Dedicated to Anthony DeAngelo and his husband Wes, thanks for checking up on me.

“Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest.”

-John Steinbeck from Cannery Row

The weather is turning in Seattle. Keats called Autumn the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” (I had to memorize that poem in college) but here it’s a bleak drizzle, and yet the strangest thing is I love it. My toes get cold if I don’t wear socks at night, soups are in season, and rain is tapping on my window even as I write this. A few days ago, on one of the last clear days we’ve had, I wandered around the graveyard near my studio. It’s peaceful there. Most friends just smile politely with cocked heads when I tell them this but occasionally someone feels the same, ominous beauty there I do. The graveyard was covered with baby mushrooms and knowing the Pacific Northwest is the capital of psychedelic mushrooms I wondered which one I could eat in order to talk with the people below. I spied a few that looked Golden-Teacher-esque but didn’t put it to the test. I found a stone bench to sit on with a view of Fremont all the way to the University of Washington’s campus. Nearby a shy, bow-legged coyote also wandered the grounds, clearly at home and quite startled to see the new lawn decoration perched on the stone bench. I smiled at it and it scurried away. Must have been a girl.

I wondered what the people below would think if they could sit up and see the view, the rows and rows of multi-colored apartment complexes, the UW tower, the constant stream of traffic, and the airplanes passing. I brushed off the headstone in front of me, “William Cyrus Powell” 1874-1935. So, it was Bill who was keeping me company while I read Cannery Row and when I got home I logged into my old LDS account so I could look him up on their ancestry sites. William Cyrus Powell was actually born in 1873 in a small town in Ontario, Canada, called “Leeds-Grenville” in the census records. Those same records show that he and his sister, Elizabeth, the children of farmers (the whole town appears to have been farmers) were the only kids enrolled in school. He was raised Methodist. I imagine his family, all five of them, George, Elizabeth, Elizabeth the younger, William, and Lillian, gathered around the fire on the cold Canadian nights reading the bible, likely one of the only books they had.  He’d later study at the Theological College of Ottowa, though he wouldn’t pursue a personal ministry till later in life.

He moved to Spokane, Washington, and became a “self-employed cattle buyer.” A lucky man, paid to shop. Once immigrated though he’d list his race as English for the rest of his life, leaving behind the Irish heritage his father kept. He married Dagmar Riley at age 35, she 28, and eleven months later they’d give birth to their son, Cecil, then Dorothy two years later. In 1917, at age 44, he’d registered for the draft, a healthy man of medium height, medium build, brown hair and blue eyes, still a cattle buyer.  Shortly after Dorothy got sick, likely she suffered seizures, severe headaches, loss of balance, perhaps even memory loss and difficulty thinking depending on the severity and placement of her cranial cancer. They moved to Seattle in 1923, likely for better medical care, and for the last few months of Dorothy’s life she visited the doctors regularly. She was twelve years, ten months, and twelve days old, the medical records just say “tumor–brain, likely sarcoma.” Rather than move back, they stayed, and William Cyrus Powell left the herd behind to pursue the flock and became Reverend William Powell, employed by his brother-in-law at the Bethel Pentecostal Church. His ministry lasted twelve years until his death on the 24th of February, 1935. His obituary was wedged between the comic strip below and the answers to last week’s crossword. The answer to 12 down was “denizened.”

Learning William Powell’s story brought me a surprising deal of comfort, though I can’t really say why. It grounded me, it reminded me of something I forgot, something I struggle to put words to. Perhaps simply that life is strange and wily and unpredictable. It has been incredibly generous to me yet the more I feel I’ve got my hands around it the less control I seem to have. I graduated debt-free cause it turns out I’m good at peddling pest control of all things. I circled the globe with the excess funds and have enjoyed experiences I never could have imagined: at 3 a.m. one night, exhausted from dancing, I ubered home past the Colosseum, I smoked a joint with a Croatian drug-dealer-turned-goat-farmer on his off-the-grid ranch, I saw war ruins in Bosnia, ate a scorpion in Bangkok, and my sweat is sprinkled across the Khumbu glacier leading up to Everest. I returned home to Seattle a well-worn traveler eager for stability but have found none. I was sure the great romance that my early twenties had been would continue–I’d find a job, get a studio, fall in love with the girl next door, and write my odyssey. I assumed that life, as generous as it seems to be, would happily acquiesce to my demands. It has not.

At BYU I picked up what work I could find, landscaping, drywall, writer-editor for a non-profit magazine, and finally pest control salesmen. Since getting home I found quirky, humble studio that has been wonderful, I read on the rooftop with a view fit for a postcard. My days are perfect for writing, filled with nothing more than the hum-drum of city life, but my head is a jumble. I’ve been waiting for lightning to strike again, another godsend job where I work with great people, make great money, and have flexibility in my life, and this mindset has brought about a kind of prison-cell stress that permeates every facet of my day. I’ve spent my days wandering the city waiting for callbacks only to have my phone buzz with another MLM or telesales job from Indeed wanting to tell me how my resumé is tailormade for them (nothing makes your life feel like more of a sham than when an MLM calls you saying, “you look like you’d fit in great here” and can explain why). The truth is good work has been hard to find, my old friends have new, busy lives, and the time is sliding through my fingers like sand. Finally, I gave in. Weed and video games, such would be my life. I’ve tasted the 98th percentile lifestyle, time to return to the land of getting by bums and layabout loafers.

There are stages to this thing. First came faith, then letdown, then a reluctant acceptance, and now peace. I’m learning that perhaps greatness isn’t achieved, perhaps greatness comes and goes and I’ve ridden the shooting star long enough. It has been a long fall back into ordinariness and I’m only now beginning to remember that once, not that long ago, I was happy here too. I’m thinking now that lightning never did strike, I just banged enough rocks together that a spark finally caught, and that tremendous fire is dying out now. I’m okay with that. I’m not sure if reading Steinbeck taught me this, or if William Powell’s ghost followed me home from the graveyard, but when I laid down that night after the trip to the graveyard I felt recollected. I realized that it’s time to start banging rocks together again.

The next morning was the first morning I actually felt like I could write. It’s still a daunting prospect, there’s much to tell, but I’m ready to start trying. By the way, Anthony, Wes, I never mentioned on this site but Christian and I made a podcast while we traveled through Europe where we interviewed the people we met. The production quality is horrible, but it’s out there. It’s called “The Wandering Conversation” (I seem to have a tight bond with the word “wander”) and you can find it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. We never did finish it, we got 13 episodes in then didn’t have time to make the final “Rome” episode, which is on trend for me, god forbid I finish a project. Oh, and we never did get that boat. We planned to buy it in Croatia and sell it in Italy in order to better afford the trip, but alas, the EU had outsmarted us. Turns out there’s a lot of legislation and paperwork that comes with buying a boat in one country and selling it in another, and between the paperwork and the taxes there wasn’t going to be any money going into our pockets.

Anyway, I have this idea to write my travels in a series of mock letters. It might be trite, might turn to fun, who knows, but more will be coming. I’ve spruced up the blog a bit, tried to make it a little nicer looking while keeping the bones the same, and rewrote some of the intro stuff, so, as always, if anyone has any feedback, please, reach out.

I’ll write again soon!

-Josh