03 Jul 2026 2 min read Field Notes

The Clearing

Some years the fog takes it. That year it didn't.

Crissy Field. July 4th, 1976.

Fireworks off Alcatraz, the bay flat and darkness between us. Most years the fog rolls in, muffled and diffuse behind marine layer, colors bleeding into grey. Freedom and incarceration in the same skyline, on the night the country turned two hundred. That's not irony. That's the whole argument in one frame.

That night it was clear. Like it was decided somewhere else and handed down.

I was seven. The bay, the fire in the sky, the specific feeling of being exactly where something was happening.

I was the only one in my family born here. Everyone else naturalized, came from somewhere else, and chose this. We were poor in a way that doesn't leave much room for perspective. Didn't notice the U.S. government labels on the cheese, butter, and powdered milk until long past needing them. You don't spend a lot of time inventorying what you don't have when getting after it is just what you did and not optional.

Our family didn't have the luxury of ambivalence about America. Made a specific choice and lived inside it without apology.

The bicentennial was a different kind of moment for a country. Two hundred years of the thing actually existing, the experiment still going. Still producing the occasional Tuesday where forty-six years of knowing is still there waiting, or a clear night over the bay when the fog decides to stay home.

I'm a patriot in the way that has nothing to do with politics. Love of country, love of countrymen and countrywomen. Love of what becomes possible, despite challenge and environment. There's an American specific version of getting after it regardless. That the conditions don't get to make all the decision for you.

I've been living for a decade inside a body that's technically in a bad way. Not from age or injury, from circumstance and conditions. You make the best of what's available and show up when the warnings lift. You go to the creek, you get on the bike, you do the zone 2 even when the math is absurd. Because the alternative is handing over the keys.

Most Americans are running some version of that same calculation, quietly, without making a production of it. Not the ideological version of the country. The functional one. The one that was always ground-up, dirt floor, get after it.

The fog takes it most years.

Some years it doesn't.

Still rolling.

Connective Tissue:

→ The DR650
→ The Light on It
→ Aliveness at the Edge