I’ve resisted writing because I wonder what’s left to write. And if that something I write could be written by an LLM?

If so, then what’s the point? I heard a commentator on public radio declare they refuse to use AI for anything. Yikes. Whether they know it or not, they’re using it. I turned off my truck and pondered how this naive take on the world persists. She was correct in that, cognitively, to a point, these advancements will decrease human intellect for some. That’s no different than the calculator, computer, or internet. I believe it simply shifts our baseline higher, which probably scares some people because it means upping their game or reskilling. In my case, if Claude writes an essay indistinguishable from my own, then my motivation to write it goes down.

So I find myself going back to familiar things AI can’t do; slaying trees for firewood, project wood, and habitat management.

There’s an urgency right now.

To cut the trees before the leaves come out, before the bugs come out, before I cut down a tree or a branch that has a wasp nest on it, or I stumble through a hornet’s nest on the ground. Now is the sweet spot, but it’s brief.

A stream of trees flows downhill as they are cut. With each, years of memory and carbon lay on the ground to rot.

It smelled like gasoline, the chainsaw, the wood, the wood chips, and they mixed with leather of my gloves.

There are times when I’m sore from working in the woods, then there are other times when I’m broken. I ignore the soreness and go beyond that point to where it doesn’t feel good the next day; body is broke, muscles ache, Advil doesn’t help, and why not do that? Sure, it’s sore. But if we don’t feel that, then we never know how to fully appreciate that time of rest. That time of feeling good. Knowing what else there could be. My mind and body become spoiled.

I feel the impulse to throw those house plants out instead of keeping them, maintaining them, watering them. They are a chore. But they bring a forced presence. It’s inefficient.

When I re-read Into the Wild again recently, I still empathized with McCandless in many ways, the most poignant being an undeniable drive to be in the wild. I feel silly, actually, since my mindset in this regard has changed little since I first read this book. In high school, I remember telling people that all I really needed was a bag of rice, and there I’d go, who knows where?

Quotes scrawled in McCandless’ botany text and the interior of the school bus on the Stampede Trail are quotes that inspire me too, resonate within me too. The quest to create our own version of wilderness creates an immense distraction.

What separated McCandless and me, beyond age, was privilege. McCandless’ well-to-do upbringing gave him opportunities that the majority of humans who have ever existed would be envious of. In addition to his overpacked backpack he hiked to Alaska with, he also carried an invisible bag that embodied the privilege of a wealthy and educated person, which in turn granted him the confidence and gumption with which he approached the world. He was skilled with many knacks, and over time, I imagine, this lead to a type of entitlement only those born into wealth experience. This is the crux his and and my difference. McCandless had a parachute, allowing him to engage in the playacting of a blue-collar worker, delivering pizzas and driving a crappy car.

But I do share the impulsivity, stubbornness, and radical belief of McCandless, yet I lack that embodied privilege to fall back on, and that probably kept me from making as careless a decision as McCandless at that age.

At times, I’m bored like him, too; moments of inspiration exist, but now the urge for the wild grows, a sentiment of unease that I believe McCandless felt after staying too long in one place. An itch to unsettle and be unsettled. Or to get to the unfamiliar.

Familiarity

The ridges, the trees, the landmarks, and the topography. There are people who cherish this familiarity, grow with it, and evolve. They appreciate it in different ways over time. Sometimes I wish I were one of those people.

BOOKS & GEAR | ABOUT

Welcome! As we continue to understand and evolve with AI, my conclusion to date is to do what AI can’t. We’ll see where that goes, but I imagine these essays will continue to focus on the elemental aspects of human experience. This past week, paid subscribers received their first field note. A preview of the next note: highlights from 2025 game camera photos.

Thanks for reading.

1. If AI can create or do whatever you do, why would you keep doing it?

2. What if AI can’t quite replicate what you do, but it’s good enough, so much so that your audience or superiors can’t tell the difference between your work and that of Claude or ChatGPT?

For a writer:

1. If AI can create writing that is as good as yours, making the two indistinguishable, why keep writing?

2. What if AI can’t quite replicate your words, but the writing it does create is actually preferred by readers?

If what I spend hours generating can be indecipherably replicated by ChatGPT in minutes, then I should stop writing that type of content.

Refusing to use AI out of principle, keeping blinders on, is ignorant. AI is a tool. It’s here.

Avoiding it and not using it would be tantamount to not using the internet, another powerful tool. Digitized content saves hundreds of hours of driving to/from the library and sifting through materials. Therefore, not using the internet is a waste of time when the same content is readily available on your laptop screen.

Not understanding its limitations or how to distinguish yourself from it means your writing (or whatever your work is) will become indistinguishable from slop.

Use AI and evolve accordingly.

The writing craft consumed by AI is like a table saw or pocket screw replacing a dovetail joint. Christopher Schwarz tells the story of Troy Sexton in his book, The Anarchist’s Toolchest. Sexton ran an extremely efficient woodshop that reflected ingenuity and hard work. Yet, in his decision to “compete with the machines on their own turf,” he lost.

Even “the most efficient one-man factory cannot compete with a factory driven by a hundred men.”

His business withered.

Schwartz blames us: “We have become a culture so obsessed with price more than any other attribute of the things we buy,” so for the cabinet-maker, “It’s difficult to compete against furniture that costs less than what you pay for your raw materials.”

I can’t help but feel Schwartz’s radical desire to resist the corporatization of a craft. It’s very romantic. Conversely, a laissez-faire approach to tech adoption is appealing since we can conveniently ignore self-restraint and mindfulness.

I look around my living room, and there’s a lot of plastic. It will be thrown out. It won’t last a lifetime.

Is there a parallel for the written word?

Writing on this paper takes time, and it’s inefficient. I’ve tried to dictate. I’ve tried to scan and OCR. Digital notepads almost work, but there’s nothing like this pen and paper.

The current AI moment is unique for two reasons.

1. AI capabilities are very good, almost good enough to fool most people. But it’s also good enough for people not to care if they prefer AI writing for whatever reason. My biased thinking tells me it’s because of its simplicity; it’s the laminate flooring of the writing world. No maintenance, durable, and it looks OK.

This is what, understandably, many people prefer for its convenience and functionality. The opposite is the floor my feet currently rest on: wide pine boards with gaps between edges that collect dirt. The finish is chipped away in high-traffic areas: in front of the woodstove is hardest hit, where the dog sleeps and plays. This floor is impractical in that it marks easily, needs to be refinished, traps dirt, and is soft. The scars from Maya’s paws are artifacts I don’t want to sand away; I want them preserved. They would never have appeared on a scratch-resistant modern faux-wood floor.

When I put my hand on the plastic floor, I feel the artificial wood-grain texture stamped into the wood at an Asian factory. I’m touching oil that’s been extracted and processed into this durable piece of flooring. The pine, alternatively, originated from a mill and trees within fifty miles. I touch it, and the character warms: rough undulations that feel like wood. Both plastic and wood are products of the earth; it’s just that one is less removed, closer to its end user, than the other.

While AI is getting close, like the plastic flooring, to replicating wood, I don’t believe it ever will. That doesn’t mean wooden floors will continue to exist; it just means we may choose plastic floors as being good enough.

2. The second reason this is a unique time period is that a very capable AI has a full 10,000 years’ worth of human-generated data to work with. This virgin dataset is rich with nuance, experience, authenticity, and patterning. There will be no other time when AI will have such an authentic dataset to work with. Starting now, we have an increasing amount of AI-generated content. There’s the boring stuff: listicles, reviews, bland reporting. Then there are the essays and books written by AI.

So begins a cycle in which we are at the beginning of: AI-generated content that is used to generate additional AI content. What will this eventually look like? Will it be as rich as human-generated content? My feeling is that it will not. Will people care if something is AI-generated, as long as it gets across the information and is affordable, like the written version of an Ikea sofa? I’m not sure, but artificial content seems to me to represent a watering down of our collective corpus of human-made words.

I once wrote about my greatest procrastination attempt (to date): I convinced myself that I needed to build my own desk before I could begin a paid writing gig. And to do that, I needed to not only buy wood for the project, but harvest, mill, and season my own wood before building said desk.

What if I actually did that and produced an heirloom-quality desk instead of this crappy pressboard I’m slouching over?

What’s the point of creating human-generated writing or craft furniture?

I’ve racked my brain for days answering this question.

The point is that the value lies in the purpose and the form itself, almost like the concept of religion. Illogical as it is, religion serves a purpose, despite its tenets defying the objectivity that underpins our modern technological prowess.

Non-AI creation requires faith in the form we choose. And consumers of this art will know what’s genuine as long as they are committed to form. Posts from X and Notes lead to essays shrinking, an attempt to better satisfy an appetite for brevity. The conniving smoothness and cadence of an AI-generated sentence doesn’t flex my brain, but that may be OK with (or even preferred by) some people.

My inclination is to resist the complacency that comes with letting all writing eventually be authored by AI. I don’t see this necessarily as anarchy, but it does overlap with Schwarz’s description of anarchy in the context of craft: “a tendency to question the institutions that make craftsmanship and well-made furniture impossible in this modern age.”

I’d add to this the desire to keep sharing human thoughts and experience, not just that of a bot. It’s convenient to buy a chair from Ikea without maxing out my credit card, but I also like using the turned bowl my friend made from a piece of mountain ash.

Perhaps it’s futile if audiences end up preferring the too-good-to-be-true cleanliness of LLMs.

Figure out AI’s capabilities and limitations. In the end, whether by choice or necessity, all that will be left is for us to do and make what AI can’t.

BOOKS & GEAR | ABOUT

The black ink from a Sharpie marker soaks through the Amazon Basics index card, making it useless as a flash card. On one side, I write the word “Atrovent,” and on the flip side, “Ipratropium Bromide, used with Albuterol. DuoNeb. 0.5mg.”

The boundaries of my brain are being realized: it’s a new language part of EMT training. Patient assessments, oxygen rates, terminology.

“OPQRST.” I’ve almost remembered this acronym. It’s humbling, exhausting, addictive, and satisfying to infuse the brain, our ultimate tool.

My favorite places are where physical and mental boundaries intersect. For example: hunting on Kodiak Island epitomized this. Unfamiliar area, physically demanding, life-threatening unknowns that challenge both emotional stability (“stay calm”) and mental acuity (“don’t get sloppy”). When that’s done, and I’ve survived, then I’m left searching for more.

What places like Kodiak demand is attention under consequence. Narrowed focus is the drug.

