind, and I jotted them down: soufle tow, singer darns, whiling narrums. Getting those nonsense words typed into a computer these days is no small matter; our machines are geared towards correcting the nonsensical.

I’ve encountered a handful of people over the years who openly embrace the supernatural. One of them, who appears in our forthcoming film The Bellow of the Beast, put it matter-of-factly: “there’s something beyond the everyday.” He wasn’t talking about a god or gods, who obviously fall into that category. He was talking about a kind of vision he had, a seeing into the future. I didn’t get a chance to probe more deeply; the supernatural was not the focus of our time together per se. But it lingered with me.

Some months after this encounter, I found myself signing up for a special tour of the menhirs at Carnac, in western France. (Menhirs are rocks. Upright megaliths from the neolithic.) It was raining, and the temperature was dipping into the high 40s, so I found a marine supply store that opened early and hit them up for a raincoat. My French, once close to fluent, comes and goes these days, but the word for raincoat burbled up on command when needed. This was a comfort, as the tour was in French, and I was curious what I’d comprehend of stone age mythology.

Not everything needs to end up as a documentary. But for 23 years, precisely half of my life, I’ve channeled my curiosities & concerns into the same rough format time and again: an 80 minute nonfiction film. It doesn’t always go well. The film with the biggest gap between what I wanted it to be and what it ended up as was Bluespace, which I finished in a bit of a hurry before our 1st son was born, in 2015. The film was odd and a little beautiful, but I think it sailed past most sane audiences. The swirl of topics was too disjointed; Kim Stanley Robinson, who appeared in the film, was generous enough to call it a constellation of ideas. What I saw as an interconnected set of questions and considerations, ranging from Hurricane Sandy to the terraforming of Mars — well doggone it, I couldn’t make plain how these things were connected.

I probably should have pivoted and turned away from exposition entirely. There were perhaps no rational explanations for the connections I saw. But I wasn’t confident working in a new mode, and failed to seek help. A good mentor might have nudged the film towards a more all-encompassing weirdness, abandoning the pretense of a logical argument, absolving the audience of “following along” and just letting the ideas & images swirl & enmesh.

After all, many of the early ideas for a film start as swirling scribbles in a journal. I use Moleskine journals when I can’t find anything more interesting, recently the soft-covered ones. The ideas are non-linear, not a tidy list of bullet points but more like the wild “graphs” that mathematicians draw, nodes and edges looping recursively and seeking connection — constellations of often lousy ideas. The menhirs, for example, have caught me in their gravity, but I do not know how they might coalesce into moving pictures.

Put another way, they enchant me but I cannot say why. Still, I must briefly try:

For as long as I can remember since I was a young boy, I’ve experienced now and again a certain strange sensation, a half-waking dream that is unlike other dreams. The sensation involves a set of bulging, bulbous ovoid shapes, vaguely cetacean but not alive, or if alive only so because they are a part of my mind and body. They grow and shift, pressing against what feels like the edges of either my body or my conscious mind. It’s not painful or scary, but it’s uncomfortable, as if I’m encountering something almost alien within myself. (This isn’t going well.)

In Bretagne, a few days before my raincoat purchase, I saw a collection of gigantic stones that gave me chills. It was, somehow, my sensation made manifest in rock. Here is what it looked like:

This is called a dolmen. It is tomb-like, but no one knows precisely why they were made. These pre-dated Stonehenge. For me, finding something ancient out there in the world which reflects something I’ve carried around inside me all my life was an odd but lovely experience. I felt somehow mirrored. I felt as if I were vibrating on the same frequency as these piles of rocks piled up five thousand years ago.

Walking a few days later among the menhirs - which are like dolmen, but solo rocks set vertically into the soil, often in incredibly long rows stretching to the horizon - I felt a certain familiarity, by which I mean a sense of family. I struggle to put this into words, of course, though I don’t mind falling short as a writer, anymore than I really minded falling short with Bluespace. How can we possibly expect ourselves to comprehensively channel what’s inside us into something that exists outside, for others to see? Still, the puzzle presents itself: if I want to explore this, whatever this is, this bodily connection I felt to the dolmens and menhirs of southern Bretagne, how would I do it? What would a film about that experience be like?

In certain landscapes I don’t feel mirrored at all. Volcanoes, for instance. I do not resonate with a volcano. I have liked walking across old volcanoes on the Canary Islands, and seeing orange lava hiss into blue sea in Hawai’i, but I feel nothing in my body at these times. My sister and her husband got engaged on a volcano somewhere in southeast Asia years ago, I don’t remember when. For their engagement party, which my parents hosted in Massachusetts, my brother and I built a ridiculous papier-mâché volcano and jammed a bunch of dry ice into the caldera so it could hauntingly sublimate while friends and family drank their gins and tonics.

I called a company in Maine a few weeks ago and asked if they could deliver me twenty pounds of dry ice on July 3rd, so that I could jam it into the front of a cannon my father was building for the parade. For the past four or five years, I’ve entered my old Dodge pickup truck in the local 4th of July parade under a string of different semi-fictional organizations: the Knox County Planetary Society, the Knox County Yorkshire Appreciation Society, the Knox County Dept of Small but Capable Pianos, etc. I realized a long time ago that I’m someone who would rather be in a parade than watching one go by.

This year my mother got it into her head that we should honor Henry Knox, the namesake of our county and a guy who had, coincidentally, hauled cannon to the little hill in South Boston where I lived in 2006. He and George Washington had a merry time driving the British out of Boston Harbor all those 250 years ago. Dad took up the project of building the cannon, perhaps pleased to have a chance to show off some old ironclad wagon wheels he’d been storing in his barn for such an occasion. Mom convinced a patron of the food pantry where she volunteers to dress up as Henry Knox - he was a big guy - in a frock and coat that she sewed together, complete with golden buttons.

Mom then decided she would be Henry Knox’s wife, the unfortunately named Lucy Flucker, which of course meant that my mom could be considered my Mother Flucker. And so we joined the big 4th of July parade as the Knox County Dept of Let’s Hear it for Henry Knox and his Wicked Cannon, with dry ice sublimating from Dad’s marvelous cannon (not a sentence I’ve ever written before) and General Knox and the Mother Flucker waving from the bed of the Dodge. My god-daughter Georgia Dale and my son Kepler tossed candy to children along the way.

At times I’ve wondered whether this nonsense is just an inescapable part of my definition of what it means to live a life. But what purpose does it serve? Does it score well on my rubric of what is worthwhile — making the world a better place, improving the lives of others, deepening my sense of self? In college, when I dallied with an International Studies 2nd major and entertained a future in diplomacy, I grew curious about something called the Human Development Index, a slightly more spreadsheet-based version of those clickbait articles you see about the Happiest Countries in the World. These concepts are subjective and fraught, but they get you thinking. What place is there in a “developed world” for nonsense? Or is that as good a goal as any, once we’ve fed and freed ourselves?

This is one of those journal entry puzzles that never ends, you just turn the pages and feel glad for the ink. These are the wayward nodes of a summer evening, memories and traces that fill a notebook without any promise of logic. They connect nonetheless. A cannon parade and a Breton dolmen call up my nonsense words: soufle tow, singer darns, whiling narrums.

It’s more or less grown back, and the other day I found myself sitting in a rocking chair in the spruce woods, taking a fresh look at the boulder. Well hell, I thought, I don’t need to remove it from the earth, I just need to move it out of the way. A few minutes later I’d dug a boulder-sized hole and prodded the boulder into that. Sometimes you need a year to think something over. At this rate I should have the shed complete by the time Halley’s Comet comes around again. Halley, by the way, rhymes with galley.

When you step away to refresh your gaze and then return to a film in progress, the work appears changed. I wish I knew what was neurologically afoot, but I do sense it amounts to an intentional estrangement. You must become a stranger to your own work. That’s part of what our film Observer was all about: trying to see the world anew.

I linger on this idea because it’s pretty close to why I think filmmaking - which so often seems awash in lingo, ego, self-aggrandizement & petty gatekeeping - is worth the time. It reminds you that you - the observer - are always changing, so that when you return to a work after a week or a year away, obviously the work hasn’t changed. You have. You clock your change.

And then of course by watching other films, we are changed anew. I love seeing films at film festivals, especially at those festivals which are brave enough to eschew the safest and dullest productions — celebrity biopics and predictable polemics. Bold, raw, weird work gives you a jolt. It’s not even so much that I like these films, though often I do, as it is that I’m grateful for the wakeup.

What wakes us matters. But I’ve been thinking more about how much the rest in between matters too. The space between scenes. The year in between the severed finger tussle and the rocking chair. The time away from the edit, the time at the film festival just wandering some city streets looking at nothing, freed from the cumbersome lanyard languishing back at the hotel.

Recently I flew to Iowa with my older son to pay respects to our beloved late cousin Bruce Cheney, who passed away in May. All the motels close to town were booked up because of the town’s summer fair, but I found a room at a dusty hotel in Mason City that supposedly had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. My son loved the design, and before bed we spent a while exploring the odd layout of interior rooms, hallways, and staircases. In one room the hotel staff had left a copy of Wright’s autobiography, a boulder of a book easily 600 pages. There but for the grace of God go my ego and I.

In the morning we drove to the old site of the acre I’d rented with my friend Curt in 2003 to make King Corn. It was planted in soybeans, and someone had rebuilt the old house left behind by our friend Chuck Pyatt who died a few years back. The land nearby looked wilder, and sure enough we found a small plaque dedicated to Chuck, thanking him for placing some land in conservation. Birds were everywhere and we parked to look around. Implausibly there was one giant brush pile that had a few old inkjet printers tossed at its base. Not knowing quite what else to do, we peed on the printers and drove into town.

Everything was quiet, still lulling forth from dawn. The parade wouldn’t start til 11am, and Bruce’s memorial visitation wasn’t til 2pm, so we had some time to kill. We stood awhile looking up at the big concrete elevator that stores grain at the center of town. We kicked rocks. We admired some very large tulip trees. By the river, we chucked sticks to see what would float. I found some flotsam: a corn stalk and cob. The blackbird whistling or just after.

Bruce was my third cousin, once removed. Third cousin means we share not a grandfather, not a great-grandfather, but a great-great-grandfather, and once removed just means he’s my parents’ generation. Bruce’s sons are my age, wonderful fellows, third cousins with no remove. One is a firefighter out on the west coast. I can’t recall what Mark does in New York. Shoot, we probably only spent 30 minutes together, in the shade of the gazebo in town, with old Bruce photos arrayed across the picnic tables, but it felt somehow restful, lengthy, restorative. A pause in our lives to say thank you for Bruce’s life. I had not expected this to be this way. On the drive back to Minneapolis airport, Kepler stared at the vanishing corn fields until his eyelids dropped and his head lolled against the window. Resting between scenes.

Returning to my office the next Monday morning, I could immediately see that one of my films, midway through production, desperately needed a new sense of direction. I don’t know how I hadn’t seen it before. What a lunkhead you are, I said to myself.

Grief, I think, needs space. In many cultures you spend a specified amount of time with the dead, or grieving, or what have you, and I like that — a kind of concentration, shot through with ritual that connects you back and back and back. I don’t feel I have that, but what I do have is a lingering curiosity about how the people who are gone stick with us.

It reminds me of a conversation I had once in California, at the NASA Ames Research Center, with an astrobiologist named Chris McKay. We were talking about water in the solar system, and at some point I must have breathed some whining comment about how much Earth water is wasted. He looked at me almost quizzically. The water is still here, he said. Only a tiny fraction escapes into space. It might be sullied from a human perspective, but the amount of water on the planet is what it is. It lingers. It moves. It freezes. It turns to vapor. But it’s not gone.

I think humanity works like that, so that no one is ever really gone, even when their name is forgotten, as David Eagleman said, and all legible traces gone. The echoes of who they were, or what they said, or something they did, or a potato they grew, or a kindness they showed, echo on. A moth flaps its wings in the 9th century and I skin my knee on a bit of granite. How could it be otherwise? All our molecules collide.

In this way, too, grief isn’t a phase or a season. It’s a vein of water that rises in your eyes when you least expect it, years after you attend Bruce’s memorial in Iowa, years after you bury your mother’s father on the outskirts of Philadelphia, years after Andrew Kroon’s heart, thumping for 25 years, gives out in the New Haven night. It’s always there. We clock these moments of grief again and again because we are always changed, always changing, and by meeting the grief anew we keep memories in play, flowing and affecting us as they should.

Kepler and I watched King Corn before the trip to Iowa; I hadn’t seen it in over 15 years. It looked pretty terrible, filmed on miniDV and super8 on those old but not special cameras. I liked some of our old jokes, and I liked seeing cousin Bruce again, in his sixties, with a fresh haircut, just moved back to Greene and choking up when talking about his love of the cornfields, his dreams of the autumnal golden corn. Our memories may be stored in the must mundane of places - like DVDs - but they fight their way through, and we meet them afresh with eyes never free of the water.

For the past few years Daniel has added firefighter and EMT to his long list of skills, and at times I’ve yearned to join him, despite knowing that my filming schedule would never permit such a training, let alone the work itself. My new office in town, renovated over these past few years, is just a block from the fire station, which is also the police station and where we vote. Once, when we were using a paint sprayer to coat 1,500 red squares for our film Observer, we triggered the fire alarm and the fire chief wandered over to see what was what. The truck wasn’t far behind him. They poked around in the bathroom, which was a horror show of plastic tarps and dripping red paint. Chief looked me over and said, “you’re all set.”

When we were working on the upstairs, we tore out two layers of disgusting wall to wall carpet, and I was confronted with a plywood subfloor. I drove out to the Robbins Mill, maybe 20 minutes past my parents’ house, and spoke with one of the Robbins brothers about the idea of using some simple shiplap pine boards as flooring. He tried to sell me on some 1x6 hemlock that they’d been trying to move for a few months, but the older woman at the register, who had that air about her that said “I worked for the owner’s father,” quietly told me that I’d end up with a hellscape of splinters. We arranged for them to deliver 1,500 board feet of shiplap 1x6 pine by the end of the week.

