Ban Kan Throm, Thailand
April 23, 2026
Beyond the checkpoint, I’d settled into a seat along the wall where floor-to-ceiling windows stretched past the coffee shop before I noticed … before the weight of actually being there settled on my chest. Sunrise dancing off the tarmac. A faint smell of duty-free perfume. Rolling suitcases clicking in time.
I had detached myself weeks ago, or months, and yet it took this quiet, solitary moment to realize I was already on the river and my makeshift raft was floating out past the fault line. No dock behind me, no tether, nothing but the current and the reflection of sky in murky water.
Somehow, without noticing, I was already adrift.
I was the least likely person to do this. Multi-generational paths run deep in the Midwest. Hunting in the crisp fall morning air. Creel and rod, wading along the river bend. Baseball was church. The town tavern, bourbon, cigars. The farm. Business meetings with foregone conclusions.
Small town. Salt-of-the-earth. Everyone knew our name. I loved it. I still do. It shaped me, defined me.
I carried my father’s name, my great-grandfather’s, proudly. I mimicked the cadence, the posture, and the inherited weight of expectation. Naturally, I should have followed through. And yet I didn’t.
From as early as I can remember, I was watching a movie of myself that didn’t make sense.
I heard the ball hit the bat, smelled the grease in the diner, felt the grain of oak bar tops beneath my palms, but my mind wandered to shadows falling across a fencepost, to the blurry margins, to a temple bell I had never heard.
My heart wandered further still, to lands where rubber trees stood in formation and red dust tasted familiar. I felt it in my bones. I knew I belonged somewhere else – not out of anger or rebellion, but in quiet recognition that the world I loved, perfect as it was, was not my own.
Guilt coiled in me for feeling so unlike the men who came before, and yet I could not anchor myself, in either life. I was displaced, hovering between expectation and yearning.
And then the movie revealed a plot twist. Everything I called my own – possessions, all of it – suddenly belonged to someone else. Everything compressed, reshuffled, and reduced down to a single backpack. Everything I needed in one strap.
I left.
The tavern, the cabin, the baseball, the office, the perceived security, the well-worn blueprint – I set them down. All of it stayed behind. The reckless visions that had lived quietly in my head for decades: photographers on assignment in faraway lands, vests with pockets full of notebooks, film, and uncertainty, the smell of distance and dust, stories waiting to be told – I carried these things forward.
I was determined to touch that world. Smell it. Feel it in my chest. I stepped off the dock, untied the rope, and trusted the river to take me.
Most men dream of packing a backpack and walking away.
Few do.
I did.
And the cliché I am still untangling – the thing many who dream of it never fully see – is that the journey is everything. The friction. The awkward steps. The small victories. The moments when nothing seems to matter and yet everything does.
The landing, the arrival, is almost beside the point. The thrill, the terror, the subtle joy that you can’t quite name – it lives in the current, not on the shore.
The cornfields behind the farmhouse, the smell of opening day, the echo of heritage and tradition inverted like a funhouse mirror to watergrass swaying in a paddy field, the reverberation of temple gongs, the warmth of red dirt beneath bare feet.
I don’t know if it makes me reckless, selfish, or authentic. I only know this: when your dogged pursuit is the undefined edges and the out-of-focus in-between, it is the work, the steps that make up your days, the imperceptible step in front of the other … this is where you find a joy no milestone could ever hold.
The prize was never at the end. It’s always been here – in the river, in the rope trailing in the current behind me, in the temple incense, in the quiet audacity of simply walking away.
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