Post-Apocalyptic Bunker on Acid

12 things I found this month

Walking 100 miles through Utah public lands to start the month. Here to protect the commons at all costs.

Every last Wednesday of the month, I’ve been sharing a dozen of the best things I found out there. Writing. Music. Podcasts. Films. Gear. Recipes. The intent: to keep them punchy-short, a simple countertactic against the algorithms, to amplify the beautiful work of others. Here’s a link to previous lists so far.

12 Things I Found in May…

1. HURON. A decade ago I crossed the full length of the Tibetan plateau and for some reason only listened to Lord Huron’s album, Lonesome Dreams—specifically this song, which still brings me right back—but I overplayed it and had to back away. Luckily, dear friend and artist Forest Woodward returned me to the Huron train with their most recent single, “Looking Back.” On repeat, obsessively.
   

2. NEUROSIS. Listening to Jia Tolentino’s essay, “My Brain Finally Broke,” in The New Yorker, on the absolute wildness that is our times right now—and I mean this—nearly induced a panic attack while cooking dinner the other night.

3. TENT. I’ve never actually owned a high-quality ultralight backpacking tent in my life, and—not that I’m turning into a sub-elite pedestrian or anything—but Durston’s long-awaited standalone X-Dome 2 just arrived in the mail and I almost hugged the UPS driver. ~2.5 pounds. A true tool of craft for the minimal wilderness walking kit.

4. BLM. I recently connected with photographer, artist, and activist Joshua Jackson after following his gorgeous Forgotten Lands Project for some time, and was moved by his recent spontaneous BLM (Bureau of Land Management) groundtruthing tour to document the half million acres of Utah/Nevada public lands that were on the chopping block. (No more!) You might catch our July 23 live event together at Green Apple Books in San Francisco if you’re in the area. (And preorder his book, Enduring Wild.) Donations for the event will be going to support the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.

5. LASAGNE. I own five cookbooks and Joshua McFadden’s Six Seasons remains, after all these years, my #1 go-to for consistent knockout meals. I made his mushroom kale lasagne for my parents a few weeks ago and they crowned me, finally, at age 41, an adult. Find this book.

6. PILGRIMAGE. There isn’t enough excitement in the world that matches the announcement of this forthcoming book on Peter Mathiesen’s life, True Nature, out October 14.

   

   Maple consciousness. Back home in the Sierra foothills for a few days.

7. JAMES. Radical transparency: I haven’t yet read Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Percival Everett’s James, but his recent live conversation on Talk Easy was a knockout.

8. DIRE. Brilliant friend, mountain foot soldier, and aviary-ecology-evolution scholar Ethan Linck wrote in High Country News that, though de-extinction isn’t real, the conservation questions it raises are.
   

9. MUSHROOMS. I know you might be tired of Michael Pollan writing about drugs, but his recent piece on priests tripping balls found me highlighting and circling things in my print magazine, something I rarely do.

   

   All things merge to one.

10. BUDDHA. Ocean Vuong seems like he’s everywhere right now. This recent conversation on the Tricycle Review podcast was gentle and revealing. I love when someone so deeply loyal to their craft weaves in mindfulness practice.
    

11. ACID. Hey, Paris Review: you had me at “dropping acid in a post-apocalyptic bunker.”

12. MANDORLA. For the 119th book of my Insta reading project-in-progress, The Mandorla 200—reading 200 books on ecology, justice, and place-belonging, then writing a 200-word micro-distillations—I’m featuring Montana Poet Laureate and friend Chris La Tray’s Becoming Little Shell. We recently shared a wonderful lunch together, and I’m honored to share a shelf as a fellow Milkweed author with this strong, courageous (and funny as hell) voice. OK, here’s my entry…

(119/200) To colonize is to actively unspool connection. Connection to ancestors. Connection to land. Connection to community. To colonize is to sever and rewire that connection through shame and synthetic force-fed terms like “landless,” to rewrite history that crowns takers and tired map-makers and choose performative civility as the upper hand of progress. These settler projections endure, taking lands of others while unwilling to interrupt the hollow vacancy in their own hearts. It’s not post-contact but here-contact, contact that’s still contacting between two stories of being. And this story is of one Little Shell poet finding his way home by following no known maps but his own longing. Not fueled by mere survival but by a heavy metal riffing guided by pride and joy and truth, stubborn to remember an older, more connected and honest thread. To resist the colonizer is to hear ancestors with fresh ears, to trust their song and their pain and follow the haunt as they stand behind, fist to chest. From here, one might create anew. Because no one has any idea where this is all going, so better to go with right relations, into this shared unknown with the honesty of ghosts and the respect of tears. We walk.

• The Book: Becoming Little Shell (2024)

• The Author: Chris La Tray

• The Publisher: Milkweed Editions

• The Tip: Daniel Slager