A guy named Darren laid that flooring. In places the subfloor was sort of buckling over the I-beams that someone had added to the 1920s building before Y2K, and I didn’t feel confident I’d be able to make it work on my own. Darren was good at it. He told a lot of stories about various friends of his in the CIA & FBI & Blackwater & super-secret Navy Seals & helicopters & his other tattoos & Somalia & would I consider doing an action movie & weaponry and for the most part I loved them all. I liked watching Darren work, he laid out all the boards first to help them acclimate, since wood swells in humid summer, shrinks in dry winter. Warm air holds more water vapor. He used a gigantic stapler to fasten the boards over the bottom L of the shiplap, and glue by the cannon to cement it. He said the boards looked pretty good. “Robbins,” I said.

I have loved sawmills for as long as I can remember. Why, as a deep lover of trees, I should so delight in their transformation from live cylinders to dead rectangles, I do not know. We featured my parents’ neighbor David Benner in our film The Arc of Oblivion. In winter, on the first shoot I ever did with my friend and cinematographer Ezra Wolfinger, we filmed David felling red oaks in the woods. Some months later, he milled them up on his band saw mill, and began to build the ark. The first short film I ever made, Two Buckets, almost twenty years earlier, also featured David Benner, but that time he was working the old mill, his father’s mill hooked up to an old tractor engine with a gigantic spinning vertical blade like the WD logo.

In Two Buckets, we were trying to find a guy known as Two Buckets, a mysterious fellow and the subject of many local rumors, and David gave us come clues. He said he lived over on the Castner Road, and that the guy who owned Moose Crossing Nursery would know how to find him. Sure enough, the owner of the nursery led us right to Two Buckets. He lived in a trailer that the town gave him, as the previous trailer collapsed when he pulled the studs out for firewood. He was said to be a misunderstood genius.

A few weeks ago, over at the grange where we’ve been filming our new film What Are Computers For? a young woman named Leilani showed up to help as a production assistant, as she had a little time after college finals before her summer job at Moose Crossing began. For reasons I won’t get into now, we were prepping a set that was meant to be a retro futuristic children’s computer design center, and the production assistants were helping us hang some shelves when my phone rang: Piña Colada! I answered the phone with delight, singing Pinã Colada! It was Daniel. He was slated to film with us for the retro futuristic children’s computer design, and he was calling to back out.

Friday prior, the Robbins Mill had had a fire. It was bad. One firefighter had died. Several firefighters and EMTs were hospitalized, and two Robbins brothers had been flown to Boston in critical condition. I gather that the silo, filled with wood chips, had exploded, and everyone in the blast zone who wasn’t in fire gear got hit bad. Three engines were destroyed. Daniel had been in the silo when it blew, and managed to crawl out, but one of his best friends, an EMT named Sarah, was caught in the blast and burned all over. I guess he pulled her out of there.

The wood floors in the downstairs of my new space are red oak, like the ark. Most of the wood I got from David Benner, who’d quarter sawn them, a slightly more challenging way to mill wood that yields a beautiful grain. I planed them and squared up the edges, at first using a jointer that I bought off a guy near Damariscotta, and then using a table saw with a jig I came up with. This whole process yielded two enormous bins of thin oak slices which we’ve been using for wood stove kindling in the winter. It’s hard to throw stuff like that away. It’s also strange, if you think about it, to create little fires in our homes. I remember sitting with David Kline, an Amish farmer and writer in Ohio, in his kitchen many years ago talking about heaven knows what. He was looking out the window at our pickup truck. “You know,” he said, nodding towards the truck, “when you’re driving that thing, you’re driving with fire.” He was right of course, tiny powerful explosions of fire, propelling us along.

I met up with Daniel at a bookstore in town after the shoot, and he said he’s taking some time to get back on his feet. I asked after his friend Sarah and he said she’s able to convey yes and no, which is progress. My sons were with me at the bookstore, and Daniel said he’d share other details at a better time. I nodded my understanding. A fire like that is more than a fire, and I cannot know what Daniel and his fellow firefighters are reliving. Even on the outskirts of the disaster, I find myself replaying scenes I never saw.

At a food conference years ago, someone brought up the question of what “local” was. In those days we were obsessed with defining the parameters of a sustainable food system, and the idea of “local” was a natural riposte to a food system that had become globalized, anonymous, commodified, and dominated by a handful of corporations. But what did local mean? After many rambling attempts from the attendees, a woman stood up and quietly said, “local is the distance the heart can travel.”

Whom you give a damn about is a complicated thing. Fire - an ancient terror, waster of cities - has a way of folding the map and bringing you closer to people otherwise distanced. Ostensibly movies compress distance as well, bringing faraway folk near or inviting you into another’s heartspace. But compression, as with the “codecs” we use to store our digital footage, involves simplifications, generalizations, errors and losses. You don’t get the full picture. In The Most Unknown (2018), one of the big three unknowns we explored was the mystery of consciousness. Part of what makes consciousness such a befuddling field for western science is that we don’t have direct access to other people’s consciousnesses. You never get the full picture.

Letting go of the full picture - of the idea that we’ll know all the facts, or feel all that another feels - is an important part of making a 90-minute documentary. The imperfection of authorship is part of what makes it art. I’ve given up on masking my authorship; put another way, I’ve come to believe that the authorship - the wild imperfections that make me who I am - is part of what makes the dang thing worth making and watching at all.

In filmmaking, you sometimes hear people that say that such-and-such director has no “right” to tell such-and-such a story because they do not have the lived experience of such-and-such a person. Most often this is well-intentioned, and rooted in a desire to help disenfranchised people tell their own stories. But sometimes it spills over into absurdity or a brand of censorship. Isn’t part of the whole purpose of documentary filmmaking, let alone human existence, the work of imagining what it’s like to be someone else? It’s kin to something you hear aplenty in life’s relationships, something along the lines of: “you don’t know how I feel!” Putting aside the obvious stupidity of such a comment (none of us can know how each other feels), I think there’s an important lesson lost in this drama. It is this: with whom lies the burden of responsibility for empathy? Is it not incumbent upon all of us to provide each other with a glimmer of how we feel? The rest of the “traditional” empathy work - imagining what it’s like to be someone else - is no less important, but I think that that door into one’s own heartspace is too often left uncracked. It’s to Daniel’s credit that he reached out and was honest about the space he needed. It provided an opening, and even if I can never know what it was like to be Daniel, crawling through an inferno to rescue a torched friend, I am invited to do the work, and humbly take it up.

Driving back from Cambridge along the Charles River all those years ago, I fished for a token to get onto I-90, taking my eyes off the road long enough to swerve idiotically onto the curb of the on-ramp, shredding the left front tire of my family’s 1987 Volvo. I pulled over, jacked up the car, got the tire iron out but had a hell of a time loosening the lug nuts. In those days you couldn’t get AAA on the tollway, and anyway I had no phone to call anyone, but a turnpike guy came along and helped me get the wheel off. We popped on a spare. I decided I wouldn’t go to Harvard.

Rainy mornings with friends still mean a lot to me. But I do not generally have a good way to convey to my friends what our friendship means, any more than I can put into words why I like a rainy morning. As someone who bustles around taking on too many projects, I suspect I give off a vibe of being too busy or too important to really be friends with many people. Obviously I am not important in the slightest, but our culture has a way of spinning yarns even on the distant fringes of the entertainment industry where I weave my little tales. On my end, I generally assume I’m not the sort of person other people would enjoy being friends with. Friendship comes easily to some of my friends, and I admire them for it. Their ease with other people, their grasp of sports & politics & pop culture, their seeming lack of insecurity — I would trade my beloved Ludwig drum kit for any of these affable traits.

I got to thinking about this on that rainy day in San Francisco after I invited Bob Reich to read a favorite poem of mine, “What Work Is” by Phil Levine. Phil was a mentor to my brother Colin, also a poet, and I was lucky enough to spend some hours with Phil and Colin back in our NYC days. Bob was a Secretary of Labor in the 1990s, so I naïvely assumed the poem may have come across his desk before. At my colleague & producer Heather’s suggestion, we filmed him reading it. He liked it. Poems contain multitudes, but the rough upshot is that work of course involves not just physical labor, but the work we do with each other — to tell each other how much we mean to one another, for example. Doing that work can be harder than hauling concrete blocks or writing code or editing documentaries or whatever else we consider to be labor. For one thing, it involves vulnerability & sincerity, which are not my favorite things to get involved in.

What happens when we don’t do our work?

I spent some time with Bob updating him on the film project we’re involved in together. I mentioned that part of my work in the editing process involves introducing some silence & space in the footage, elements understandably overlooked by editors rushing along on deadlines. Bob, Heather, Elliot and I have talked before about the importance of silence, and I’ve made no shortage of complaints about Zoom calls which generally do not accommodate such a thing — compared to in-person meetings where a degree of generative quiet can be tolerated. Bob likes to use the phrase “eloquent listening” to describe the degree of attention we need to grant each other in an America struggling to stitch itself back together.

Work involves making space between the busy scenes of our lives.

Not long ago, on a film shoot for a different project, my friend Reif - who, incidentally, has always seemed to me to be someone to whom friendship comes naturally, like walking barefoot or breathing - suggested we film a friend of his, a Buddhist monk, convening a dawn Zoom session with his students. For two sessions of 30 minutes, they just sat there with their Zoom screens open, meditating. With two other cinematographers I sat with my camera filming this, at times trying to quiet my own mind into meditation. But something about the camera, in REC mode with its red light staring me down, kept me astir. What are you doing, Dave? This is highly irregular.

I enjoyed having my mind boggled by a world where we sit in meditation next to our laptops. I would no more pass judgment on such an activity than I would judge the older filmmaker in NYC who, if I’m recalling correctly, had a sort of tiny lap pool in his basement, with rushing water to create resistance as he swam in place, going nowhere but in motion. A puddle of water at temperatures above freezing contains enough molecular motion that eventually the ambient heat will break it up into vapor. Each of us dwellers in the universe - and each of us is a collection of molecules, mostly water - navigates stillness and motion in ways that might bewilder another.

Phil Levine used to quaff lots of Scotch and stay sharp as an icicle. I suppose I was drawn to his casual, amicable alcoholism in my 20s, gradually developing my own reliance on the ancient lubricant to stave off the exhausting effects of social interactions. This particular lubricant, of course, has a way of corroding the machinery, and I cannot much longer keep up with the old ways. A friend told me that Americans are drinking a lot less alcohol, which is surely a good thing, though I also sympathize with Jonathan Richman’s lament - truer today perhaps than when he wrote it - that we need more parties in the USA.

Only a fool or a coward would rely on intoxication to sustain friendships. Long a fool & a coward who, in Levine’s articulation, does not know what real work is, I still pine for a fitting methodology - Poetry? Hugs? I am told not to sing - to equip the people I love with a glimmer of my love. (If you are reading this there’s a high likelihood you are one of these people.) As it happens, I was chatting with Elliot’s daughter the other day about my old love of the drums, which I practiced before the advent of silent padded kits; thinking of all the banging and trouncing and perididdling my parents put up with, it occurred to me that an act of Love & Appreciation might involve picking up the sticks again and creating a bespoke percussion performance for them. Especially as their hearing goes the way of the wolf, it might not be a complete nightmare flashback to the mid-90s, but more of a coda. Love Song of the Drums.

Maybe it’s the unpredictable percussion of the rain that I love. I wrote a lousy poem in high school called “Thirteen Ways of Telling If It’s Raining,” a format after poet Wallace Stevens that later reared its head in a film of mine called Thirteen Ways. In that film, I spent a day at a time with a dozen different visitors on a plot of land across the stream from my parents’ house. With my camera I felt somehow less shy, as if there were another person along with me and my visitor; I have always felt an odd comfort in threes. I don’t know if I can call what we forged “friendships,” but I think my guests sensed an unmistakeable appreciation from me as I followed them around with my camera, asking quiet questions, chronicling them exploring the land in their own particular way. I was honoring their perspective on the world, which is in itself a kind of love. Each visitor changed me.

Change may be the ultimate puzzler when it comes to friendships. How can we sustain a love for someone if we humans are always changing? And we are always changing, even more than the puddle of water jostling itself into vapor. The vapor joins the clouds, and returns to Earth as a rain, and becomes a puddle again. We are not the same puddles. Perhaps the word sustain isn’t appropriate when it comes to love and friendships. We aren’t holding on to something unchanging. We are tethering ourselves with invisible threads to another wild animal. It is probably more like the quantum phenomenon that Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” where two entangled particles, light years apart and utterly disconnected in every conventional sense, nevertheless behave as if they are holding hands.

I am not the young man who shredded his Volvo tire on the I-90 ramp, but my friend Chris - who did his four years at Harvard - still wanders through midcoast Maine every year to say hello, drop a gift for my sons, steal a few hours with me talking about stars or Nova Scotia or whatever else pops up. I reckon friendships have a way of bending space and time in ways only the poets can chart. True work, like love, isn’t orderly or methodical, it’s shot through with vulnerability, unpredictability, wildness. In the wild, time skips & starts & skirrs. I love friendships old and new. I love the memory of the rain and the rain itself.

Our cat, Big Eddie, likes spring because the windows are thrown open to the screens and he can drive himself mad with desire watching the robins. I found a dead robin in the upstairs of the barn yesterday and need to bury it once this rain lets up. Eddie doesn’t go in the barn, I don’t know what befell this bird. I try to leave the barn doors cracked so anything that gets in can get out, but it might have grown trapped and broken its neck trying to escape.

Last week a theater in Amherst, Massachusetts requested a high-resolution copy of The City Dark (2011) for a theatrical showing as part of a “Science on Screen” evening. I had to use three adapter cables to connect the old hard drive to my new laptop and get it uploaded, but I like this sort of thing. It reminds me of those Star Trek episodes where the engineer has to jerry rig some way to get data off an old drifting starship. Much of The City Dark was shot at a low-resolution, 720x480. That’s 720 pixels wide by 480 pixels tall. By the time I was finishing the film, everything was at 1920x1080, which is what we call “HD.” So half the film looks not so great, and I winced a little as it uploaded. These days most of our footage is shot at 3840x2160, which we call “4K.”

For The City Dark, I made several trips to Chicago in my late twenties. One trip was to wander the dawn streets with a woman who rescued birds that struck buildings during the night. Birds, including migratory birds, get disoriented by bright city lights and enormous reflective windows. If they hit them at full speed they can break a beak, a wing, or a neck. Many of the small birds we found were dead, and many we couldn’t get to before street sweepers swept them up or maintenance men hosed them into the drains. But we found an American woodcock who had broken its beak, and a yellow-bellied sapsucker in rough shape, and we brought them to a veterinarian who somehow specialized in this sort of thing. There were all sorts of animals there, falcons and owls and songbirds, many of whom would spend the rest of their lives in animal sanctuaries or small-town zoos, too marred to brave again the wild.

