hiking to high tea
(a different version of high)
altitude wins sips
perfect alpine lakes
to start and finish the day
as we drink in views
glacially made mirrors
waterfall motivation
for the long walk down
Road Trip 2026, Day Four
health
A National Emergency
A national emergency is a series of hurricanes on one coast and as many fires on the other coast, the direct results of climate change that our country chooses to ignore. A national emergency is the healthcare crisis, where we can’t get prosthetics if we’re missing a limb or pay for cancer treatment even if we’re dying. A national emergency is CEO pay which has multiplied exponentially for five decades and left the common worker with a salary too low to buy a house, buy eggs, or pay rent.
There is no national emergency at our border. There are millions of people, despite all of our national emergencies, who have faced far worse: farms that can no longer grow coffee due to climate change, dictatorships that have taken away all rights, medical care that includes fewer options for cerebral palsy or cancer than we have here.
Their emergencies trail behind them, left in their home countries weeks, months, or years ago, and like that train that they cling to carrying them across Mexico, they hope never to see again.
They are here now, families in tow, babies in tow, ready to work, ready to enroll their children in school and provide jobs for teachers like me, ready to take into their hands the American Dream that you have declared doesn’t exist for them.
They are not criminals.
They are not illegal.
They are not a national emergency, an executive order you’ve used to circumvent Congress on your first day in office.
They pick your food and clear your sidewalks after snow and build your roofs and work in your restaurants and run your factories and teach your children and make you rich. They are professors and lawyers and engineers and mechanics and everything in between.
They are human.
And after more than four hundred years of forced colonization and enslaved labor indoctrinated in our blood by imperialists like you, the only national emergency is how far back we’ve moved the dial of progress, and for how long we will make Suffering the motto of YOUR AMERICA.
Work
i'm back at work today
after a solid two weeks
of rest and relaxation
in which i found this schedule
from my first job
age seventeen
(started there at sixteen)
where i'm scheduled for all but four days
of July of '95
and i've never stopped since.
really stopped.
even when i was
home with the babies
i watched other people's babies
and the two weeks
thirty years past due
just seems
so
short
Silver Anniversary Trip, Day Twenty-one
a calming cycle
on a rails-to-trails flat path:
way to start the day
more history learned
at a medieval castle
built, burned, lost, rebuilt
my man boating us
back down the river, towards home
our heritage left
Silver Anniversary Trip, Day Seventeen
we’re the post office:
through wind, rain, sleet, clouds… weather
we weather the storm
just another day
in the life we’ve created
in sickness and health
Silver Anniversary Trip, Day Twelve
ten thousand stone steps
slippery at dawn, at noon
as mist never stops
ten thousand reasons
to be afraid of this hike,
yet we keep trekking
ten thousand peak views
all in different shades of light
just like our marriage
ten thousand questions
when we married at twenty
look how far we’ve come
Step Write Up 