How to Build a Road Out of Nowhere

The river came fast. The road vanished. We built a new one with our bare hands.

A few days ago, I wrote about Tommy and the koi. He’d stood there by the pond, perfectly still, watching them swirl below the surface like they were messengers from another dimension. Twelve to 15 hours per day for two weeks!

I saw something in him I recognized: reverence, or confusion, or longing—whatever—but definitely it was wordless devotion to the mystery of being alive.

And I’ve been thinking about him and that notion ever since.

Because that’s how I want to live. I want to be as close to the Mystery as I can get. I’m a moth drawn to the mystery’s flame, I guess.

I know I’m not everyone’s cup of tea. To most “normal” people, I probably seem like a nut job—too mystical, too abstract, too sensitive. And to the nut jobs I know, I’m often too grounded, too structured, too bound to language, maybe even too tied to tradition. But I’ve come to see that I stand in my own ground. Or maybe I’m not standing at all. I’m circling.

Yes, circling is how I live. My mind works in loops, not lines. I feel things first, then try to make sense of them. Not your ordinary American masculinity, I will admit. I see the world in images, symbols, intuitions. I don’t need psychedelics because most days already feel like a trip when I wake up. Every now and then

An omen on the road to the monastery.

my mornings are like walking through the slow drag of a bad trip—my chest tight, the air electric, every interaction magnified and raw. Other days feel lucid and full of light, like I’ve eaten holy bread and suddenly the veil’s been lifted for a few precious hours. Years ago, I tried to do the transcendence thing. To meditate my way out of the paper bag of our humanness. But now I understand that the work, for me, is not to escape.. It’s to land. To ground. To learn how to stay here—inside the aliveness of it all—and make something out of it.

That’s why I write. And that’s probably why you do too—or why you want to.

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A few weeks ago, Hasita and I drove the long dirt road out to Christ in the Desert Monastery. It’s a road I know well—thirteen miles of high desert winding through red cliffs and juniper, past rock spires and cottonwood groves, toward the silence that always waits there. You pick the road up a few miles north of Abiquiu. I’ve been coming for years. I sit on the beach in stillness, stack rocks into cairns, strip off my clothes and slip into the Chama River where it bends and swirls into that long, slow eddy called Big Eddy.

She and I brought a picnic this time—Hasita, her small dog Foxy, and me. We’d planned to swim, the way I always do. But first we laid out food: salmon, salad, peaches, olives, a torn loaf of bread. We sat in the dirt, watching the water curl around the submerged stones, while Foxy paced the bank like a tiny general.

And then it rained.

At first, the drops were lazy, summer-fat. Then came the wind. Then the kind of sudden hard rain that sends you scrambling for cover. We threw lunch in the car

Hasita, standing by the Rio Chama, a few minutes before the rain fell and the road washed out.

and drove out fast, headlights cutting through the downpour. That road is beautiful but unforgiving. I’ve seen what flash floods can do out there.

When we reached the first fat turn, we found the road had turned to river. The road was gone. Torrents poured down the side of the canyon. The water wasn’t coming toward us exactly, but it had ripped the ground out from under the roadbed and made crossing impossible. We sat for an hour or more, stunned.

I turned to Hasita and asked a question: “If this were a dream, what would it mean? How would you make sense of it?”

She looked at me quizzically. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but it was something about problem solving and curiosity.

“Yes,” I said. “This river is a threshold. Whatever happens, by crossing it, we’ll never be the same. But first, I guess we’re going to find our way.”

Then the rain stopped, and we watched the flood begin to slow. It took hours. The sun started to droop. The adrenaline softened. After five hours of waiting, reality set in: no one was coming to save us. We weren’t getting home unless we did something about it.

So we did. We rolled up the cuffs on our pants, got out of the car, and began moving rocks. We began to build a road of our own. Rock by rock.
Mud stuck to our shoes. My back screamed. The pumpkin-size boulders were slick and heavy. We sang songs. We laughed. We sweated and slipped. We sang more. We both worked hard. Foxy paced, watching us like we’d completely lost our minds. Nobody—Foxy included—freaked out, cried, or complained. We stayed in a state of joyful wonder.

At one point, Hasita looked up at me, soaking wet, curly hair plastered to her cheeks, and she smiled—really smiled. And I knew something was shifting for us. We were in it now, together. That washed-out road did become a threshold, something to cross, something wonderful, something to celebrate.

It took more than an hour to rebuild the small stretch of makeshift road, but eventually we completed it. And then, I backed up the car a few lengths. Hasita positioned herself on the other side, directing me with her arms toward the preferred path. I hit the gas, and prayed. My Kia Soul shot forward, bumping and skidding across the temporary road we’d made. The road held—and I didn’t lose my oil pan either. I stopped, and Hasita and Foxy climbed back in, beaming. We were both grateful that we were safe—and in awe of the magic and mystery that we’d just lived through. Grateful for the grace and protection.

An hour later, after dark, we pulled into Santa Fe. Dirty. Tired. And, yes, changed a little. Maybe a lot.

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Since then, I’ve managed to outline my new book, The God I Can’t Quite Believe In. I’ve been circling this wild one for a while—trying to write my way into a type of faith that’s built from the ground up, not handed down from anyone else’s system or story. That day on the river helped. The absurdity of it all. The wet dog. The laughter. The ache in my back. The cuts in my palms. The two of us who now have an adventure story to tell and retell to each other.

It reminded me why I believe in lived wisdom. Why I trust stories more than systems. Why I believe that we earn the right to say something true only by walking life’s muddy path. That’s what I teach my memoir students. You don’t get to offer insights just because you’ve read a book or had a clever thought. You don’t get to preach or teach because you did some yoga and meditated. You have to earn the tell. You have to live it, feel the struggle in your body, try and fail and sweat and make it real. Then, maybe, you can say what the experience taught you.

Don’t tell me to have more gratitude unless you tell me your version of getting caught in a flood and then building a road back home.

Don’t tell me what enlightenment means unless you’ve stood soaking in the mud with a dog judging you and a woman laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.
Don’t tell me what life is until you’ve let it knock you on your ass and teach you something from down on the ground.

That’s the only kind of spiritual path that makes sense to me anymore.
That’s the kind of path I want to write from. And I think maybe you do too.

Is that true?

If you’re circling a story, I hope you stay with it.

If you feel like your life is already too psychedelic, too complicated, too much—good. That means you’re paying attention. That means you’re alive.

You don’t need to have it figured out. You don’t need a mountaintop or a guru or a self-help plan.

You just need to notice the swirl. Step in. Pick up a stone.

Begin.

P.S. If this story brought something up for you—if you’ve ever been caught in the weather, or found yourself building a road where one used to be, or just trying to figure out what a relationship is becoming—I’d love to hear it. I read every comment and respond to each one.

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