Notes from the Road Travelogue
Sunrise over rolling Midwestern farmland, a white barn and dark shade trees above a field of young corn in a golden haze.

Field Notes from East of the Rockies

Wander Laurentia

Laurentia is everything east of the Rockies, from the Great Plains and Canada's prairies to the bayous and the Atlantic — a vast, emptying heartland reshaped by climate change and industrial agriculture. Follow me down its lonely roads, from Minnesota to Louisiana.

Louisiana Bayou Sketches

Sinking Slowly on the Louisiana Bayou

Traveling the back roads of Louisiana's bayou country prior to Hurricane Katrina.
Flyfishing in Minnetonka

Worms, Pop & Northern Pike on Lake Minnetonka

Notes on Minnesota culture and fishing customs, including a backstory about hagfish.
Hill Country in Texas

Texas Hill Country

Travels in Austin and the Texas Hill Country region, including notes on American camels.
Harmony, Minnesota

Pilgrims of the Holy Can

Notes on the Spam Museum, Southeastern Minnesota and the Amish of the Midwest.
Soho, Lower Manhattan

Green Skies and Pseudo-Events in Lower Manhattan

The sky above is green, and the strange color casts a glow on everybody rushing for cover.

Sweet Swamp in the Southern United States

Blue Laws & Black Water in the Okefenokee

I left Macon, in Central Georgia; pastures and pines; hungry for sweet potato cakes and grits.
Deep South Journal

The Deep South Sketch Journal

Sketches, photographs and notes from my travels in America's deep south.
Line map of North America east of the Rocky Mountains on black, shading from wheat gold on the Great Plains through green across the Midwest to blue on the Atlantic coast, with the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio rivers, the Great Lakes, the Appalachians and the Gulf of Mexico, and Denver, Winnipeg, Minneapolis, Chicago, Kansas City, Austin, New Orleans, Atlanta, Toronto and New York marked.

Why Laurentia?

Everything East of the Rockies

Strictly speaking, the Great Plains are the grasslands that roll east from the foot of the Rocky Mountains, from the prairies of Alberta and Saskatchewan down to the Texas Hill Country. Short grass in the rain shadow of the mountains gives way to mixed and then tall grass as the land drops and the rain comes in. Somewhere near the Missouri, the plains become the Midwest.

Laurentia is the whole of that downhill run: everything east of the Rockies. It takes in the farm country and lakes of the upper Midwest, the great Mississippi basin that drains it all, the bayous and swamps of the Deep South, the old worn-down Appalachians, and the Atlantic seaboard where the continent finally ends. The name comes from what lies beneath most of it: Laurentia, the ancient stone core, billions of years old, around which North America was built.

  • 100thmeridian, roughly where the rain gives out and the dry West begins
  • 41%of the contiguous United States drains into the Mississippi
  • ~4%of the original tallgrass prairie still standing
  • 21%of the world’s surface fresh water, in the Great Lakes

From the Plains to the Atlantic

My stories, from the southern plains to the eastern seaboard.

  1. TexasWhere the plains meet the Hill CountryLimestone hills, spring-fed rivers and Austin, at the southern end of the plains.
  2. The Upper MidwestMinnesotaLake country, the bluffs of the Driftless and the long northern winters.
  3. The Deep SouthBayous and swampsBack roads through Cajun country and the blackwater swamps of southern Georgia.
  4. The Atlantic SeaboardNew YorkThe eastern edge, where the continent ends in a city.