The sound is small: a dry snap underfoot. My nervous system is spiked, and I stop mid-step. Across the river, a brown bear works a crowd of spawning, rotting, pink salmon. His paws’ splash is barely audible above the steady river flow.

No trails in the comforting sense. I borrowed game paths through alders and brambles. Bears framed every decision.

The pathfinder loves the frontier, the edges. In discovering these places, he kills them.

I know this impulse.

The edge cracks open to civilization, and they are no longer desirable to the pathfinder. He must find a new frontier or be depressed.

I share this affliction.

Strava picks up on a trail that becomes part of a global network that is seamless, accessible, false. With a heatmap, the mystery of a new place fades, outcome deceivingly calculated, and the perception of risk minimized.

A cryptic trail I ski occasionally gets peppered with flagging tape by someone committed to certainty; they place plastic every 20 feet. I tear it down. Inevitably, the trail will end up on Strava, which enables the anxious and curious to edit behavior before arrival. Yesterday’s natural resources are today’s “likes” and “shares.”

Books used to be the only thing that allowed that.

Touring eastern Oregon’s hot springs before online reviews meant faith in an unknown that today is inconceivable. We used a guidebook, slept in a car, and met someone who gifted me a bag of freshly made mountain lion jerky. I believe that’s the only time (I know of) that I’ve eaten cat. This was the consequence of our inability to pre-edit the trip for safety.

Killing a frontier isn’t about land, but about legibility and control. There was a risk in driving the vintage Volvo into a remote area of Oregon, where Reno was the closest hospital.

By sharing a place or idea, are we killing the reason we love it to begin with? Some will never know that space of discovery. Discovery is both liberating and destructive.

Our own frontiers are an edge, where our competence about a topic ends, and new knowledge begins. To what end?

I don’t believe there is an end.

Each of us has a frontier.

It’s solitude, uncertainty, and thrill. Not only do modern needs and wants fade; they’re obliterated by consequence. Chasing a wild animal or being eyeballed by a predator awakens a mindset that’s increasingly dulled by the suburban tendencies of the mind to compare and streamline. Break a leg two ridges away chasing a whitetail deer? In the moment of pursuit, I don’t care. Chaos, recklessness, and freedom in lieu of low stakes and constant connection.

Does our fear of quick death lead to a life of slow death?

I trade the Sharpie for a pen and continue to scrawl the terms I’ll be tested on.

A frontier is just the point where control runs out.

BOOKS & GEAR | ABOUT

Blood-streaked snow formed a halfpipe that trailed down the side of the mountain, now crimson-patterned. Suddenly, all I could think of was the waterpark in northern Vermont I brought my kids to when they were younger.

Arterial blood. A quick, clean kill; the neck shot relieved a pressure, an unpluggable leak that rendered failure across the deer’s circulatory system.

New areas never seem old. What makes them new is either geography or time. I shot this deer in a tract of wilderness in New York’s Adirondack Park; this particular area was one I’d never set foot in before.

Two weeks before, I ventured into a “new” area of the Green Mountain National Forest, only to realize I’d been there 20 years earlier. I saw the exact location but through a completely different lens, a form of twisted time travel: my mind knows the place, but that memory is all that remains, no hard evidence I’d actually been there before. Every cell in my body has regenerated since then– it was “newness” all around.

A day earlier in New York, I committed to a buck that I saw only once, exactly at last light. By “committed,” I mean I said to myself, “ I’m going to follow this deer until last light, no matter what.” Often when I do this, a deer will make a circle back to some form of civilization, like a trail, road, or even my own truck. Shooting hours end, and voila! I’m five minutes away from heated seats. In this area of the Adirondack wilderness, that wasn’t the case. The buck kept going deeper, further from anything resembling a trail.

Leaning into freelance, consulting, and stay-at-home parenting, I continue to take advantage of the opportunities it affords. It’s a path I chose to go down, not knowing where it would lead, a known-unknown. Professional and household structures and systems were created and entrenched, with the primary purpose of cocooning and protecting for 18 years.

On the second day of committing to a buck track, I made the same conscious decision to follow it no matter where we went. The night before, I spent about two hours getting out of the woods, hitching a ride back to my truck via state highway. It was colder the next day– about 15 degrees Fahrenheit. Cool enough to have numb toes but not overheat.

Steady marching, no standing around.

Again, I was on the scent of a wild buck, unlike the homebody buck who likes to stay near the roads and houses. After three hours, his tracks were as crisp & clean as if he just stepped there. Freshly bitten maple shoots and wafty brown hairs settled on the snow. He was feeding. He was close.

While cobbled-together freelance work and parenting often mix in a beneficial, harmonious way, the trajectory isn’t certain. I’ve been okay with that, yet instead of the usual nebulous future uncertainty, it is now. A parent must be there day after day for 18 years, until, abruptly, that requirement ends. I followed the path, and it led here.

When something sublimates, it changes directly from a solid to a gas, skipping the liquid stage. That’s what parenting an 18-year-old feels like: we skip an in-between stage that we otherwise expect based on the natural order of how parenting worked before that point: gradual, slow, and dillusionally prepared.

Gazing at the handsome buck, I made my peace, holding my open palm against his chest, feeling his earthy-brown coat, thinking of the dislodged hairs I had followed all morning. I couldn’t pause long because I was wet from sweat. I put my stiff gloves back on after getting him ready to leave his wooded home. Hands warmed from his insides, I trusted the drag would thaw things out.

Later that night, out of the woods, I recalled how hopeless it seemed to chase a wild animal straight into an unfamiliar wilderness. Thankful for the success, to be alive, and for the friendship of a buddy who met me halfway to help drag.

When the day-to-day logistical responsibilities of parenting shift, the purpose remains, but a chasm opens between what’s needed now and what was needed then. Hunting came into my life because it matched my passion for the outdoors and wilderness, but, logistically, like freelance work, I built it around my parenting responsibilities and the unpredictability and inconsistency that parenting entails.

That changed last June, so I asked myself, “How will I fill this chasm of time and logistics?” Write more? I don’t like to write just to write; I must do to write. And I hate sitting in an office for long stretches. This almost-empty nest coincides with a new era for writers. AI handily generates gear reviews and how-to articles that are nearly as good as any. I recently received a rejection letter from a magazine where I pitched such a piece. Mostly out of curiosity, I finally gave in and asked the latest GPT to generate an article from my rejected outline. I can’t blame the editor for the rejection. For $20/month, an editor can generate plenty of readable (or scrollable) pieces on countless outdoor themes without managing the niceties, administration, and editing obligations of hiring someone like me.

The article ChatGPT produced was excellent in terms of providing useful and readable information. Of course, there was no voice, no sincerity, no story. Yet I imagined myself sitting at the airport, delayed for a flight, scrolling on my phone out of boredom. If I encountered the GPT article, I probably would read it. Perhaps it would save me additional scrolling of search results if I were trying to figure out a new piece of gear to buy.

Four days later, the splendor of the Adirondack Park had faded slightly into my memory when I grabbed the 80 lb dummy out of the smoke-filled window and walked it down the extension ladder. Placing it a safe distance away, I charged back up the ladder, bailing through the window, onto the hallway floor of the training building. Despite the smoke, our four-person company cleared the second floor for other “victims.” I inconsistently desire the certainty of a trail, and my gaze now rests on the body of knowledge I feel the need to learn to do the job of a volunteer firefighter proficiently: part trail, part path, uncertain outcome.

Hunting for both purpose and deer is uncertain. Each is an inward hunt, full of choices about commitment, fear, and hope. There are paths we follow, laid out before us, perhaps by need, evolution, or the divine. These differ from a trail, and my favorite distinction between trail and path was written in 1840.

“...one is a matter for the eye, while the other is little more than scent.”

- The Pathfinder, James Fenimore Cooper

Well-worn trails are ubiquitous, but infinite paths lie ahead with only a scent to show us the way.

A deer roams the woods. A five-year-old lets go of their dad’s hand to go down the waterslide for the first time. I accidentally put out four plates for dinner, but I only need three.

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BOOKS & GEAR | ABOUT

Happy New Year!

In today’s essay, I review one element of what I learned from the books I read in 2025. Instead of a straightforward list, I attempt to articulate the thoughts/ideas I have gleaned from these books; a metanarrative of sorts. It’s an exercise in reflection and forced synthesis, which I feel compelled to do to prove to myself that there’s a utility to all of this reading (maybe there isn’t). That is, what did I learn from these books (if anything) and how will I apply it to my life? I plan to continue this discussion with other themes from 2025’s reading in future essays.

I hope you get something out of it, and thank you for reading Next Adventure.

- Jesse

Some ideas seem significant, novel, and valuable when I discover them, and most of these originate from books. Over 52 weeks, I read about one book per month.12 I read daily, but much of my reading also comes from essays, magazines, and textbooks.3

Some books are great reads; in the heat of the moment, the information seems helpful and applicable. But often, the gems of wisdom dissipate. Example: Ryan Holiday’s books are enjoyable and quick reads; I appreciate their accessibility and Stoic elements. However, I can’t tell you what I’ve learned from any of his books. It may be my own issue or something inherent in his books.

I’ve read other self-help books and gleaned applicable knowledge from them, so I don’t think it’s a genre issue. I've noticed a trend among some authors in the self-help space (e.g., pop Stoicism, pop psychology). Scott Galloway is another author who, like Holiday, writes captivatingly about meaningful subjects. Yet days after reading, it’s hard to know exactly what the point of it all was.

Both Holiday and Galloway have had very successful careers in marketing; they know how to create effective sales campaigns, so they’ve no doubt applied these methods to the book-selling sphere. I can’t help but think this is also why, in the end, their books reach only superficial layers of my psyche.

Alternatively, if I go directly to a source an author like Holiday draws from, such as Meditations, I glean hundreds of helpful, thought-inspiring inspirations I end up writing on pieces of paper and taping to the wall; they “stick.” What begins as a note evolves into a message I apply to my own perspective, one I continually revisit.

One idea gleaned from 2025’s reading is “usefulness.” Useful to me? My family? My community? Having an honest conversation with myself about my practical skills and contributions serves as a self-induced wake-up call. For example, if electricity and the internet disappeared tomorrow, what would we do with our time? What skills could we contribute to our community? Thinking about this from time to time may inform today’s actions.

A new skill or ability? Maybe it’s getting in shape or, conversely, reassessing a compulsive exercise habit to prioritize another aspect of our life. This is a subjective and personal form of assessment.

There have been days when it truly seemed useless to move electrons on a screen; there’s really been no material change in the world as a result of the desk-based work. Alternatively, seeing a stack of firewood I spent the day processing from my woodlot is gratifying. Yet recently, this chosen challenge can seem vain. I decided to do it primarily to get heat. But is it useful? Heat is useful, but does the outcome add value or meaning?

