They paid me almost nothing to be outside all day, and for a couple of years that math worked out perfectly. after chapel hill i went to work for the north carolina state parks, which is a fancy way of saying I got a uniform and a truck full of tools and a standing appointment with the sun. trail work, mowing, digging, fixing what the weather broke and then watching the weather break it again (you can't even be mad, it's the weather, i've been a fan since childhood). I was broke in the way that only reads romantic afterward, tan in the way that stops being a tan and just becomes your color, and happy. really happy. the uncomplicated kind, the kind you don't even notice you're inside of until years later you catch the smell of two-stroke exhaust and cut grass and get homesick for a version of yourself.

And the work was honest in a way i've spent the rest of my life trying to get back to. you cut the fallen pine off the trail and the trail is open. you fix the waterline and the water runs. no meetings about the pine. no quarterly roadmap for the waterline. the feedback loop between your hands and the world was about four seconds long, and every evening you could stand there filthy and point at the day: here is what i did. it is right there. and the geology degree didn't turn off either, it just went feral. i read the cutbanks while i worked, the piedmont laid open in every eroded gully, four hundred million years of backstory under a trail i was fixing for weekend crowds who would never once look down. that was fine. somebody has to know what the ground is doing. for a while that was my actual job (i still can't quite believe it either).

Somewhere in those years, in Durham, in 2018, a german shepherd puppy entered the story and renamed everything. Lady. best little dog i might ever know, though little stopped applying almost immediately (ears like satellite dishes, opinions like an old woman). she has since been west with us and onto the water with us and through every chapter after this one, and i want it on the record that she predates almost everything: the wedding, the coast, the boats, the whole rest of the plot. Lady was there before the story knew where it was going. so was Al.

Because Al was becoming somebody, is the thing. while i was out cutting trails she was building a career in energy, and she was good. the kind of good that gets noticed, the kind of good that gets offers. and one of those offers pointed west, all the way west, california west. people ask how we decided and the honest answer is that it barely rated as a decision. she was the plan. she had been the plan since a snow day in college. i could dig holes anywhere. so we packed the car, loaded the dog, and drove out of the piedmont with the pines shrinking in the mirror, and i'd be lying if i said i didn't cry a little somewhere in tennessee, and i'd be lying worse if i said i wanted to turn around.

California gave me more parks. a park in marin this time, golden hills instead of green, live oaks instead of loblollies, fog doing the job the thunderstorms used to do. and it also gave me the summer that changed everything, though it didn't announce itself. i spent that summer trenching up and fixing broken plumbing. all summer. during wildfire season. down in a ditch with a shovel while the sky went that muddy orange and the sun turned into a coin you could look straight at, ash sifting down into the fresh trench, and me down in the hole with the busted pipe thinking, with unusual clarity: i am thirty feet from where i was yesterday. i will be thirty feet further tomorrow. and that is the whole trajectory.

That's what I mean by the ceiling. nobody warns you the outdoor idyll has one, because from the ground it looks like open sky. but i could suddenly see the whole shape of it. the pay that never really moves. the body that keeps score of every trench (a busted pipe is a pain in the ass at any age, but the age starts to matter). the fact that the work i loved for being simple was also, forever, going to stay exactly that simple. and the itch had already started underneath anyway. I had friends who were software engineers, and they'd describe what they did (build a thing, out of nothing, and then thousands of people use the thing) and it hit the same nerve the trail work hit. hands to world. four second feedback loop. except their trails could be walked by a million people at once and no storm could ever blow a tree across them. were they smarter than me? i checked. repeatedly. no. they had just, at some point, decided to sit down and learn the magic words.

And i knew something about myself that the ditch had taught me: i could do a long, unglamorous, repetitive thing every single day without quitting, as long as i believed the trench was going somewhere.

So at night, after the shovel, I started studying. a laptop, a free course, a kitchen table, a dog asleep on my feet, javascript staring back at me and not making a lick of sense. i gave the parks a couple of good years and every one of my calluses, and i regret exactly none of it. and then i picked up a much stranger hammer.