In Pursuit of Dirt

How do we learn to love the wild?

I didn’t always love dirt. Growing up, I was a pretty standard suburban kid with a slightly less than ordinary set of parents. Time will tell whether giving me the time, space, and freedom to explore the world was an act of responsible parenting but, after 33 trips around that sun of ours, I have a feeling that they did all right. 

My friends and I were the weirdos, choosing skateboarding over sports and music over just about anything. We spent most of our time outside not because of dirt, sea, or sky, but because that’s where our parents weren’t. Leonia, New Jersey, isn’t known for natural wonder or literally one goddamn thing that inspires awe. It is, instead, just a one square mile town about five miles west of the behemoth that is New York City.

It was a calm place with green lawns, big trees, and enough cultural rejects to make me feel at home. My parents landed in New Jersey after meeting in Los Angeles and then moving across the country to Richmond, Virginia, where my father pursued a Masters of Fine Arts degree and I was apparently conceived and thrown into the Universe. 

Ora and David Melamed, my parents, were born and raised in the first version of the state of Israel. My mother, having grown up in the northern port city of Haifa, has spent 33 years of my life wishing that I spent more time in Israel, or that I had more Israelis in my life. My father, having grown up outside of Tel Aviv with a few too many chickens, barely speaks of Israel and, when he does, it is often to the tune of it being hot, no longer what it once was, and full of loud people. My mother has visited Israel almost every year that I can remember. The last time I remember my father returning was when I was 8 years old. 

Having now spent a fair amount of time in Israel I can safely say that it is a beautiful place full of beautiful people, the majority of which are some of the proudest, most vibrant individuals on this floating rock that we all share.

Having now spent a fair amount of time in California, I can safely say that it is one of the most absurdly wild and ecologically diverse states in the nation, albeit that it is being both insanely overpopulated in some areas, and prohibitively expensive to try and make a life in these days.

Having now spent not enough but still a fair amount of time in Virginia, I can now safely say that the south has nuance and charm like only the south can have.

I could’ve been Israeli, a sun kissed Sabra, deeply rooted in both the land and culture of my heritage. I could’ve grown up Californian, bummin’ around the beaches of SoCal and exploring its 15 million acres of public land. I could’ve been from the south with a charming accent and strong sense of tradition and hospitality. I could have been any of these things. I could have been all of these things. Instead, I’m from New Jersey. 

Why New Jersey? Like so many New Jerseyans, my mother needed to be close to New York City so that she could sell her soul to Wall Street. As far as I can tell, people don’t move to New Jersey to be in New Jersey, they move there for a family or opportunity. New Jersey’s appeal lies in its proximity to several major metropolitan areas and its deep-rooted cultural enclaves that thrive there. I have never once heard someone say that they fell in love with New Jersey and decided to call it home. More often than not people want to be close to their families or are chasing a job, lover, or any of the other myriad opportunities that the tri-state area has to offer.

Despite the harsh tone that I find myself taking while talking about my home state, I am glad that I grew up the way that I did. The tri-state area equipped me with a resilience, sense of humor, and unmistakable quickness of wit, the sharpness of which my other recovering East Coasters and I have lovingly dubbed The East Infection. 

If you know even a little bit about me, it may appear as if I have a well-rooted, generationally crafted, and overtly romanticized idea of what the American wildlands are. While I am one hell of a romantic when it comes to the dirt that this country is made of, prior to one very specific experience when I was 16 years old I had almost no connection to the wild.

My oldest friend on the planet is Oliver Capone. Ollie, one of the most kind-hearted, deeply curious, and intensely passionate creatures that I ever did meet, was also loud, rebellious, and annoyingly stubborn. Together we participated in a variety of degenerate activities, explored the boundaries of what was acceptable in the public school system. Though we were both angsty, gutsy, and performative pieces of shit, Ol could never seem to help himself and would always push situations a little too far, resulting in all manners of disciplinary action. At some point, several years after being expelled from public school in the seventh grade for using a pair of craft scissors to separate a particularly antagonistic teacher from her ponytail, Ol was sent to Outward Bound.