The obvious question here is “so what?” What am I to do with this thought, this sentiment? This is where pragmatism clashes with meaning. The Lord of the Rings trilogy may be less pragmatic than The Beginner’s Guide to Raising Chickens, but in total, LOTR has likely added more meaning to the world.

There are endless mental gymnastics to play here, but the point is to consider our purpose through a lens of usefulness and see what comes to mind.

For years, I’ve felt the collective pull of humanity’s digital realm to stay seated at a screen for everything: work, communication, and learning. Therefore, the answer to the “so what?” test in terms of how “usefulness” applies is to balance this digital pull with engagement with the world's incredible tactile and kinetic elements. Perhaps the measure of something’s utility is if it brings us meaning.

We habitually think about the histories of the places we live in and visit. Sometimes it’s research, sometimes imagination. While hiking the Green Mountains this fall, I considered: Who else lived and hunted here? As I looked west over Lake Champlain and onto the Adirondack Mountains, the daydream consumed my imagination. Quiet and snowy, with no visible houses, lights, or engine noises, it was easy to conjure up images of people traveling the length of the lake. A few weeks later in the Adirondacks, I wondered how many dugout canoes lie sealed under the dark water.

It’s hard not to feel a connection to the land and to ancient people when traveling any stretch of woods. Imagining ties between an ancient people and the present is, at best, an exercise in solidarity and connection, which is an enjoyable feeling. At its worst, it’s naive in the sense that it glosses over the struggle and bloodshed that define human territoriality. As stories become certain, they make decisions for us.

Champlain

As imagination, belief, and knowledge converge, there’s a human tendency to assert a combination of these as fact, as in the case of most mythmaking. Belief is private, whereas knowing with conviction feels like a fact. The courage of explorers such as Samuel de Champlain was grounded not only in cartographic mastery but also in a sense of purpose, a precursor to Manifest Destiny. Notice how Champlain observes and then concludes with duty, not more inquiry:

“as I had observed in my previous journeys, there were in some places people permanently settled, who were fond of the cultivation of the soil, but who had neither faith nor law, and lived without God and religion, like brute beasts. In view of this, I felt convinced that I should be committing a grave offence if I did not take it upon myself to devise some means of bringing them to the knowledge of God.” (Champlain)

Ego? Money? God? Certainty gave him permission.

Champlain overcame doubt, fear, and criticism because a force possessed him, a force that brought him to a place of certainty in his part of history.

Knowing is both powerful in steadying the unknown, but it also tends to make the unknown submit as a means of control.

Hiawatha

Four hundred years before Champlain observed the great lake that separates Vermont and New York, the mourning wars among tribes of precolonial America involved long cycles of violence. That cycle ended with Hiawatha. A depressed Onondaga warrior who, after losing his family in war, joined the Great Peacemaker to end seemingly endless bloodshed among the Haudenosaunee nations. A transformed Hiawatha, no longer in mourning, became a war-shaped leader of peace, who allied the five nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy has been dated to around the year 1200 (though this date is contested), with each nation joining to achieve a combination of economic, cultural, and political stability. The Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, and Oneida tribes formed a Confederacy that became a dominant force in the region, with each group controlling its own territory.

“The Mohawks were the guardians of the eastern door in the lower Mohawk Valley area. The Oneidas occupied the upper Mohawk Valley and the area of modern day Oneida, NY. The Onondagas were the keepers of the council fire in the center of the “longhouse,” in the modern day greater Syracuse area. The Cayugas occupied the finger-lakes area and the Seneca were the guardians of the western door in the modern Rochester-Buffalo NY area.” (NPS).

Peace ensued, and the Confederacy later proved pivotal to European relations and settlement.

I don’t yearn to live in the time of either Champlain or Hiawatha, but I admire something in both men: their ability to turn belief into knowledge.

The Onondaga warrior and the European explorer did not believe their paths were correct; they knew they were correct, destined to achieve their objectives. Belief and faith often leave wiggle room for hope, uncertainty, interpretation, and powerlessness, while knowledge is certain.

Both individuals knew their purpose with the same certainty that you know you’re reading these very words on this screen. We now live in the opposite condition: unprecedented information with a shrinking conviction.

Developments in science yield breakthroughs. With computers, the internet, and AI, we have the potential to calculate our way through almost any decision. In other words, it seems like we should be certain about everything we do, from day-to-day drudgery to matters of international conflict. Yet, today, 40% of teenagers are depressed, and more than half of adults are lonely. Scott Galloway’s powerful commentary should strike a nerve: “The most dangerous person in the world is a broke and alone young male.”

Science guides us through storms, yet in contemporary discourse, it appears vulnerable to conspiracy theories and spurious arguments; we’ve made science contestable. That’s one problem, but it may hint at a deeper issue. As a species, are we subconsciously recognizing that science does not, and never will, have answers to certain mysteries of humanity? Love, passion, and purpose are provable only to ourselves, within our own minds.

The open-endedness of these topics carves out a valuable space for myth, and, subsequently, belief and, ultimately, knowledge. This knowledge may not be scientifically informed, but it is necessary for human thriving and perhaps missing among the fragile, aimless, distracted, and depressed among us.

At times, religion and science trap us from either end; religion gets written off as silly and outdated, while scientific facts indicate a degree of hopelessness for much of humanity, including American youth. For this group, the numbers don’t add up favorably: buying a house, finding a job, meeting a spouse seems impossible, and the boogeyman of climate change is going to kill us. Riddled with relativistic arguments about right and wrong and self-loathing, America’s young people need a course correction.

How can we re-create the knowledge-based certainty of a Hiawatha and Champlain in today’s world? How could we infuse their certainty into the nervous minds of people raised on infinite options and thin meaning?

Perhaps religion would work; there’s an obvious appeal to such certainty, but there’s also a downside. Knowledge derived from a divine power can be harmful, if history is our guide.

Cultivating knowledge based on belief about mysteries we’ll never have a scientific explanation for involves trying. Trying involves struggle and failure, two things that petrify us. Trying (i.e., experience) helps us determine what’s worth believing in, moving us one step closer to a knowledge that steers us. Information and data can be parsed and validated, but they can’t tell you what to live for— that’s where experience comes in. Warriors and explorers of the old world lived a certain existence that wasn’t necessarily moral by today’s standards, but it unfolded within a structure built out of purpose.

BOOKS & GEAR | ABOUT

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Thank you for reading.

Jesse

Preoccupied is a good way to describe it. Perhaps “preoccupied” is not the most accurate word, however. Compelled to hunt or having a compulsion to hunt are better descriptors. What is a word for doing something despite knowing of the potentially negative consequences? Consequences you’re fully aware of? I won’t be surprised to enventually realize the neglected house chores & projects, sidetracked writing, and missed deadlines—all bystanders to my lack of attention to non-deer-hunting things.

The compulsion is the activity itself, not necessarily thinking about it or ruminating on it. Plenty in the modern hunting crowd are as obsessed or more so than I am. My anecdotal observation is that more and more passionate hunters now spend more and more hours “screen hunting” in chat rooms, Instagram, Facebook, and other digital spaces than they do in the field. That’s not an unusual development since this behavior now parallels most any topic or endeavor, especially politics and pop culture, where our experiences, our views, our lives get filtered through the digital tools in our hands, curated (un)knowingly by private interests, which encourage us to keep looking at the things we love through their prism.

I may obsess where to go the night before a hunt, looking and re-looking at maps, but I’ve intentionally veered away from the digital hunting experience thats grown to a point of simulacrum, where reality and imagination blur, an exercise in armchair outdoorsmanship, not unlike the conceptual chasm between an in-real-life relationship and porn– unreal expectations, envy, shortcuts, simplicity, fantasy. Hunting or intimacy– you can imagine both from the comfort of your screen, though neither exists, in that form, outside the frame of our iPhone or Android.

Wool Green Shirt, Lined

Warm and silent. It’s now faded with a few holes, but it’s my go-to for all gun seasons. I never have to think about it, which in the end says a lot about a piece of gear. If it snagged, was itchy, or ripped easily, I would find a replacement.

While wearing this shirt, I’ve experienced the highest highs and lowest lows; this pretty much sums up all deer hunting for me. It’s hopeless until it’s not. The shirt’s kept me warm and dry, which in turn has enabled me to have these thoughts about the pursuit and philosophy that grounds me in it— perhaps the most valuable attribute a shirt can have.

Boots

It’s taken nearly ten years to find a boot that suits me. The funny thing is that they work perfectly when I’m hunting in the environment I love: snowy, hilly, wooded areas. When I need to walk on a road to get back to my truck, they are uncomfortable.

What does this mean? Getting your feet on the ground is different from trying them on in the store or in the living room. Taking this further: looking at a picture of a place or of deer is a form of digital comfort and safety. Placing feet in situ introduces an entirely new scenario. How will your feet respond to an icy rock ledge when all we’ve done is wear the boots around the house? The digital hunter feeds the ego, while the in-real-life hunter feeds the soul.

Bag

How much can we carry before the weight and complexity become useless or even harmful? I used to take only what I could fit in my pockets, and then I brought so much that I exhausted myself. Where’s the balance? If we let the “what-ifs” distract and consume us, we’ll pack so much we can’t go very far.

​I settled on an 835-cubic-inch bag that fits within my torso profile, so it doesn’t snag on branches. I’ve considered switching to a hip-style pack, but haven’t found one I like yet. This bag accommodates a water bladder that requires insulation when temperatures are below 20 degrees Fahrenheit. I carry a gallon Zip-Lok bag of food, extra ammo, extra gloves, and other random items that might come in handy.

The real baggage is in the mind, and it manifests in what we carry. Never go, but only think about it? That’s easy; there’s nothing to carry, but your mind bears tremendous weight in anxious thought.

When I started hunting, a big draw was that it was an un-Google-able endeavor; I loved that component. Today, it still is that way, but the internet is crafty in making you believe that with enough of the right gear and oogling at freakshow bucks, you can scroll your way to a trophy, all the while lining the pockets of sponsors, celebrities, and platforms.

I can’t help but wonder if there are parallels here with other pursuits that require some preparation, but lead to too much research. Where is the balance between carrying enough on our backs and in our heads to be prepared, but not so much that we’re encumbered by unnecessary thoughts and poundage that ultimately limit how far we can go?

​

Where____is____that____line?