That same autumn back in New York, I filmed what I think was called the “Tribute in Light,” two powerful towers of light created on September 11th to commemorate those attacks, still fresh in memory. Thousands of birds swam dazedly in the light towers, and I didn’t stick around to see what became of them. I was scolded some months later by several people in the light pollution community after an NPR piece came out. A reporter named David Greene had invited me to wander around the US Capitol with him, talking about the film, the stars, and the city lights. I expressed a certain ambivalence about turning out all the lights, and conveyed my experiences being mesmerized, even from a distance, by the tribute towers of light in New York. I recall imagining the Capitol going dark, and thinking that would be a rather grim sight.

Over the years, I’ve learned that you have to cling to this grey area, this ambivalence. It goes against the grain. Sure, I value boldness, decisiveness, clarity. Unequivocal rights and wrongs rear their heads now and again: children must have a chance to thrive; clam chowder must not be made with tomato juice. Surety’s magnetism found its way to Hollywood years ago, and tidy storybook endings have run amok with our expectations of what must happen before the credits roll. Even when you pitch a documentary, you’re often expected to have a “story arc” and/or a definitive thesis. As if our job as artists is to wrestle whatever strangeness we find out there in the universe into a predictable and marketable package, then rinse and repeat. The ending of The City Dark fit this uninspiring bill; my NPR comments notwithstanding, I wanted to leave people with a stirring reminder of the value of the stars. The film fit comfortably on PBS and Netflix. Blah blah blah.

I’m OK with where I was then as a filmmaker. In the years since, mentors like Werner Herzog have given me the confidence to stray a little from this safe, scriptable terrain, even though my work is by no means fringe or experimental. The wilds of non-formulaic filmmaking have frankly involved generating my own formulae: odd but controlled narrative experiments, peripatetic personal journeys. Within these new bounds I now wander. In trying to steer clear of bombastic polemics or storybook endings, I’ve found - especially in midlife - that I need to more or less constantly question the rights and wrongs, even to a degree stretching beyond the skepticism I was taught in the liberal arts classrooms.

This then is the work. You have to map the contours of your own moral universe. I reckon many of us allow religion to do this for us, since it’s exhausting - and never-ending - to do it on one’s own. Lately I’ve been wondering what this sort of thing should look like. Is it a sort of moral code? As I define the shifting terms of what I believe in, do I write it down? Make a list? And then how would that list or code inform the films that I make, the way I live day to day, the way I vote or protest or show up, the way Amanda and I raise our two boys?

The other morning I saw an enormous osprey land in the vegetable fields across the road. By the time I’d focused my binoculars, he was gone. I think they like the old corn stalks, which are lightweight but must give good structure to their enormous nests. If an osprey isn’t clutching a fish, it’s clutching a stick. I don’t think they eat other birds. But surely they could. Swoop upon a songbird for a snack, who is stopping them? Far as I know, there are no rules binding birds, no social contracts, Ten Commandments, bills of rights.

I don’t know how birds navigate the world, especially during migrations. You hear all sorts of things - Earth’s magnetic field, constellations of starlight, the setting sun, temperature swings - but I reckon it’s a swirl of different things. As much as we’d like to imagine it’s “encoded” in some non-negotiable way in their DNA, birds also give off an air of beautiful insanity, wild uncertainty. This year I’ll put my nest under this yellow canoe. This year I’ll try eating a frog.

On another trip to Chicago, I filmed with an archivist at the Field Museum. On his way to work, for years, he would collect fallen birds from sidewalks below skyscrapers. In his archive he stored tens of thousands of these birds, each carefully tagged with a date and location. He wasn’t sure why he was saving them, but he imagined they’d be useful to someone. It struck me as a good thing to do, even though neither of us could quite say why. He showed me another room, through a sort of airlock, where bugs were devouring the flesh and skin of an animal, the better to preserve its skeleton.

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, I have a profession that involves a more or less constant re-examination of my moral code. I can’t say whether it’s from meeting so many people around the country & world and really trying to understand what’s in their heads, or whether it’s the editing process, making decisions about what to include, what to preserve, what to amplify — but either way I’m constantly trying to figure out what I believe in, and why. Layer upon that a workday of handling budgets, logistics and crew, and many such a workday ends with exhausted disorientation, the feeling I’ll walk through a sheet of glass without seeing it.

It’s quite possible there’s something wrong with me, and my disorientation is a symptom of my not being up to the task of my work. But most days I take the other tack: I’m not mad, the world is mad! I think we all have minds which yearn to forge our own sense of what the heck we are supposed to make of this world, how to act and how to live and love. But I don’t reckon that we’ve arranged most of our cultures - I’m talking about contemporary cultures on the planet Earth - to encourage this exploration. Religions and governments create formal codes, cultures and societies less formal ones, but more or less everywhere we are drawn to the safety of predictability. You join a team or a tribe or a political party, you commit yourself to a God, you pledge allegiance. Codes can give order to our world, but they can also suppress our wonderings, negate our nuances. I guess this is obvious. It’s the madness of living in America, a place which perhaps paradoxically encodes a promise of freedom; true freedom is always just around the corner, out of reach. I hope for my children that their world will support a degree of disorientation, short of anarchy, within which they may explore what they really think and feel.

When I was an undergraduate I found myself taking a lot of classes at Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, to the point that I worked up the courage to ask for credit. My thinking was that my undergraduate classes would count towards half of a master’s degree, and I could stick around for a fifth year to do the other half. The Dean at the time more or less shrugged, but the Associate Dean, Gordon Geballe, picked up on the idea and ran with it. He helped make it possible, and even recruited a few others to join as well. I was thinking of Gordon the other day while mowing dandelions because he was a big advocate of what he called Freedom Lawns. These are basically lawns you don’t mow. You let them go wild; to hell with what the neighbors think. You save on gas, you let the pollinators roam, and you see what happens. I love everything about this idea, and will always love Gordon Geballe, but I cannot yet fathom a Freedom Lawn. I want my grass so short you could mistake it for a putting green. But hey Gordon, I’ll keep an open mind. May through October, I’ll keep thinking it over.

I’d been in France with my family trying to take a break. For reasons I cannot entirely explain, but which nonetheless don’t seem quite inexplicable, I’d found myself yearning for rest. Sleep, to be sure, but also a kind of emptying or quieting of the mind. Not meditation per se, which is something I’ve practiced on and off (mostly off) for a decade or so, but actual unconsciousness. I wanted to stop thinking for a spell. Short of rapping myself on the temple with a hammer or drugging myself with sleeping pills, it wasn’t altogether obvious how to achieve this, especially since my concurrent yearning was to spend time with my family — which, yes, entails thinking.

As it happens, I’d been catching snippets of conversations in the documentary film world about something similar. Namely, how much thinking we ask our viewers to do. It’s nothing new to peddlers of expository storytelling, but it’s come up yet again as streaming has come to dominate the way filmmakers distribute their work. (I resist or at least resent this trend!) Streaming isn’t the same as TV-watching, but there are similarities that can affect how you think about your film. You ask yourself questions about how people are going to watch: is it quiet and dark in the room? Are people catching every detail? Are they scrolling their phone while they watch? Are they watching it on their phone and not on the TV at all? Are they prepared to track complexity and hold multiple ideas in their minds at once?

I do not believe that people’s brains have changed so utterly that they cannot watch a movie, pay attention to details and, well, think. My friend Elliot likes to point out that people happily consume complex multi-character narratives on streaming platforms (think of Game of Thrones) where you more or less have to watch every scene to follow what the hell is going on. Can we not expect the same from them in a documentary?

Years ago, I found myself in the absurd situation of pitching a science series idea to a Netflix executive in a hotel room in Brisbane, Australia. The pitch was horrendous, but her main point of feedback was that it was too complicated. She told me to picture a viewer sitting on a couch with a glass of wine after a long day of work, phone in hand. Keep it simple and dramatic. The next day, as I scootered around town in the delirious sunshine, I puzzled over Netflix’s seeming pivot away from thinking, especially since my film then streaming on the platform, The Most Unknown, was described on its landing page as “cerebral.”

In Bretagne, we took our kids to the King Arthur forest one day — Broceliande. They have an exhibit at the visitor center where you immerse yourselves virtually in the mysteries of the forest, led by an audio-guide named Pierre. We were clocked as Englishmen by the staff and given minimalist and ineffective headsets, soon finding ourselves listening simultaneously to English and French Pierres at equal and equally incomprehensible volumes. My kids politely took off their headsets after a while and just watched the show, a blur of maps, fog, tree branches and swords. I kept up with the gist of the French, but also gave myself over to wonder after a while. I love forests, and recalled the comfort of flying home to Maine from Iowa during my early filmmaking days in those denuded corn lands, Maine our most forested state, the forests an almost inexhaustible font of wonder & mystery & shade & ticks. Beyond the comfort of the woods, I find the trees to be a good place to think — a cerebral setting, of sorts.

Broceliande gives you that most treasured quality of a natural setting — enchantment. The kids vetoed any forest hikes but we visited the sword in the stone and drove lovely roads arched with oak trees. Oaks are sacred to anyone who has any damn sense, and so it was with the druids whom Julius Caesar encountered during his conquests of Gaul. By some accounts the word druid means “oak-knower,” but who knows, it’s good enough for me that my family name is rooted in the French for oak, chêne. My parents’ woods here in Maine are full of them, mostly red. In France I bought six books on the druids, though there is broad consensus that everything we know for sure about them from antiquity could fit on a single page.

Reading these dense, speculative books using my high school French proved to be a conduit to unconsciousness of sorts. The beds in our tiny rental house were tiny, and many nights I retreated to the third floor bedroom with the shutters flung open to the North Atlantic, reading on a little twin bed with too many unread or unreadable books tumbled across it, like fallen menhirs, all of us, books and blankets and occasionally sleeping middle aged man waiting for the 5am rumble of the scallop boats so that we could reset for another day.

I cannot fathom what someone like Chrétien de Troyes thought of the audiences for his work, what notions he may have had nurtured about their attention spans in what we now call the middle ages, and whether as a middle-aged man himself he occasionally wondered what the hell was the point of writing book after book. He didn’t finish the story of Percival, which perhaps says something about his attention span, but then again this was a time of bards and minstrels and oral traditions too, before many of the old scrolls of antiquity had been rediscovered and passed around, so perhaps he finished it in some other fashion, in songs or sayings that didn’t get inked. My kids’ favorite film, Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail, abruptly and absurdly ends before its own resolution, with Arthur and his gang getting rounded up by English bobbies. Who needs a tidy ending?

The streamers do, by any reckoning, given the formulae of Hollywood TV. A tidy ending means you don’t lay awake thinking & wondering; it’s a closed book, a groomed city park compared to the wild forests of real life. The story of my family’s friendship with Evelyne’s family is more of the sylvan ilk, leading heaven knows where, unscripted, an open book delight. Her younger son Bertrand, now middle-aged and bearded like me, met the love of his life Hiroko at EPCOT center in the early 2000s. She was working at the Japan pavilion, he at the French restaurant, and they fell in love in broken English. Later they moved to Sun Valley, Idaho, where he won a raffle for a new Mercedes which he promptly sold so he could buy a used maroon Cadillac, which he considered a “rapper’s car.” A few years back, I looked him up in Tokyo when we were in town filming for Shelf Life, our cheese film. We ate sushi and he rang up his parents in Troyes to tell them we were together. After hanging up, he looked at me somewhat bewildered, as if summing up the whole trajectory of our families’ comings and goings, or for that matter summing up the whole insanity of this life, which is decidedly unscripted, cerebral, with no grails or tidy endings but a font of things to puzzle over until our brains give out on us: “Crazy, no?”

One bit of the book caught my attention in particular. Michael mused on the idea that consciousness likely has a lot to do with our bodies, not just our intellects, and suggested that our evolving research on the mind might, rather surprisingly, bring us closer to non-human animals — the same animals that western culture has been trying to distance itself from for centuries amidst our ongoing quest to dominate ecosystems, justify confinement and generally feel special.

As it happens, I was flying to San Francisco to talk to technologists about computers. I’m not alone in wondering whether our current AI growth spurt - which of course has tremendous overlap with the study of consciousness - might actually spawn a new sense of what it is to be human. To have a body, a pulse, a wet brain and thumping, trembling veins. To feel sun on skin, panic in bowels, salt in eyes. The more time I spend with screens, the more I wonder what it was like before them, even in my own life. For the first two-thirds of my life, up until I was 30 years old, an airport wasn’t a place where I looked at my phone, it was a place where I sat and looked about me. My sensorium must have been different; I was a different animal.

What sort of animals are we?

San Francisco was enduring a heat wave, but its beauty was in full swing. I love it there — the wild steep hills, dramatic bridges, $9 cups of coffee. Some of the animals there have billions of dollars and private chefs, other animals slump on street corners under fentanyl before dawn, but most wander the messy world in between, delivering food, joining Zoom calls, writing code, tuning guitars, you name it. One of my interviews was with Astro Teller, the grandson of Edward Teller, inventor of the hydrogen bomb. Astro - he’s named after his erstwhile haircut - runs Google’s X lab and wears rollerblades. I liked him. They take some of the advertising money that Google rakes in and try to build interesting things, like robots that help farmers figure out what their crops need. Driverless cars. Flying robots. That sort of thing. While acknowledging the risk of things going awry, he defended the optimism around AI by suggesting a certain inevitability to it, and recommended that we approach it not with fear and suspicion, but in a way with a kind of love.

If these machines are what we bake into them, then I reckon he’s got a point. And love is something we do fairly well, all things considered. I think it’s the animals in us. Few would argue that love lodges in the mind, which means it courses elsewhere through our bodies; it’s as much in our skin & fingertips as in our neurons. I’ve never done psychedelics, but I’ve heard tell that it’s an experience in which love bubbles freshly up into the mind and out across the expanse of the universe — suggesting that we suppress it in our daily grind, like a buried spring.