Outward Bound is an organization that provides immersive outdoor education programs for all ages. There are two kinds of people that end up participating in an Outward Bound expedition. The first type of outward bounder is the kind of person with a genuine interest in the outdoors and the recreational opportunities that the organization provides. The other, slightly less enthusiastic brand of outward bounders were like Ol, troubled youth with a history of disciplinary issues, legal battles, or drug and alcohol abuse who are prescribed the great outdoors in an attempt to detoxify their lives from the emotional, behavioral, or chemical imbalance that makes integrating into society a challenge.

It was through Outward Bound that this mohawked, New Jersey bred, anarchist punk found himself outfitted and calmly marching towards Mount Katahdin on the Appalachian Trail. It was also through Outward Bound that the same dirty, foul-mouthed, teenager was sent home to New Jersey just days after arriving at Hurricane Island in Maine. At the time, the reasons as to Ollie’s sudden re-emergence on the streets of Leonia were vague. Justifiably embarrassed, Ol was never one to admit anything that even remotely resembled weakness.

That, simply put, wouldn’t have been very punk of him.

I didn’t press or prod him for answers, instead choosing to do the one thing adolescent boys do when their best friend embarrasses themselves: Find any and every excuse to relentlessly mock them until something funnier and/or more awkward happens to anyone in or around our social circle. Relentless and strategic, it didn’t take long for my jokes and backhanded insults to strike a nerve, driving Ollie into a fit. 

“Fuck you, dude, you couldn’t do it.” 

I have never liked being told what I can or cannot do, and so I only had two words in response to Ol’s impassioned statement… 

“Watch me.”

I don’t remember much about my Outward Bound experience, which is odd. I can recall slivers, like a dream. An orange whistle hung from my neck, gently tapping my chest as I hiked. A calm stream in the morning and the way it felt on my face. The kind eyes of a wayward hippie who was somehow in a position to lead us, and the stick that was always in his hand. It was peaceful and poetic, a simple collection of days spent walking through the wild with strangers that quickly became family, though I never saw any of them again once we parted ways.

Throughout the course of the experience, we learned how to take care of ourselves and each other in what, at the time, was the wildest place I’d ever been. It was cold. It was wet. It was miserable and I loved it. At the time, I didn’t quite have the words to properly articulate what I was finding out there in the woods, nor the inclination to look for them. It was a simple and visceral pleasure that brought with it an urge, a compulsion, to chase whatever it was that I found in the wild. As someone who had never really felt like they belonged anywhere, the woods of Maine taught me that I actually belonged everywhere. 

It was the first of many trips into the fray, into not just the wild pockets of dirt that litter this country of ours, but also the towns that evolved beside them. On the way to Bangor airport in a beat-up 15 passenger van with some newly designated hiker trash, I watched as the woods that I had grown to love so much melted into the background while the van threw itself back towards civilization. It started with gas stations and eventually houses. First just a few of them, small vestiges of humanity punctuating a seemingly endless poem written across the bark of countless oak and maple trees.

I don’t remember how long we were driving before we reached the church, it could’ve been an hour… It could’ve been a week. Time was moving differently now that we had been pulled out of the mud. I remember thinking how trivial a stop sign felt after weeks of only coming to a halt thanks to gravity, fatigue, or darkness. As the van idled, waiting to feel safe enough to cross the completely empty intersection, I looked out the window and was met by the familiar sight of a marquee sign stationed outside of the local church. I’ve always enjoyed the kind of universal humor that these signs bring into the world, a simplistic and secular one-liner goes a long way in this day and age. 

Stop drop and roll doesn’t work when you’re in hell.

No, I guess it wouldn’t. 

The van lurched forward as the driver refused my request to get out and take a look around town. He continued shrugging me off as subsequent requests became more insistent, eventually devolving into demands. To this day, I have no idea what that town was called but I think of it often. I’ve written stories about it in my mind and traced potential routes on a map with my finger hoping that something would bring back a memory that I don’t think I ever had. Wherever that town was, it was the first gateway community that I remember dropping into, even if just for a moment.