​

The only way I know to find this seam between a calculated life and a passionate one is subjective. Our gut, our voice, our soul tells us when to stop and go, lean in or retreat. That voice has always been corruptible by us. Yet never before has the panopticon that is our smartphone and the world it unlocks been so effective at sidelining us from listening to it.

Look at what we carry. Feel it. Go somewhere with it. The kinetic meets the hypothetical, and the feedback tells us whether that voice is our own.

BOOKS & GEAR | ABOUT

3:30 PM. He’s standing behind a hemlock, leaving a narrow window for the shot.

Two days earlier: At 5:40 AM, the headlamps’ red light shows the snow, and by six, I’m sweaty and smelly, near the ridge top. I’m hunting Vermont’s November rifle season on a ridge I’ve climbed so many times I could almost do it blind, but every year feels like starting over.

Merino stinks, and I’m not sure how every outdoor clothing company can claim otherwise. Tracks here and there, but nothing exciting. No more wisps of woodsmoke from my smoldering woodstove; a west wind ensures it.

I start in the dark, so I’ll be where the deer are when there’s enough light to see and subsequently, shoot them.

Shooting hours arrive like a welcome, yet slightly irritating relative: before they arrive, it’s peaceful and predictable; then they show up, and there’s drama. But the drama is what we remember. They are the thunderstorm that brings much-needed rain.

Today I won’t wait. I’ll patrol this ridge and the next ridge this ridge runs into, all day, looking for a buck track.

Waiting in a tree during archery is fun if there are deer around. But if it’s a dead zone, it’s helpless, since there’s no corner to peek around or a hill to summit. In gun season, I can delude myself into thinking the prize is just ahead. Impatience is a frenemy of mine, and we spend some quality time together every fall.

The fiddling of archery season and the intricacies of gear melt away with mid-November. A small (or sometimes no) bag on my back and a gun in my hand liberate both mind and body.

By 1 PM, I find a fresh set of buck prints. He’s with a doe and they’re going up, up, up. Fourteen inches of snow make it harder for all of us, but they have it easier with four legs. Few worries for them in this area. He’s leaving rubs as we walk, and the bark shavings sprinkled on the snow remind me of sprinkles on my kids’ ice cream cones. This one is smelly, and I can smell the tarsal musk he leaves behind.

November and December. Sometimes I’ll walk forest roads or trails, but most often I’ll walk through the woods, looking for a track to follow. This year, the snow’s been good. Some years, I have to travel further to find it.

By late afternoon, this pair has slowed, so I slow. When I see them, I get a look at the buck, then the happy couple bolts. At 2,650’, I need to begin my descent, message my ride, and try to get to a recognizable place (e.g., a trail or forest road) so my nighttime walk out is doable. I’ve stumbled out of the woods in the dark plenty of times, but in snowy, steep, and cold conditions, the risks are too high unless I think I’m about to catch a deer.

This passion is multifaceted, weaving together culture, environment, health, and survival into a single tapestry. And there’s a perpetual struggle because there’s constant refinement, learning, and development. This maddening struggle is what keeps me coming back for more, running myself ragged, nearing the edge of hypothermia, only to often return home with nothing other than snow- and ice-encrusted boots and stinking, wet clothing.

This pursuit consumes like no other, save for addiction. It doesn’t make any sense to wake up in the dark to wander the woods. It’s illogical and arguably insane.

It consumes me physically because it breaks down my body; ligaments, quads, shoulders—they creak, they weaken. Yet the magic happens when the opening weekend ends and hope fades for the weekend warrior: day 3. You’re recovering, and your body is ready to climb. “Let’s go,” it says. “Get up there.” Midday Advil helps.

It consumes me mentally, greedily demanding all my thoughts. “Where to go?” is persistently the question. What about the weather? What mistakes to improve upon? There’s always luck, but I hate relying on that. I drink the Kool-Aid I mix for myself that says it’s more than luck. And I don’t think that this must consume a person, but for me, it does.

My word retrieval fades. My commitment to commitments wavers. And I know it. I witness it happening, helpless.

As the season goes on and I watch the hope in other hunters’ eyes fade, mine grows. Their disillusion energizes me. Big, slow trucks creep down the road, then park at the diner for lunch. “Get lost, give up. That’s right, there’s no hope. Move on. Leave the woods to me.” I don’t say it out loud.

It’s a particularly selfish, aggressive shift in mindset. Vermont has a black powder season, and it’s one of my favorites; worse conditions and fewer deer, which means fewer hunters.

After that first day on the ridge, I moved on to new territory. Late in the day, a buck track made that morning leads me to a fresh one, which I follow. A long shot and specks of blood, this time like the cherry-red county fair Sno-Kone. I sprint, the buck bounds, and night approaches. “Push it,” I say out loud to myself. “There’s no other way.” In a half mile, he pauses behind that hemlock. Thunder unleashed, and we’re both at peace.

It’s dark now, and as we pass by a stepped series of beaver dams, the kerplunk of beaver tails startles and then comforts me. When we cross the icy river, I pause to rinse him out; magically clear water briefly turns a cloudy red.

What about the difficulty of watching a creature die? At face value, I feel like I should feel this, but I don’t. When I shoot a deer, I’ve already made the decision, overcome the difficulty, and accepted it the moment I pick up my rifle. To waver beyond that will only cause suffering. Suffering is difficult to watch, but we can minimize it as the predator.

Shoot to kill, and you’ll likely have to watch it die, which is your obligation, your duty, what you owe to the animal. You should be willing, even thrilled, to watch it die a noble death; embrace the fact that you killed it. That thought is worth listening to. Looking away or hoping you don’t have to see it die means you probably shouldn’t be hunting (at least not in North America, where the hunter is expected to handle the hard parts of the process).

When I’m unsuccessful, the thrill doesn’t dissipate; I keep going to whatever season is next, but I go dark and defiant. There’s no radical acceptance for boredom. No curiosity or patience for anything. It’s a storm within, and like thunder, it shakes us, and is impossible to ignore or control. Your own storm may look different, but the weather feels the same.

Storms pass, antlers fall, the thunder inside quiets, and December bleeds into a new year.

BOOKS & GEAR | ABOUT

What was once a joy, a hopeful pursuit ignorant of the realities of obstacles, morphs into disappointment, confusion, and overwhelm. We’ve not reached the mountaintop, but a false summit. Our choice is to either keep climbing to the summit of informed passion or descend to find another foothill to climb.

Tree of Life

Step outside and look at a tree. Try not to look up. After The Old Way, I began to think differently about humans’ relationship with trees. The relationships have always been strong, and I’ve always felt connected to them. For much of the fall, I’ll spend a lot of my free time up in a tree.

Hunting from trees isn’t really new; tree stands have existed for many years.

We started in trees. We left them, and some of us are going back. A tree protects us, and we can look down on the predators below. This afternoon, when I’m hanging in a tree saddle, I’ll look for prey below.

My eyes rotate up; an unclimbable spruce or a monstrous yellow birch. I keep looking up, no matter where I go in these woods.

A tragedy…

Which will I become? [each of us will succumb to at least one].

Of Polti’s thirty-six options, I think the one about passion…

All sacrificed for passion.

Hello! I am Jesse’s prefrontal cortex. We are experiencing a shutdown. I’ll be out of the office until next Tuesday [bullshit], and upon my return, I’ll get back to you [also bullshit]. Have a nice day!1

There’s the seasonal pull of not writing; word retrieval goes out the door, and my day is consumed with the wind, finding new spots in a finger of woods that reaches into a publicly-accessible corn field.

I inconsistently kill deer during archery season. See how I say “kill”? That’s because that’s what it is; it’s not harvesting: that’s what we do with potatoes. Harvesting a deer is trying to make this pursuit like farming, agriculture, like a science.

I am Jesse’s amygdala. I tell him things like, “You’re spending too much time hunting, wandering the woods.” Get a real job. Without a supportive spouse, you’d be living in a shed in Alaska, working seasonally in the fish-canning factory.

[This is true.]

I consistently try despite my inconsistency. How great would it be to approach the season like a scientist: the woods are my lab, and by changing the inputs over time, I could refine my deer-hunting formula. Eventually, my season would approach, and I’d have “my” deer on camera, then slay it a few hours into the season. “It went according to script,” I’d say afterward.

Variables honed, conditions mastered, struggle…eliminated.

Year after year, I do the opposite, often maximizing the struggle. Day after day, hunt after hunt, I return with hope and new ideas for an unvisited place to try. You see, I hunt like an artist; where am I drawn, what do I smell, what excites me? What’s practical? What’s the Hail Mary option?

I bounce between these mindsets, hoping and striving to hunt a different way, that of the scientist in a lab who methodically studies, plans, and executes consistently. Or the agronomist with the perfect balance of fertilizer. Hunters who operate this way are more successful than I am. The pinnacle of this trajectory is the canned hunt, where you can swap money for a shortcut to borrowed glory, where the guide or ranch owner bides their time, their investment growing in the form of antlers on the head of a cervid.

In the heat of the struggle, I dream of a large, private lot I could manage and control, my own deer lab, where I could monitor conditions and pull the strings of these meat puppets, nudging them toward my treestand with bait piles and fences.

It’s a daydream that trades struggle for ease, and it makes me sleepy, eyes glossed over like weekly sitting in the pews of a house of worship.

Make the deer docile in their micromanaged zones for the TV hunting celebrities’ panopticon.

I am Jesse’s restless attention span. I want more stimulation. Give me meds. Satiate me. We can regulate him, keep his impulses in check. Give in.

I want him docile.

What about market hunting? Piles of game, killed in abundance, hunter-mercenaries. The pictures say it all, and I, at first, ogled. Hunt for a job?! But it wasn’t hunting, it was exterminating. No thanks.

The frustration, anger, and hopelessness of the struggle of the hunt are what make it a hunt. And in much of the northeast, hunting like an artist — adapting, deciding based on your gut, trying out the illogical — is sound practice.

The hero’s journey appeals (as it does for everyone), but passion resonates, and I feel that especially now: I want to throw my computer in the trash and only be in the woods, at the field edge, or in a tree, refining the strategy and the next hunt. To improve? I can’t help but think there’s another factor at play —a force—the moon, the seasonality, the photoperiod, a scientific explanation for the blind restlessness and uncompromising desire that’s within us.

See why and when I write:

When I started writing this letter to you, the air was cold. It was October 9th at 9:43 AM in Underhill, Vermont, the thermometer outside my kitchen window read 34°F, and I was wearing four layers of clothing. I had yet to turn on the heat or stoke the wood stove.