As it happens, I’ve been thinking lately about the suppression of my own creative instincts. In the same way that setting my alarm keeps me from sleeping well - and dreaming well - I have wondered whether deadlines and grant requests, ostensibly engines of productivity and possibility, have instead slowly suffocated me. I thought about this while preparing a “pitch desk” for an advertising agency that approached me about doing a job for them. These things are a hoot: colorful blasts of total bullshit. I couldn’t stomach it for long, so I ended up letting myself go wild, writing long dense paragraphs about my methodology and ethic which they of course completely ignored, rightly depriving me of the absurdity of earning $10,000 a day for filming some horses jump around in Texas. I emerged penniless but creatively intact, the gamble being that in the long run I’ll be a happier animal.

I asked Astro if he knew the musician Jonathan Richman, and he looked at me blankly. Jonathan Richman, like Werner Herzog, Agnes Varda, and Terence Nance, is one of those artists I admire whose mad love of life imbues an ecstasy to their work that lights you right up. Google’s X looked like a pretty darn interesting place to work, but I also wonder if there’s too much money at Google to really light a person up; stars only ignite under particular conditions and constraints.

A few days later, we got to talking about star birth with David Levy, the famed comet hunter, in a backyard observatory outside of Tucson. It was a beautiful evening, the day’s 104º heat fading into the desert blue as we trained a big Dobsonian on the Orion Nebula, a classic first stop for first time stargazers, and a so-called stellar nursery where hydrogen starts banging together into helium, releasing an ignition of energy. David, who I’d filmed with years ago for The City Dark, is more rickety now but still whip smart, quietly reciting poetry as we took turns climbing the stepladder to the eyepiece.

I think the stars unleash us, or release us. I don’t know what to call it. I’ve always had a hard time describing the strange gift that the stars give us as human animals. I don’t give a damn about the practical parts of astronomy— like the much ballyhooed ancillary engineering benefits of certain lenses or space fabrics — which I think distract us from the wilder thrill of these sky lights. A night with the stars changes you, and I don’t understand how. You don’t feel the warmth of their touch, though they are suns. You don’t sleep well. You feel a little smaller. But you also know you’ve been zagged in a new direction, the future getting a little more unknown, like you were visited by angels who spoke to you in a language you couldn’t parse, but could only wonder at.

Computer scientists have described to me that their early experiences with coding gave them a thrill that I think aligns with all this. I believe them, I can see it in their eyes. It wasn’t always about money. There was a raw creative force at play, a sort of magic, the code like a trail of runes that alchemically transformed nothing into something. I don’t know, I’ve never done much of it, but I’m spending some time trying to step into their sneakers. Nowadays software like Claude can harness the black box of “AI” to code more quickly than any human could, and I wonder whether the thrill holds. Anyone who has used the Large Language Models can testify to the peculiar magic of the computer talking to you, but I wonder whether we’re crossing a technological line that our animal bodies cannot grok, and we’ll be leaving the joy behind.

In Tucson we talked to a Diné woman named Chucki a few hours before a rock show she was going to play. The conversation swung towards the borderlands, and immigration, and I asked her whether her culture’s deep history in America gave her a unique perspective on who should be welcome in this place. She didn’t claim to speak for all Diné, never mind all native peoples, but she said there was a reason white colonists gained a foothold on these shores; the people already here often welcomed them, or in other cases had no formal articulation of ownership and borders. I got the sense that the western idea of borders just didn’t make that much sense to her.

Chucki also expressed something I’d heard once or twice before, and that has haunted me since. She said that the people coming from Europe had forgotten their ceremonies, had somehow left them behind. I interpreted this comment as being imbued with a combination of pity and dismay, as if she was saddened that there was no way that white people could behave well — we are so far astray.

Most nights, during my interval in the early hours, I have been reading what I can about the old ceremonies in Europe. I’m talking of course about the druids, the pagan ways more or less wiped out by the monotheistic religions that spread out of the Levant. I think these are the old ceremonies, the ones we’ve mostly lost in western culture. They pop up now and again on the fringe, or by other names, often before being swallowed by modernity — neodruidism, rainbow gatherings, counter-cultures, burning men festivals. But you don’t get much of it in your formal schooling; my kids pledge allegiance to a flag but not to trees, wild animals, streams.

What sustains us? What releases the best in us? What sort of animals are we?

Astro said he was developing an AI technology that can analyze waste streams on a molecular level, rescuing billions of dollars of valuable materials before they end up in landfills. Rooted in capitalist rhetoric, I think this is nonetheless a relic of the old ceremonies, an aversion to wasting the planet. Let us use the whole animal, as it were. It’s a reminder that we’re not all gone, not yet. We’re all twisted around, for sure, but we are yet animals moved by stars and molecules and fingertips.

Back in Maine, I sat in my truck by the harbor watching the rain and eating a ham sandwich for breakfast. One of my little ceremonies. The rest of the day would brim with machines. Each day of filming generates about 2TB of footage which must be ingested, backed up, transcoded, synced and organized for my editing colleagues. My hard drives are precious cargo, tiny jewel boxes made of metals pulled from the earth, somehow etched now with traces of this world, Chucki and Astro and so many others, animals we will try to honor with the strange, imperfect ceremony of filmmaking. It’s good for now, but there’s no telling how long it will last.

I was fresh from graduate school, where I’d explored the disconnect between producers and consumers of food, a disconnect in no small way related to consolidation in the food industry — the big getting bigger, the rich getting richer. I suppose I imagined that our nascent corn film would engage a critique of American capitalism. These were the heady days of Michael Moore, and I figured we’d be muckrakers in the corn fields, harrowing up trouble and pointing a better way forward.

As I wandered the streets of Iowa City, fuming from the argument and concocting all my unspoken retorts in the inimitable esprit de l’escalier, I didn’t know whether we’d go forward with the film. We did. I like the film we made, about corn, even if it wasn’t what I’d initially envisioned. As a team we put aside our differing opinions about capitalism (and GMOs), electing instead to focus on the fundamental mechanics underpinning the whole system — farm subsidies as a reasonable idea gone awry. By nature I wasn’t much of a confrontational muckraker, nor were my colleagues. On the road, with our cameras, we were no Michael Moores. We ended up doing a lot of listening.

Many of my activist friends criticized the film, saying we didn’t go far enough in our critique of the system; fair enough. Maybe we could have done more, but then again those six words can surface in the aftermath of almost any effort. I do think the film was an honest account of our journey, our thinking, our listening, our time in Iowa — and in this sense, more than any other, it was a successful documentary.

But it took its toll on us. My older colleague and I don’t really speak anymore. He was a marvelous fellow who only rarely exploded with a temper, but his outbursts were admittedly terrifying —a vicious meanness I’d not encountered before. From his perspective I was probably a precocious, ungrateful leftist runt. I never found the words to explain to him how our working relationship made me feel, perhaps because I also felt indebted to him for helping make the film in the first place, or - more likely - simply because I was not courageous enough. I was afraid of him, a runt indeed. I pulled away after the film and started my own production company, an act which only further enraged him, and it became easier for me to wear the label of an ungrateful turncoat than do the work of confronting him about the psychological abuse I’d experienced.

In those early years, it took me a while to stop grinding my teeth at night from the anxiety of his presence. Around the same time, my girlfriend in Iowa and I went through a painful breakup. Looking back on it now, I think I was more than a little lost. My best friend at the time was going through his own swirl of breakups, but I found in him a powerful, sane, anchoring presence that I’m grateful for to this day. We invited our former Iowa intern - Taylor Gentry - to move to South Boston with us to make a movie about green building, and I started taking more pictures of the night sky. My jaw finally stopped hurting.

This was two decades ago. A few weeks ago I found my way back to Iowa for the first time since those corn days, for a week of filming on a new project. I brought my ten-year-old son with me on the trip, ostensibly to give him a taste of the filmmaking life, but also I think to give me an emotional center, a gravitational force of newness and joy that would keep me from tumbling back into the well of whatever I’d gone through in my twenties. I hadn’t been physically abused; people have endured far worse. But still I worried I’d be triggered in some form, start grinding my teeth or lose my way again.

I needn’t have worried. Maybe it’s that my own team of filmmakers now are the opposite of tempestuous; maybe the old scars have healed enough that I could immerse in the remembered delights of those Iowa adventures; maybe it’s that my son, both my sons, and my wife provide such a loving atmosphere at home that I’m simply stronger than before when I head out on the road; maybe people in Iowa are just darn nice. But the week was lovely.

The Mill is long gone, and I needed Google Maps to find my way around town, but the quiet brownness of midwestern March was somehow soothing. Fog clouded the landscape most mornings. My old member number, 20877, worked at the food coop. Eagles were everywhere. Fitting: our new film explores America on its 250th birthday, and we convened a series of conversations between Iowans young and old. With the exception of a few people who trotted out predictable talking points, most of the Iowans we encountered were thoughtful listeners, ready to hear each other and share perspectives. Many people in America are angry right now, but still people find a way to show up, pour a coffee, sit for a while. Why do people agree to be in our film?

It’s hard to listen when you’re angry, but it’s not impossible. I reckon forgiveness must be a part of it. When you’re hurt or angry, some small part of you must wish to forgive the person hurting you, because you sense therein a way forward, a twinkle of calm light. Activists like to chant “no justice no peace” but I think “no forgiveness no peace” is equally apt. Yes, there’s a lot of anger in America right now, but I wonder if there are also the seeds of forgiveness more or less everywhere; apart from the people who profit from division, powerlessness and strife (many of whom, let it be said, are dyed-in-the-wool capitalists), a lot of people want to climb out of today’s muck. Justice, forgiveness, peace.

After two decades out east, Taylor Gentry moved back to Iowa recently and we spent the week together filming. He was kind to my son, hard-working with our team, and made beautiful pictures to boot. He’s the sort of person who makes you feel like things are going to be all right. I saw the lousy old house where our corn team had spent two years puzzling through low-resolution footage and writing unsuccessful grant requests. For some reason, looking at the house, I remembered my best friend Curt preparing an avocado in the kitchen. He halved it and removed the pit. Poured olive oil in the wells. I’d never seen anyone eat an avocado like that, and come to think of it, I haven’t ever since.

Little memories are good for healing; we are not only our scars. I forgive the colleague with the temper. Who knows what he’d been through before those days, or what frustrations of his own he felt. I forgive the fool that I was bumbling through my twenties without a roadmap. (We didn’t have smart phones; how could I know my way around?) I forgive Earl Butz for rejiggering the farm subsidies, and the processed food industry for being so wrapped up in making money that they lost sight of the fact that they were making crap. I forgive my great-great-grandfathers for plowing up the beautiful prairie and planting corn.

I like to think now that Iowa got into my system somehow and shaped the filmmaker I became. I still probably talk too much when interviewing people, but I love the listening most of all, the learning and thinking. I love when someone changes my mind about something, and I can feel my stubbornness ebb away. Maybe these aren’t Iowa traits, but it helps to pin memories in time and space. Geographies of our emotional past help us understand where the heck we are now.

And where are we now? Can’t ignore the depth of the muck. Bombs falling in Iran, Beirut and Gaza. Unhoused people going hungry on cold streets. Generations of kids sucked into digital devices. Deportations, censorship & incarceration. Or what the Iowans said: topsoil disappearing. Well water polluted from hog farms. Innocent people mistreated. No justice, no peace; no forgiveness, no peace.

Listening isn’t always enough. And I don’t mean that we need to take to the streets, although we do. What I mean is that we probably aren’t finding a way to ask each other the right questions. About how we’re doing, about what we’ve been through. About where we want to go next. Here in the fuzzy throes of midlife, I’m quick to mutter “what is it all for?” But the questions and the listening bring me back to Earth. Iowa - despite its polluted well waters and depopulated rural towns and bursts of intolerance - brings a person back to Earth. Most of the prairie is gone but you can still glimpse it here and there, slowly building topsoil, nurturing life, arguably the ultimate metaphor for what happens when you stop cutting and let the living live — the arc of the Earth bending towards life.

At the end of our shoot in Iowa, I took Kepler to a basketball game at Carver Hawkeye arena. The film crew bought tickets too, and we all waved little yellow foam fingers and shouted our support of some rather tall young men who we’d never met, and would probably never meet. The crew ate hot dogs and drank Miller Lite. Kepler had popcorn. In the fourth quarter he took my hand and said, “let’s go home.” We left the game early and walked out into the Iowa dark, not saying much, but both I think enjoying the grasp of a new memory that we shared with each other, with the film crew he’d come to admire & adore, and with thousands & thousands of strangers in a basketball stadium in the middle of America in 2026.

Gulls on the harbor ice were black this morning, looking like vultures on a battlefield amidst the sea smoke. -2°F driving the boys to school, my younger son slowed by the cold snap, so we played a bit of Ace of Base before drop-off, for pep. This time of year you can almost feel your money burning as you try to keep house, office and pickup truck warm. Nevermind that the new year brings a fresh look at finances and fitness; it’s slow going insulating a space in our cluttered timber-framed barn to house the rickety treadmill we bought during the pandemic, when the YMCA closed down. Running your hand along the walls, you can sense where the heat flows out into the wild.

We started a new film recently, a project exploring America on the eve of its 250th birthday. We’re shooting it fast, a snapshot captured during the first half of the year to be released as a feature documentary in the second half. At first it was bewildering: what goes in, and what does not? As we’ve swung into motion, we’ve found our boundaries and constraints, but this morning watching the sea smoke, sans camera, I wondered what it meant to miss this stark, contrasty harborscape in our time capsule; my brother and his family in southern Maine, protesting the fascist ICE thugs prowling for people of color; a bald eagle glimpsed the other day hunched over on a frozen lake, thick inches from its swimming prey. Black body, white head.

The film is a collaboration with Robert Reich, who quietly framed our journey a few weeks ago in Berkeley with a simple question: what do we as Americans owe each other? The idea of mutual responsibility is of course fresh on the mind during a time when our elected leader espouses selfish mores. But it’s also a nod, I think, to what was penned 250 years ago by founders steeped in Enlightenment philosophy. Shedding kings, people found themselves tasked with articulating a social contract: what rights do we give up as individuals, so that we together as a society can flourish? What commitments do we make to one another, recognizing that not everyone can make it on their own? Maybe our answers will help us understand the distance our hearts can travel, and what we can reasonably expect of our democratic project.

My colleague Elliot is married to a Hawaiian woman, and he suggested we film one of our chapters there; after all, many Hawaiians were born before the islands became a state, and many more have advocated for separation and sovereignty. A good place to ponder America, plus about 80° warmer than midcoast Maine. Oahu has become a trafficky place, nonetheless shot through with colorful beauty and the rich layers of intertwined cultures: it’s a complicated joy to visit there. I’ll save our gleanings for the film, but I want to mention here that many islanders, even before the swell of current madness, identified more as Hawaiians than Americans.