I keep telling myself that I’ll find it one day, that I’ll accidentally end up back there and find out what it’s called. In truth, it doesn’t need a name, because, as I’ve learned in the nearly two decades since that ride to Bangor airport, as a visitor passing through - that town was simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. In truth, assigning that town a place in anything that even remotely resembles reality would be doing a disservice to the myth that I have built around it. A major lesson that I’ve had to learn from countless hours behind the wheel of my truck, is that some things should be left to thrive in the corner of your eye, just a vague hint of an idea, living in a moment that melts easily into the rearview. 

I’ve spent most of my life looking for something, though I’ve never known what it was. I used to think it was home, a place that invited the deepest parts of me to put down roots and stay awhile. I now know that I found a home back there in the woods, buried next to a snarky marquee sign in an unnameable town that I only knew for a moment. For better or for worse, I am at home in all the corners of this great big nation of ours.

I am at home in The Northeast, where I spent my youth soaking up all the art, music, and debauchery that I could find.

I am at home in the South, under a live oak where I went to help a dear friend tell a story that needed telling.

I am at home in the Midwest where I once had a transmission explode while trying to get off of a train track, and later tried cooking a carp for the first and last time.

I’m at home in the Northwest, where I discovered who it is that I truly am, where I gave myself fully to the wild and all of the magic that comes with it. I’m at home in the Southwest, where you find me writing this as I immerse myself in a red wasteland that defies everything that I think I know about the world. 

I was never handed a home, only an origin. Throughout my time wandering from place to place, I have met so many people, each with their own unique relationship to the land.

There are those that are born into a place that infects their bones at an early age, probably before they were even conceived. They might venture off to try life elsewhere but find themselves missing the dirt that they call home and return to it.

There are those that happen upon a piece of themselves in a foreign place as if it had been waiting for them their whole life. They find themselves whole in a way they didn't think possible and reposition themselves in the world to accommodate this new fledgling romance.

There are others who simply exist in a place, because it’s where they know how to do so, their lives orbit people and societal constructs that make them feel secure. They don’t love the dirt beneath their feet any more than a similar swathe across the planet, it’s just where they are and where they’ve been.

For much of my life, this was me, growing up in the shadow of New York City.

New York, monster that it is, is not a city. It is, instead, a celestial body with as much gravity as anything else that is floating around in space. People gravitate towards New York for so many reasons, but when you’re from there, those reasons are less clear. As an artist, it felt impossible to justify leaving the center of the universe in search of anything else. It wasn’t until a perfect storm of events finally helped me reach escape velocity and sent me sailing into the void, just a wayward soul in search of new dirt and simple moments that make me cry. That pursuit has colored every decision that I have made and has been driven me forward, through the darkness, to find myself at home in the wild.

The first place that I ever truly felt at home was a forest. It was wet and cold and I couldn’t believe how alive everything was. On every surface existed a green and sprawling carpet, in every crack and crevice was a world of its own making. As I walked through the trees, my bare feet soaking it up and getting soggy with the song of it all, I couldn’t help but feel like I too was bursting at the seams with life. It was in the forest that I learned about the sweetness of surrender, about how good it feels to simply be a part of something bigger than yourself. 

My next home met me unexpectedly, in the throes of a momentum that I didn’t notice at the time.  In the desert, everything you see is what’s left, what’s managed to survive despite having the very fabric of the world turned against it. It’s what’s still there after the wind has spent countless days and nights choosing violence over romance. It’s what’s still there after the water slowly carves a path for itself to move through the world. It’s what’s still there after the sun has risen and set every day, almost never missing an opportunity to beat itself upon the ground. It’s what’s still there after people have come and gone, scarring the land with the footprint of our relentless greed. 

In the forest I stand amongst kin, enveloped by the softness of the living.  In the desert, I stand amongst survivors, spun into a thread from which the indifference of time is woven. 

Here, I don’t just feel alive, I remember who I am. 

Here, I’m constantly reminded that what’s left of me is the part that has been chiseled away by the wind, smoothed by the water, burned off by the sun, and held in place by my people.

I’m rough and complicated, more-so than I’d like to admit. 

I’m also sweet and tender, if you can manage to get close enough. 

I am so many things but most of all, I’m still here.  

Despite a touch of madness, I persist.