I’m thoroughly distracted by choosing a spot to hunt this afternoon; that distraction will follow me (or I will follow it) through mid-December. At that point, beginning when hunting season ends, the preoccupation continues with whatever activity draws me in…predictably, an outdoor activity like skiing or firewood.

My compulsion is to give in to these impulses; sometimes that’s good, other times, not so much. Typing on a keyboard on a day like today, as the seasons change, and there’s deer to chase, is difficult. A lot of the time, I’m blessed to pursue deer or whatever other pursuit “distracts” me.

I’m writing these words with a pen on paper. I transcribed them onto the screen you’re reading. For some reason, perhaps kinetic, if I try to type directly, there’s no flow.

The compulsion for the outdoors, for a kinetic existence, is irresistible; rich or poor, better or worse. There’s a passion in there, and there’s also a struggle. Through passion and struggle, I strive to share words that provide you, the reader, with something valuable: Purpose? Meaning? Entertainment? In any case, I view this as a shared exploration between writer and reader.

Next Adventure is pivoting. Not in subject matter, but form. I will no longer publish strictly on Thursdays; the helpfulness of this cadence has waned and become arbitrary. Instead, I will publish essays when they’re ready and worthy of your limited attention; likely two to four essays per month. The other change is that there will be an occasional paywall in some essays.

I have spent the past few weeks thinking about how to make this newsletter work for me and you. With widespread sophistication and use of AI, I’ve paused some essays to consider a path forward that I enjoy exploring as well as one you, the reader, will enjoy traveling down.

There’s seamless access to abundant content, much of which is very good. I myself struggle with where to focus my reading attention. As a writer, the natural question becomes: how do I distinguish myself? How much do I compromise my voice for “likes,” subscriptions, and followers? How will I gauge reader interest?

My personal choice is not to gameify or compromise in the direction of the social media elements of Substack (). I find social media draining and unfulfilling. I do not intend this sentiment to offend those who value social media or the like; I see the value of these tools in building connections, but for me, they tend to counterproductive in every way, an attention-draining kryptonite.

Ideas and issues we care about are often complex. Superficially reducing them, oversimplifying, does little to further dialogue or understanding.

In the same sense that I am compelled to go outside and split firewood or hike, I’m equally compelled to write about topics that matter in a longer format. Tweeting about a topic (aka: Susbtack Notes) typically brings me nothing but stress, frustration, and disappointment.

Next Adventure will continue to be built around these themes:

• Place [outdoors, hunting, environment]

• Kinship [parenting, fatherhood]

• Resilience [mindset, skills, gear]

The best part of this newsletter is you, the reader. The word “community” is overused, but I think it’s appropriate here. We are an open-minded community that’s grown exponentially this past year. It’s a group that’s open to adventures, new ideas, provocative questioning, and critical thought.

Lately, it’s been tempting to bend in the direction of “likes,” short punchy sentences, and self-help, get-rich content; it’s the content that’s threatening to overwhelm the Substack space. There’s plenty of that content out there if you’re looking for that type of quick read about making money online. And there appear to be a lot of people who are very good at it (i.e., writing about it, that is). I’m not very good at that type of writing (or making money, for that matter), and when I try, I end up hating the writing process itself.

If you’re reading this and expecting that type of material, consider unsubscribing because you will be disappointed.

For those who remain: Please know how much I value your readership. In this “attention economy,” I appreciate how much other stuff there is to read, but you choose Next Adventure. For paid subscribers, know that paid support keeps me inspired, motivated, and dedicated to writing about place, kinship, and resilience. I believe the reader-writer synergy can uphold long-form and meaningful content, preventing all newsletters from becoming bullet point writing that primarily focuses on selling something and scrollability.

Please consider reaching out to me with your thoughts on an interesting topic you’d like to see written about, collaborations, or questions.

Thank you for your attention, readership, and support.

Jesse

Underhill, Vermont

10.14.2025

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BOOKS & GEAR | ABOUT

Perhaps the most iconic of American architects is Frank Lloyd Wright, and this is due primarily to his landmark project, Fallingwater. As legend has it, Wright procrastinated for months until his client, the department store magnate E.J. Kaufman, was on the way to visit Wright to check on his progress. With a few hours to spare, Wright quickly drafted the plans for Fallingwater, and this first draft was the final draft; Kaufman approved the plan.1

This tale is spun as a showcase of procrastination’s benefits; subconscious incubation of ideas yielded a miraculous jolt of genius in the form of Wright’s “Lightning Sketch.” Is the delay of real work like an idea composting underground, or is it justifying inefficiency?

My greatest procrastination to date occurred before writing a gear review article. Starting it alluded me. I decided that before I could begin, I needed a new desk. Buying the desk I really wanted would have cost a couple of thousand dollars, which I wasn’t willing to pay. The cheaper ones seemed just that: cheap. So I would build my own desk.

But before that, I needed to decide on the species of wood I would use. I reasoned that making my own lumber for the desk project made sense. Find the tree, cut it down, season the lumber. And voilà, once the three coats of polyurethane had dried on my new desk, I could start writing the article I had agreed to write!

I was sharpening the spear forever, avoiding the task.

Procrastination in the self-help space is traditionally viewed as an affliction to overcome. Books like The Procrastination Equation and Solving the Procrastination Puzzle promise solutions to dealing with it. In general, psychologists do not couch procrastination as serving a hidden purpose, but rather as a problem. “Procrastination is the act of intentionally delaying task progress or completion with the understanding that doing so may come at a cost” (Shin & Grant). Professionals cite self-control, self-deception, and perfectionism as typical, interrelated causes: “Procrastinators are often perfectionists, for whom it may be psychologically more acceptable never to tackle a job than to face the possibility of not doing it well.”

But what if the process of procrastinating hides something beneficial? What if, like Wright, we could delay our work until the last minute, yet still complete the job? Santella’s history of procrastination reveals variations that highlight some of the virtues of procrastination, making those who do it feel good about themselves. In a meta-analysis, Kooren et al. distinguish between passive (indecision to act) and active (deliberate decision to work under pressure) procrastination, with the latter showing moderate positive outcomes. If procrastinators like Newton, Darwin, and Wright procrastinated, why can’t I?

Maybe their genius lay in allowing their ideas to incubate? It’s an attractive proposition.

We should be skeptical of this trend of turning negatives into positives in the self-help space, however. Taking a behavior, such as procrastination, and spinning it to be positive is problematic because it leads to “there is no right answer” thinking. On this path, procrastination is a benefit and not a habit that needs reform. In this world, we waste the day, sharpen the spear forever, and only daydream about one day sinking it into the broadside of our prey.

Pen to paper, blade through flesh.

For those who can afford it (in both time and money), procrastination becomes a luxury and a justification for inaction, the adult equivalent of placing a chemistry textbook under our pillow at night in hopes that we absorb the page’s content before tomorrow’s exam.

Pre-castination, on the other hand, is defined “as the tendency to complete, or at least begin, tasks as soon as possible, even at the expense of extra physical effort.” If procrastination is delaying the chase, then precrastination is its mirror mistake: rushing to the task in an automaton-like fashion to feel busy.

In cases where procrastination yields measurable benefits in terms of creativity, the question arises whether the activity in question is, in fact, procrastination or something else entirely, such as thinking or research, both of which are necessary activities for complex tasks.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s hurried design of Fallingwater resulted in an iconic building, but also introduced unsustainable design elements that required constant repair. A consequence of procrastination? Had he not rushed at the last minute but instead considered the longevity of the structure, what would Fallingwater look like today? If his delay had been an incubation of ideas, would it have culminated in a sound design?

I still haven’t built that desk, but I did finish the article.

BOOKS & GEAR | ABOUT

Robert Ruark’s safari in the early 1950s was simultaneously unique and timeless, kind of like a classic piece of fiction. It was anachronistic in the sense that he was one of the last to venture into the eastern Africa region with such an open range mentality.

At first, I was skeptical of Ruark; I came across mentions of him in contemporary magazines that hark back to the good old days of African trophy hunts, but often do so in a hyper-masculinized way. Combined with my upbringing during a post-Ruark reorganization of the African continent, this post-colonial period corresponded to the preservation of big game animals. The Bambi-fication of big game in Africa was fully legitimized with The Lion King; a majority of my cohorts and I winced at the thought of “hunting Africa.”

Yet as I read Ruark, an unfurling of a hunter’s mentality appeared, like a mid-summer day lily that’s exploding by 2PM. Horn of the Hunter preserves the sentiments of modern hunters the world over. And though the colonial and exploitative conditions Ruark encountered and benefited from are gone, I now realize his appeal as an author.

One of my kick-in-the-pants motivations for reading Ruark was Richard Mann, whose Substack features some of Mann’s recent trips to Africa. Mann is an excellent writer and hunter whom I admire, so after reading some of his trip reports, I remained intrigued and dove into the world of Ruark.

British East Africa (today’s Kenya & Tanzania)

Ruark was a writer and fulfilled his desire to hunt Africa with a multi-month trip to British East Africa under the guidance of the famed Harry Selby. Early in the book, Ruark captures the essence of hunting much in the same manner a fire embodies heat:

The hunter’s horn sounds early for some, I thought, later for others. For some unfortunates, prisoned by city sidewalks and sentenced to a cement jungle more horrifying than anything to be found in Tanganyika, the horn of the hunter never winds at all. But deep in the guts of most men is buried the involuntary response to the hunter’s horn, a prickle of the nape hairs, an acceleration of the pulse, an atavistic memory of their fathers who killed first with stone, and then with club, and then with spear, and then with bow, and then with gun, and finally with formulae. How meek the man is of no importance; somewhere in the pigeon chest of the clerk is still the vestigial remnant of the hunter’s heart, somewhere in his nostrils the half-forgotten smell of blood. There is no man with such impoverishment of imagination that at some time he has not wondered how he would handle himself if a lion broke loose from a zoo and he were forced to face him without the protection of bars or handy, climbable trees. (p.23)

Once I read this, I knew Ruark’s hunting experience impacted him in a foundational manner, and this kept me reading. I also appreciated that although Ruark and I shared an understanding of “the hunt,” he was operating in a different time. Driving around the plains, sneaking out of the passenger side of the Land Rover, and then shooting a lion or looking for a shot at a rhinoceros, they followed all game laws, but the laws themselves were wild-Westy by today’s standards. And I wouldn’t consider shooting either of those species today. Nevertheless, lions are a prominent feature of Ruark’s world, and we learn about their ability to stalk, namely the female’s tendency to use wind direction to push prey in the direction of a lazy male upwind.

But the challenge, while it certainly is appreciated by Ruark, finds a broader meaning: “You get the lion or the lion gets you” (p.24); a truism of lion hunting that echoes for pretty much everything else on this planet, including our own demons.