I get this, in my own way. I’ve long identified as a New Englander, not only because of my family roots in England but also because of a whole swirl of things, some more frivolous than others, that make this place home: landscape, family, memory, school, forests, sports teams, Dunkin’ Donuts. The first time I reckon I glimpsed democracy in any meaningful way was in Vermont during high school, when our teachers brought us to the town meeting. With only 400 residents in the town, the 40 or so assembled participants represented 10% of the population, and they set about with the business of keeping up the town. Taxes, school enrollment, fire trucks; decisions felt immediate and impactful. They needed a volunteer to mow the cemetery, and one of our teachers raised his hand. Before my eyes, people were giving up time and money to contribute to keeping the town livable for everyone.

Point is, we struggle with scale. Even putting aside the fact that America’s founding documents were put on paper before Napoleon sold Jefferson much of the continent, before Indians had been wrenched from their native lands, before the full scale of America’s forests & prairies & coal & gold had been tallied & pillaged — even putting all that aside, you have to wonder whether we’re conducting our democratic experiments at the right scale. (It is indeed an experiment, at least from the perspective of history; as one Hawaiian pastor put it to us, our country is but “a baby.”)

Capturing the contrast between the large scale at which our country attempts to operate and the smaller scales at which most of us live our lives is part, I suppose, of our challenge with this new film. I’m heartened to work with a team of 8 or 9 thoughtful people, even as we recognize that our own sliver of experiences will render a film that can only ever be a sliver of perspectives. Still, that’s the thing. That’s the American project. To remain distinct, individual, and free to express oneself, while still participating in, communicating with, and contributing to a larger whole. I have always liked these odd little lines by Wallace Stevens, which I read in high school, drawn by the astronomy reference, and have pondered since:

It’s a strange courage

you give me, ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise,

toward which you lend no part!

Jason the Mason, who builds stone walls in summer and plows driveways in winter, steamed up on Christmas Eve after 9” had fallen and created a white mountain range, 4’ elevation, beside the old brown van. The boys and I promptly set about digging tunnels and caves. My younger son Percival, a shy and sometimes reclusive fellow, has a particular affection for caves and forts, and at one point mid-dig he paused and looked me over. “We love tunnels,” he said, his pronoun I think referring to our three-man squadron of spelunkers, but I took it to mean the human race. “We are closely related to mice,” I replied, and he smiled: everyone knows this. “We are big mouses.”

When this snow pile melts, if all goes as planned, it will turn into a seasonal creek that runs right under the brown van and over to the neighbors, eventually joining the now frozen stream that runs through Cooper’s farm across the road, the same farm of mostly fallow fields where I took my annual cross country ski that same morning, a pleasant enough glide with the 25mph winds at my back but a nearly frostbitten experience on the trek home.

If things go awry with the spring melt and the creek way is blocked, the water will go into the barn. It’s not the end of the world. The barn has a concrete floor and the posts are set up on pilings. Learning to accommodate floodwaters was much the subject of my film Bluespace, made partly in the wake of Hurricane Sandy down in my old neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn over a decade ago. I remember filming with Latter Day Saints volunteers in the house of Don Riepe on the edge of Jamaica Bay. The Mormons gutted the house while Don tried to figure out what he’d do next and, for that matter, what we all would do next. Would we rebuild our houses with electrical outlets 4’ up to acknowledge that the waters would come again? It’s the kind of attitude shift - we can’t wall out nature - that may seem anathema to a western mind, but I reckon we’ll get there. Don had a professional affection for the water - he worked as a Jamaica Bay “guardian” with the Littoral Society - that I think meant he would stay. Floods would come again.

In Mississippi this fall I’d picked up a copy of my late college advisor Jim Scott’s book In Praise of Floods. It mostly unfolds in Burma, but he meanders to other riverscapes as well, pointing out that you can never really map precisely where a river is. We may like to think of a river as a road, with fixed shoulders and cartographically pinned curves, but ecologically a river is wilder, uncertain — more quantum, you might say. Jim always had a bone to pick with top-down, state-inflicted stupidities that oppressed the weak and wrecked ecologies. I’d lost touch with him in the decade before he died, but was glad to be in his presence again, following the rivers of his thought.

Friends of mine from Ivy League schools like to make sweeping general predictions about the future — Trump this, climate that, AI AI AI. I share their concern for the trajectory of things, but reject their ill-begotten confidence. It ironically smacks of patriarchy, the cocky old confidence of Dads driving the family Mercedes while telling the wife and kids what shall be. At the risk of losing my own children’s respect or fueling their nascent anxieties, I’ve gravitated towards a chorus of “I don’t knows” in the face of a lot of their questions. These days, you can ask computers all sorts of questions, creating the hilarious illusion that computers know what’s what, or what’s best, or what shall be. Good scientists know better: the universe at its smallest and largest scales and everywhere in between is not a clockwork machine but a bestiary of unknowns. It doesn’t mean we do nothing about Trump and climate change and AI, but what we do we must do with humility.

Percy and I busted through a new section of snow tunnel, and this time there was a bit of grass hanging from the top. Percy gave it a good deep study. Jason the Mason does a good job, but even the best plowman upturns a bit of lawn which ends up mid-mountain range, befuddling amateur glaciologists like Percy. How did the Earth get above the snow? With the brown grass dangling down into our tunnel, it seemed like a proper cave, where roots of trees sometimes poke down through. But my mind went elsewhere, to a permafrost tunnel I’d visited in 2016 outside of Fairbanks, Alaska, trooping along with a busload of Arctic scientists during a short fellowship I had there.

Stepping into the tunnel, which had been excavated for exploration and interpretation, you immediately smelled barnyard. Roots dangled from the ceiling, glowing yellow from the lights strung through above the narrow walkway. You half expected mammoth bones to jut out of the walls. I used this footage for a short film called The Measure of a Fog, where I explored humanity’s difficulty with grokking the scale of climate change. Part of the challenge involves timescales that surpass our lifetimes. Exploring a permafrost tunnel, you are plunged sensorially into the Pleistocene; you can smell the old times. I wonder now whether that tunnel tugged on some ancient human memory, like an epigenetic impulse to be safely encaved. We are big mouses.

Now and again Percy would pause his digging to simply curl up in a patch of snow cave we’d dug. The day was not warm, single digits with the wind, but if you found the lee you could almost imagine sleeping peacefully outside; the snow swallowed such sounds that at times we couldn’t hear each other talk. I recalled an unused interview we filmed for The Arc of Oblivion, outside under the stars in Ny-Ålesund on Svalbard. While Fiona Amery, a British researcher we’d invited along on our expedition, spoke quietly about 19th century attempts to depict the aurora borealis, we projected slides of the artwork on an enormous snowbank. I loved the strange colors cast unevenly on the snow, the frozen powder swirling in front of the slide projector lens, the odd quiet of a muffled snow world. When we ran out of lithium ions in the below zero temperatures, we sat awhile in the muted dark.

Sensing teatime, the boys and I went inside and began the absurd process of shedding snow gear while trying to keep socks dry. Gloves and hats became supplicants before the wood stove. While thawing, I happened upon a poem by my friend Aimee Nezhukumatathil in the latest New Yorker with an enchanting last line: Our bodies remember the glide / just like a river remembers its meander. I thought of the previous weekend, when I’d gotten home late afternoon to see my neighbor, Cooper, working with a few fellow farmers to replace a field covering that had blown and twisted in a recent windstorm.

I’d wandered over to help, even though I find the covering - basically a huge black tarp - less than pleasing to look at from my kitchen window. But I don’t fault the farmer. It kills the grass of the fallow field, and come spring the old grass will be plowed under and the soil planted with vegetables. As we tugged the plastic back in place, someone made a joke about being the grounds crew at Fenway Park. Before it was covered, I grew enamored by the world the wind had exposed: tunnels carved by voles in the surface layer of the soil. It was nice to imagine that we were restoring the voles’ roof, under which they could while away the winter, warmed by the withering sun, safe from the surveillance of owls, following their whims like rivers freed of any certainty at all.

-2°F the other morning, and down at Rockport Harbor the river water spilling out into the bay shone as a jagged frozen puzzle beneath the sea smoke, silver blue edged with frost, immobile in water’s mercurial way, the cold strong enough to freeze beard, so it was with some relief that I realized, standing on the pier, that I would not fall senselessly into the sea, but instead hold my ground.

The sensations of a cold morning - a draft along the old kitchen wall, the truck creaking, dry snow underfoot - are a bulwark against insipid digital days. Get some of that cold in you and the prattle of the internet about the dangers of AI and the disappearance of literacy, decency, and democracy slip away a bit — we are yet the same humans we have been. Instincts kick in: look after your neighbors, put away enough wood for the winter, make coffee for your officemates. Your body swings into motion. All that’s frozen is not lost.

On milder days, I have occasionally found myself alone in my office staring insensibly at a screen, immobilized by the onslaught of information before me. Scroll and click, try to think, stave off despair. Sometimes I imagine that our digital devices put out an invisible toxic gas that hypnotizes us, and like trench warriors on the western front we should mask up against Musk et al.

Our relationship to technology is at the heart of our latest film, currently in production, tentatively entitled What Are Computers For? It’s a collaboration with a software developer named Ross who grew up in New England but has worked a lot in the Bay Area. Ross has been thinking a lot about how what we might be doing with computers is held back by increasingly powerful forces which are hellbent on the humdrum goal of selling. Tech companies smother us with apps, social media addictions and advertising.

My friend Curt, when we were freshmen in college, gifted me Wendell Berry’s What Are People For? I always liked the way you could read the title in different ways. With the emphasis on People, you wonder what it is we’re supposed to do with our lives, bodies, and minds. What is the function of a person? With the emphasis on For, you think about morality, the normative question of what we ought to stand for. The questions are interrelated, but with computers we are still not at a stage where computers can be For something, as they do not have volition or consciousness.

Berry wrote an essay about why he didn’t use computers. The gist of it was that computers got him further from what he valued. We’ve been talking a bit about this as a film team, with regards to the question of what computers are for. We end up asking: what are humans for? Humans make computers. So to answer What Are Computers For we must ponder What Humans Are For.

So pondering, I jotted a bunch of things on index cards on the big long cork board that covers one wall of our conference room at HQ. It’s a funny task. What are the values and goals of human beings? I wrote: Exploration. Prosperity. Memory. Love. Self-determination. Freedom from Suffering. Self-expression. Justice. Certainty. Uncertainty. Reproduction. Wonder.

A friend of mine who rents a desk here wandered in the other day and took a look at my cards. He shook his head. Anything to do with computers, he said, basically took him further away from all those values and goals. I nodded in agreement. This was Berry’s point, which he made long before we had smart phones to get addicted to and Zoom calls to suck quiet pauses from our working lives. If there’s no middle ground - if the only healthy relationship with computers is a full breakup - then we are in for grim futures. We both went back to our computers.

These days I wake up at 2am and wander around the house with my anxieties for a few hours. The anxieties cover the full terrain of my existence. Personal anxieties as a father, husband, son, brother, uncle, cousin, friend. Professional anxieties about sustainability and success. Political anxieties about country, climate & community. I click on my phone and read about the latest films to get into Sundance, mostly well-heeled alums of the festival returning with their latest celebrity portraits. There are, too, a few beautiful sounding projects that I’d love to see, but I won’t make the trip to Utah this year, as the experience gets me further from what I value. It tugs on my yearning for fame & fortune, but this creates the same feeling - distance from myself - that I get from spending too much time online.

A few weeks ago, insensibly running a half-marathon in Virginia with a clunky arm brace on, I got to thinking about how lovely it is to inhabit a body, even an out-of-shape body who gets passed by an older man jogging in a full-size hot dog costume. 135 minutes and 17 seconds was enough time to experience both the fragility of the human foot and the unique joy of feeling completely connected to myself and others. Can computers help us along that path? Help us forge new connections with ourselves — and for that matter, with each other? Computers enhance our senses in some ways; digital processing sharpens images of deep space. But mostly, day to day, screens deaden.

Wind skirrs along the ocean’s edge. Cormorants plunge for fish. Our driveway sheets over with ice. You don’t want to take a tumble, but there’s something whimsical about it too. The kids learn to navigate it, thousands of imperceptible happenings in their nerves and neurons making little adjustments every day, teaching them to gingerly walk the earth. My best advice for people not accustomed to walking on ice is: walk as if you are walking on ice. We set off for school, a 6-minute drive that accommodates two Ace of Base songs, music whisked to my pickup truck heaven-knows-how but surely thanks to computers, humans, satellites, rare earth metals, fossil fuels, and my irrepressible ability to choose to listen to Ace of Base on a clear December morning in Maine.

The other day, after talking with some of Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s graduate students at the University of Mississippi, I wandered through campus back towards downtown Oxford, MS. It was a warm November day, and I liked being out among the live oaks and the students hustling to class. There were lots of signs around campus saying “Hotty Toddy.” That’s a phrase that falls into a category of things (“thirst trap,” “six seven”) that I do not understand but prefer not to look up on the internet; it’s better to just wonder at them, or ask people who obviously would have no idea, like foreigners or hermits or great-grandmothers. Near a food truck, I saw three box-shaped robots on wheels. I asked a student if these were food delivery machines. He looked at them and said, “Yeah, that is what those are.”

Under an enormous oak tree, an older gentleman was holding forth to a group of twenty young women. I wandered closer to eavesdrop, thinking it might be a campus tour. “Ladies,” he was saying, “I appreciate your attention today. You stay focused on your studies, get a degree and go get a good job. Stay away from boys, they are evil and up to no good. I know all about it. God bless you.” The students murmured their thanks and dispersed, and I approached the gentleman. “What class is this?”

He explained it was a class on the history of the university, and he was a substitute lecturer for the day. “My real passion is the University Greys, do you know about them?” I shook my head no. He bent my ear for a while about a group of young men on campus who, just after the breakout of the Civil War in 1861, decided to join the Confederate war effort. Campus shut down, and by the end of the war one-third of the student body was dead.

“I went up to Gettysburg,” he said, “with $300,000 I’d raised to make three monuments for my boys.” He said he’d wasted his life between the ages of 12 and 35 until he’d discovered the story of the Greys and discovered his true passion: researching them, celebrating them, writing a book. “I had 24,000 Facebook followers before they kicked me off.”

