Today I turn forty-four.

Forty-four years.

Christ.

That number has a strange weight when you say it out loud. It sounds respectable. Mature. Like I should own a cardigan, understand retirement accounts, and hold strong opinions about lawn fertilizer.

Instead, I’ve spent forty-four years wandering the strangest corners of this country with a camera, a notebook, questionable judgment, and an apparently incurable need to see what’s around the next bend.

And what a goddamn ride it has been.

I’ve wandered the dark corners of Hollywood, where the neon seemed permanently stained with bad decisions and old ghosts. I’ve crossed deserts, climbed mountains, chased waterfalls, walked through forgotten graveyards, stood inside abandoned buildings, photographed people living on the edges of society, crawled through forests hunting mushrooms, and stood on top of the Steens wondering how the hell I got there.

I’ve driven the Oregon coast so many times that stretches of Highway 101 feel like old acquaintances.

I’ve walked through ghost towns where the buildings seem to remember more than the people do.

I’ve sat beside rivers.

Walked through burned forests.

Camped under stars.

Photographed strange people, beautiful people, broken people, wildlife, mountains, street corners, graffiti, decay, and all those little moments most folks walk past because they’re too busy staring at a phone.

And somewhere along the way, all of it became part of me.

The good.

The bad.

The absolutely fucking ridiculous.

There are plenty of things I wish had gone differently. Hard years. Broken relationships. Courtrooms. Grief. Death. Betrayal. Losing people I thought would always be there.

But would I erase any of it?

No.

Because every scar came with a lesson.

Every wrong turn taught me something.

Every bastard who disappointed me showed me exactly what kind of man I did not want to become.

Every failure forced me to adjust the compass.

That’s the strange truth about getting older that nobody explains when you’re young: character isn’t something you wake up with one morning.

You build it.

Usually the hard way.

Piece by piece.

Bad decisions.

Good decisions.

Heartbreak.

Responsibility.

Standing back up when you’d rather stay on the floor.

Learning when to fight.

Learning when to walk away.

Learning that some people deserve another chance and others deserve nothing but your silence.

Forty-four years of gathering parts.

And somehow, against all statistical probability, I ended up here.

Three amazing kids.

A beautiful wife.

A roof over my head.

A job.

A camera.

A few books’ worth of stories.

That’s enough.

More than enough.

I don’t need a giant house overlooking a golf course or a garage full of absurd toys to prove I survived adulthood.

Give me my family.

Give me a camera.

Give me a road disappearing into the Cascades.

Give me strong coffee at six in the morning and a weather report promising a seventy-percent chance we’re making a terrible decision.

I’ll be fine.

This year tested that philosophy.

I lost two people I once counted among my best friends. Not because death took them, but because their own choices carried them somewhere I couldn’t follow.

That kind of loss is strange.

No funeral.

No grave.

No clean ending.

Just the slow realization that somebody you once trusted has become somebody you no longer recognize.

And eventually you learn that loyalty doesn’t mean sacrificing your own peace while somebody else sets fire to everything around them.

So the circle got smaller.

As it stands, Robert is the one close friend still standing beside me.

And you know what?

Maybe that’s enough, too.

You don’t need twenty friends.

You need one bastard who answers the phone, loads the truck, grabs his camera, and says, “Where are we going?”

One person willing to disappear down some miserable logging road because the map says there might be a waterfall at the end.

One friend who understands that sometimes the best therapy available is strong coffee, bad directions, a camera bag, and eight hours somewhere outside cellphone reception.

Quality over quantity.

I understand that far better at forty-four than I did at twenty-four.

Maybe that’s the real currency of age.

Not wisdom, exactly.

Wisdom sounds too clean.

Maybe it’s perspective.

You start to understand what actually matters because you’ve spent enough years watching things that didn’t matter collapse under their own bullshit.

Family matters.

Time matters.

Health matters.

Stories matter.

The people who actually show up matter.

Everything else is mostly noise.

And today, October 21st, I officially begin the road to forty-five.

That’s bizarre to write.

Forty-five.

Jesus.

But I’m curious about it.

That’s probably the best thing I can say about where I am right now.

I’m still curious.

There are still roads I haven’t driven.

Forests I haven’t walked.

Ghost towns I haven’t photographed.

People I haven’t met.

Stories I haven’t written.

There are still mornings when I’ll sling the camera bag over my shoulder and head somewhere simply because the name on the map sounds strange.

There are still photographs out there that I don’t even know exist yet.

And hopefully, when forty-five comes knocking, I’ll be buried somewhere inside Book Three, complaining about deadlines, staring at photographs at two in the morning, wondering why the hell I voluntarily decided to do this again.

That sounds pretty damn good to me.

Forty-four years.

A wife.

Three kids.

One good friend.

A camera.

A growing pile of stories.

And enough road left ahead to keep things interesting.

I’ll take it.

Because if these first forty-four years have taught me anything, it’s that life was never supposed to be clean.

It was supposed to leave dirt on your boots.

Scars on your hands.

Strange photographs on your hard drive.

And a few stories that make people stare at you and ask:

“Wait… that actually happened?”

Yeah.

It did.

And with any luck, the weirdest parts haven’t happened yet.