Similar to Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, Ruark was lucky to visit a place on Earth that would soon after change irrevocably. And both authors’ presence hastened, and to a degree, cannibalized the places they wrote about by making them destinations for other trailblazers, not unlike a present-day Rick Steves, who, in touting the benefits of European travel, contributes to the demise of the places he promotes.

Ruark knew this:

“...in a very short time there will be little big stuff left to practice on. It is thought by most of the smart ones that the next three or four years will see the last of safari in the old sense, when a man went out to kill a lion, a leopard, an elephant, and the more elusive big antelopes with some feeling of certainty.” (p.78)

Today, it’s possible to hunt in Africa, though I haven’t researched what’s legal, ethical, or sustainable. I’m pretty sure rhinos and elephants are likely on the no-no list. Yet, as it is today amongst ethical hunters, nobility of the hunt was paramount, as Selby explained to Ruark:

“You are not shooting an elephant,” Selby told me. “You are shooting the symbol of his tusks. You are not shooting to kill. You are shooting to make immortal the thing you shoot. To kill just anything is a sin. To kill something that will be dead soon but is so fine as to give you pleasure for years is wonderful. Everything dies. You only hasten the process. When you shoot a lion, you are actually shooting its mane something that will make you proud. You are shooting for yourself, not shooting just to kill!” (p.90)

The passion and logic of a hunter is as varied as a snowflake, but the fundamental form remains: “You are shooting to make immortal the thing you shoot.” And in this sense, you honor it. Wanton killing and waste were as frowned upon then as they are today (poaching and waste of harvested animals continue anywhere game laws exist).

Ruark employed a crew to support him and his wife: guides, skinners, drivers, and an assembly of staff to do all the shit work; it was the fruits of colonialism realized in full force. If I could hunt Africa (sans colonialism) and not further the extinction of a delicate species, I would. And doing it Ruark-style sounds appealing, albeit drastically different from the DIY style of hunting I do. Ruark and his guide would spend a morning driving to look for game and return to camp for a lunch of gazelle chops and “warm martinis.” Honestly, this sounds like a splendid way to hunt; a pristine country with beautiful flora and fauna, abundant game to hunt, staff to process it, and a chef prepared lunch with gin-heavy cocktails. I suppose one could argue that this isn’t so different from road hunting New England logging roads while drinking Bud Light; this doesn’t appeal to me, but the way Ruark did it, does.

Whether we spend the morning chasing a frosty Vermont ridge runner or getting tipsy while glassing for kudu in Kenya, there’s a hunter’s tendency that leans toward obsession; Ruark encountered it with kudu; apparently, it was not uncommon to become obsessed by the pursuit of this specific species.

“The kudu is just under your hand, and yet he always manages to escape you. Sometimes he escapes you even if you kill him.” (p.351).

This passage was towards the end of Horn of Hunter, and I suspect Ruark put it there because it took him months to cognitively process what he chased. (Ruark did shoot a spectacular kudu, which he was happy with until he noticed it only had one curl in the horn, not two— an indication the animal was younger than he thought). He left Africa with his trophies, but continued to pursue something, likely an element of himself he may have never found. Sound familiar? That’s the beauty of a lot of Ruark’s writing: honest relatability, written beautifully.

There’s always that next thing, the monster buck or new toy, but like Ruark’s kudu or a crafty whitetail, without the realization that it’s the chase that is the hunt, the satisfaction of the kill will be fleeting like a hole that’s filled with dirt from a neighboring freshly excavated hole, that itself must be refilled. Some hunters are simply never satisfied. And this, ironically, is what drives them over the next ridge and onto the next season.

Additional Reading:

BOOKS & GEAR | ABOUT

What is our next adventure? Where do we go from here? On one hand, nothing’s changed. Artists have always been exploited and sought reimbursement for their work, but those are really just characteristics of humans in general.

Things change. Adventures change. I cultivated a strong passion for fishing years ago, mostly because I needed something to do with my kids. When they were younger, we had an abundance of time together. I explored all sorts of areas with them, and fishing was a go-to activity throughout the summer. Where does that leave me now, when they’re either at college or busy with other activities and a dwindling interest in the activity? It’s an abrupt evolution in the adventure.

I don’t expect you to pay for writing that’s generated using AI. You could easily go into ChatGPT and type in a prompt that requests “an essay in the tone of Jesse McEntee” and see what pops out. You’ll get something that resembles my words, but it won’t be from my heart.

Today I’m writing from the 35 acres of mostly wooded land that I inhabit and manage for firewood and wildlife.

In about two weeks, deer season opens here in Vermont. I’m excited for it and spending a lot of time getting ready by scouting and shooting (lately, shooting my crossbow).1 After that, there will be rifle seasons, and then that will be followed by muzzleloader. In the past few years, I’ve been traveling to hunt in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Hampshire (and Alaska, though that’s not a regular occurrence).

I started writing essays in Next Adventure because I have a passion for the outdoors, going on adventures, and searching for meaning. As I’ve indicated before, the idea of going on an “adventure” each day was born with my children. From the time they could speak, we’d ask each other, “What’s our next adventure today?”

While the pull to stay home amidst the toddler chaos was strong, we continually found activities suitable for their age.

I aim to provide ideas and a dialogue, either between us or within you.

As I sit here in an office, I can hear all sorts of sounds: bugs, birds, and a dump truck’s dump gate slamming closed at the town garage. But I can also see things. I can see the leaves turning. They’re orange, they’re yellow, they’re brown. The stain is peeling off my woodshed, and I need to re-stain it. The archery target is full of holes, and it’s bleeding fuzz. I put a hay bale behind it, and next I’ll make a new target out of discarded clothing that neither fits my children anymore nor is suitable for donation. Soon cotton threads will litter the ground, snow will cover them, and they’ll melt into the ground by April’s thaw.

This time of year, all of the bees, hornets, and wasps are going crazy, panicking. They know the cold is coming.

In the past, I thought of myself as more of a scientist (albeit a social scientist). But as I lean away from the technical, I find myself closer to the artistic.

The reason is my preoccupation with meaning. As Bayles and Orland put it, “meaning of the world is made, not found.” We create our interpretations of the world, which then establishes the meaning du jour.

And that’s what I promise readers of Next Adventure: a continuous discussion of the search for meaning, often through a prism of adventure. I provide you with an honest interpretation of the world; the meaning of what we find is up for discussion.

We’ve entered a new chapter in the world of writing, and a lot of that is mimicked in other art forms. Catchy tunes or jingles aren’t new, and they continue to be made by artists in the TikTok era; singers create hooks for songs with this medium in mind. Just as essays like this one need to be shorter if I expect anyone to read them.2 I recently thumbed through my copy of Coming into the Country by John McPhee, and after reading a few random passages, wondered how it would have done in today’s market. Such ponderings are useless; we can’t go back in time, and every artist responds to the moment with the tools at their disposal and the market conditions they face.

Changing one’s work based on market demand or saleability isn’t new; it’s timeless, even for artists. It’s evolution.

With AI, we face new consequences, but evergreen challenges. The playing field remains level in the sense that AI is generally available to everyone. So having access to it doesn’t really provide any advantage. If I want to do some research, I can turn to AI, and it’ll help me research a topic. And that’s true for everyone; there’s no edge to gain.

Craft writing is different, though, from the art of writing. A craft uses a template and technique to recreate that which may or may not already exist. Honing that craft is doing it well, aiming for perfection (e.g., I carve wooden spoons, often striving to make a perfect version of a particular design; that’s predominantly craft). And I’d say AI is getting reasonably good at crafting AI-generated words. But we (humans) can identify it. AI-created articles and essays are everywhere. They’re smooth, but soulless. The clever headlines are a telltale sign, and when I read someone who once did not use AI but now does, it’s disappointing, but understandable. We’ve all tried it, but their voice is now diluted and will gradually be gone. As they say, “Use it or lose it.”

Art speaks to us differently. Words might be clunky, more basic. The struggle, hope, love, frustration, anger, and soul of art cannot be replicated by AI. Would I pay for an AI-authored book or article that synthesises some valuable data? Perhaps. But those are means of data and information transfer. There’s a template being followed.

A piece of art, on the other hand, by definition, is uniquely human.

BOOKS & GEAR | ABOUT

I believe our and our children’s (un)willingness and (in)ability to take these risks is potentially one of the greatest threats to the United States.

Eighty years after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, and as Congress probes last year’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump, I witnessed a Class of 2025 senior say they were “scared” of the future during a June commencement speech. It’s a concerning trend: the CDC’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey found 40 percent of high-schoolers feel “persistent sadness or hopelessness.”

As the parent of two teenagers, I watched this fear build for years. Elementary school once taught my kids that the world is vast and worth exploring. Today, teachers and news broadcasts often frame most current events as some form of crisis. Teachers who spoke at June’s graduation ceremonies repeated the well-worn “follow your dreams” script, but the student speakers I heard described a world of conflict in tones of hesitation and anxiety.

Cultivation of Fear

Well before Covid, classrooms and Vermont media labeled most challenges as an existential “crisis.” Healthcare crisis, housing crisis, climate crisis—the list grows. Pre-Covid, a middle-school climate unit once warned my 12-year-old that the time to “save” the planet was gone; an alarmism that paralyzed more than it motivated. Alarm may rouse action, but when it becomes adults’ dominant note, children learn paralysis, not problem-solving. The CDC links poor mental health (which I contend chronic fear is a part of) to higher absenteeism and lower test scores, proof that the cost is real. Covid poured fuel on the panic: classrooms closed, screens replaced friends, and disinformation flooded every feed.

Fear alerts; courage decides.

Victory in Our Stories

If “fear is the mind-killer,” as Frank Herbert wrote in Dune, stories of victory supply the antidote. Had Frodo cowered in the Shire, mired in his own overwhelm, Middle-earth would have fallen. Tolkien shows us the remedy: name the danger, then act. Heroism is nonpartisan, yet progressives rarely answer spectacle with equal moral clarity. As reminds us, Spartan women were “the steel in the society’s spine”; bravery was never meant to be the property of any one gender or party. Young minds need that script more than another loop of catastrophe.

Fear should never be a student’s final lesson.

Courage Beats Spectacle

When protesters muddle their symbols, courage still cuts through: witness the injured candidate who, fist raised, shouted “Fight!” and electrified supporters. Courage, seen live, wins attention; our schools can teach the habit without theatrics. Opportunities for non-violent bravery abound. Speak to unfriendly press, hear out opponents, and condemn violence from your own side. Senator Bernie Sanders’ unscripted appearance on Joe Rogan in August showed the kind of open-minded bravery our culture needs more of.