I asked him why he thought he’d become so passionate about these boys and their story. He thought a moment and said, “I don’t want them to be forgotten.” He changed the subject, launching into what seemed like an old chestnut of his, Jefferson Davis and the little-known legality of secession. “They had a whole bunch of northern lawyers who wouldn’t take the case of prosecuting him, because they knew they didn’t have a case. So they let him go.”

I took my leave of Starke Miller and dutifully paid a visit to his favorite stained-glass window, a celebration of the Greys in the former geology building. A receptionist told me I could stand on the landing to look at the window, but I wasn’t allowed upstairs. She went back to scrolling through her phone. The previous week, the university had hosted a Turning Point USA rally with JD Vance and Erika Kirk, and it was all over the papers.

On a stone stoop near the road, I sat for a while and read the transcript of what the Vice President said. He talked mostly about immigration, and needing fewer people in the country, which was funny because he also talked a lot about having babies. “I know at Ole Miss, occasionally some of you will have a few drinks on a Friday or Saturday, or hopefully not a Tuesday night, but I’m sure that happens from time to time here in SEC Country. But here’s the thing, when you go out until 3:00 in the morning and wake up at 6:00 AM for class, the thing that I’ve learned in my old age is that incredible energy, God actually meant it for another purpose. And that purpose was to help take care of a family. So, while you’re young, have those babies if you’re able to.”

No wonder this was a popular rally, here he was promoting campus copulation! He also talked a few times about Christianity’s power to fight ritualistic child sacrifice, and about archaeological digs where the bones of prostitutes were dug up beside the bones of children. He said he and Trump had managed to block or kick out 2.5 million people from the country, people who were taking up housing and driving down wages. The big theme was saving America.

My grandfather didn’t finish college. He enrolled in the University of Virginia in the late 1930s, but soon dropped out, having struggled with dyslexia. He enlisted in the navy just before the outbreak of World War II. To hell with this campus, let’s go fight! Or who knows what he was thinking, twenty years old or so, becoming an aviation metalsmith. He survived the Pacific, started a family in his early 20s.

I was in Africa when I was twenty years old and living for a few months in Saint-Louis, Senegal. I rented a room at the guest house of the university, where I’d connected with Ousmane Kane, a political scientist friend of my college adviser, James C Scott. As the summer wore on, students grew fed up with food shortages. At the dining hall, where I took meals with my friend Ousmane Balde, we ate horse. A group of young men took to rioting, burning a car and generally raising a ruckus. Young men with muscles and pent up energy. In Boston, where I’d gone to high school, you mostly saw this sort of behavior after a Red Sox game. The police patrolled on horseback with batons.

“Weapons of the Weak” was how Jim Scott described certain acts of resistance by people oppressed by the State. I wonder if the young men of the Greys saw themselves as oppressed by the north, fighting a noble war of resistance and resilience against all odds. Whether for them it was a war about slavery, about the fate of men and women shipped from the slave markets in Senegal, across the blue Atlantic to the sun scorched cotton plantations and the life of the whip, as I’d been taught in school, or whether it was more elemental, a fight against the overbearing Northerners in their blue coats, damn them and their lies. Despite my conviction that hardworking empathy is the path to decency, I do not devote much time trying to empathize with the Confederate cause. In the north, if someone is flying a Confederate flag, you figure they’re a dipshit.

In the small cemetery near my parent’s house in rural Maine, small bronze stars adorn the graves of men who died in the Civil War. I filmed there for my film The Arc Of Oblivion, which explores humankind’s struggle with the fact that most things get forgotten. Forgotten, really, are the stories of these boys in that cemetery, their journeys to join the Union Army, their fitful sleeps in scummy tents before charging out in some hot field to kill some other boys from Oxford, Mississippi, or be killed, all of their mothers waiting at home under shade trees for news of the young men they brought into this world, nursed and raised and sent off, half of them trying to hold the country together, half of them trying to split it apart. Most of these boys’ journals were lost, so who knows what any of them were really fighting for. What do we live for when we’re that age? I’d asked Starke, the substitute lecturer, what he thought of today’s youth in America, and he replied, “they’ve got little skulls full of mush.”

I bought an abnormal number of books in Oxford’s wonderful bookstore. Aimee’s beautiful books were prominently featured, and I bought a book of poetry that she’d blurbed about; on the cover was a marvelous map of the Mississippi river with all its twisting historical tracks. My late adviser Jim Scott had written about this map not long before he died. The mapmaker had made thousands of drill cores through the center of the country to figure out where the river had once flowed. Jim’s point, among others, was the absurdity of maps that pin a river in place. They are always shifting, their floods a form of breathing. It’s their freedom that gives life to the land.

The sun got lower in the southern sky, and I wanted to rest a little before the evening’s screening, which would be followed by a dinner with English professors where we’d talk about AI, essay writing, that sort of thing. I would not ask the meaning of Hotty Toddy, and before dawn I’d be off to points west. I never saw the robot delivery boxes in action, but I saw them all over the campus, usually parked quietly under the shade of live oaks, with little flags sticking up, waiting to be pressed into service.

On Wednesdays I work in our tiny spice & candy shop that we opened a few months ago. Pretty much nobody comes in on Wednesdays. I prop my laptop on top of my lap and catch up on email, bookkeeping, that sort of thing. The other day a woman came into the shop and asked me what music I was playing. It was some sort of French pop playlist, and the artist was Stromae, a Belgian. “Stromae?” she said, surprised. “I didn’t know he was still relevant.”

The idea of relevance is interesting. Does it imply quality, staying power, or currency? I suspect what she meant at a very basic level was, “I didn’t know Stromae was still cool.” Despite my never having had a grasp of coolness, the idea of it is certainly relevant to my life as a documentary filmmaker. Out there, somewhere, like a haze flowing over the cities and suburbs, lingers a notion of what’s current and compelling. It’s hard to grasp precisely, but most everyone can see it. It’s changing but ever-present – meteorological.

These hazy currents of coolness have never been my stock and trade, but no matter how cloistered I become in my coastal edit room, I’m aware that my eventual audience largely - statistically - dwells in a more urban world. A few years ago, my colleague Martha Shane came up to Maine from Brooklyn so we could finish editing our movie Picture Character, about emojis. We had a scene with a guy who worked for Tinder, talking about the use of emojis on the dating app. I was puzzling over whether we needed to explain to our audience what Tinder was, figuring that a certain portion of them might have never used dating apps. Martha rolled her eyes at this notion: “everyone knows Tinder.” At that moment my father, in town for a dentist appointment, wandered into my office and Martha put it to him. “Mr. Cheney, do you know what Tinder is?” Dad appreciated the formality, having spent 50 years as a high school teacher. “Of course. Kindling to light a fire from sparks.”

Five years ago, when I was turning forty, I planned to have a party with a neighbor - a defense lawyer & dahlia farmer - who had a birthday around the same time. I had an idea for a cocktail made with black currants which would be named Eau Quarante. It was a triple or maybe quadruple pun. Eau Quarante is a bad translation of Forty Water, which is 1990’s slang for malt liquor, the kind of thing you drink in college or on a stoop. But it sounds a little like “au courant,” which means well informed (someone who is au courant with society surely knows the currents of coolness), and if you pronounce “currant” with a French accent, you get a sort of code-mixed “Currant Water.” Anyway, fortunately for all involved the party was cancelled because of the onset of the pandemic, and no one was subjected to my irrelevant puns.

When I was in fifth grade I was selected for bullying by the cool kids. These three guys - Christer, Leo & Chad - called themselves “the posse,” which my parents & older brother probably found hilarious after consoling me. A centerpiece of their campaign revolved around the fact that I wore second-hand clothes, a fact which Christer, as my former best friend, knew all too well, his mother having donated some discards to me. An ancillary campaign revolved around the fact that most everyone watched different TV than I did, thus empowering the cool kids to jeer at me for not knowing certain terminology which was making its way around. They were au courant with The Simpsons, I was probably stuck on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

These days, most of my colleagues are fairly gentle with their introduction of new slang, and I enjoy learning what I can. Some years ago, when I was teaching at Yale, a student began a presentation by saying that a certain movie was “fire, y’all. It is fire!” I loved this expression, I thought it was very vivid. Who came up with it? In science, you sometimes get a few people - Charles Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace - stumbling upon the same theory around the same time, a reflection of the ways in which science builds on itself, thousands of contributions laying the groundwork for a discovery such that the discovery becomes, in a way, inevitable. Was it this way with “it is fire”?

My plan, going to Yale as a freshman myself, was to be an astrophysicist or a poet. The trouble with the astrophysics classes was that there wasn’t enough poetry in it for me. It was deep math, and no observation. I reckon if I’d stuck with it I would have found my way back to the sky, but after a few chalkboard classes I wandered elsewhere, wondering if I should have taken up the invitation of Jay Pasachoff, the astronomer at Williams College who had reached out to me delighted that an applicant expressed interest in the stars. (Was astronomy not cool?) My mother and I had driven out to see him in the fall of 1997 on Route 2, a beautiful autumn drive that I still think of often, especially this time of year, golden quaking aspens, hairpin turns, skies shedding summer’s humidity and filling with stars.

It was a single professor who put me off poetry. John Hollander. I’d lobbied hard to get into his writing seminar as a precocious sophomore, and been accepted. I thrilled to the opportunity, having read his work in high school where I was the editor of our school’s little literary magazine. He wasn’t my type, but he was famous, so how could I go wrong. I went wrong, he was boorish and bossy, a bully of a teacher, and I couldn’t even sit through a single class.

Evidently these ambitions - astronomy, poetry - were but thinly held. Or maybe I needed to find my way back to them in my own way. Years later, when I was teaching in these same classrooms, I showed a film called The City Dark, which tries to articulate the reasons we might try to protect the night sky from the hazy specter of light pollution. For me, the reasons are astro-poetical. They are bound up in each other, in a shared space of sky and spirit. I don’t reckon the great medieval astronomers - who were predominantly Muslim, and gave names to many of our stars - thought to separate their wonder at the sky from their mappings and categorizings. Modern western science went largely the other way, splitting science from poetry, giving us Whitman’s complaints about the Learn’d Astronomer. If you’re not careful about the company you keep, you can find the cleavage still, as I did.

I think that’s why Alan Lightman, who I filmed with for Thirteen Ways, has insisted on exploring his spirituality through some very lovely and readable books rooted in his life as an astrophysicist. Earlier today I flew on the 8-seater plane down to Boston over the coastal islands where he spends his summers stargazing. Maine’s weather is spotty, but we’re far enough away from the cities that we don’t catch much smog or streetlight. You get a lot of poems coming from those islands, and at this time of year the woodstoves are burning (it is fire!), each domicile marked by a thin trail of smoke or warm shimmer tendrilling up, perhaps to join the greater haze clustering around the towns or somehow to escape, unscathed, straight up and out into the vast purity of space.

The other night, my son Kepler and I watched Monty Python’s The Quest for the Holy Grail in our tiny cabin on a boat heading up the coast of Norway. Our bargain room had no view, or rather just a view of the enormous orange lifeboats which allegedly can hold up to 48 people, so at night we watched movies. Or really just this one movie, over and over. After it ended he “rewound” on the laptop and watched John Cleese’s infamous castle guard scene one last time before we got our books out and read ourselves to sleep, blue light from the night fog gathering at the window.

The next morning, over toast, he asked me the three questions the bridgekeeper asks Lancelot (also John Cleese) towards the end of the film:

What is your name?

What is your quest?

What is your favorite color?

It was the second question that tripped me up.

A ferry ride up a fjordy coast isn’t a bad time to mull one’s quest in life. I have no shortage of films I want to make, plenty of things I can list as “things that make life worth living,” but the idea of an overarching quest that spans my entire life — that’s a stumper.

In Trondheim, we got off the boat and met up with Ida Beathe Øverjordet, an ecotoxicologist with whom I’d traveled to Svalbard for The Arc of Oblivion. Ida had her son with her, and we piled into her car to go see some skeletons. The library in town is built around or above a Viking grave site. We looked at the bones awhile, then walked across the street to the Trondheim science center. While our boys enfolded themselves in various interactive contraptions teaching them (in Norwegian) the fundamentals of transistors or centrifugal forces, Ida told me the research community was struggling.

So many friends and colleagues of mine are pivoting to new jobs or careers that I wasn’t surprised to hear it. Filmmakers are becoming social workers. Environmental advocates are plumb out of work. Scientists are leaving science. Some are going willingly, others not. I don’t know what the numbers say. But if you’ve got rent to pay and backlogs of credit card debt to confront, the overarching quest of one’s life swims in and out of focus as you try to make ends meet.

By the time the Crusades got going, some of the Vikings who had sailed and sallied south into mainland Europe had intermingled with the locals in France — Gauls, Celts, Romans, Franks, who knows. They became Christians. These descendants of the northmen who settled Normandy, relatives of the library skeletons in Trondheim, picked up their swords, joined the throngs and quested to the Middle East to wage Holy War, which is to say, fight Muslims. I’ve read it described as a kind of fever that got whipped up in people. They piled into boats and sailed the Mediterranean with their armor and horses and god knows what. During certain sieges in the Levant, the Crusader dead piled up in such numbers that their bodies were slung into the moats to use as platforms for ladders to climb the ramparts. Was their quest to climb into heaven, by serving God?

Not long after 9/11, I attended a neighbor’s funeral in rural Maine. The deceased’s grandson, a National Guardsman, asked me if I was going to enlist to go wage war in Iraq. “I’m going to go. We’ve got to go,” he said, his voice ever so lightly afire. He looked at me with the assumption that I would, too. I have no idea what I said to him in return. The funeral was near a field where, in the last few years, a very dedicated heavy machinery operator has piled up enormous concrete blocks and painted them as a shrine to President Trump. Drive by and it whips you into a fever of one sort or another.

Trump’s Christian nationalism here in the states hasn’t escalated to the scale of Holy War, but he stokes many a skirmish. In the Levant, murderous fevers abide. Fighting an enemy, real or imagined, in the name of God, on a quest for admittance to paradise — I suppose that’s a kind of overarching quest that you can hang your helmet on, now or medievally. There must be a clarity to it for those enthralled, but to me it smacks of darkness.

Ida took us to lunch in a tower overlooking Trondheim, a spire broadcasting TV signals across the wet green countryside. The lunch room slowly spins, so by the time you’ve finished your French fries you’re back where you began. She wanted to show us her most recent work, captured in 360° underwater the fjords of Svalbard. Kepler and I strapped on VR goggles right there during lunch, and as we slowly spun above Trondheim we wandered the seafloor of the Arctic, watching her take soil samples and haul them up to the ship for study. “Where’s the walrus?” Kepler asked, remembering the scene from our film. Ida laughed. “There’s a seal at least!”

In Norway, after the Crusade era, Christian evangelists encountered pockets of paganism in the forests, wild-eyed wood folk resisting the spread of the Gospel. Stories of these wild folk seemed to have morphed into mythologies of trolls haunting the wilderness. We’d read about this in the Troll Museum in Bergen, one of those commercial “museums” that entrap tired parents but also can’t help providing at least one or two interesting morsels of information. I grew up an acolyte in the Episcopal Church, under the tutelage of selfless pastors I still admire, but as someone who has logged a good chunk of hours under stars and tree canopies, among moss and beside streams, idly piling rocks into cairns, I’ve long had a soft spot for pagans.

Before Trondheim & the boat ride & the spinning lunch, we’d been in Bergen for the Bergen International Film Festival, where I’d been invited to show several films and give a few talks. The festival was kind enough to issue Kepler an accreditation badge. One of the programmers at the film festival, Jesper, took Kepler under his wing during my panel discussions and explained some of the finer points of trolls. They turn to stone during the day (everyone knows this), and at night if you tickle their noses they will run away. They are enormous, but they are descended from other creatures, even more enormous, called Jötunn, who more closely resembled humans despite their astonishing size, the size of tall trees. In the woods of Maine we have tall trees but we don’t have stories like this. The comparable “pagans” I suppose were the Wabanaki Indians driven by settler Christians from the woods, and I do not know their old stories well. We use their trails still.

Jesper suggested we visit the science center in Bergen (so many science centers!), and there I met an American guy from San Diego who had been living in Norway for a few decades. He was there to showcase his invention, the Pancake Bot, which is a kind of 3D printer that makes pancakes in the shape of robots. A genial fellow who caught wind that I was a filmmaker, he wanted to take us on a train trip east of Bergen to see the snowy landscape where George Lucas had filmed the planet Hoth for The Empire Strikes Back. I told him we were getting on a boat instead. “Next time,” he said.

The finishing of a film is not a Holy Grail. At film festivals, which is the first time you find yourself blinking in the spotlight of public attention, you’re not granted eternal life so much as a temporary reprieve from the otherwise constant existential morass of asking yourself why you bother. “Thank you for the film,” people say, as they bustle out of the theater in their black coats, into the rain. One woman offers a chef’s kiss with her hand, partly apologizing for not sticking around for the q&a. It’s hard to tell who’s just being nice and who really means it, but somehow the room recharges you.

But what does it all add up to? Will there come a point when I make a film and I say, that’s it, I’m done, I’ve said all I want to say, my film journey is over? Or is it about the sum of all the films, and eventually they will stack up in such a way that they form a kind of body of work, and this body was what it was all about, something that can remain - for my kids, for whoever cares - after my own body is gone?

Or maybe I’m thinking of quests too narrowly by thinking about my films. If I’m being honest, films are just one star in the constellation of my life. The other stars are easy enough to identify - family, friends, love, community, landscapes, dreams, language, trees. Learning & wondering, more learning. Making memories. Clinging to the elements of existence that enthrall and sustain. Life, since as long as I’ve thought to think about it, has been about nurturing this constellation of sustenance while trying to do some good in the world. But what’s the end point?

Or maybe I’ve got it all wrong. After all, a quest in western literature isn’t usually a lifelong thing. It lasts the length of the story, a matter of pages, yielding to happily-ever-after which is presumably a form of retirement in Bermuda or the Canary Islands. Gins with tonic, electric scooters, telescopes and bus tours. Well, I like all those things, especially bus tours if you sit in the back and heckle and let someone else do the driving and parking. Maybe my quest in life is to start a bus tour company. You’d watch my documentaries on those little bus TVs, eating Cheez-Its and drinking coffee, and then I’d drive you around to meet the people in my films, people like Ida, people all over the country and world who have strange & marvelous things to share. I think that would be more interesting than most bus tours, where someone prattles on with facts about old cathedrals built by plundering Crusaders. Who remembers anything from those tours anyway? I guess my point is this: maybe it’s obvious, maybe the point is to have a lot of quests, a life full of stories, journals full of inks. A life illustrated with unusual images, filled like a vessel - a bus, a ferry? - with strange cargo, moving none too fast. When it moves too fast, on too straight a track, life’s not a wander but a whirlwind.

From Trondheim, after saying goodbye to Ida and her son, we made our way back to Bergen. In the taxi to the airport, our driver carried on about immigrants in Oslo and hand grenades. I couldn’t quite parse his thesis, beyond xenophobia, so we steered back towards the film festival, which he knew something about. “I like film, young kids, using knives, very nice.” I didn’t ask him to clarify, preferring to nod and watch the rain. You get these sort of odd taxi poems all the time when traveling and sometime it’s better to leave them be. Kepler and I watched the rain collect on the glass. One day, the cabbie broke in again, it rained for 89 days straight and they gave out T-shirts. “Huge boxes of T-shirts, you wouldn’t believe it!” He was soon headed to Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, for sun. I mentioned I’d been there and he was unimpressed. “Everyone goes there. They filmed Star Wars there.”

Standing on the curb in the rain with our bags, watching him drive off, Kepler commented that the cab driver sure talked a lot. “But it made it go quickly,” he said. I laughed and nodded and we headed inside. Our little trip had passed in a flash, a rare journey we were lucky to take together. My name is Ian, my quest in life is to slow life down, and my favorite color is blue.

Downstairs, 6am, the kitchen is still chaos from Saturday’s backyard dinner party with an untold number of colleagues, kids, Dad, Dad’s sister, Dad’s sister’s husband, phenologist Dallas Hudson, visiting filmmakers, Captain Jim, a dog named Yoshi. Amanda makes coffee and everything becomes possible. You fix your bandage, shielding your hideous wound from the kids, take your medicine. Only one boy is going to make it to school today, the other out sick, and you know you’re not going to remember all the film equipment you need to load into the pickup truck, there’s always something, why even bother making a list.

It’s 7am, you better warm up the old Dodge, it’s a chilly morning. There’s nothing viable for breakfast but there’s paella from the dinner party, made by Brandon your colleague and cinematographer who grew up in Tucson and cooked the rice mussels scallops shrimp over an open fire in the backyard, the day is looking up. He used the hot paprika with aplomb; your fast is broken.

You drop the 4th grader at school and talk at the gate for a while with the vice principal, who saw your film the other night and got to thinking about psychology, the way we frame our views of others. What do children see when they gaze at each other? He looks like he’s caught hold of an idea and will chase it. It’s a good feeling. Walking away, you think maybe there’s more benefit to making slightly odd films, if you can get them in front of people, than easy films, satisfying films. There are lots of good stories, we are awash in them. But oddities? Not that Observer is an avant-garde film, but it’s not everyday fare. It stuck with the vice principal. You wonder what sticks where and why.

You drive your usual circuitous route to HQ, down past Rockport Harbor, up past the hardware stores and around the bend where the film festival founder’s Dad runs the gas station. What’s the impact of a film? People talk about that. They can talk all they want, it’s a great unknown. By great unknown I mean it’s great, it’s wonderful that we don’t know what effects our films have on people. What are we going to do, interview everyone after they leave the theater? For how long? Will they tell all? What if the film follows them into their dreams? What if they forget all about it until years later, when something stirs in them and bubbles up, froths over, tumbles out? Here’s the impact of Observer on someone ten years later, on the other side of the world: they pick up a dead butterfly, trapped in a spider’s web, and gently flap its little wings.

You load gear into the truck, trying to remember everything: camera body, gold mount batteries, viewfinder, SDI cables, tripod, tripod plate, dana dolly, rails, stands, 24-35mm lens, 50mm lens, 85mm lens, 150mm macro lens, 70-200mm zoom lens, macro probe lens. You’re still tired, and only one arm is working well, you’re like one of those lobsters they call culls. You’ve agreed to shoot some footage for a friend who’s on the board of a marine science non-profit down one of the peninsulas. You’ve in turn asked your friend Brandon to help shoot, because you’ve ruptured your distal biceps tendon. On you go. You stop for gas ten minutes from home, and realize you’ve forgotten the brackets that hold the dolly in place, so you drive back to HQ, loop around, do it all again.

You drive down the St George peninsula on 131. This time of year, the water is so blue you can’t say a thing about it. Twelve years ago yesterday you got married down here, you pass the place, a field by the sea, an old grange hall looking out over the flats. Memories flood you. No motion pictures of the event exist, except some Handicam video your Uncle Paul shot at the grange hall variety show your friends put on the night before the wedding, torrential rain outside. Uncle Paul passed away this past year, and you spoke briefly at his memorial service in Tampa, the streets still debris-strewn from hurricane. Weddings, memories, memorials, coastal storms.

You’ll spend the day by the sea in Maine, encountering hermit crabs, sea potatoes, this and that kelp, periwinkles. You’ll pocket an empty whelk and bring it home to show your wife. (Empty whelks are the traditional gift for 12th wedding anniversaries.) You’ll forget the whelk and lose track of it in the truck. A better gift is one of those slender vacuums you can use in the car to vacuum up Cheez-its and old crushed whelks.

A few days later, you’ll be flying to Europe and you never sleep on planes so you’ll get to reading about dog whelks, also called dogwinkles, which can be found on the Maine coast and which, if you play your cards right, might yield a few drops of red or purple dye. It’ll seem like a good project, it might involve a snorkel set and some patience. How the color might differ from the Mediterranean whelk purples is another pleasing unknown. Dogwinkle isn’t a word you ever thought you’d encounter, a dream word, and whether or not you get around to extracting purple droplets from a sea creature, it’s the sort of thing that you ought to get into your head on the airplane on the off chance that you nod off even for a moment, on the off chance that seashells and dyes might find their way into your dreams, swirls of color, Tyrian purple, cochineal, redcoats, moon rock whelks.

Dreams, of course, are our most private and ephemeral moving pictures — made for an audience of one, slipping away quickly into the night but somehow, you imagine, indelibly printing their delicate purple ink upon your day.

This is my home, but I’m a stranger here.

I was conceived, my mother tells me, on an island ten miles or so from here. I was born in Boston, the de facto capital of New England, and did all my schooling in New England until I was 23 and I went off the midwest to see about corn and my great-grandfather. Flying home for Christmas from the cornfields and a stressful collaboration, I felt my body unclench over the sweep of Maine forests, the cold blue Atlantic. I remembered living in Africa for a summer when I was twenty, homesick beyond what I’d imagined possible, lying under my mosquito net in a Lariam-induced hallucinatory state in the Sahel, picturing the drive from Logan Airport north to Maine, the traffic falling away and the tall pines crowding in, cool air, crickets, stars. Home.

There’s no place on Earth where I feel more at home than in Maine, and yet I’ve learned to call myself a stranger here. I can tell you what the trees are, where the sun sets in the winter, where to look for crabs, when Arcturus is high in the sky and when the well will run dry. The pulse of insects through the seasons, the odd cry of the osprey. But over the years I’ve also realized how many unfamiliar things there are: trees oddly grown, undergrowth strangely mossed, expressions I haven’t heard, fish I do not know. Much of home is, if viewed a certain way, foreign.

It’s taken some work to sense the world this way; it would have been easier to let home feel like home, and leave it at that. Filmmaking has anchored this reorientation. In A Meter of Maine, I staked out a square meter of land in my backyard and filmed it now and again over the course of the year, gradually sensing things I hadn’t sensed before, the play of the stiff wind in winter, the path of a slug along a stem in spring. That was a short film, not much of a thing. I expanded it in Thirteen Ways, where I staked out a hectare or so on my parents’ land and invited a dozen people to wander it with me and my camera over the course of a year. That was when I first met David George Haskell, a writer and biologist who has taught me a lot about observation and wonder. I met Alan Lightman, an astrophysicist who wrote Einstein’s Dreams and stood around with his pencil talking about spirituality. On a particularly hot day, I had a vagal episode when talking to forester Dr Thomas Easley, who helped me into the cool shade of a fir tree. We’d been talking about trees and racism and indigenous knowledge, and I was embarrassed to be fainting on my home turf, weighed down by my camera gear in July’s newfound humidity. He’d never been to Maine; as a black man he remarked on Maine’s inescapable whiteness. He helped me back to consciousness under a balsam fir.

Who is a stranger? Who belongs where? Who knows what?

For The Most Unknown, I brought scientists of different disciplines together on a series of awkward blind dates. They were completely ignorant of each other’s work, strangers in each other’s labs, yet thrilled by the chance to ask questions, learn something new. What propels science is the thrill of the unknown; it’s a joy to not know. I hadn’t been taught science that way. It is a humbling way to look at the world. My recent film Observer is a continuation of this journey: what do we notice when we’re plunked down somewhere new? One man, Dallas Hudson, walks the same plot of land in his backyard everyday, an observer par excellence, humble as can be.

Gradually, I have learned to see my home in a new way. I am perhaps more proud of this achievement than any other, even though it’s more or less the opposite of achievement — it’s an understanding of how little I know about my own home. This paradox is thrilling. It doesn’t mean everything is unfamiliar; I go to sleep at night hearing the old crickets. I know what the water tastes like. But it means the local world is wondrous. We are everywhere travelers, visitors, strangers. I find this to be an invigorating way to think about home. If nothing else, it is an antidote to boredom, a way to keep life from slipping by too fast. But it also resets one’s sense of belonging.

The Wabanaki have been in what we call Maine longer than Europeans have, so you could suggest that they are the only ones who are not strangers here. The true locals. Of course they were once strangers here, in the years after the mile-thick glaciers receded 11,000+ years ago. On geologic time scales, no one comes from nowhere. But still, the Wabanaki are what we consider indigenous to Maine. How many years do you and your blood relatives need to live in a place before you become native to the place? Is it faster for some cultures than others? What constitutes a sense of place? These are lovely and fascinating questions. But for as long as we’ve had nation states, these concerns have also been weaponized; they are the harbingers of xenophobic exclusion acts, deportations, and all sorts of other idiotic behavior. Everyone’s just making up whatever rules they like. You go back far enough and we’re all bumbling strangers; every visitor deserves a chance to feel at home.