Three Ways to Teach Courage

• Make civics class a forum where students stand up and defend an idea—Florida, for example, pairs its required Civic Literacy Exam with $1.5 million in state grants for the Civics & Debate Initiative, seeding debate teams in every district.

• Offer graduates a paid year of national service—the bipartisan Unity through Service Act of 2025 would create a federal service council and authorize stipends for “service-year” posts once Congress appropriates the funds, so teenagers learn by doing instead of doom-scrolling.

• Anchor K-12 discipline codes to a simple free-speech pledge, modeled on the college-born “Chicago Statement,” now embraced by more than 100 universities, so every student learns that open disagreement is normal.

Critical Thinking Begins at Home

My teenagers and I dissect headlines, ask “Who benefits?” and test ideas against facts. They now spot the irony of driving six hours to protest carbon emissions, the chanting slogans that mask antisemitism, and the often performative nature of land acknowledgments. The habit is uncomfortable; teachers and peers sometimes discourage it, but the friction is the point. At our table, we tackle hot-button issues—immigration quotas, Middle East policy, tech & government layoffs—not to win arguments but to practice evidence-based thinking. We must model courage and curiosity so children meet challenges with “Let’s try,” “We’ll figure it out,” or “What’s the opposing view?”

Denying students (or anyone else) the chance to ask “why” in public turns classrooms (and society) into incubators for partisan reflexes. Ignorance breeds fear, and it has begun to feel normal.

The second half of FDR’s famous line about fear warns of “unreasoning, unjustified terror…which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Teach and practice fearless inquiry, and all of us, including the Class of 2025, will turn retreat into advance.

BOOKS & GEAR | ABOUT

At sunset, swallows dive bomb the water’s surface, creating ripples. Thinking the ripples are fish, I can’t help but feel both avian and aquatic companions are coming alive in this golden hour. A Black Fury Mepps lure splashes into the middle of the chaos, and I simultaneously consider the impact of this splash on the birds, but also the journey of this lure. Call it distraction or inattention, I notice the “Made in France” marking on the lure, which I bought at Walmart last year. Now it’s in this pond, causing excitement amongst the birds, and I hope, the fish. Close to home, this particular pond is generally good fishing because it doesn’t allow any combustion motors; to fish it, you need to paddle. Despite being in the middle of Vermont’s most crowded county, this requirement precludes over-eager anglers who rely on engines from dwindling the resident pike population.

Before long, a pike struggles on the end of my line. Its spitting and thrashes grow, a chaotic whirl of pops and sputters. I scoop him into the boat. Soon enough, the hook’s out, and he’s back to the depths.

This summer’s been particularly dry, and it’s evident from the leaves covering the ridge above the pond. Some are already that furious orange reserved for fall.

Run-hiking up to the ridge the next day, I notice a dry game trail at about 2,500 feet. The soil there is superficial, black, and typically muddy, but on this day it is desert-like. The predominantly southern wind topples spruce trees; their criss-crossing looks like an all-grey set of pick-up sticks.

Each day, the VT Department of Forests, Parks, and Recreation publishes a Wildfire Situation Update. Right now, the Fire Danger Forecast is “High.”

Fire’s mostly been our friend, not foe. Cooking is likely the winner in the contest of our most valued use. Passing through a campground full of car campers and RVs, their sardine-like layout was distinguishable by a single attribute: an individual fire pit. “Damn, that’s a persistent habit we have,” I thought.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ field work in the Kalahari Desert calls out fire as our means of extracting more nutrients from meat. It’s a process we’ve refined for 1.5 million years. At the same time as Thomas’ anthropological sojourn to southern Africa, Robert Ruark was on an incomprehensively polar opposite of exploits in eastern Africa, slaying all sorts of creatures, many considered sacrosanct today. He typically ended the day with a fire (and gin).1

I burn five cords of wood in a woodstove each winter, starting in October and ending in April. Wood heat is great, but it’s a pain in the ass. It’s dirty, requires constant attention, and is labor-intensive. I harvest and process the wood I burn, which means I’ve touched the wood half a dozen times between chainsawing the tree and tossing it in the stove. The entire process makes little sense when a thermostat is sitting there on the wall. Yet I’m drawn to the physicality and productiveness of firewood; the work product is readily observable and utilitarian. When the screen’s nebularity becomes too much, I split logs.

It’s a functional exercise, but it’s not really worth it. The work is hard and genuine, but the hourly rate is horrible. Buying a cord of wood or simply burning natural gas makes more sense. One of my knacks is finding activities that require hard work and I enjoy, but generally pay poorly; firewood epitomizes this.

Vermont has the highest percentage of wood burners: 14%.2 Stubburness, passion, conservatism, or frugality, it’s unclear to me why so many people are still willing to deal with wood. My best guess is that, like those cramped campers, fire resonates with us. Whether in a campfire or a wood stove, we get to be part of a ritual. Which sounds better to you?: Turning the thermostat and doomscrolling? Or, collecting newspaper, kindling, and a match to light a flame that will heat your home for the next twenty-four hours? The former is practical, while the latter isn’t. But I’m stubborn, and for as long as I can, I’ll start the fire.

When I choose not to light that match, it means I’ve given up. Which means I should buy a minivan, move to the suburbs, get a 9-5 job, and lose the chip on my shoulder. Sure, all those scions of the good life have attributes I appreciate, like convenience. But the constant striving for convenience and efficiency yields what? More time. For what? More time on a screen for work, pleasure, or some netherworld between the two, like reading Fox News in a cubicle; glorious in that you’re getting paid to read more things to be afraid of, but depressing in that it’s the most synthetic jail cell I can imagine.

For better or worse, I refuse despite familial and societal pressure.

Small campfires are emblematic of our choice. Find the firestarting material and a spot for a fire, and cook some meat on it. And keep it simple. “Come over for a campfire,” a friend said. I chuckled darkly to myself when I stepped onto the bluestone patio that held a pedestal campfire holder, an elevated shrine to tidiness and control; a prison fitted for flame.

A fire with hardwood coals that glows is a glorious sight, even if it’s just the size of a pie plate. On a canoe camping trip, I squat on my haunches next to such a fire, entranced, with a death stare, dilated pupils, and a blank mind. I reach for the pan, hesitate, and instead grab the venison from the cooler. Without much thought at all, I toss the meat on the hot coals.3 The early-season venison is fatty. Contracting, smoking, bleeding, I don’t see a dead deer; I see the moments before I pulled the trigger, and the view from the top of the mountain the buck grazed. On the coals, the meat sizzles and sputters, making a sound not unlike the pike’s thrashing tail as it struggled to break free from my fishing line.

BOOKS & GEAR | ABOUT

You realize tiny, microscopic cuts hours or days later. Slightly infected, they’re sore, but you need to keep digging and ignore them.

You dig again the next day and the next. Soreness swells, sensitivity peaks. You don’t stop. Crow and wood thrush provide the laugh track, heckling words of encouragement.

Calluses form, and dozens of minor cuts dot your hands, sensitive to touch. Soap and hot water needle the tiny holes in your hand. You pull back, but a back-of-the-brain need nudges you, and you embrace the pain: conditioning.

Training the signal, not chasing the pain.

You start to crave the smell of earth and leaf mold and crushed ferns. Injured, but strong, your hands’ conditioning is nearly complete, and they yearn to dig. “Why am I not digging?” they ask. “Find me a spot to dig!” they demand.

Your hands learn. Nerves in your fingertips subconsciously respond to the hint of a rock’s jagged edge and go around or behind it. Like a seasoned coach, they know how hard to push an athlete: enough to get the job done, but shy of injury.

I must do to write.

First hands, then words. That’s the work.

You see, I’m not a writer who writes; I’m an experiencer who experiences and then thinks and writes about it. For me, that’s stumbling through a blowdown or big box aisle; one teaches how to move when the way’s not there, while the other teaches how not to be moved by what’s there.

Sitting in my office, day after day, for the sake of writing is a killer for me. Glowing screen and raised shoulders.

It’s the difference between hiking through an un-trailed forest and a paved path.

For me, writing requires focus, risk, thrill, or struggle. My goal is to bring back what those conditions teach: mistakes, lessons, connections.

Get to that raw, focused place. Struggle, get lonely, scared, sore. Forced discomfort. Force myself into that zone through circumstance. Know what it feels like and be reminded of it, then ingrain it into my life in both the everyday and outlier standout events.

I don’t want formulas. I want to share these experiences and their meaning.

To build the habit of going together.

Of focus.

Of not saying we can’t do that.

Of not saying we don’t do that.

Hands ready. Ground waiting.

To keep digging and see where it leads.

BOOKS & GEAR | ABOUT

Snapping to attention when I hear a twig break, I watch the indifferent swagger of a brown bear as it gorges on spawning pink salmon. He’s looking at me out of the corner of his eye.

His paw print could encompass an 8.5” by 11” sheet of paper.

The owner of the off-grid cabin warned me, “These aren’t park bears.” Kodiak City’s 100 miles of roads allow a visitor to see a bear from the comfort of their vehicle. These bears are accustomed to being watched, reaching a level of docility that one could call “park-like.”

A bear living in the remote sections of the island behaves differently since it’s unlikely they’ve ever encountered a human.

A human isn’t something to fear, but a curiosity or annoyance. Guides describe bears, after detecting a follower, sitting and waiting for the tracker creeping behind them. Other times, they’ll circle behind the follower, stealing the role of hunter from the human.

The bears here are still in charge.

In the Northeast, we have black bears. Powerful, yes, but likely to slip away before you see them.

From a predator standpoint, there’s nothing to fear. There’s a hubris etched into the psyche of people habituated to the woods of the Northeastern US. Getting lost, trying to find a trailhead or parked vehicle; I’m familiar with these follies, and every time I think to myself, “This may suck, but at least I don’t need to worry about a grizzly bear or mountain lion sneaking up on me.”

Hunters shot the last Catamount in Vermont in 1881 and wiped out wolves soon after.

There isn't a trail network on most of Kodiak, so I used game trails when convenient to get through the dense thicket of brambles and alders. Each potentially hid a bear. To a brown bear, swatting me to the side is an afterthought. Bat me around like a ragdoll and throw me into the salmonberry bushes? A 1,500-pound boar would think nothing of making me fodder for fox and raven.

Still, it’s difficult to un-see a wild place; knowing such a place exists tends to have one of two effects on a person: they’re either comforted not to be living in such a place or maddened by not existing within it.

By eliminating all predators capable of hunting humans in the Northeast, we’ve successfully made it our domain, a form of ecological tyranny. In places like Kodiak, we observe a role reversal: humans as prey.

Vigilance, attention to detail, is not a choice. Call it prey-mind: a nervous attention that sharpens the senses for survival.

On Kodiak, bears became everything, all-consuming gluttons of my decision-making. Success didn’t mean getting a deer; it meant not being got by a bear.

There’s a contemporary romanticism for bears, big cats, and wolves. Yet, in most of the lower 48, we’re also used to ruling the roost of our woods. I can only imagine the reaction to a modern-day Catamount attack in Vermont. The day a mountain lion snatches a child as prey is the day a mountain lion bounty is created (sanctioned or not); rewilding efforts be damned.

Human control over nature started with fire, farming, and exploration, but since the 1950s industrialization turning point, whether or not a place remains wild or cultivated, is predominantly a matter of human choice, no longer restricted by cognitive, natural, or capital resources.

Knowing a predator could be anywhere, you’re no longer in command. The nervous, paranoid movements of a prey animal no longer seem so strange, so unrelatable. High-definition lines pop and borders stand out, like a snowshoe hare in its winter coat on a snowless landscape.

Fear hones peripheral vision, and with each delicate step, I remind myself of a deer.

It would be a lie to say I don’t miss that feeling when I walk in the woods of the Northeast. I can be a slob in these woods, missing countless details, ignoring cues; maybe the consequence is that I get lost or miss a shot.

Paul Rezendes described the biodiversity balance of Isle Royale between moose and wolf as two animals forming a single organism.1 In this totality, each requires the other for a healthy existence.

Does the absence of a predator, one that can bat us around like a cat does a mouse, distort our sense of the woods? On our greater sense of purpose?

Would it not do us good to have a sense of fear or helplessness when we walk in the forest? As a result of this sensory jolt, what new species would we see, smell, and hear if we felt the constant threat of a mountain lion clinging to our back? Would traffic, flight delays, and internet outages be as maddening? Would I still loathe the desk, chair, and screen if I began my day, not with a walk in the park-like woods of New England, but instead with a hike where paying attention wasn’t a choice?

Is there a dormant part of our brain that, once engaged, could serve as a counterforce to unchecked domination?

I can’t help but think that without a predator, we’re missing the other half of the single organism, not unlike that described by Rezendes’ wolf-moose dynamic. Instead of an overpopulation of moose, it’s a free-for-all of human thought, complete control, unchecked by the primal threat of being hunted.

Nature has become a plaything, without consequence, there only for our entertainment, designed by us, left wild only if we deem it so.

Observing a deer utilize its sixth sense is illustrative. Abruptly stopping to change directions, they don’t smell, hear, or see the hunter, but know something is askew because they sense it. The result of this adherence to instinct is survival.

Sitting on a rock ridge that overlooks the Champlain Valley, I lean back, arms folded behind my head. Dozing, I hear cars below and planes above—nothing to fear on this hazy August day.

BOOKS & GEAR | ABOUT

A Black Hawk helicopter churns on a straight shot, east-west line as I fiddle with a tiny fly and a knot. Overlooking perhaps the most remote spot of Vermont, the pond shimmers, and I see the helicopter’s reflection on the water’s surface. US Customs and Border Protection markings on its side are visible. The sound of the rotors dissipates, and I’m alone again, save for a pair of loons.

Three beat-up, but usable, lightweight mini jon boats stashed on the shore allow me to drift and cast in the mid-day sun.

The reason I’m lazily drifting in a sketchy, barely floating aluminum boat is that I have a recurring urge to roam.

A forest, anywhere, is a multi-layered universe. As a hunter, no matter what time of year it is, I’m subconsciously looking for deer. It affects how I walk and how I react to smells.

I need to roam to live; the obstacle is then satisfying this need in a world that is progressing toward uniformity, routine, and predictability. Some things in this life can’t be scheduled without denuding them of their value.

The cedar-scented breeze pushes me to the east side of the pond, and I paddle back to shore to put my sneakers on.

Earlier that morning, I packed a 19-pound backpack; enough to spend the night in the woods if necessary, but not obnoxiously heavy to carry around all day. Cold food, blanket, trimmed-down med kit, fishing gear, and a water filter. Plus the luxury of a tent and rain fly. I’d rather carry the extra weight than sit at home tapping weather apps.

Four ponds spread over the area serve as benchmarks. Today, I’m lucky enough to find one with a self-sustaining population of brook trout. The government helicopters brook trout into a handful of remote ponds, but not this one.

On this outing, if I discover a nice spot or need more time to reach the ponds, I’ll stay overnight. If not, I’ll hike out.

“Did you check the Doppler?”

“Fuck the Doppler.”

If roaming is an itch, then I’m going to scratch it.

For most of our 300,000 years, we trailed food and weather, pacing out roughly 17 miles at a stretch between camps and lodges. About 174 miles each year.

Even after crops, shrines, and villages appeared, communities still shifted fields, herds, and pilgrimage routes. Only engines, screens, and suburbs have let us sit long enough to forget that motion was once survival.

Some trails I walk are on the map, convenient guardrails from which to base bushwacking. Searching for a pond, I stumble onto a moose trail that contained only moose prints, but showed evidence of humans: survey tape hastily tied on the scrubby trail’s edge conifers. Following it north, it was easy walking, and soon enough I see a border-straddling pond. But I also realize I am on the border, standing on that slashed line between two countries.

Ten feet in front of me lay The True North. Glancing around for cameras, listening for the Black Hawk, I turned and headed south.

I discover more unmarked trails and flagging near the border, but no human prints.

If the ponds are my purpose, then walking and navigating are my method.

I chose this region not only because of its beauty and newness to me, but because there’s no cell service. Without the bullshit of text messages, notifications, and alerts, the melancholy of suburbia vanishes.

Fifteen thousand years ago, on its steady retreat, the mile-deep Laurentide ice sheet covered this area. When Rogers’ Rangers attacked the settlement of Saint-Francis during the French and Indian War, they too retreated through some of the hellish spruce bogs I’m walking through.

As the eleventh black fly dive-bombs into my eyes, I consider how long I could stay out here. If I were home in the yard, a single fly in the eye would result in me stopping what I was doing, going inside, and trying to get the fly out. Here in the wild, I try once with my sleeve, then journey on; it will become a problem or it won’t.

It’s 5 PM, and I make a long sweeping loop towards the last pond. Based on an old map, there’s evidence of a shelter on the north side.

In 1994, individuals tracking a group of large cat tracks in this area sent in a scat sample with subsequent results indicating the presence of mountain lion hairs. My concern isn’t animals, though; it’s people. I’d be disappointed to find a group of campers out here or settle in somewhere only to have an adventurous group of teenagers show up, young roamers themselves, looking for a private party spot.

The shelter I find is a ramshackled lean-to not worth using unless it were a torrential rain; an uneven and hole-ridden deck makes my tent look like a less “mousey” option.

For 18 years, I planned and packed for my family’s camping trips, prioritizing comfort. But if it’s just me, I’m resetting to a pre-kid packing mentality. Yet the digital tools are hobbling; they treat us like children.

Algorithms whisper danger like Gollum seeking the ring.

Where can I put myself into that place where what I see is what’s actually there, in front of me?

No rotors overhead now; only the hush of a tangerine sun. I find a canoe in the scrub not too far from the lean-to. When I flip it over, there’s a rustic, hand-carved paddle. The silence is a note higher than insect buzz; the hum I hear is my own resonance. On the water’s edge, dozens of fallen trees lay submerged in the water, pointing to the center of the pond like points of a crown.

I shove off with all my belongings on my back into this last pond, gliding to the center, no idea what I’m fishing for or where I’ll be spending the night.

BOOKS & GEAR | ABOUT

If you’re new here, welcome.

I’m Jesse McEntee. I live in Vermont, and I write this Substack because I keep coming back to the same things: wild places, fatherhood, hunting, conservation, resilience, and the question of how to stay fully awake in a life that can get dulled by screens, routine, and noise.

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Some of these pieces begin in the woods. Some begin at home. A few start with deer season, field notes, or a stretch of water and end up somewhere else entirely.

The name Next Adventure came out of family life. When my kids were younger, I used to ask, “What’s our next adventure?” The question stuck, and it still feels like the right one.

This publication is for readers who feel more like themselves outside. People who care about place, family, attention, risk, work, and the kinds of experiences that leave a mark. You do not need to hunt, fish, or live in Vermont to find something here.

A few good places to start:

On risk, striving, and the urge to keep pushing toward the edge.

A piece about hunting, family, and the strange work of trying to understand your own life.

On deer season, digital overload, and what follows us into the woods.

One of the best entry points into the place-based side of this work.

A good place to start if you want the larger argument running underneath many of these essays.

On memory, inheritance, and the long view.

You’ll also find occasional posts on gear, books, mindset, field photos, and audio versions now and then.

What subscribers get:

• Free subscribers get new essays, Notes, and updates.

• Paid subscribers support the work directly and get a monthly Field Note with occasional gear or book recommendations, field photos, and behind-the-scenes notes.

Thanks for reading.

— Jesse

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It requires five minutes to acclimate to the rain, to push through that point of icky discomfort. Running in the woods, an indistinguishable mix of a human and earth; we’re both perspiring, both saturated. I enter a cave of now: attentive, excited, where energy, focus, and will redirect to the moment. The opposite of the chair and screen.

Flooded by strategy and content calendars… These are sedatives: calming, addictive, transporting the mind into tomorrow, tricking it into ignoring today. The chair and screen are great at generating yawns.

Instead of all, everything, all the time, and the flurry of too much content, a run in the woods is the now; rain, sweat, birds, leaves, deer flies, and bramble scrapes are one. If there is an opposite of a yawn, achievable in a few steps from the front door, this is it.

Choice, calculation, overthink. An incremental drift away from a goal, from a call…

Artificial re-creation of an intelligence that’s already here.

A sensory orchestra. The rain? The maestro. It softens my steps, refilling ponds so the frogs can play. When the downpour stops, a harmony between owl and wood thrush begins. After this crescendo, in one opening of the forest canopy, the dark green chlorophyll-packed leaves serve as a frame for the next movement. With just a 180-degree swivel of my head, the sky turns from an onyx-black-blue to clear; a full spectrum of color-light mixing inexplicably, yet easily. Its texture.

In this cave or camp or hunt. Lost, cold, struggling, then purpose. A spark that lights the fire, that signals the orchestra. Less yawns, more unknowns.

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