It’s somewhat fashionable now in Maine to footnote your emails by saying that you live on “unceded Wabanaki lands.” I don’t know precisely why people do this, whether it’s to remind their email correspondents that America was not peaceably settled but violently taken, or to suggest that this land should be returned to its prior inhabitants, or some other purpose. Perhaps it’s that colonial powers exercised such devastating judgment that the descendants of these colonists seek out whatever meek opportunities they can find to apologize, even if it’s just in an email signature.

I appreciate it as an expression of discomfort, an acknowledgment that we’re not sure where we belong — any of us. Perhaps the moment you feel you belong, the moment you become an insider, that’s when you start putting up fences. You start shutting other people out. Bullies are insiders. Plenty of people are. Folks with a few generations of family roots in Maine are quick to ask a stranger whether they grew up in Maine. If not, you are “from away.” I’ve sensed this mild and absurd brand of xenophobia to be on the wane, but who knows.

After all, a sense of belonging is pretty darn nice. Without it, we’d be unmoored. I love being home. So I try to keep both things at once: I belong here, and I do not. This is my home, and I too am a stranger here. I know this land, but it is mostly unknown to me. As a filmmaker, the camera gives me a sense of capturing the land, of owning it in some way; it arbitrates my relationship to the world. But it also reminds me that what I’m capturing is a brief glimpse, a sliver of time and sky. I do not own it in any sense. And there’s still so much I haven’t learned to see.

In the summer we get a lot of strangers in town, but I suppose everyone is in some sense a stranger, and I’ve been thinking this over amidst the bustle of summer film shoots, fog sounds on an island, strange computer sets in an old grange hall, kids to pickleball camp, family hospital visits, wild blueberries on questionable yogurt, parched garden no rain for weeks, tiling 200-year-old godforsaken bathroom floor, a new cat named Big Eddie, torn bicep tendon lifting a props chest, severed fingertip under a boulder, country roads in the ’75 Dodge, talking on the dock with an old friend, escargots in Nova Scotia, hard drive backups & uploads & downloads, stars moon mists swims lakes, visitors from afar. Through it all the tourists come and go from our tiny spice & candy shop in town. Who are they? Where do they come from? Why are they here?

Earlier this year, after a day of sound mix work, I stepped out of the pouring rain into a small restaurant in Brooklyn and sat down to eat dinner alone. I try not to pull out my cell phone during such a one-man dinner, largely because I imagine how depressing it would be for the servers & chefs & owners to work in a restaurant filled with solo diners staring at their phones, or how embarrassing it would be if aliens or Captain Picard or John Locke happened to beam into the restaurant at that very moment and think, this is what has become of Earth’s people, sitting alone staring at their phones? If I’ve forgotten a book, I sit and look about me. It’s occurred to me that this is perhaps even less pleasant for the servers: some wet crummy guy just looking around.

On this particular evening, the rain had disoriented me after a bit of a walk, and I didn’t really know where I was. “What neighborhood is this?” I asked the server. “Greenpoint,” he said, then: “You’re not from around here.” I shook my head no. Like most documentary filmmakers, I’d lived in New York for some years, but I’d never felt like a New Yorker and laid no claim to the place. Kim Stanley Robinson, a science fiction writer and walker of the Sierras who I interviewed for my film Bluespace, once remarked to me that he loved visiting New York City and compared the towering Manhattan skylines to great canyons, vast and beautiful and terrifying all at once — “the technological sublime.” Sublime indeed, but it’s not my home landscape, so I don’t mind bearing the brand of an out-of-towner. I am called Ian, I come from New England, I’m soaking wet and here to eat ravioli.

As a documentary filmmaker, I’m often a stranger in someone else’s midst. In a farmer’s kitchen in Iowa, asking about the farm suicides of the 1980s. On a pirogue in Senegal, asking about the black crowned crane. In a delightfully shabby hotel in Hunan Province, drinking strange liquors with General Tso’s great-great grandson. In the Atacama desert, asking a guide for permission to fly a drone above geoglyphs.

It has been commonplace for years to question whether documentary filmmakers should travel far from home to gather footage and then bring that footage home. As a white man collecting footage in foreign lands, I resemble the colonial naturalists & anthropologists whose practices are often now seen as extractive and morally reprehensible. Shouldn’t those faraway people be telling their own stories, doing their own research, publishing their own perspectives, making their own films? Yes, of course. Then by extension, shouldn’t I just stay home, rather than popping into someone else’s world for a few days of filming and then going home?

It’s an ancient tussle, ever-present too: who belongs where?

I’ve filmed all over the world, and it remains mysterious to me what effect our filming has on the places we visit. Putting aside the few dollars of tourist money we inject into a place, what effect do we have on a community? Obviously it’s different everywhere. Some communities, like Longyearbyen, are visited time and again - by filmmakers, tourists, researchers, you name it - and in other communities, like on a hillside in rural Nepal, a stranger turns heads. Is there a difference between being a documentary filmmaker traveling to a place and a tourist traveling to a place? Both take pictures, ask dumb questions, wonder about the water, wear unattractive shoes. We come home and tell stories about what we’ve seen.

My late friend and mentor Barry Lopez told me once that there are three things people want to know when a stranger comes into their midst. Who are you, where do you come from, and why are you here? In this regard, I suppose there’s a certain benefit to wielding a movie camera while I’m visiting a new place: it clarifies why we’re there. Without a camera - without a tool broadcasting intent - you could be anybody. Of course, a casual observer won’t know why we’re filming, or what we’re making, or what we’re going to do with the footage. So I still feel a bit creepy and invasive.

The whole thing with being a documentary filmmaker is that you always feel a little bit like a jerk, wandering around pointing your camera at things. But I think the moment we stop feeling like jerks, we will have lost our humanity. You see, a part of me believes, deep down, that we must not - as filmmakers, as citizens, as a species - stay home, despite the risk of missteps and wrongdoings. We are a species of wanderers and wonderers. We want to exchange ideas, explore new lands, meet new people. The ills that come from cultural collisions are well documented, but the good that comes from travel is immeasurable.

Still, it’s uncomfortable to assert that we must travel to other lands, and I think discomfort is called for here. Layers upon layers of discomfort: it feels odd to be away from home, it feels wrong to be filming in a place where I don’t know the customs, it feels plunderous to haul footage home on hard drives and squirrel it away. We can ignore these discomforts, but I think they are important & instructive. They are part of what it means to be a stranger. We have to deal with them. As documentary filmmakers, we have to think about how we depict others, how we share authorship, how we can give back. We have to know when to put the camera away, when to step aside, and when to go home.

This is the work of strangers, a peculiar self-awareness about one’s presence in a place. You could see this as a burden, if you’re someone who expects life to be a breeze. But I don’t find this sort of thing overly unpleasant; it’s part of the art. I’ve mostly found my way into a mode of filmmaking where I provide reminders that I’m there, behind the camera, clumsily finding my way, bumbling along on a journey I don’t entirely understand. Here I am, the bozo making this movie, giving it my all. “Observational” filmmakers ask the people they’re filming to pretend the camera isn’t there, to treat the filmmaker as a mere “fly on the wall.” I’m not a fly. I’m a 200-pound white man wearing unattractive shoes.

And so I land at a kind of truce with my qualms: it’s both okay and not okay to wander elsewhere, and I have to hold both those things at once. I have to be okay with the idea that I’m both welcome and unwelcome in places. Navigating this complexity gives you the opportunity to think differently about your own home — and the visitors who come to town. I’ve been giving that some thought, too, and have more to say on this small matter of who belongs where, about that other side of the coin: our conduct at home. I’ll get into that next time. Stay tuned, or better yet, unsubscribe and go explore somewhere new, get some sand in your beautiful shoes.

Four years ago, not long after a bad fall through a construction platform landed me on crutches, I hobbled around with Amanda on a Maine island shaped unmistakably like male genitalia, looking at a scrap of undesirable real estate. Undesirable meaning tough to build on: no elevation, no soil, no grand views, but a few hundred feet of granite coastline and mossy woods that felt magical to us. We talked to a local bank and made an offer to a fellow named Barry, who in the 1960s had helped his grandfather connect the island to the mainland by building a rocky causeway where clammers park at low tide. Barry’s great-great-great-great grandfather had been granted the land by the King of England. Barry granted it to the local bank on our behalf and, when my back felt better, I began cutting spruce trees to make a gravel driveway. His wife told us she was in the midst of restoring the old movie theater in town. I hauled the spruce up the road to a sawmill and used the timber to fashion a sort of outhouse, to date the only structure on the land. A driveway to a privy.

I don’t know how you would make films without having a place to go and reset your gaze. You don’t need to own a vacation home, or an outhouse, but I do like having our own little scrap of rock and moss, it gives you the sense that you won’t be interrupted. Sometimes I think that’s the origin of private property, or really any turf you defend from others, stretching back to the Pleistocene: sure, it’s a hunting ground, a place to secure food and shelter and make the beast of two backs, but it’s also a sanctuary. Look, I just need a place where I can sit and think for a damn minute. Interrupt me and you shall watch my atlatl fly.

For years, before my back injury, running provided this sanctuary: a patch of breath and solitude in a hectic day. But then came a stupid fall and in the past four years I gained twenty pounds — middle age, kids’ French fries and Maine’s ubiquitous India Pale Ales slowing me down too. So slowed, I noticed anew the obvious connections between the mind and body; I confronted anxiety and depression to larger degrees. It’d be a wild oversimplification to suggest that I just had more trouble “resetting my gaze” but that’s more or less how I think about it. I’ve lost track of what being an introvert technically means, but as someone whose energy is drawn down in the presence of others, and resurged in solitude, I think losing my daily run put me at low tide.

I overshare all this because being alone with one’s thoughts is also of course an antidote to the fray of our clattering time — and, I think, to the odd fray of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence, despite its clean appearance, is noisy. When using the chatbots, the tidy, serene answers seem to come from a single, measured intelligence, but they are of course scraped from the crowded, colorful panoply of human ideas. So whose ideas are we getting? Certainly not yours. That’s what is simultaneously wonderful and befuddling about the internet and all it has trucked along with it. On the one hand, we have unprecedented access to a marvelous spectrum of human voices. On the other hand, you can’t always hear yourself think.

Well, what I think is of course inseparable from everything I’ve heard and encountered. There’s no bright line separating “me” from the rest of humanity. That’s how brains work; they sponge. Similarly, there’s no moment at which my body is disconnected from the environment; at every instant, air clings to my lungs, my face, my body. We exist seamlessly with the world.

Even so, I think there’s a way in which we can keep tabs on our own voice, cacophonous though that voice may be. Writing has always done this for me, far more than conversation. Here I am. Running too, even when listening to ridiculous loud music. I feel my heartbeat, the thump of my feet on trail or road or treadmill. Here I am.

I’ve used AI twice for this newsletter, or maybe one-and-a-half times. The first time, I was hunting for a better metaphor for isostatic rebound to talk about the rise of land masses after being freed from the weight of glaciers. (Seems like a reminder for you to unsubscribe.) I was using the idea of a mattress springing back after a body gets out of bed, and I figured the chatbots, having read many of humanity’s websites, might have stumbled upon a better metaphor. They suggested the idea of a mattress springing back after a body gets out of bed. The second time, I wanted a silly AI-generated image of a filmmaker in Maine gazing out the window of his blue pickup truck. There I am?

As a reader, I like to think I can still detect when something is written by a real human or not. Admittedly most of what I read was written before AI could write anything at all, so undoubtedly I’m not as trained an observer of AI language as, say, a teacher of English writing must be these days. They see a lot of essays, and must do their best to sense the non-sentient’s sentences. For a student, sleep deprived and screen depraved, the AI option must be irresistible unless the teacher somehow gets through to them that it’s not about the grades, it’s about learning to express and explore what’s inside you. But most students, as I did, absorb pretty early on that our grades are just an early proxy for a socioeconomic system that demands metrics; grades are a species of bottom line. Keep your grades near the start of the alphabet, preferably an Alpha or a Beta, and you have a measurable mark of value. So marked, you climb another rung, enjoy the view, and get hooked on the idea that life is about climbing rungs. Which is not to suggest that the kids with the best grades eventually make the most money or accrue the most power, but you see what I mean despite my clumsy parade of clichés and metaphors: kids must feel pressure to use AI to write their essays because on some level they sense - it’s in the crackling wifi-soaked air! - that our society values profit over a sense of self.

Recently I had occasion to remember the summer after my junior year of high school, when some Maine neighbors and I formed a ridiculous band called the Trashmeisters to play at a local river cleanup. My friends, college-age guys named Sam and Josh, played the keyboards and saxophone, the local preacher played the guitar, and for some reason there was always another woman there, a friend of Sam’s named Sunshine who wore - in my mind’s eye at least - flowing dresses and did whatever she pleased. The prospect of a life where I played wild music for river cleanups and got to know a woman like Sunshine was intoxicating to my adolescent self.

Sunshine’s murder a few weeks ago, on a lake nearby, made national news. She’d gone out paddle boarding at the end of the day. We don’t know what happened. Sam said he got interviewed by Inside Edition about it. There’s a poem that used to hang in my bathroom when I was seventeen, by Theodore Roethke, about his deceased student Jane, thrown by a horse. The last line, after he says all he has to say, goes: “I, with no rights in this matter, neither father nor lover.”

I feel that way, with no rights in this matter, but I got to thinking about Sunshine and Sam and music and summer on my run the other day, two miles up and over the causeway to the main road, two miles back, a sorry plod that would have embarrassed my younger self. I listened to music from my high school days - Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, that sort of thing - and startled two rabbits, half a dozen blue jays. Everything reminded me of everything. Maybe when we are alone, we are not alone, we are with everyone we’ve encountered. Which means the internet, the wild web of interconnected people and ideas, is nothing new, or at least is profoundly and unmistakably human.

When I got back to camp, my boys were thwacking each other with the sticks we’d whittled to roast marshmallows the night before. Amanda was drinking coffee and reading, looking beautiful and unkempt. The fog that had soaked us all morning was slowly lifting. A fragment of a line from a poem my brother wrote floated up towards me: here we are, all of us. The sunshine breaking through the spruce trees made the forest blossom.